The Golden Bowl, Volume I by Henry James (page 6)

Regret as he might, too, the difference made by this obligation, he frankly didn’t mind, inasmuch as, over and above the pleasure itself, his scruple would certainly gratify both Mr. Verver and Maggie. They never yet had absolutely and entirely learned, he even found deliberation to intimate, how little he really neglected the first–as it seemed nowadays quite to have become– of his domestic duties: therefore he still constantly felt how little he must remit his effort to make them remark it. To which he added with equal lucidity that they would return in time for dinner, and if he didn’t, as a last word, subjoin that it would be “lovely” of Fanny to find, on her own return, a moment to go to Eaton Square and report them as struggling bravely on, this was not because the impulse, down to the very name for the amiable act, altogether failed to rise. His inward assurance, his general plan, had at moments, where she was concerned, its drops of continuity, and nothing would less have pleased him than that she should suspect in him, however tempted, any element of conscious “cheek.” But he was always–that was really the upshot–cultivating thanklessly the considerate and the delicate: it was a long lesson, this unlearning, with people of English race, all the little superstitions that accompany friendship. Mrs. Assingham herself was the first to say that she would unfailingly “report”; she brought it out in fact, he thought, quite wonderfully–having attained the summit of the wonderful during the brief interval that had separated her appeal to Charlotte from this passage with himself. She had taken the five minutes, obviously, amid the rest of the talk and the movement, to retire into her tent for meditation–which showed, among several things, the impression Charlotte had made on her. It was from the tent she emerged, as with arms refurbished; though who indeed could say if the manner in which she now met him spoke most, really, of the glitter of battle or of the white waver of the flag of truce? The parley was short either way; the gallantry of her offer was all sufficient.

“I’ll go to our friends then–I’ll ask for luncheon. I’ll tell them when to expect you.”

“That will be charming. Say we’re all right.”

“All right–precisely. I can’t say more,” Mrs. Assingham smiled.

“No doubt.” But he considered, as for the possible importance of it. “Neither can you, by what I seem to feel, say less.”

“Oh, I WON’T say less!” Fanny laughed; with which, the next moment, she had turned away. But they had it again, not less bravely, on the morrow, after breakfast, in the thick of the advancing carriages and the exchange of farewells. “I think I’ll send home my maid from Euston,” she was then prepared to amend, “and go to Eaton Square straight. So you can be easy.”

“Oh, I think we’re easy,” the Prince returned. “Be sure to say, at any rate, that we’re bearing up.”

“You’re bearing up–good. And Charlotte returns to dinner?”

“To dinner. We’re not likely, I think, to make another night away.”

“Well then, I wish you at least a pleasant day,”

“Oh,” he laughed as they separated, “we shall do our best for it!”–after which, in due course, with the announcement of their conveyance, the Assinghams rolled off.

XXII

It was quite, for the Prince, after this, as if the view had further cleared; so that the half-hour during which he strolled on the terrace and smoked–the day being lovely–overflowed with the plenitude of its particular quality. Its general brightness was composed, doubtless, of many elements, but what shone out of it as if the whole place and time had been a great picture, from the hand of genius, presented to him as a prime ornament for his collection and all varnished and framed to hang up–what marked it especially for the highest appreciation was his extraordinarily unchallenged, his absolutely appointed and enhanced possession of it. Poor Fanny Assingham’s challenge amounted to nothing: one of the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble balustrade–so like others that he knew in still more nobly-terraced Italy–was that she was squared, all-conveniently even to herself, and that, rumbling toward London with this contentment, she had become an image irrelevant to the scene. It further passed across him, as his imagination was, for reasons, during the time, unprecedentedly active,–that he had, after all, gained more from women than he had ever lost by them; there appeared so, more and more, on those mystic books that are kept, in connection with such commerce, even by men of the loosest business habits, a balance in his favour that he could pretty well, as a rule, take for granted. What were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures, but combine and conspire for his advantage?–from Maggie herself, most wonderful, in her way, of all, to his hostess of the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably come to keep Charlotte on, for reasons of her own, and who had asked, in this benevolent spirit, why in the world, if not obliged, without plausibility, to hurry, her husband’s son-in-law should not wait over in her company. He would at least see, Lady Castledean had said, that nothing dreadful should happen to her, either while still there or during the exposure of the run to town; and, for that matter, if they exceeded a little their license it would positively help them to have done so together. Each of them would, in this way, at home, have the other comfortably to blame. All of which, besides, in Lady Castledean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in Charlotte herself, was working; for him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their part–definite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte–that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his remarkable fortune.

