by Henry James
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 Fanny Assingham 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 Fanny Assingham, “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 factitious 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 damnatory 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!”
Fanny 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. Assingham, 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—?”
Fanny at first, however, feeling the response in this, didn’t say all she meant; she said for the moment something else instead. “He did it for you—largely at least for you. And it was for you that I did, in my smaller, interested way—well, what I could do. For I could do something,” she continued; “I thought I saw your interest as he himself saw it. And I thought I saw Charlotte’s. I believed in her.”
“And I believed in her,” said Maggie.
Mrs. Assingham waited again; but she presently pushed on. “She believed then in herself.”
“Ah?” Maggie murmured.
Something exquisite, faintly eager, in the prompt simplicity of it, supported her friend further. “And the Prince believed. His belief was real. Just as he believed in himself.”
Maggie spent a minute in taking it from her. “He believed in himself?”
“Just as I too believed in him. For I absolutely did, Maggie.” To which Fanny then added: “And I believe in him yet. I mean,” she subjoined—”well, I mean I DO.”
Maggie again took it from her; after which she was again, restlessly, set afloat. Then when this had come to an end: “And do you believe in Charlotte yet?”
Mrs. Assingham had a demur that she felt she could now afford. “We’ll talk of Charlotte some other day. They both, at any rate, thought themselves safe at the time.”
“Then why did they keep from me everything I might have known?”
Her friend bent upon her the mildest eyes. “Why did I myself keep it from you?”
“Oh, you weren’t, for honour, obliged.”
“Dearest Maggie,” the poor woman broke out on this, “you ARE divine!”
“They pretended to love me,” the Princess went on. “And they pretended to love HIM.”
“And pray what was there that I didn’t pretend?”
“Not, at any rate, to care for me as you cared for Amerigo and for Charlotte. They were much more interesting—it was perfectly natural. How couldn’t you like Amerigo?” Maggie continued.
Mrs. Assingham gave it up. “How couldn’t I, how couldn’t I?” Then, with a fine freedom, she went all her way. “How CAN’T I, how can’t I?”
It fixed afresh Maggie’s wide eyes on her. “I see—I see. Well, it’s beautiful for you to be able to. And of course,” she added, “you wanted to help Charlotte.”
“Yes”—Fanny considered it—”I wanted to help Charlotte. But I wanted also, you see, to help you—by not digging up a past that I believed, with so much on top of it, solidly buried. I wanted, as I still want,” she richly declared, “to help every one.”
It set Maggie once more in movement—movement which, however, spent itself again with a quick emphasis. “Then it’s a good deal my fault—if everything really began so well?”
Fanny Assingham met it as she could. “You’ve been only too perfect. You’ve thought only too much.”
But the Princess had already caught at the words. “Yes—I’ve thought only too much!” Yet she appeared to continue, for the minute, full of that fault. She had it in fact, by this prompted thought, all before her. “Of him, dear man, of HIM—!”
Her friend, able to take in thus directly her vision of her father, watched her with a new suspense. THAT way might safety lie—it was like a wider chink of light. “He believed—with a beauty!—in Charlotte.”
“Yes, and it was I who had made him believe. I didn’t mean to, at the time, so much; for I had no idea then of what was coming. But I did it, I did it!” the Princess declared.
“With a beauty—ah, with a beauty, you too!” Mrs. Assingham insisted.
Maggie, however, was seeing for herself—it was another matter, “The thing was that he made her think it would be so possible.”
Fanny again hesitated. “The Prince made her think—?”
Maggie stared—she had meant her father. But her vision seemed to spread. “They both made her think. She wouldn’t have thought without them.”
“Yet Amerigo’s good faith,” Mrs. Assingham insisted, “was perfect. And there was nothing, all the more,” she added, “against your father’s.”
The remark, however, kept Maggie for a moment still. “Nothing perhaps but his knowing that she knew.”
“‘Knew’?”
