She can't of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can't say in so many words 'Don't think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.' I don't get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it. But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. (339) So that she's--well," the Prince wound up, "what you may call practically all right." Charlotte in fact however, to help out his confidence, did n't call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She let him two or three times over spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit's end was she for once clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already a couple of times arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might a little later on be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall then was empty, before the army of rearranging cushion-patting housemaids were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end, where they might imitate with art the unpremeditated. Above all here, for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these passages in truth made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman's tone had even now a certain dryness. "It's very good of her, my dear, to trust us. But what else can she do?"
(340) "Why whatever people do when they don't trust. Let one see they don't."
"But let whom see?"
"Well, let ME, say, to begin with."
"And should you mind that?"
He had a slight show of surprise. "Shouldn't you?"
"Her letting you see--? No," said Charlotte; "the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don't look out, may let HER see." To which she added: "You may let her see, you know, that you're afraid."
"I'm only afraid of YOU, a little, at moments," he presently returned.
"But I shan't let Fanny see that."
It was clear however that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs.
Assingham's vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had n't even yet done. "What in the world can she do against us? There's not a word that she can breathe. She's helpless; she can't speak; she'd be herself the first to be dished by it." And then as he seemed slow to follow: "It all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage."
The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. "May n't she also be said a good deal to have made yours? That was intended, I think, was n't it? for a kind of rectification."
Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still. "I don't mean there was (341) anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I'm not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I'm speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR lives in hand, and how therefore that ties her up to-day. She can't go to them and say 'It's very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.'"
He took it in still, with his long look at her. "All the more that she was n't. She was right. Everything's right," he went on, "and everything will stay so."
"Then that's all I say."
But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. "We're happy--and they're happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?"
"Ah my dear," said Charlotte, "it's not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she's FIXED, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It's you who have seemed haunted with the possibility for her of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for." And she had with her high reasoning a strange cold smile. "We ARE prepared--for anything, for everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She's condemned to consistency; she's doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth.
Now then therefore," Mrs. Verver gently laughed, "she has the chance of her life!"
"So that her present professions may even at the (342) best not be sincere?--may be but a mask for doubts and fears and for gaining time?"
