Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea,
despatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her
maid into a cab, for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their
effects. The result of this for each of the pair was a state of
occupation so unbroken that the day practically passed without
fresh contact between them. They dined out together, but it was
both in going to their dinner and in coming back that they
appeared, on either side, to have least to communicate. Fanny was
wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-
coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her
husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less
disposed than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would
have said, his end of it. They had, in general, in these days,
longer pauses and more abrupt transitions; in one of which latter
they found themselves, for a climax, launched at midnight. Mrs.
Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first
floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the landing outside the
drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair--of which at
first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of
throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with
her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless
Sphinx about at last to become articulate. The Colonel, not
unlike, on his side, some old pilgrim of the desert camping at
the foot of that monument, went, by way of reconnoissance, into
the drawing-room. He visited, according to his wont, the windows
and their fastenings; he cast round the place the eye, all at
once, of the master and the manager, the commandant and the
rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a
moment, he stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued
to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these
minor manoeuvres and conscious patiences something of a
suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that
intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now.
This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield,
on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly,
and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at present
to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr. Assingham's
face a mild perception of some finer sense--a sense for his
wife's situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough,
about to repudiate--that she had fairly caused to grow in him.
But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very
much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she
had given herself, all the afternoon, to her friends in Eaton
Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt
result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming
baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a
process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with
abstentions and discretions that might almost have counted as
solemnities. The solemnities, at the same time, had committed him
to nothing--to nothing beyond this confession itself of a
consciousness of deep waters. She had been out on these waters,
for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact had been his
keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had not
quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the
mystic lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she
could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the
planks of her bark had parted--THEN some sort of plunge would
have become his immediate duty. His present position, clearly,
was that of seeing her in the centre of her sheet of dark water,
and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him didn't perhaps
mean that her planks WERE now parting. He held himself so ready
that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and
waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however--that is before he had
uttered a question--he perceived, not without relief, that she
was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a
little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. The bump was
distinct, and in fact she stepped ashore. "We were all wrong.
There's nothing."
"Nothing--?" It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
"Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy--but I'm
satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There's nothing."
"But I thought," said Bob Assingham, "that that was just what you
did persistently asseverate. You've guaranteed their straightness
from the first."
"No--I've never till now guaranteed anything but my own
disposition to worry. I've never till now," Fanny went on gravely
from her chair, "had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it
at that place--if I had, in my infatuation and my folly," she
added with expression, "nothing else. So I did see--I HAVE seen.
And now I know." Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her
head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. "I know."
The Colonel took it--but took it at first in silence. "Do you
mean they've TOLD you--?"
"No--I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven't
asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter
wouldn't count."
"Oh," said the Colonel with all his oddity, "they'd tell US."
It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his
short cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt,
none the less, that she kept her irony down. "Then when they've
told you, you'll be perhaps so good as to let me know."
He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the
back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. "Ah, I
don't say that they'd necessarily tell me that they ARE over the
traces."
"They'll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I
hope, and I'm talking of them now as I take them for myself only.
THAT'S enough for me--it's all I have to regard." With which,
after an instant, "They're wonderful," said Fanny Assingham.
"Indeed," her husband concurred, "I really think they are."
"You'd think it still more if you knew. But you don't know--
because you don't see. Their situation"--this was what he didn't
see--"is too extraordinary."
"'Too'?" He was willing to try.
"Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn't see. But
just that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously."