f.a.n.n.y felt then it was stare for stare. "But surely you always knew they had met."

"I didn't understand. I knew too little. Don't you see what I mean?" the Princess asked.

Mrs. a.s.singham wondered, during these instants, how much she even now knew; it had taken a minute to perceive how gently she was speaking.

With that perception of its being no challenge of wrath, no heat of the deceived soul, but only a free exposure of the completeness of past ignorance, inviting derision even if it must, the elder woman felt, first, a strange, barely credible relief: she drew in, as if it had been the warm summer scent of a flower, the sweet certainty of not meeting, any way she should turn, any consequence of judgment. She shouldn't be judged--save by herself; which was her own wretched business. The next moment, however, at all events, she blushed, within, for her immediate cowardice: she had thought of herself, thought of "getting off," before so much as thinking--that is of pitifully seeing--that she was in presence of an appeal that was ALL an appeal, that utterly accepted its necessity. "In a general way, dear child, yes. But not--a--in connexion with what you've been telling me."

"They were intimate, you see. Intimate," said the Princess.

f.a.n.n.y continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history, so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other time. "There's always the question of what one considers--!"

"What one considers intimate? Well, I know what I consider intimate now.

Too intimate," said Maggie, "to let me know anything about it."

It was quiet--yes; but not too quiet for f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham's capacity to wince. "Only compatible with letting ME, you mean?" She had asked it after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney and wondering, even while she took relief from it, at this gap in her experience. "But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is perfect."

"They went about together--they're known to have done it. And I don't mean only before--I mean after."

"After?" said f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham.

"Before we were married--yes; but after we were engaged."

"Ah, I've known nothing about that!" And she said it with a braver a.s.surance--clutching, with comfort, at something that was apparently new to her.

"That bowl," Maggie went on, "is, so strangely--too strangely, almost, to believe at this time of day--the proof. They were together all the while--up to the very eve of our marriage. Don't you remember how just before that she came back, so unexpectedly, from America?"

The question had for Mrs. a.s.singham--and whether all consciously or not--the oddest pathos of simplicity. "Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America--and how she stayed with US, and what view one had of it."

Maggie's eyes still, all the time, pressed and penetrated; so that, during a moment, just here, she might have given the little flare, have made the little pounce, of asking what then "one's" view had been. To the small flash of this eruption f.a.n.n.y stood, for her minute, wittingly exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten--quite saw the Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of itself. She saw her--or she believed she saw her--look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pa.s.s it by; and she felt herself, with this fact, hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery--since it was, however obscurely, a case of "discovery"--could make less needful. These seconds were brief--they rapidly pa.s.sed; but they lasted long enough to renew our friend's sense of her own extraordinary undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of the terms on which she was let off--her quant.i.ty of release having made its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte's old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed--ah, so inspiringly when it came to that! her steady view, clear from the first, of the beauty of her companion's motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice for a larger conquest "Only see me through now, do it in the face of this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom isn't to be said!" The aggravation of fear--or call it, apparently, of knowledge--had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to pa.s.sion her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms of his ignorance, still the law of her att.i.tude and the key to her solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat with his knees; and she might absolutely have been putting it to her guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only "meet"

nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she had definitely met f.a.n.n.y yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, pa.s.sed, through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at crossroads, with a lantern for the darkness and wavings away for unadvised traffic, look out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie's reply. "They spent together hours--spent at least a morning--the certainty of which has come back to me now, but that I didn't dream of it at the time. That cup there has turned witness--by the most wonderful of chances. That's why, since it has been here, I've stood it out for my husband to see; put it where it would meet him, almost immediately, if he should come into the room. I've wanted it to meet him," she went on, "and I've wanted him to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that hasn't taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here--yes, in particular lately--he hasn't showed to-day." It was with her managed quietness, more and more, that she talked--an achieved coherence that helped her, evidently, to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together.

"It's quite as if he had an instinct--something that has warned him off or made him uneasy. He doesn't quite know, naturally, what has happened, but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and isn't in a hurry to be confronted with it. So, in his vague fear, he keeps off."

"But being meanwhile in the house--?"

"I've no idea--not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before luncheon. He spoke to me then," the Princess freely explained, "of a ballot, of great importance, at a club--for somebody, some personal friend, I think, who's coming up and is supposed to be in danger. To make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there. You see the efforts he can make"--for which Maggie found a smile that went to her friend's heart. "He's in so many ways the kindest of men. But it was hours ago."

Mrs. a.s.singham thought. "The more danger then of his coming in and finding me here. I don't know, you see, what you now consider that you've ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object that you declare so d.a.m.ning." Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. f.a.n.n.y could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared the Prince's mystic apprehension. The golden bowl put on, under consideration, a st.u.r.dy, a conscious perversity; as a "doc.u.ment," somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace. "His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly disagreeable--for all of us--than you intend or than would necessarily help us. And I must take time, truly, to understand what it means."

"You're safe, as far as that goes," Maggie returned; "you may take it from me that he won't come in; and that I shall only find him below, waiting for me, when I go down to the carriage."

f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham took it from her, took it and more. "We're to sit together at the Amba.s.sador's then--or at least you two are--with this new complication thrust up before you, all unexplained; and to look at each other with faces that pretend, for the ghastly hour, not to be seeing it?"

Maggie looked at HER with a face that might have been the one she was preparing. "'Unexplained,' my dear? Quite the contrary--explained: fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add. My own love"--she kept it up--"I don't want anything more. I've plenty to go upon and to do with, as it is."

f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links, verily, still missing; but the most acceptable effect of this was, singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact. "But when you come home--? I mean he'll come up with you again. Won't he see it then?"

On which Maggie gave her, after an instant's visible thought, the strangest of slow headshakes. "I don't know. Perhaps he'll never see it--if it only stands there waiting for him. He may never again," said the Princess, "come into this room."

f.a.n.n.y more deeply wondered, "Never again? Oh--!"

"Yes, it may be. How do I know? With THIS!" she quietly went on. She had not looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express and include for her the whole of her situation. "Then you intend not to speak to him--?"

Maggie waited. "To 'speak'--?"

"Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it represents."

"Oh, I don't know that I shall speak--if he doesn't. But his keeping away from me because of that--what will that be but to speak? He can't say or do more. It won't be for me to speak," Maggie added in a different tone, one of the tones that had already so penetrated her guest. "It will be for me to listen."

Mrs. a.s.singham turned it over. "Then it all depends on that object that you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?"

"I think I may say that _I_ depend on it. I can't," said Maggie, "treat it as nothing now."

Mrs. a.s.singham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney--quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her companion's vision. She looked at the precious thing--if precious it was--found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie's knowledge. It was brave and rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable. She didn't touch it, but if after a minute she turned away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of doing so. "Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your future does? For that's what it comes to, I judge."

"What it comes to," Maggie presently returned, "is what that thing has put me, so almost miraculously, in the way of learning: how far they had originally gone together. If there was so much between them before, there can't--with all the other appearances--not be a great deal more now." And she went on and on; she steadily made her points. "If such things were already then between them they make all the difference for possible doubt of what may have been between them since. If there had been nothing before there might be explanations. But it makes to-day too much to explain. I mean to explain away," she said.

f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham was there to explain away--of this she was duly conscious; for that at least had been true up to now. In the light, however, of Maggie's demonstration the quant.i.ty, even without her taking as yet a more exact measure, might well seem larger than ever. Besides which, with or without exactness, the effect of each successive minute in the place was to put her more in presence of what Maggie herself saw.

Maggie herself saw the truth, and that was really, while they remained there together, enough for Mrs. a.s.singham's relation to it. There was a force in the Princess's mere manner about it that made the detail of what she knew a matter of minor importance. f.a.n.n.y had in fact something like a momentary shame over her own need of asking for this detail.

"I don't pretend to repudiate," she said after a little, "my own impressions of the different times I suppose you speak of; any more,"

she added, "than I can forget what difficulties and, as it constantly seemed to me, what dangers, every course of action--whatever I should decide upon--made for me. I tried, I tried hard, to act for the best.

And, you know," she next pursued, while, at the sound of her own statement, a slow courage and even a faint warmth of conviction came back to her--"and, you know, I believe it's what I shall turn out to have done."

This produced a minute during which their interchange, though quickened and deepened, was that of silence only, and the long, charged look; all of which found virtual consecration when Maggie at last spoke. "I'm sure you tried to act for the best."

It kept f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham again a minute in silence. "I never thought, dearest, you weren't an angel."

Not, however, that this alone was much help! "It was up to the very eve, you see," the Princess went on--"up to within two or three days of our marriage. That, THAT, you know--!" And she broke down for strangely smiling.

"Yes, as I say, it was while she was with me. But I didn't know it. That is," said f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham, "I didn't know of anything in particular." It sounded weak--that she felt; but she had really her point to make. "What I mean is that I don't know, for knowledge, now, anything I didn't then.

That's how I am." She still, however, floundered. "I mean it's how I WAS."

"But don't they, how you were and how you are," Maggie asked, "come practically to the same thing?" The elder woman's words had struck her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too fact.i.tious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove. The situation had changed by--well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak of the definite; and this could keep Maggie at least firm. She was firm enough as she pursued. "It was ON the whole thing that Amerigo married me." With which her eyes had their turn again at her d.a.m.natory piece.

"And it was on that--it was on that!" But they came back to her visitor.

"And it was on it all that father married HER."

Her visitor took it as might be. "They both married--ah, that you must believe!--with the highest intentions."

"Father did certainly!" And then, at the renewal of this consciousness, it all rolled over her. "Ah, to thrust such things on us, to do them here between us and with us, day after day, and in return, in return--!

To do it to HIM--to him, to him!"

f.a.n.n.y hesitated. "You mean it's for him you most suffer?" And then as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the room--which made the question somehow seem a blunder--"I ask," she continued, "because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may be for him, really may be MADE for him, quite as if it hadn't been."

But Maggie had, the next moment faced about as if without hearing her.

"Father did it for ME--did it all and only for me."

Mrs. a.s.singham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she faltered again before she spoke. "Well--!"

It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that it had reached her. "Do you mean that that's the reason, that that's A reason--?"