He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life--as life had shrunk for him now--the most luminous of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp that had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief--how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her however on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer--there was another plum in the pie. "What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?"
"The Prince's? By his not 'really' caring?" She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough. "I mean that men don't, when it has all been too easy.
That's how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman IS treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he (400) works," she added; "but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays."
Well, he made it up. "Like a Prince?"
"Like a Prince. He IS profoundly a Prince. For that," she said with expression, "he's--beautifully--a case. They're far rarer, even in the 'highest circles,' than they pretend to be--and that's what makes so much of his value. He's perhaps one of the very last--the last of the real ones.
So it is we must take him. We must take him all round."
The Colonel considered. "And how must Charlotte--if anything happens--take him?"
The question held her a minute, and while she waited with her eyes on him she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest longest deepest injunction he had ever received from her. "Nothing--in spite of everything--WILL happen. Nothing HAS happened.
Nothing IS happening."
He looked a trifle disappointed. "I see. For US."
"For us. For whom else?" And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it. "We know nothing on earth--!" It was an undertaking he must sign.
So he wrote, as it were, his name. "We know nothing on earth." It was like the soldiers' watchword at night.
"We're as innocent," she went on in the same way, "as babes."
"Why not rather say," he asked, "as innocent as they themselves are?"
(401) "Ah for the best of reasons! Because we're much more so."
He wondered. "But how can we be more--?"
"For them? Oh easily! We can be anything."
"Absolute idiots then?"
"Absolute idiots. And oh," Fanny breathed, "the way it will rest us!"
Well, he looked as if there were something in that. "But won't they know we're not?"
She barely hesitated. "Charlotte and the Prince think we are--which is so much gained. Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence--but he does n't matter."
"And Maggie? Does n't SHE know--?"
"That we see before our noses?" Yes, this indeed took longer. "Oh so far as she may guess it she'll give no sign. So it comes to the same thing."
He raised his eyebrows. "Comes to our not being able to help her?"
"That's the way we SHALL help her."
"By looking like fools?"
She threw up her hands. "She only wants, herself, to look like a bigger!
So there we are!" With which she brushed it away--his conformity was promised.
Something nevertheless still held her; it broke, to her own vision, as a last wave of clearness. "Moreover NOW," she said, "I see! I mean," she added, "what you were asking me: how I knew to-day in Eaton Square that Maggie's awake." And she had indeed visibly got it. "It was by seeing them together."
"Seeing her with her father?" He fell behind again. "But you've seen her often enough before."
(402) "Never with my present eyes. For nothing like such a test--that of this length of the others' absence together--has hitherto occurred."
"Possibly! But if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it--?"
"Why is it such a test? Because it has become one without their intending it. It has spoiled, so to speak, on their hands."
"It has soured, eh?" the Colonel said.
"The word's horrible--say rather it has 'changed.' Perhaps," Fanny went on, "she did wish to see how much she can bear. In that case she HAS seen.
Only it was she alone who--about the visit--insisted. Her father insists on nothing. And she watches him do it."
Her husband looked impressed. "Watches him?"
"For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It does n't, as I tell you, come. But she's there for it--to see. And I felt," she continued, "HOW she's there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She could n't keep it from me--though she left her post on purpose: came home with me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all--her dust; but it was what showed me." With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her room. "Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing--from him--HAS come."
"You're so awfully sure?"
"Sure. Nothing WILL. Good-night," she said. "She'll die first."
