Lt;5 THE GOLDEN BOWL

'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 today 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 diem 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 die 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 diem in a manner of which neither party had been capable, doubdess, 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 die intensity of dieir 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

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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.

Chapter 34

Left with her husband, Maggie, however, for the time, said nothing; she only felt, on the spot, a strong, sharp wish not to see his face again till he should have had a minute to arrange it. She had seen it enough for her temporary clearness and her next movement - seen it as it showed during the stare of surprise that followed his entrance. Then it was that she knew how hugely expert she had been made, for judging it quickly, by that vision of it, indelibly registered for reference, that had flashed a light into her troubled soul the night of his late return from Matcham. The expression worn by it at that juncture, for however few instants, had given her a sense of its possibilities, one of the most relevant of which might have been playing up for her, before the consummation of Fanny Assingham's retreat, just long enough to be recognised. What she had recognised in it was his recognition, the result of his having been forced, by the flush of their visitor's attitude and the unextinguished report of her words, to take account of the flagrant signs of the accident, of the incident, on which he had unexpectedly dropped. He had, not unnaturally, failed to see this occurrence represented by the three fragments of an object apparently valuable which lay there on the floor and which, even across the width of the room, his kept interval, reminded him, unmistakably though confusedly, of something

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known, some other unforgotten image. That was a mere shock, that was a pain - as if Fanny's violence had been a violence redoubled and acting beyond its intention, a violence calling up die hot blood as a blow across die mouth.might have called it. Maggie knew as she turned away from him that she didn't want his pain; what she wanted was her own simple certainty - not the red mark of conviction flaming there in his beauty. If she could have gone on with bandaged eyes she would have liked mat best; if it were a question of saying what she now, apparendy, should have to, and of taking from him what he would say, any blindness that might wrap it would be the nearest approach to a boon.

She went in silence to where her friend - never, in intention, visibly, so much her friend as at that moment - had braced herself to so amazing an energy, and there, under Amerigo's eyes, she picked up the shining pieces. Bedizened and jewelled, in her rusding finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order -only to find, however, that she could carry but two of die fragments at once. She brought them over to die chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place occupied by the cup before Fanny's appropriation of it, and, after laying them carefully down, went back for what remained, the solid detached foot. With diis she returned to the mantelshelf, placing it with deliberation in die centre and then for a minute occupying herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels together. The split, determined by the latent crack, was so sharp and so neat that if there had been anything to hold them the bowl might still, quite beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for uninjured. But, as there was, naturally, nothing to hold them but Maggie's hands, during the few moments the latter were so employed, she could only lay die almost equal parts of die vessel carefully beside dieir pedestal and leave them thus before her husband's eyes. She had proceeded without words, but quite as if with a sought effect - in spite of which it had all seemed to her to take a far longer time than anything she had ever so quickly accomplished. Amerigo said nothing either - though it was true that his silence had die gloss of die warning she doubdess appeared to admonish him to take: it was as if her manner hushed him to the proper observation of what she was doing. He should have no doubt of it whatever: she knew, and her broken bowl was proof that she knew - yet the least part of her desire was to make him waste words. He would have to diink - diis she knew even better still; and all she was for the present concerned with was that he should be aware. She had taken him for aware all day, or at least for obscurely and instinctively anxious - as to that she had just

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committed herself to Fanny Assingham; but what she had been wrong about was the effect of his anxiety. His fear of staying away, as a marked symptom, had at least proved greater than his fear of coming in; he had come in even at the risk of bringing it with him -and, ah, what more did she require now than her sense, established within the first minute or two, that he had brought it, however he might be steadying himself against dangers of betrayal by some wrong word, and that it was shut in there between them, the successive moments throbbing under it the while as the pulse of fever throbs under the doctor's thumb?

Maggie's sense, in fine, in his presence, was that though the bowl had been broken, her reason hadn't; the reason for which she had made up her mind, the reason for which she had summoned her friend, the reason for which she had prepared the place for her husband's eyes; it was all one reason, and, as her intense little clutch held the matter, what had happened by Fanny's act and by his apprehension of it had not in the least happened to her, but absolutely and directly to himself, as he must proceed to take in. There it was that her wish for time interposed - time for Amerigo's use, not for hers, since she, for ever so long now, for hours and hours as they seemed, had been living with eternity; with which she would continue to live. She wanted to say to him, 'Take it, take it, take all you need of it; arrange yourself so as to suffer least, or to be, at any rate, least distorted and disfigured Only see, see that / see, and make up your mind, on this new basis, at your convenience. Wait - it won't be long - till you can confer again with Charlotte, for you'll do it much better then - more easily to both of us. Above all don't show me, till you've got it well under, the dreadful blur, the ravage of suspense and embarrassment, produced, and produced by my doing, in your personal serenity, your incomparable superiority.' After she had squared again her little objects on the chimney, she was within an ace, in fact, of turning on him with that appeal; besides its being lucid for her, all the while, that the occasion was passing, that they were dining out, that he wasn't dressed, and that, though she herself was, she was yet, in all probability, so horribly red in the face and so awry, in many ways, with agitation, that in view of the Ambassador's company, of possible comments and constructions, she should need, before her glass, some restoration of appearances.