But there were more things before him than even these; things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious–and the towers of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of tone–didn’t he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? It made everything fit; above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he lingered and waited, his meditative smile. She had detained Charlotte because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she couldn’t detain Mr. Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ampler drapery. Castledean had gone up to London; the place was all her own; she had had a fancy for a quiet morning with Mr. Blint, a sleek, civil, accomplished young man–distinctly younger than her ladyship–who played and sang delightfully (played even “bridge” and sang the English-comic as well as the French-tragic), and the presence–which really meant the absence–of a couple of other friends, if they were happily chosen, would make everything all right. The Prince had the sense, all good-humouredly, of being happily chosen, and it was not spoiled for him even by another sense that followed in its train and with which, during his life in England, he had more than once had reflectively to deal: the state of being reminded how, after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant to the working of affairs that he could be bent on occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of her guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess; affairs, of whatever sorts, had claimed, by early trains, every active, easy, smoothly-working man, each in his way a lubricated item of the great social, political, administrative engrenage–claimed most of all Castledean himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, on the other hand, had an affair, it was not of that order; it was of the order, verily, that he had been reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute.

It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision of being “reduced” interfered not at all with the measure of his actual ease. It kept before him again, at moments, the so familiar fact of his sacrifices–down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his wife’s convenience, of his real situation in the world; with the consequence, thus, that he was, in the last analysis, among all these so often inferior people, practically held cheap and made light of. But though all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn’t somehow take Mr. Blint seriously–he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance. Yet it was past finding out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him–since this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, “well”; he had lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various other things with them; but the number of questions about them he couldn’t have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one residual impression. They didn’t like les situations nettes–that was all he was very sure of. They wouldn’t have them at any price; it had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise–the very influence of which actually so hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air, the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, owed to it every accent of their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it had succeeded; it had made, up to now, for that seated solidity, in the rich sea-mist, on which the garish, the supposedly envious, peoples have ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even much initiation left one, at given moments, so puzzled as to the element of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness, of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning. The inquiring mind, in these present conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply challenged; but the result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to know, was too often to be confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse of logic, a confirmed bewilderment. And moreover, above all, nothing mattered, in the relation of the enclosing scene to his own consciousness, but its very most direct bearings.

Lady Castledean’s dream of Mr. Blint for the morning was doubtless already, with all the spacious harmonies re- established, taking the form of “going over” something with him, at the piano, in one of the numerous smaller rooms that were consecrated to the less gregarious uses; what she had wished had been effected–her convenience had been assured. This made him, however, wonder the more where Charlotte was–since he didn’t at all suppose her to be making a tactless third, which would be to have accepted mere spectatorship, in the duet of their companions. The upshot of everything for him, alike of the less and of the more, was that the exquisite day bloomed there like a large fragrant flower that he had only to gather. But it was to Charlotte he wished to make the offering, and as he moved along the terrace, which rendered visible parts of two sides of the house, he looked up at all the windows that were open to the April morning, and wondered which of them would represent his friend’s room. It befell thus that his question, after no long time, was answered; he saw Charlotte appear above as if she had been called by the pausing of his feet on the flags. She had come to the sill, on which she leaned to look down, and she remained there a minute smiling at him. He had been immediately struck with her wearing a hat and a jacket–which conduced to her appearance of readiness not so much to join him, with a beautiful uncovered head and a parasol, where he stood, as to take with him some larger step altogether. The larger step had been, since the evening before, intensely in his own mind, though he had not fully thought out, even yet, the slightly difficult detail of it; but he had had no chance, such as he needed, to speak the definite word to her, and the face she now showed affected him, accordingly, as a notice that she had wonderfully guessed it for herself. They had these identities of impulse–they had had them repeatedly before; and if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness. What in fact most often happened was that her rightness went, as who should say, even further than his own; they were conscious of the same necessity at the same moment, only it was she, as a general thing, who most clearly saw her way to it. Something in her long look at him now out of the old grey window, something in the very poise of her hat, the colour of her necktie, the prolonged stillness of her smile, touched into sudden light for him all the wealth of the fact that he could count on her. He had his hand there, to pluck it, on the open bloom of the day; but what did the bright minute mean but that her answering hand was already intelligently out? So, therefore, while the minute lasted, it passed between them that their cup was full; which cup their very eyes, holding it fast, carried and steadied and began, as they tasted it, to praise. He broke, however, after a moment, the silence.