“That he was doing it, so much, for me. To what extent,” she suddenly asked of her friend, “do you think he was aware that she knew?”
“Ah, who can say what passes between people in such a relation? The only thing one can be sure of is that he was generous.” And Mrs. Assingham conclusively smiled. “He doubtless knew as much as was right for himself.”
“As much, that is, as was right for her.”
“Yes then—as was right for her. The point is,” Fanny declared, “that, whatever his knowledge, it made, all the way it went, for his good faith.”
Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her successive movements. “Isn’t the point, very considerably, that his good faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in me as he himself took?”
Fanny Assingham thought. “He recognised, he adopted, your long friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness.”
“No,” said Maggie with still
deeper consideration: “he counted her selfishness out almost as he counted his own.”
“So you may say.”
“Very well,” Maggie went on; “if he had none of his own, he invited her, may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only since have found that out.”
Mrs. Assingham looked blank. “Since—?”
“And he may have become aware,” Maggie pursued, “that she has found it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage,” she explained, “of how much he had asked of her—more, say, than she had understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand was, in the long run, to affect her.”
“He may have done many things,” Mrs. Assingham responded; “but there’s one thing he certainly won’t have done. He’ll never have shown that he expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to give.”
“I’ve often wondered,” Maggie mused, “what Charlotte really understood. But it’s one of the things she has never told me.”
“Then as it’s one of the things she has never told me either, we shall probably never know it; and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things,” said Mrs. Assingham, “that we shall never know.”
Maggie took it in with a long reflection. “Never.”
“But there are others,” her friend went on, “that stare us in the face and that—under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour—may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.”
It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way; but she rallied to this with a rush. “Extraordinary.”
“Magnificent,” said Fanny Assingham.
Her companion held tight to it. “Magnificent.”
“Then he’ll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he’ll do to the end. He didn’t undertake it to break down; in what—quiet, patient, exquisite as he is—did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won’t have done it on this occasion.”
“Ah, this occasion!”—and Maggie’s wail showed her, of a sudden, thrown back on it. “Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t then, so much the better. Leave him alone.”
“Do you mean give him up?”
“Leave HER,” Fanny Assingham went on. “Leave her TO him.”
Maggie looked at her darkly. “Do you mean leave him to HER? After this?”
“After everything. Aren’t they, for that matter, intimately together now?”
“‘Intimately’—? How do I know?”
But Fanny kept it up. “Aren’t you and your husband—in spite of everything?”
Maggie’s eyes still further, if possible, dilated. “It remains to be seen!”
“If you’re not then, where’s your faith?”
“In my husband—?”
Mrs. Assingham but for an instant hesitated. “In your father. It all comes back to that. Rest on it.”
“On his ignorance?”
Fanny met it again. “On whatever he may offer you. TAKE that.”
“Take it—?” Maggie stared.
Mrs. Assingham held up her head. “And be grateful.” On which, for a minute, she let the Princess face her. “Do you see?”
“I see,” said Maggie at last.
“Then there you are.” But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window, as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs. Assingham’s reverted to that complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, was that both of recurrent wonder and recurrent protest. She went over it, looked at it afresh and yielded now to her impulse to feel it in her hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and was surprised, thus, with the weight of it—she had seldom handled so much massive gold. That effect itself somehow prompted her to further freedom and presently to saying: “I don’t believe in this, you know.”
It brought Maggie round to her. “Don’t believe in it? You will when I tell you.”
“Ah, tell me nothing! I won’t have it,” said Mrs. Assingham. She kept the cup in her hand, held it there in a manner that gave Maggie’s attention to her, she saw the next moment, a quality of excited suspense. This suggested to her, oddly, that she had, with the liberty she was taking, an air of intention, and the impression betrayed by her companion’s eyes grew more distinct in a word of warning. “It’s of value, but its value’s impaired, I’ve learned, by a crack.”
“A crack?—in the gold—?”