Amerigo, meanwhile, after all, could clearly make the most of her having enjoined on him to wait - suggested it by the positive pomp of her dealings with the smashed cup; to wait, that is, till she should pronounce as Mrs Assingham had promised for her. This delay,

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again, certainly tested her presence of mind - though, that strain was not what presently made her speak. Keep her eyes, for the time, from her husband's as she might, she soon found herself much more drivingly conscious of the strain on his own wit. There was even a minute, when her back was turned to him, during which she knew once more the strangeness of her desire to spare him, a strangeness that had already, fifty times, brushed her, in the depth of her trouble, as with the wild wing of some bird of the air who might blindly have swooped for an instant into the shaft of a well, darkening there by his momentary flutter the far-off round of sky. It was extraordinary, this quality in the taste of her wrong which made her completed sense of it seem rather to soften than to harden, and it was the more extraordinary the more she had to recognise it; for what it came to was that seeing herself finally sure, knowing everything, having the fact, in all its abomination, so utterly before her that there was nothing else to add - what it came to was that, merely by being with him there in silence, she felt, within her, the sudden split between conviction and action. They had begun to cease, on the spot, surprisingly, to be connected; conviction, that is, budged no inch, only planting its feet the more firmly in the soil - but action began to hover like some lighter and larger, but easier form, excited by its very power to keep above ground. It would be free, it would be independent, it would go in - wouldn't it? - for some prodigious and superior adventure of its own. What would condemn it, so to speak, to the responsibility of freedom - this glimmered on Maggie even now - was the possibility, richer with every lapsing moment, that her husband would have, on the whole question, a new need of her, a need which was in fact being born between them in these very seconds. It struck her truly as so new that he would have felt hitherto none to compare with it at all; would indeed, absolutely, by this circumstance, be really needing her for the first time in their whole connection. No, he had used her, he had even exceedingly enjoyed her, before this; but there had been no precedent for that character of a proved necessity to him which she was rapidly taking on. The immense advantage of this particular clue, moreover, was that she should have now to arrange, to alter, to falsify nothing; should have to be but consistently simple and straight. She asked herself, with concentration, while her back was still presented, what would be the very ideal of that method; after which, the next instant, it had all come to her and she had turned round upon him for the application. 'Fanny Assingham broke it - knowing it had a crack and that it would go if she used sufficient force. She thought, when I had told her, that

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34¹

that would be the best thing to do with it - thought so from her own point of view. That hadn't been at all my idea, but she acted before I understood. I had, on the contrary,' she explained, 'put it here, in full view, exactly that you might see it.'

He stood with his hands in his pockets; he had carried his eyes to the fragments on the chimney-piece, and she could already distin­guish the element of relief, absolutely of succour, in his acceptance from her of the opportunity to consider the fruits of their friend's violence - every added inch of reflection and delay having the advantage, from this point on, of counting for him double. It had operated within her now to the last intensity, her glimpse of the precious truth that by her helping him, helping him to help himself, as it were, she should help him to help her. Hadn't she fairly got into his labyrinth with him? - wasn't she indeed in the very act of placing herself there, for him, at its centre and core, whence, on that definite orientation and by an instinct all her own, she might securely guide him out of it? She offered him thus, assuredly, a kind of support that was not to have been imagined in advance, and that moreover required - ah most truly! - some close looking at before it could be believed in and pronounced void of treachery. 'Yes, look, look,' she seemed to see him hear her say even while her sounded words were other - 'look, look, both at the truth that still survives in that smashed evidence and at the even more remarkable appearance that I'm not such a fool as you supposed me. Look at the possibility that, since I am different, there may still be something in it for you - if you're capable of working with me to get that out. Consider of course, as you must, the question of what you may have to surrender, on your side, what price you may have to pay, whom you may have to pay with, to set this advantage free; but take in, at any rate, that here is something for you if you don't too blindly spoH your chance for it.' He went no nearer the damnatory pieces, but he eyed them, from where he stood, with a degree of recognition just visibly less to be dissimulated; all of which represented for her a certain traceable process. And her uttered words, meanwhile, were different enough from those he might have inserted between the lines of her already-spoken. 'It's the golden bowl, you know, that you saw at the little antiquario's in Bloomsbury, so long ago - when you went there with Charlotte, when you spent those hours with her, unknown to me, a day or two before our marriage. It was shown you both, but you didn't take it; you left it for me, and I came upon it, extraordinarily, through happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in prowling about to pick up some small old thing for