“It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a serenade.”

“Ah, then,” she lightly called down, “let it at least have THIS!” With which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another in the front of her dress and flung it down to him. He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his buttonhole. “Come down quickly!” he said in an Italian not loud but deep.

“Vengo, vengo!” she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she had left him the next minute to wait for her.

He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of far-away watercolour that represented the most distant of the cathedral towns. This place, with its great church and its high accessibility, its towers that distinguishably signalled, its English history, its appealing type, its acknowledged interest, this place had sounded its name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of things which now throbbed within him. He had kept saying to himself “Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,” quite as if the sharpest meaning of all the years just passed were intensely expressed in it. That meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte, stood there together in the very lustre of this truth. Every present circumstance helped to proclaim it; it was blown into their faces as by the lips of the morning. He knew why, from the first of his marriage, he had tried with such patience for such conformity; he knew why he had given up so much and bored himself so much; he knew why he, at any rate, had gone in, on the basis of all forms, on the basis of his having, in a manner, sold himself, for a situation nette. It had all been just in order that his–well, what on earth should he call it but his freedom?–should at present be as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl. He hadn’t struggled nor snatched; he was taking but what had been given him; the pearl dropped itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand. Here, precisely, it was, incarnate; its size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared, afar off, in one of the smaller doorways. She came toward him in silence, while he moved to meet her; the great scale of this particular front, at Matcham, multiplied thus, in the golden morning, the stages of their meeting and the successions of their consciousness. It wasn’t till she had come quite close that he produced for her his “Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,” and his “Look at it over there!”

She knew just where to look. “Yes–isn’t it one of the best? There are cloisters or towers or some thing.” And her eyes, which, though her lips smiled, were almost grave with their depths of acceptance; came back to him. “Or the tomb of some old king.”

“We must see the old king; we must ‘do’ the cathedral,” he said; “we must know all about it. If we could but take,” he exhaled, “the full opportunity!” And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes: “I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together.”

“I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel! But do you remember,” she asked, “apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you wouldn’t have? Just before your marriage”–she brought it back to him: “the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop.”

“Oh yes!”–but it took, with a slight surprise on the ‘Prince’s part, some small recollecting. “The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me, and the little swindling Jew who understood Italian and who backed you up! But I feel this an occasion,” he immediately added, “and I hope you don’t mean,” he smiled, “that AS an occasion it’s also cracked.”

They spoke, naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as they were, though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows; but it made each find in the other’s voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed. “Don’t you think too much of ‘cracks,’ and aren’t you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks,” said Charlotte, “and I’ve often recalled the bowl and the little swindling Jew, wondering if they’ve parted company. He made,” she said, “a great impression on me.”

“Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on him, and I dare say that if you were to go back to him you’d find he has been keeping that treasure for you. But as to cracks,” the Prince went on–“what did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English?-‘rifts within the lute’?–risk them as much as you like for yourself, but don’t risk them for me.” He spoke it in all the gaiety of his just barely-tremulous serenity. “I go, as you know, by my superstitions. And that’s why,” he said, “I know where we are. They’re every one, to-day, on our side.”

