"The question isn't of what I think. The question's of the
conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte--who have better
opportunities than I for judging."
The Colonel again wondered. "Are you so very sure their
opportunities are better?"
"Well," his wife asked, "what is their whole so extraordinary
situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?"
"Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity--of their extraordinary
situation and relation--as much as they."
"With the difference, darling," she returned with some spirit,
"that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see
the boat they're in, but I'm not, thank God, in it myself.
To-day, however," Mrs. Assingham added, "to-day in Eaton Square I
did see."
"Well then, what?"
But she mused over it still. "Oh, many things. More, somehow,
than ever before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing FOR
them--I mean for the others. It was as if something had
happened--I don't know what, except some effect of these days
with them at that place--that had either made things come out or
had cleared my own eyes." These eyes indeed of the poor lady's
rested on her companion's, meanwhile, with the lustre not so much
of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at
various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired,
obviously, to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of
large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasise
the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct
action: she must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in
her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he
should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took
such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable
for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out
in the afternoon. "It was as if I knew better than ever what
makes them--"
"What makes them?"--he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.
"Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It
might well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they
may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to
see. As I say, to-day," she went on, "it was as if I were
suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their
eyes." On which, as to shake off her perversity, Fanny
Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the dim
illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare
look of "type," to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of
inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave
a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late
hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly
adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim
midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved
mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on
the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for
the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. "I can imagine
the way it works," she said; "it's so easy to understand. Yet I
don't want to be wrong," she the next moment broke out "I don't,
I don't want to be wrong!"
"To make a mistake, you mean?"
Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what
she meant. "I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate--in thought--
crimes." And she spoke with all intensity. "I'm a most dreadful
person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've
done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel
that I'd do it again--feel that I'd do things myself."
"Ah, my dear!" the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.
"Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you
you never have. You've done every thing else, but you've never
done that. But what I really don't a bit want," she declared, "is
to abet them or to protect them."
Her companion turned this over. "What is there to protect them
from?--if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing
that justly exposes them."
And it in fact half pulled her up. "Well, from a sudden scare.
From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think."
"Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing--?"
She waited again. "It isn't my 'whole' idea. Nothing is my
'whole' idea--for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so
much in the air."
"Oh, in the air--!" the Colonel dryly breathed.
"Well, what's in the air always HAS--hasn't it?--to come down to
the earth. And Maggie," Mrs. Assingham continued, "is a very
curious little person. Since I was 'in,' this afternoon, for
seeing more than I had ever done--well, I felt THAT too, for some
reason, as I hadn't yet felt it."
"For 'some' reason? For what reason?" And then, as his wife at
first said nothing: "Did she give any sign? Was she in any way
different?"
"She's always so different from anyone else in the world that
it's hard to say when she's different from herself. But she has
made me," said Fanny after an instant, "think of her differently.
She drove me home."
"Home here?"
"First to Portland Place--on her leaving her father: since she
does, once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a
little longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there,
came with me herself back here. This was also for the same
purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message
from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and
Charlotte must have arrived--if they have arrived--expecting to
drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner
there. She has everything there, you know--she has clothes."
The Colonel didn't in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension.
"Oh, you mean a change?"
"Twenty changes, if you like--all sorts of things. She dresses,
really, Maggie does, as much for her father--and she always did--
as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house
very much as she had it before she was married--and just as the
boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when
she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien
that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a
friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able
to put them up."
It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself,
Bob Assingham could more or less enter. "Maggie and the child
spread so?"
"Maggie and the child spread so."