"I've left them," she went on, "but now I see how and where. I've
been leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to HER."
"To the Princess?"
"And that's what I mean," Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued.
"That's what happened to me with her to-day," she continued to
explain. "It came home to me that that's what I've really been
doing."
"Oh, I see."
"I needn't torment myself. She has taken them over."
The Colonel declared that he "saw"; yet it was as if, at this, he
a little sightlessly stared. "But what then has happened, from
one day to the other, to HER? What has opened her eyes?"
"They were never really shut. She misses him."
"Then why hasn't she missed him before?"
Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints,
Fanny worked it out. "She did--but she wouldn't let herself know
it. She had her reason--she wore her blind. Now, at last, her
situation has come to a head. To-day she does know it. And that's
illuminating. It has been," Mrs. Assingham wound up,
"illuminating to ME."
Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention
was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp.
"Poor dear little girl!"
"Ah no--don't pity her!"
This did, however, pull him up. "We mayn't even be sorry for
her?"
"Not now--or at least not yet. It's too soon--that is if it isn't
very much too late. This will depend," Mrs. Assingham went on;
"at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before--for
all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun
some time ago. Now, however, she has begun to live. And the way
it comes to me, the way it comes to me--" But again she projected
her vision.
"The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she'll like it!"
"The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes
to me is that she'll triumph."
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly
cheered her husband. "Ah then, we must back her!"
"No--we mustn't touch her. We mayn't touch any of them. We must
keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch
and wait. And meanwhile," said Mrs. Assingham, "we must bear it
as we can. That's where we are--and serves us right. We're in
presence."
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy
portents, she left it till he questioned again. "In presence of
what?"
"Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come
off."
She had paused there before him while he wondered. "You mean
she'll get the Prince back?"
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might
have been almost abject. "It isn't a question of recovery. It
won't be a question of any vulgar struggle. To 'get him back' she
must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him.
"With which Fanny shook her head. "What I take her to be waking
up to is the truth that, all the while, she really HASN'T had
him. Never."
"Ah, my dear--!" the poor Colonel panted.
"Never!" his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. "Do you
remember what I said to you long ago--that evening, just before
their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?"
The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be
feared, robust. "What haven't you, love, said in your time?"
"So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having
once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all
events, than when I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was
the person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be
communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it,
her sense altogether sealed, That therefore," Fanny continued,
"is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense will have to open."
"I see." He nodded. "To the wrong." He nodded again, almost
cheerfully--as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a
lunatic. "To the very, very wrong."
But his wife's spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to
remain higher. "To what's called Evil--with a very big E: for the
first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge
of it, to the crude experience of it." And she gave, for the
possibility, the largest measure. "To the harsh, bewildering
brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed"--and here
Mrs. Assingham noted a limit "unless indeed, as yet (so far as
she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the
suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that mere
dose of alarm will prove enough."
He considered. "But enough for what then, dear--if not enough to
break her heart?"
"Enough to give her a shaking!" Mrs. Assingham rather oddly
replied. "To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won't
break her heart. It will make her," she explained--"well, it will
make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the
world."
"But isn't it a pity," the Colonel asked, "that they should
happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to
her?"
"Oh, 'disagreeable'--? They'll have had to be disagreeable--to
show her a little where she is. They'll have HAD to be
disagreeable to make her sit up. They'll have had to be
disagreeable to make her decide to live."
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly
revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he
seemed vaguely to "time" her as she moved to and fro. He had at
the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last
attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this
teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll, as from
the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had
thought of the response his wife's words ideally implied.
"Decide to live--ah yes!--for her child."
"Oh, bother her child!"--and he had never felt so snubbed, for an
exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. "To live, you
poor dear, for her father--which is another pair of sleeves!"
And Mrs. Assingham's whole ample, ornamented person irradiated,
with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to
glow. "Any idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a
motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her.
She'll have to save HIM."
"To 'save' him--?"
"To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT"--and she seemed
to see it, before her, in her husband's very eyes--"will be work
cut out!" With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she
wound up their colloquy. "Good night!"
There was something in her manner, however--or in the effect, at
least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a
single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had
turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he
overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of
excited perception. "Ah, but, you know, that's rather jolly!"
"Jolly'--?" she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the
staircase.
"I mean it's rather charming."
"'Charming'--?" It had still to be their law, a little, that she
was tragic when he was comic.
"I mean it's rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would
be. Only," he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea,
and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections
hitherto dim--"only I don't quite see why that very care for him
which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect
one as so 'rum,' hasn't also, by the same stroke, made her notice
a little more what has been going on."
"Ah, there you are! It's the question that I've all along been
asking myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she
raised them as she pursued--she let him have it straight. "And
it's the question of an idiot."
"An idiot--?"
"Well, the idiot that I'VE been, in all sorts of ways--so often,
of late, have I asked it. You're excusable, since you ask it but
now. The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me
in the face."
"Then what in the world is it?"
"Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him--the very
passion of her brave little piety. That's the way it has worked,"
Mrs. Assingham explained "and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a
way as possible. But it has been working from a rum start. From
the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it
then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very
opposite effect was produced--!" With the renewed vision of this
fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.
"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That WAS a rum
start."
But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to
make her sense, for a moment, intolerable. "Yes--there I am! I
was really at the bottom of it," she declared; "I don't know what
possessed me--but I planned for him, I goaded him on." With
which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. "Or,
rather, I DO know what possessed me--for wasn't he beset with
ravening women, right and left, and didn't he, quite
pathetically, appeal for protection, didn't he, quite charmingly,
show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie," she thus lucidly
continued, "couldn't, with a new life of her own, give herself up
to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past--to
fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping THEM off. One
perceived this," she went on--"out of the abundance of one's
affection and one's sympathy." It all blessedly came back to
her--when it wasn't all, for the fiftieth time, obscured, in face
of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. "One was no
doubt a meddlesome fool; one always IS, to think one sees
people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves.
But one's excuse here," she insisted, "was that these people
clearly DIDN'T see them for themselves--didn't see them at all.
It struck one for very pity--that they were making a mess of such
charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it
go. They didn't know HOW to live--and "somehow one couldn't, if
one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it.
That's what I pay for"--and the poor woman, in straighter
communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she
appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the
whole of the burden of her consciousness. "I always pay for it,
sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary
interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix
itself also on Charlotte--Charlotte who was hovering there on the
edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle
mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste
and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good
to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over
me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who
COULD keep off ravening women--without being one herself, either,
in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr.
Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was
something, of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you
know what I mean--it looks at me," she veritably moaned, "out of
your face! But all I can say is that it didn't; the reason
largely being--once I had fallen in love with the beautiful
symmetry of my plan--that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would
accept Charlotte, whereas I didn't quite make out either what
other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her
accepting."
"I see--I see." She had paused, meeting all the while his
listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with
her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her,
on his side, but with cooling breath. "One quite understands, my
dear."
It only, however, kept her there sombre. "I naturally see, love,
what you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes.
You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless
ignorance. Yes, dearest"--and the grimness of her dreariness
suddenly once more possessed her: "you've only to tell me that
that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do,
can I stand up to you? You see," she said with an ineffable
headshake, "that I don't stand up! I'm down, down, down," she
declared; "yet" she as quickly added--"there's just one little
thing that helps to save my life." And she kept him waiting but
an instant. "They might easily--they would perhaps even
certainly--have done something worse."