Resting on the parapet; toward the great view, she was silent a little, and he saw the next moment that her eyes were closed. “I go but by one thing.” Her hand was on the sun-warmed stone; so that, turned as they were away from the house, he put his own upon it and covered it. “I go by YOU,” she said. “I go by you.”

So they remained a moment, till he spoke again with a gesture that matched. “What is really our great necessity, you know, is to go by my watch. It’s already eleven”–he had looked at the time; “so that if we stop here to luncheon what becomes of our afternoon?”

To this Charlotte’s eyes opened straight. “There’s not the slightest need of our stopping here to luncheon. Don’t you see,” she asked, “how I’m ready?” He had taken it in, but there was always more and more of her. “You mean you’ve arranged–?”

“It’s easy to arrange. My maid goes up with my things. You’ve only to speak to your man about yours, and they can go together.”

“You mean we can leave at once?”

She let him have it all. “One of the carriages, about which I spoke, will already have come back for us. If your superstitions are on our side,” she smiled, “so my arrangements are, and I’ll back my support against yours.”

“Then you had thought,” he wondered, “about Gloucester?”

She hesitated–but it was only her way. “I thought you would think. We have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They are food for superstition if you like. It’s beautiful,” she went on, “that it should be Gloucester; ‘Glo’ster, Glo’ster,’ as you say, making it sound like an old song. However, I’m sure Glo’ster, Glo’ster will be charming,” she still added; “we shall be able easily to lunch there, and, with our luggage and our servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours. We can wire,” she wound up, “from there.”

Ever so quietly she had brought it, as she had thought it, all out, and it had to be as covertly that he let his appreciation expand. “Then Lady Castledean–?”

“Doesn’t dream of our staying.”

He took it, but thinking yet. “Then what does she dream–?”

“Of Mr. Blint, poor dear; of Mr. Blint only.” Her smile for him– for the Prince himself–was free. “Have I positively to tell you that she doesn’t want us? She only wanted us for the others–to show she wasn’t left alone with him. Now that that’s done, and that they’ve all gone, she of course knows for herself–!”

“‘Knows’?” the Prince vaguely echoed.

“Why, that we like cathedrals; that we inevitably stop to see them, or go round to take them in, whenever we’ve a chance; that it’s what our respective families quite expect of us and would be disappointed for us to fail of. This, as forestieri,” Mrs. Verver pursued, “would be our pull–if our pull weren’t indeed so great all round.”

He could only keep his eyes on her. “And have you made out the very train–?”

“The very one. Paddington–the 6.50 ‘in.’ That gives us oceans; we can dine, at the usual hour, at home; and as Maggie will of course be in Eaton Square I hereby invite you.”

For a while he still but looked at her; it was a minute before he spoke. “Thank you very much. With pleasure.” To which he in a moment added: “But the train for Gloucester?”

“A local one–11.22; with several stops, but doing it a good deal, I forget how much, within the hour. So that we’ve time. Only,” she said, “we must employ our time.”

He roused himself as from the mere momentary spell of her; he looked again at his watch while they moved back to the door through which she had advanced. But he had also again questions and stops–all as for the mystery and the charm. “You looked it up–without my having asked you?”

“Ah, my dear,” she laughed, “I’ve seen you with Bradshaw! It takes Anglo-Saxon blood.”

“‘Blood’?” he echoed. “You’ve that of every race!” It kept her before him. “You’re terrible.”

Well, he could put it as he liked. “I know the name of the inn.”

“What is it then?”

“There are two–you’ll see. But I’ve chosen the right one. And I think I remember the tomb,” she smiled.

“Oh, the tomb–!” Any tomb would do for him. “But I mean I had been keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with it.”

“You had been keeping it ‘for’ me as much as you like. But how do you make out,” she asked, “that you were keeping it FROM me?”

“I don’t–now. How shall I ever keep anything–some day when I shall wish to?”

“Ah, for things I mayn’t want to know, I promise you shall find me stupid.” They had reached their door, where she herself paused to explain. “These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I’ve wanted everything.”

Well, it was all right. “You shall have everything.”

XXIII

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.”

He followed at his own pace. “Their situation?”

