"For such matters? Oh, he doesn't count."

"I thought that was just what--as the basis of our agitation--he does do!"

Mrs. a.s.singham, 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," f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham continued, "G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 f.a.n.n.y's drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus pa.s.sed between them, pa.s.sed 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y'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 pa.s.sage 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. a.s.singham wound up, "of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world."

It was impressive, f.a.n.n.y'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. a.s.singham, 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 f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham, 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!" f.a.n.n.y 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 const.i.tuted 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. a.s.singham 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, f.a.n.n.y 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. a.s.singham 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. a.s.singham 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. a.s.singham, "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."