It only, however, half contented Fanny, who thoughtfully raised
her eyebrows. "He's prodigious; but what is there--as you've
'fixed' it--TO dodge? Unless," she pursued, "it's her getting
near him; it's--if you'll pardon my vulgarity--her getting AT
him. That," she suggested, "may count with him."
But it found the Princess prepared. "She can get near him here.
She can get 'at' him. She can come up."
"CAN she?" Fanny Assingham questioned.
"CAN'T she?" Maggie returned.
Their eyes, for a minute, intimately met on it; after which the
elder woman said: "I mean for seeing him alone."
"So do I," said the Princess.
At which Fanny, for her reasons, couldn't help smiling. "Oh, if
it's for THAT he's staying--!"
"He's staying--I've made it out--to take anything that comes or
calls upon him. To take," Maggie went on, "even that." Then she
put it as she had at last put it to herself. "He's staying for
high decency."
"Decency?" Mrs. Assingham gravely echoed.
"Decency. If she SHOULD try--!"
"Well--?" Mrs. Assingham urged.
"Well, I hope--!"
"Hope he'll see her?"
Maggie hesitated, however; she made no direct reply. "It's
useless hoping," she presently said. "She won't. But he ought
to." Her friend's expression of a moment before, which had been
apologised for as vulgar, prolonged its sharpness to her ear--
that of an electric bell under continued pressure. Stated so
simply, what was it but dreadful, truly, that the feasibility of
Charlotte's "getting at" the man who for so long had loved her
should now be in question? Strangest of all things, doubtless,
this care of Maggie's as to what might make for it or make
against it; stranger still her fairly lapsing at moments into a
vague calculation of the conceivability, on her own part, with
her husband, of some direct sounding of the subject. Would it be
too monstrous, her suddenly breaking out to him as in alarm at
the lapse of the weeks: "Wouldn't it really seem that you're
bound in honour to do something for her, privately, before they
go?" Maggie was capable of weighing the risk of this adventure
for her own spirit, capable of sinking to intense little
absences, even while conversing, as now, with the person who had
most of her confidence, during which she followed up the
possibilities. It was true that Mrs. Assingham could at such
times somewhat restore the balance--by not wholly failing to
guess her thought. Her thought, however, just at present, had
more than one face--had a series that it successively presented.
These were indeed the possibilities involved in the adventure of
her concerning herself for the quantity of compensation that Mrs.
Verver might still look to. There was always the possibility that
she WAS, after all, sufficiently to get at him--there was in fact
that of her having again and again done so. Against this stood
nothing but Fanny Assingham's apparent belief in her privation--
more mercilessly imposed, or more hopelessly felt, in the actual
relation of the parties; over and beyond everything that, from
more than three months back, of course, had fostered in the
Princess a like conviction. These assumptions might certainly be
baseless--inasmuch as there were hours and hours of Amerigo's
time that there was no habit, no pretence of his accounting for;
inasmuch too as Charlotte, inevitably, had had more than once, to
the undisguised knowledge of the pair in Portland Place, been
obliged to come up to Eaton Square, whence so many of her
personal possessions were in course of removal. She didn't come
to Portland Place--didn't even come to ask for luncheon on two
separate occasions when it reached the consciousness of the
household there that she was spending the day in London. Maggie
hated, she scorned, to compare hours and appearances, to weigh
the idea of whether there hadn't been moments, during these days,
when an assignation, in easy conditions, a snatched interview, in
an air the season had so cleared of prying eyes, mightn't
perfectly work. But the very reason of this was partly that,
haunted with the vision of the poor woman carrying off with such
bravery as she found to her hand the secret of her not being
appeased, she was conscious of scant room for any alternative
image. The alternative image would have been that the secret
covered up was the secret of appeasement somehow obtained,
somehow extorted and cherished; and the difference between the
two kinds of hiding was too great to permit of a mistake.
Charlotte was hiding neither pride nor joy--she was hiding
humiliation; and here it was that the Princess's passion, so
powerless for vindictive flights, most inveterately bruised its
tenderness against the hard glass of her question.
Behind the glass lurked the WHOLE history of the relation she had
so fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrate--the glass
Mrs. Verver might, at this stage, have been frantically tapping,
from within, by way of supreme, irrepressible entreaty. Maggie
had said to herself complacently, after that last passage with
her stepmother in the garden of Fawns, that there was nothing
left for her to do and that she could thereupon fold her hands.
But why wasn't it still left to push further and, from the point
of view of personal pride, grovel lower?--why wasn't it still
left to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to him
their friend's anguish and convincing him of her need?
She could thus have translated Mrs. Verver's tap against the
glass, as I have called it, into fifty forms; could perhaps have
translated it most into the form of a reminder that would pierce
deep. "You don't know what it is to have been loved and broken
with. You haven't been broken with, because in your RELATION what
can there have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was
everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine
of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better
meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it,
at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for
deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find
the golden flame--oh, the golden flame!--a mere handful of black
ashes?" Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was
insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for
minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to
rest upon her--the duty of speaking before separation should
constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be
carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of
the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and
negotiable some day in the market of misery.