“The incredible side of it. They make it credible.”

“Credible then–you do say–to YOU?”

She looked at him again for an interval. “They believe in it themselves. They take it for what it is. And that,” she said, “saves them.”

“But if what it ‘is’ is just their chance–?”

“It’s their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up. It’s their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had.”

The Colonel showed his effort to recall. “Oh, your idea, at different moments, of any one of THEIR ideas!” This dim procession, visibly, mustered before him, and, with the best will in the world, he could but watch its immensity. “Are you speaking now of something to which you can comfortably settle down?”

Again, for a little, she only glowered at him. “I’ve come back to my belief, and that I have done so–“

“Well?” he asked as she paused.

“Well, shows that I’m right–for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. They’re beautiful,” she declared.

“The Prince and Charlotte?”

“The Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”

“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of themselves.”

The Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”

Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes–of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”

He turned it over. “That danger BEING the blindness–?”

“That danger being their position. What their position contains– of all the elements–I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily–for that’s the mercy– everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”

He stood for a moment; he WOULD have it straight. “Whose husband’s?”

“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on. “The blindness is most of all his. That they feel–that they see. But it’s also his wife’s.”

“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention. And then as she only gloomed: “The Prince’s?”

“Maggie’s own–Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for herself.

He had a pause. “Do you think Maggie so blind?”

“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.”

Well, he considered. “It IS rather rum,”

“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.

XXIV

“I can’t say more,” this made his companion reply, “than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best–and her very best, poor duck, is very good–to be quiet and natural. It’s when one sees people who always ARE natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it–then it is that one knows something’s the matter. I can’t describe my impression–you would have had it for yourself. And the only thing that ever CAN be the matter with Maggie is that. By ‘that’ I mean her beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world.”

It was impressive, Fanny’s vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. “To doubt of fidelity–to doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But she’ll put it all,” he concluded, “on Charlotte.”

Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake. “She won’t ‘put’ it anywhere. She won’t do with it anything anyone else would. She’ll take it all herself.”

“You mean she’ll make it out her own fault?”

“Yes–she’ll find means, somehow, to arrive at that.”

“Ah then,” the Colonel dutifully declared, “she’s indeed a little brick!”

“Oh,” his wife returned, “you’ll see, in one way or another, to what tune!” And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation–so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. “She’ll see me somehow through!”

“See YOU–?”

“Yes, me. I’m the worst. For,” said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, “I did it all. I recognise that–I accept it. She won’t cast it up at me–she won’t cast up anything. So I throw myself upon her–she’ll bear me up.” She spoke almost volubly–she held him with her sudden sharpness. “She’ll carry the whole weight of us.”

There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. “You mean she won’t mind? I SAY, love–!” And he not unkindly stared. “Then where’s the difficulty?”

“There isn’t any!” Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. “Ah, you mean there isn’t any for US!”

She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what they had most to consider. “Not,” she said with dignity, “if we properly keep our heads.” She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis. “Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first REAL anxiety–after the Foreign Office party?”

“In the carriage–as we came home?” Yes–he could recall it. “Leave them to pull through?”

“Precisely. ‘Trust their own wit,’ you practically said, ‘to save all appearances.’ Well, I’ve trusted it. I HAVE left them to pull through.”

He hesitated. “And your point is that they’re not doing so?”

“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.”

He thought. “Worse than that Charlotte–?”

“Ah, don’t tell me,” she cried, “that there COULD have been nothing worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary.”

He was almost simultaneous. “Extraordinary!”

“She observes the forms,” said Fanny Assingham.

He hesitated. “With the Prince–?”

“FOR the Prince. And with the others,” she went on. “With Mr. Verver–wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms” –she had to do even THEM justice–“are two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them.”

But he jerked back. “Ah, my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the world!”

“Say,” she none the less pursued, “he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for.”

“You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte–?” This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: “No!”

“Then what on earth are they up to?” Still, however, she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time, further, to risk, soothingly, another question. “Are the ‘forms’ you speak of–that are two-thirds of conduct–what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?”

“Yes–absolutely. THEIR forms.”

