by Henry James
"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 straig
htness 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."