This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help
herself was one of the traps set for Maggie's spirit at every
turn of the road; the click of which, catching and holding the
divine faculty fast, was followed inevitably by a flutter, by a
struggle of wings and even, as we may say, by a scattering of
fine feathers. For they promptly enough felt, these yearnings of
thought and excursions of sympathy, the concussion that couldn't
bring them down--the arrest produced by the so remarkably
distinct figure that, at Fawns, for the previous weeks, was
constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end
of any watched perspective. Whoever knew, or whoever didn't,
whether or to what extent Charlotte, with natural business in
Eaton Square, had shuffled other opportunities under that cloak,
it was all matter for the kind of quiet ponderation the little
man who so kept his wandering way had made his own. It was part
of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his white waistcoat,
of the trick of his hands in his pockets, of the detachment of
the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his secure
pince-nez. The thing that never failed now as an item in the
picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife's immaterial
tether, so marked to Maggie's sense during her last month in the
country. Mrs. Verver's straight neck had certainly not slipped
it; nor had the other end of the long cord--oh, quite
conveniently long!--disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked
thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out
of sight. To have recognised, for all its tenuity, the play of
this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic
it was twisted, to what tension subjected, but could never be to
doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect
durability. These reminded states for the Princess were in fact
states of renewed gaping. So many things her father knew that she
even yet didn't!
All this, at present, with Mrs. Assingham, passed through her in
quick vibrations. She had expressed, while the revolution of her
thought was incomplete, the idea of what Amerigo "ought," on his
side, in the premises, to be capable of, and then had felt her
companion's answering stare. But she insisted on what she had
meant. "He ought to wish to see her--and I mean in some protected
and independent way, as he used to--in case of her being herself
able to manage it. That," said Maggie with the courage of her
conviction, "he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy, he ought
to feel himself sworn--little as it is for the end of such a
history!--to take from her. It's as if he wished to get off
without taking anything."
Mrs. Assingham deferentially mused. "But for what purpose is it
your idea that they should again so intimately meet?"
"For any purpose they like. That's THEIR affair."
Fanny Assingham sharply laughed, then irrepressibly fell back to
her constant position. "You're splendid--perfectly splendid." To
which, as the Princess, shaking an impatient head, wouldn't have
it again at all, she subjoined: "Or if you're not it's because
you're so sure. I mean sure of HIM."
"Ah, I'm exactly NOT sure of him. If I were sure of him I
shouldn't doubt--!" But Maggie cast about her.
"Doubt what?" Fanny pressed as she waited.
"Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays--and how
that ought to keep her present to him."
This, in its turn, after an instant, Mrs. Assingham could meet
with a smile. "Trust him, my dear, to keep her present! But trust
him also to keep himself absent. Leave him his own way."
"I'll leave him everything," said Maggie. "Only--you know it's my
nature--I THINK."
"It's your nature to think too much," Fanny Assingham a trifle
coarsely risked.
This but quickened, however, in the Princess the act she
reprobated. "That may be. But if I hadn't thought--!"
"You wouldn't, you mean, have been where you are?"
"Yes, because they, on their side, thought of everything BUT
that. They thought of everything but that I might think."
"Or even," her friend too superficially concurred, "that your
father might!"
As to this, at all events, Maggie discriminated. "No, that
wouldn't have prevented them; for they knew that his first care
would be not to make me do so. As it is," Maggie added, "that has
had to become his last."
Fanny Assingham took it in deeper--for what it immediately made
her give out louder. "HE'S splendid then." She sounded it almost
aggressively; it was what she was reduced to--she had positively
to place it.
"Ah, that as much as you please!"
Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next
moment determined in her friend a fresh reaction. "You think,
both of you, so abysmally and yet so quietly. But it's what will
have saved you."
"Oh," Maggie returned, "it's what--from the moment they
discovered we could think at all--will have saved THEM. For
they're the ones who are saved," she went on. "We're the ones who
are lost."
"Lost--?"
"Lost to each other--father and I" And then as her friend
appeared to demur, "Oh yes," Maggie quite lucidly declared, "lost
to each other much more, really, than Amerigo and Charlotte are;
since for them it's just, it's right, it's deserved, while for us
it's only sad and strange and not caused by our fault. But I
don't know," she went on, "why I talk about myself, for it's on
father it really comes. I let him go," said Maggie.
"You let him, but you don't make him."
"I take it from him," she answered.
"But what else can you do?"
"I take it from him," the Princess repeated. "I do what I knew
from the first I SHOULD do. I get off by giving him up."
"But if he gives you?" Mrs. Assingham presumed to object.
"Doesn't it moreover then," she asked, "complete the very purpose
with which he married--that of making you and leaving you more
free?"