"I thought you wanted me to be quiet."
"So I doand I'm trying to make you so much so that you won't worry more. Can't you be quiet on THAT?"
She thought a momentthen seemed to try. "To relate that she had to 'bolt' for the reasons we speak of, even though the bolting had done for her what she wishedTHAT I can perfectly feel Charlotte's not wanting to do."
"Ah then, if it HAS done for her what she wished-!" But the Colonel's conclusion hung by the "if" which his wife didn't take up. So it hung but the longer when he presently spoke again. "All one wonders, in that case, is why then she has come back to him."
"Say she hasn't come back to him. Not really to HIM."
"I'll say anything you like. But that won't do me the same good as your saying it."
"Nothing, my dear, will do you good," Mrs. Assingham returned. "You don't care for anything in itself; you care for nothing but to be grossly amused because I don't keep washing my hands!"
"I thought your whole argument was that everything is so right that this is precisely what you do."
But his wife, as it was a point she had often made, could go on as she had gone on before. "You're perfectly indifferent, really; you're perfectly immoral. You've taken part in the sack of cities, and I'm sure you've done dreadful things yourself. But I DON'T trouble my head, if you like. 'So now there!'" she laughed.
He accepted her laugh, but he kept his way. "Well, I back poorCharlotte."
"'Back' her?"
"To know what she wants."
"Ah then, so do I. She does know what she wants." And Mrs. Assingham produced this quantity, at last, on the girl's behalf, as the ripe result of her late wanderings and musings. She had groped through their talk, for the thread, and now she had got it. "She wants to be magnificent."
"She is," said the Colonel almost cynically.
"She wants"his wife now had it fast "to be thoroughly superior, and she's capable of that."
"Of wanting to?"
"Of carrying out her idea."
"And what IS her idea?"
"To see Maggie through."
Bob Assingham wondered. "Through what?"
"Through everything. She KNOWS the Prince."
"And Maggie doesn't. No, dear thing"Mrs. Assingham had to recognise it"she doesn't."
"So that Charlotte has come out to give her lessons?"
She continued, Fanny Assingham, to work out her thought. "She has done this great thing for him. That is, a year ago, she practically did it. She practically, at any rate, helped him to do it himselfand helped me to help him. She kept off, she stayed away, she left him free; and what, moreover, were her silences to Maggie but a direct aid to him? If she had spoken in Florence; if she had told her own poor story; if she had, come back at any timetill within a few weeks ago; if she hadn't gone to New York and hadn't held out there: if she hadn't done these things all that has happened since would certainly have been different. Therefore she's in a position to be consistent now. She knows the Prince," Mrs. Assingham repeated. It involved even again her former recognition. "And Maggie, dear thing, doesn't."
She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband's flat common sense. "In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she's in danger, there IS danger."
"There WON'T bewith Charlotte's understanding of it. That's where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be"the good lady by this time glowed. "So she sees itto become, for her best friend, an element of POSITIVE safety."
Bob Assingham looked at it hard. "Which of them do you call her best friend?"
She gave a toss of impatience. "I'll leave you to discover!" But the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. "It's for US, therefore, to be hers."
"'Hers'?"
"You and I. It's for us to be Charlotte's. It's for us, on our side, to see HER through."
"Through her sublimity?"
"Through her noble, lonely life. Onlythat's essentialit mustn't be lonely. It will be all right if she marries."
"So we're to marry her?"
"We're to marry her. It will be," Mrs. Assingham continued, "the great thing I can do." She made it out more and more. "It will make up."
"Make up for what?" As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. "If everything's so all right what is there to make up for?"
"Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a mistake."
"You'll make up for it by making another?" And then as she again took her time: "I thought your whole point is just that you're sure."
"One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always possibilities."
"Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?"
It made her again look at him. "Where would you have been, my dear, if I hadn't meddled with YOU?"
"Ah, that wasn't meddlingI was your own. I was your own," said the Colonel, "from the moment I didn't object."