“It isn’t gold.” With which, somewhat strangely, Maggie smiled.
“That’s the point.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s glass—and cracked, under the gilt, as I say, at that.”
“Glass?—of this weight?”
“Well,” said Maggie, “it’s crystal—and was once, I suppose, precious. But what,” she then asked, “do you mean to do with it?”
She had come away from her window, one of the three by which the wide room, enjoying an advantageous “back,” commanded the western sky and caught a glimpse of the evening flush; while Mrs. Assingham, possessed of the bowl, and possessed too of this indication of a flaw, approached another for the benefit of the slowly-fading light. Here, thumbing the singular piece, weighing it, turning it over, and growing suddenly more conscious, above all, of an irresistible impulse, she presently spoke again. “A crack? Then your whole idea has a crack.”
Maggie, by this time at some distance from her, waited a moment. “If you mean by my idea the knowledge that has come to me THAT—”
But Fanny, with decision, had already taken her up. “There’s only one knowledge that concerns us—one fact with which we can have anything to do.”
“Which one, then?”
“The fact that your husband has never, never, never—!” But the very gravity of this statement, while she raised her eyes to her friend across the room, made her for an instant hang fire.
“Well, never what?”
“Never been half so interested in you as now. But don’t you, my dear, really feel it?”
Maggie considered. “Oh, I think what I’ve told you helps me to feel it. His having to-day given up even his forms; his keeping away from me; his not having come.” And she shook her head as against all easy glosses. “It is because of that, you know.”
“Well then, if it’s because of this—!” And Fanny Assingham, who had been casting about her and whose inspiration decidedly had come, raised the cup in her two hands, raised it positively above her head, and from under it, solemnly, smiled at the Princess as a signal of intention. So for an instant, full of her thought and of her act, she held the precious vessel, and then, with due note taken of the margin of the polished floor, bare, fine and hard in the embrasure of her window, she dashed it boldly to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it, with the violence of the crash, lie shattered. She had flushed with the force of her effort, as Maggie had flushed with wonder at the sight, and this high reflection in their faces was all that passed between them for a minute more. After which, “Whatever you meant by it—and I don’t want to know NOW—has ceased to exist,” Mrs. Assingham said.
“And what in the world, my dear, did you mean by it?”—that sound, as at the touch of a spring, rang out as the first effect of Fanny’s speech. It broke upon the two women’s absorption with a sharpness almost equal to the smash of the crystal, for the door of the room had been opened by the Prince without their taking heed. He had apparently had time, moreover, to catch the conclusion of Fanny’s act; his eyes attached themselves, through the large space allowing just there, as happened, a free view, to the shining fragments at this lady’s feet. His question had been addressed to his wife, but he moved his eyes immediately afterwards to those of her visitor, whose own then held them in a manner of which neither party had been capabl
e, doubtless, for mute penetration, since the hour spent by him in Cadogan Place on the eve of his marriage and the afternoon of Charlotte’s reappearance. Something now again became possible for these communicants, under the intensity of their pressure, something that took up that tale and that might have been a redemption of pledges then exchanged. This rapid play of suppressed appeal and disguised response lasted indeed long enough for more results than one—long enough for Mrs. Assingham to measure the feat of quick self-recovery, possibly therefore of recognition still more immediate, accompanying Amerigo’s vision and estimate of the evidence with which she had been—so admirably, she felt as she looked at him—inspired to deal. She looked at him and looked at him—there were so many things she wanted, on the spot, to say. But Maggie was looking too—and was moreover looking at them both; so that these things, for the elder woman, quickly enough reduced themselves to one. She met his question—not too late, since, in their silence, it had remained in the air. Gathering herself to go, leaving the golden bowl split into three pieces on the ground, she simply referred him to his wife. She should see them later, they would all meet soon again; and meanwhile, as to what Maggie had meant—she said, in her turn, from the door—why, Maggie herself was doubtless by this time ready to tell him.