“‘Theirs’–?”

“Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s–those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the Prince. Those,” she developed. “that, so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones.”

He considered–but only now, at last, really to relapse into woe. “Your ‘perversity,’ my dear, is exactly what I don’t understand. The state of things existing hasn’t grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they’ve DONE. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?”

Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it, “Yes–they are. To be so abjectly innocent–that IS to be victims of fate.”

“And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent–?”

It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. “Yes. That is they WERE–as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s were beautiful–of THAT I had my faith. They WERE– I’d go to the stake. Otherwise,” she added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”

“Ah then,” he asked, “what does our muddle make THEM to have been?”

“Well, too much taken up with considering each other. You may call such a mistake as that by what ever name you please; it at any rate means, all round, their case. It illustrates the misfortune,” said Mrs. Assingham gravely, “of being too, too charming.”

This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again did his best. “Yes, but to whom?–doesn’t it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming?”

“To each other, in the first place–obviously. And then both of them together to Maggie.”

“To Maggie?” he wonderingly echoed.

“To Maggie.” She was now crystalline. “By having accepted, from the first, so guilelessly–yes, so guilelessly, themselves–her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life.”

“Then isn’t one supposed, in common humanity, and if one hasn’t quarrelled with him, and one has the means, and he, on his side, doesn’t drink or kick up rows–isn’t one supposed to keep one’s aged parent in one’s life?”

“Certainly–when there aren’t particular reasons against it. That there may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what is before us. In the first place Mr. Verver isn’t aged.”

The Colonel just hung fire–but it came. “Then why the deuce does he–oh, poor dear man!–behave as if he were?”

She took a moment to meet it. “How do you know how he behaves?”

“Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!” Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose. “Ah, isn’t my whole point that he’s charming to her?”

“Doesn’t it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?”

She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of dignity she brushed it away. “It’s Mr. Verver who’s really young–it’s Charlotte who’s really old. And what I was saying,” she added, “isn’t affected!”

“You were saying”–he did her the justice–“that they’re all guileless.”

“That they were. Guileless, all, at first–quite extraordinarily. It’s what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I repeat,” Fanny went on, “that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr. Verver–which was serious, as well it might be!–would save them.”

“I see.” The Colonel inclined himself. “And save HIM.”

“It comes to the same thing!”

“Then save Maggie.”

“That comes,” said Mrs. Assingham, “to something a little different. For Maggie has done the most.”

He wondered. “What do you call the most?”

“Well, she did it originally–she began the vicious circle. For that–though you make round eyes at my associating her with ‘vice’–is simply what it has been. It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably GOOD.”

“In their way–yes!” the Colonel grinned.

“Which was, above all, Maggie’s way.” No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now. “Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become–poor little dear, as she believed–so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path–by instalments, as it were– in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however,” Mrs. Assingham further explained, “by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire–this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been–involved in some degree, and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold,” Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, “that a person can mostly feel but one passion–one TENDER passion, that is–at a time. Only, that doesn’t hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the ‘voice of blood,’ such as one’s feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities–as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn’t adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie”–she kept it up–“is in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind– her feverish little sense of justice, as I say–had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn’t have done. And now she knows something or other has happened–yet hasn’t heretofore known what. She has only piled up her remedy, poor child–something that she has earnestly but confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and that would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father’s wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that, peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there’s anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that–God forgive me the comparison!–she’s like an old woman who has taken to ‘painting’ and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity, with a greater impudence even, the older she grows.” And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. “I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent–learning to be so to gloss things over. She could–she even will, yet, I believe–learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it’s all rouge–!” She paused, staring at the vision.

It imparted itself even to Bob. “Then the fun would begin?” As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry. “You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?”

She was silent a moment more. “As I’ve told you before, she won’t be lost if her father’s saved. She’ll see that as salvation enough.”

The Colonel took it in. “Then she’s a little heroine.”

“Rather–she’s a little heroine. But it’s his innocence, above all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “that will pull them through.”

Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver’s innocence. “It’s awfully quaint.”

