It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying "Do you and she agree together for what you'll say to me?"--but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. "I think I don't know what to make of you."

"You must receive me at least," he said.

"Oh, please, not till I'm ready for you!"--and, though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of him.

XVI

Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could m.u.f.fle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake.

For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded, at first, in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It wouldn't, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror. It had become, for the occasion, preposterously, terror--of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground. The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her; since she found, on trying, that, lurid as her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give it no name. The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw. Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued; since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause she should surely be less vague about what she had produced. This, further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one's connection with any matter was too indirect to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she had in fact recognised that she couldn't be as curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent. But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.

"It's only their defending themselves so much more than they need--it's only THAT that makes me wonder. It's their having so remarkably much to say for themselves."

Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. "You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?" To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added: "What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man's in a position in which he has nothing in life to do."

Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband's company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him.

"He has behaved beautifully--he did from the first. I've thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I've more than once, when I've had a chance, told him so. Therefore, therefore--!" But it died away as she mused.

"Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?"

"It isn't a question, of course, however," she undivertedly went on, "of their behaving beautifully apart. It's a question of their doing as they should when together--which is another matter."

"And how do you think then," the Colonel asked with interest, "that, when together, they SHOULD do? The less they do, one would say, the better--if you see so much in it."

His wife, at this, appeared to hear him. "I don't see in it what YOU'D see. And don't, my dear," she further answered, "think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They're the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in right."

"I'm surely never horrid or low," he returned, "about anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends--as I see them myself: what I can't do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up--!" But he exhaled it again in smoke.

"My additions don't matter when you've not to pay the bill." With which her meditation again bore her through the air. "The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn't afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was--if I hadn't seen he wasn't--so," said Mrs. a.s.singham, "could I.

So," she declared, "WOULD I. It's perfectly true," she went on--"it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted.

And I LIKED his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn't have faced it. Then, if SHE had not had confidence, we might have talked. But she had it to any amount."

"Did you ask her how much?" Bob a.s.singham patiently inquired.

He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the sharpest spring of response.

"Never, never--it wasn't a time to 'ask.' Asking is suggesting--and it wasn't a time to suggest. One had to make up one's mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as--for so proud a creature--almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due."

"That is to Mrs. a.s.singham?"

She said nothing for a little--there were, after all, alternatives.

"Maggie herself of course--astonishing little Maggie."

"Is Maggie then astonishing too?"--and he gloomed out of his window.

His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. "I'm not sure that I don't begin to see more in her than--dear little person as I've always thought--I ever supposed there was. I'm not sure that, putting a good many things together, I'm not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary."

"You certainly will if you can," the Colonel resignedly remarked.

Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out. "In fact--I do begin to feel it--Maggie's the great comfort. I'm getting hold of it.

It will be SHE who'll see us through. In fact she'll have to. And she'll be able."

Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a c.u.mulative effect for her husband's general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that f.a.n.n.y had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr.

Verver. "Oh, Lordy, Lordy!"

"If she is, however," Mrs. a.s.singham continued, "she'll be extraordinary enough--and that's what I'm thinking of. But I'm not indeed so very sure," she added, "of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I mean I'm not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife."

"I shouldn't think you would be, love," the Colonel with some promptness responded. "Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist--!"

His cigar, in short, once more, could alone express it.

"Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?"--this memory, for the full view, f.a.n.n.y found herself also invoking.

It made her companion, in truth, slightly gape. "An incredible little idealist--Charlotte herself?"

"And she was sincere," his wife simply proceeded "she was unmistakably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it."

"And that--I see--happens to be another of the questions you can't ask her. You have to do it all," said Bob a.s.singham, "as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up--though who's to come down on you if you break them I don't quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses--like forfeits on Christmas eve?" To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her, he further added: "How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?"

"I shall go on," f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham a trifle grimly declared, "while there's a sc.r.a.p as big as your nail. But we're not yet, luckily, reduced only to that." She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver's obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. "Even if her debt was not to the others--even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight. For what, really, did the Prince do," she asked herself, "but generously trust her? What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong? That creates for her, upon my word," Mrs. a.s.singham pursued, "a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which--well, which she'll be really a fiend if she doesn't make the law of her conduct. I mean of course his trust that she wouldn't interfere with him--expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time."

The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel's next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united, for the most part, but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best, his note. He at present, however, actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps. He literally asked, in short, an intelligent, well nigh a sympathising, question. "Grat.i.tude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel--that, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?"

"Taking it in the right way." f.a.n.n.y, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.

"But doesn't it rather depend on what she may most feel to BE the right way?"

"No--it depends on nothing. Because there's only one way--for duty or delicacy."

"Oh--delicacy!" Bob a.s.singham rather crudely murmured.

"I mean the highest kind--moral. Charlotte's perfectly capable of appreciating that. By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone."

"Then you've made up your mind it's all poor Charlotte?" he asked with an effect of abruptness.

The effect, whether intended or not, reached her--brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which, somehow, the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort. "Then you've made up yours differently? It really struck you that there IS something?"

The movement itself, apparently, made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question.

"Perhaps that's just what she's doing: showing him how much she's letting him alone--pointing it out to him from day to day."

"Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair-case in the manner you described to me?"

"I really, my dear, described to you a manner?" the Colonel, clearly, from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.

"Yes--for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn't tell me very much--THAT you couldn't for your life; but I saw for myself that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it." She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion--confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even HE, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of it would escape--she should have it at hand for reference. "Come, my dear--you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you couldn't resist thinking. I don't ask more of it than that. And your idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine--so that you can't pretend, as usual, that mine has run away with me. I haven't caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see," she concluded, "where you are, and I'm much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point de repere outside myself--which is where I like it. Now I can work round you."

Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key, so that their household had gone to bed; and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob a.s.singham waited--conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn't turn his face, but he stared straight before him, and his wife had already perceived in the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire-- proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. "Leave it," he at last remarked, "to THEM."

"'Leave' it--?" She wondered.