"Well, these people won't object. They are my own tooin the sense that I'm awfully fond of them. Also in the sense," she continued, "that I think they're not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round, existsit's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possiblethat, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover," she said with conviction, "all the ground." And then as his own conviction appeared to continue as little to match: "The ground, I mean, of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty and I shan't rest till my duty's performed." She had arrived by this time at something like exaltation. "I shall give, for the next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can."
He took it at last as it came. "You hold there's no limit to what you 'can'?"
"I don't say there's no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chancesenough of them for hope. Why shouldn't there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?"
"By after 'all' you mean after she's in love with somebody else?"
The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. "She's not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to."
"Has she told you so?"
"Not yet. It's too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don't require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth."
"And what truth?"
"The truth of everything I say."
"Prove it to whom?"
"Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for meto work for her. What it will prove," Mrs. Assingham presently went on, "will be that she's cured. That she accepts the situation."
He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. "The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?"
His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. "The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her her chance to be magnificent."
He slowly emitted his smoke. "And best give you, by the same token, yours to be magnificent with her?"
"I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can."
Bob Assingham got up. "And you call ME immoral?"
She hesitated. "I'll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed to a certain point IS, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?" This he was unable to tell her; which left her more definitely to conclude. "Besides, it's all, at the worst, great fun."
"Oh, if you simply put it at THAT!"
His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even thus he couldn't catch her by it. "Oh, I don't mean," she said from the threshold, "the fun that you mean. Good-night." In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd, short groan, almost a grunt. He HAD apparently meant some particular kind.
V
"Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest." So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. "I don't want to pretend, and I can't pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don't care. I knew I shouldn't and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this," she repeated as, under the influence of her tone, the Prince had already come to a pause.
"For 'this'?" He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to himor were, rather, a quantity that couldn't, at the most, be much.
It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it. "To have one hour alone with you." It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her, with expression, from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed, weatherwashed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly, an Americanas indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn't, blessedly or not, to remain in America. The Prince had, by half-past tenas also by definite appointmentcalled in Cadogan Place for Mrs. Assingham's visitor, and then, after brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs. Assingham's drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had done nothing to invalidateeverything, much rather, to place in a light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn't have fitted that anyone should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter, to raise one, from the moment Mrs. Assingham, informed and apparently not disapproving, didn't intervene? This the young man had asked himselfwith a very sufficient sense of what would have made him ridiculous. He wasn't going to beginthat at least was certainby showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.
The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own wedding-guests and by Maggie's scarce less absorbed entertainment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she had not, as wouldn't have been convenient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had been present, with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repastshe had never in his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eatingwhenever he had looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he had not seen even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even Maggie, nothing was more natural than that he shouldn't have seen Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind himso ready she assumed him to be of what they were to do. Time pressed if they were to do it at all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations had brought wondershow did they still have, where did they still find, such treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn't be put off. She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie, he must remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the minute so far as to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then to risk bringing his reason out. The risk was because he might hurt herhurt her pride, if she had that particular sort. But she might as well be hurt one way as another; and, besides, that particular sort of pride was just what she hadn't. So his slight resistance, while they lingered, had been just easy enough not to be impossible.
"I hate to encourage youand for such a purpose, after allto spend your money."
She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. "Because you think I must have so little? I've enough, at any rateenough for us to take our hour. Enough," she had smiled, "is as good as a feast! And then," she had said, "it isn't of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn't a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn't she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poorsomething, precisely, thatno rich person COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have." Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. "Only, as it can't be fine, it ought to be funnyand that's the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself."
He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. "'Funny'?" "Oh, I don't mean a comic toyI mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That's what I call funny," she had explained. "You used," she had also added, "to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn't saythe little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August."
"Ah, but I don't understand your English buying, and I confess I find it dull." So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. "I understood my poor dear Romans."
"It was they who understood youthat was your pull," she had laughed. "Our amusement here is just that they don't understand us. We can make it amusing. You'll see."
If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted."The amusement surely will be to find our present."
"Certainlyas I say."