“Of course it’s awfully quaint! That it’s awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness–by which I don’t mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from whom I’ve so deplorably degenerated–that,” Mrs. Assingham declared, “was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still,” she rather ruefully subjoined, “before they’ve done with me!”

This might be, but it wasn’t what most stood in the Colonel’s way. “You believe so in Mr. Verver’s innocence after two years of Charlotte?”

She stared. “But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn’t really–or what you may call undividedly–had.”

“Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has ‘really or undividedly,’ had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn’t had,” the Colonel conceded, “to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us in admiration.”

So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. “It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is that–strange though this be–her effort for her father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged–the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding–he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn’t worked them out in detail–any more than I had, heaven pity me!–and the queerness has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both,” she neatly wound up, ‘help.'”

“‘Both’–?”

“I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte,” Fanny declared, “works like a horse.”

So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. “And what does the Prince work like?”

She fixed him in return. “Like a Prince!” Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly– decorated back–in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.

He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life–as life had shrunk for him now–the most luminous of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief–how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer –there was another plum in the pie. “What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?”

“The Prince’s? By his not ‘really’ caring?” She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough. “I mean that men don’t, when it has all been too easy. That’s how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works,” she added; “but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays.”

Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”

“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with expression, “he’s–beautifully–a case. They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be–and that’s what makes so much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last–the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”

The Colonel considered. “And how must Charlotte–if anything happens–take him?”

The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her. “Nothing –in spite of everything–WILL happen. Nothing HAS happened. Nothing IS happening.”

He looked a trifle disappointed. “I see. For US.”

“For us. For whom else?” And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it. “We know nothing on earth–!” It was an undertaking he must sign.

So he wrote, as it were, his name. “We know nothing on earth.” It was like the soldiers’ watchword at night.

“We’re as innocent,” she went on in the same way, “as babes.”

“Why not rather say,” he asked, “as innocent as they themselves are?”

“Oh, for the best of reasons! Because we’re much more so.”

He wondered. “But how can we be more–?”

“For them? Oh, easily! We can be anything.”

“Absolute idiots then?”

“Absolute idiots. And oh,” Fanny breathed, “the way it will rest us!”

Well, he looked as if there were something in that. “But won’t they know we’re not?”

She barely hesitated. “Charlotte and the Prince think we are– which is so much gained. Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence–but he doesn’t matter.”

“And Maggie? Doesn’t SHE know–?”

“That we see before our noses?” Yes, this indeed took longer. “Oh, so far as she may guess it she’ll give no sign. So it comes to the same thing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Comes to our not being able to help her?”

“That’s the way we SHALL help her.”

“By looking like fools?”

She threw up her hands. “She only wants, herself, to look like a bigger! So there we are!” With which she brushed it away–his conformity was promised. Something, however, still held her; it broke, to her own vision, as a last wave of clearness. “Moreover NOW,” she said, “I see! I mean,” she added,–what you were asking me: how I knew to-day, in Eaton Square, that Maggie’s awake.” And she had indeed visibly got it. “It was by seeing them together.”

“Seeing her with her father?” He fell behind again. “But you’ve seen her often enough before.”

“Never with my present eyes. For nothing like such a test–that of this length of the others’ absence together–has hitherto occurred.”

“Possibly! But if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it–?”

“Why is it such a test? Because it has become one without their intending it. It has spoiled, so to speak, on their hands.”

“It has soured, eh?” the Colonel said.

“The word’s horrible–say rather it has ‘changed.’ Perhaps,” Fanny went on, “she did wish to see how much she can bear. In that case she HAS seen. Only it was she alone who–about the visit–insisted. Her father insists on nothing. And she watches him do it.”

Her husband looked impressed. “Watches him?”

“For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It doesn’t, as I tell you, come. But she’s there for it to see. And I felt,” she continued, “HOW she’s there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She couldn’t keep it from me–though she left her post on purpose–came home with me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all–her dust; but it was what showed me.” With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her room. “Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing–from him–HAS come.”

“You’re so awfully sure?”

“Sure. Nothing WILL. Good-night,” she said. “She’ll die first.”