"That's all I claim"--she seemed thankful for the word. "I don't
say it's anything more--but it IS, distinctly, rum."
Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. "'More'? What more
COULD it be?"
"It could be that she's unhappy, and that she takes her funny
little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy"--Mrs.
Assingham had figured it out--"that's just the way, I'm
convinced, she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since--as
I'm also convinced--she, in the midst of everything, adores her
husband as much as ever?"
The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. "Then if she's
so happy, please what's the matter?"
It made his wife almost spring at him. "You think then she's
secretly wretched?"
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. "Ah, my dear, I give
them up to YOU. I've nothing more to suggest."
"Then it's not sweet of you." She spoke at present as if he were
frequently sweet. "You admit that it is 'rum.'"
And this indeed fixed again, for a moment, his intention. "Has
Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?"
"Never, that I know of, a word. It isn't the sort of thing she
does. And whom has she, after all," Mrs. Assingham added, "to
complain to?"
"Hasn't she always you?"
"Oh, 'me'! Charlotte and I, nowadays--!" She spoke as of a
chapter closed. "Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes
me, more and more, as extraordinary."
A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the
Colonel's face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then,
isn't that why one must just resign one's self to wash one's
hands of them--to be lost?" Her face, however, so met the
question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their
trouble had now become too real for--her charged eyes so betrayed
the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough,
to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain
man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now.
"Hasn't she then, Charlotte, always her husband--?"
"To complain to? She'd rather die."
"Oh!"--and Bob Assingham's face, at the vision of such
extremities, lengthened for very docility. "Hasn't she the Prince
then?"
"For such matters? Oh, he doesn't count."
"I thought that was just what--as the basis of our agitation--he
does do!"
Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. "Not a bit as
a person to bore with complaints. The ground of MY agitation is,
exactly, that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!"
And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver's superiority to any such
mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of
her head--as marked a tribute to that lady's general grace, in
all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had
ever received.
"Ah, only Maggie!" With which the Colonel gave a short low
gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.
"No--not only Maggie. A great many people in London--and small
wonder!--bore him."
"Maggie only worst then?" But it was a question that he had
promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she
had shortly before sown the seed. "You said just now that he
would by this time be back with Charlotte 'if they HAVE arrived.'
You think it then possible that they really won't have returned?"
His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her
responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her
from entertaining it. "I think there's nothing they're not now
capable of--in their so intense good faith."
"Good faith?"--he echoed the words, which had in fact something
of an odd ring, critically.
"Their false position. It comes to the same thing." And she bore
down, with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. "They
may very possibly, for a demonstration--as I see them--not have
come back."
He wondered, visibly, at this, how she did see them. "May have
bolted somewhere together?"
"May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have
wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done,"
Fanny Assingham continued, "God knows what!" She went on,
suddenly, with more emotion--which, at the pressure of some
spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress,
imperfectly smothered. "Whatever they've done I shall never know.
Never, never--because I don't want to, and because nothing will
induce me. So they may do as they like. But I've worked for them
ALL" She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and
the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the
explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She
passed into the dusky drawing-room, where, during his own prowl,
shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of
the street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for
this window, against which she leaned her head, while the
Colonel, with his lengthened face, looked after her for a minute
and hesitated. He might have been wondering what she had really
done, to what extent, beyond his knowledge or his conception, in
the affairs of these people, she COULD have committed herself.
But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was, quickly enough, too
much for him; he had known her at other times quite not try not
to, and that had not been so bad. He went to her and put his arm
round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she
gasped, she let it stay a little--all with a patience that
presently stilled her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly
enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result
of sending them to bed: what was between them had opened out
further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling,
taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more
words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it
and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They
remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window
which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which
let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and
colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny's
drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus passed between them,
passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his
wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of
their silence, above all, which might have represented their
sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake
where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle
alone--the beauty of it was that they now could really talk
better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all,
defined itself. What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely
exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved--so far
as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them?
It did save them, somehow, for Fanny's troubled mind--for that
was the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed to her now, at
all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had
sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted.
This remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what
she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie. "I don't
altogether see, you know, what you infer from it, or why you
infer anything." When he so expressed himself it was quite as if
in possession of what they had brought up from the depths.