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father's birthday, after my visit to the Museum, my appointment there with Mr Crichton, of which I told you. It was shown me, and I was struck with it and took it - knowing nothing about it at the time. What I now know I've learned since - I learned this afternoon, a couple of hours ago; receiving from it naturally a great impression. So there it is - in its three pieces. You can handle them - don't be afraid - if you want to make sure the thing is the thing you and Charlotte saw together. Its having come apart makes an unfortunate difference for its beauty, its artistic value, but none for anything else. Its other value is just the same -1 mean that of its having given me so much of the truth about you. I don't therefore so much care what becomes of it now - unless perhaps you may yourself, when you come to think, have some good use for it. In that case,' Maggie wound up, 'we can easily take the pieces with us to Fawns.'

It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something -that she was emerging a little, in fine, with the prospect less contracted. She had done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not merely momentary on which he could meet her. When, by the turn of his head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity presided. It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show was promptly portentous. 'But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had to do with it?'

She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled: his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her. But it left her only to go the straighter. 'She has had to do with it that I immediately sent for her and that she immediately came. She was the first person I wanted to see - because I knew she would know. Know more about what I had learned, I mean, than I could make out for myself. I made out as much as I could for myself - that I also wanted to have done; but it didn't, in spite of everything, take me very far, and she has really been a help. Not so much as she would like to be - not so much as, poor dear, she just now tried to be; yet she has done her very best for you - never forget that! - and has kept me along immeasurably better than I should have been able to come without her. She has gained me time; and that, these three months, don't you see? has been everything.'

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She had said 'Don't you see?' on purpose, and was to feel the next moment that it had acted.' "These three months"?' the Prince asked.

'Counting from the night you came home so late from Matcham. Counting from the hours you spent with Charlotte at Gloucester; your visit to the cathedral - which you won't have forgotten describing to me in so much detail. For that was the beginning of my being sure. Before it I had been sufficiently in doubt. Sure,' Maggie developed, 'of your having, and of your having for a long time had, two relations with Charlotte.'

He stared, a little at sea, as he took it up. 'Two - ?'

Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost foolish - leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence, a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing. 'Oh, you may have had fifty - had the same relation with her fifty times! It's of the number of kinds of relation with her that I speak - a number that doesn't matter, really, so long as there wasn't only one kind, as father and I supposed. One kind,' she went on, 'was there before us; we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never thought of there being another, kept out of our sight. But after the evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had, before that, my idea - which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and she, vaguely, yet uneasily, conscious of the difference. But it's within these last hours that I've most seen where we are; and as I've been in communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let her know my certainty - with the determination of which, however, you must understand, she has had nothing to do. She defends you,' Maggie remarked.

He had given her all his attention, and with this impression for her, again, that he was, in essence, fairly reaching out to her for time -time, only time - she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of his losing almost everything else by it. It was still, for a minute, as if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that he too - as was his right - should know where he was. What stirred in him above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech, must have been the impulse to take up something she put before him that he was yet afraid directly to touch. He wanted to make free with it, but had to keep his hands off- for reasons he had already made out; and the discomfort of his privation yearned at her

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out of his eyes with an announcing gleam of the fever, the none too tolerable chill, of specific recognition. She affected him as speaking more or less for her father as well, and his eyes might have been trying to hypnotise her into giving him the answer without his asking the question. 'Had he his idea, and has he now, with you, anything more?' - those were the words he had to hold himself from not speaking and that she would as yet, certainly, do nothing to make easy. She felt with her sharpest thrill how he was straitened and tied, and with the miserable pity of it her present conscious purpose of keeping him so could none the less perfectly accord. To name her father, on any such basis of anxiety, of compunction, would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor less than give Charlotte away. Visibly, palpably, traceably, he stood off from this, moved back from it as from an open chasm now suddenly perceived, but which had been, between the two, with so much, so strangely much else, quite uncalculated. Verily it towered before her, this history of their confidence. They had built strong and piled high - based as it was on such appearances - their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid, a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found him as unprepared as if he had been, like his wife, an abjectly simple person. And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning, for herself, mat, whatever he might have to take from her - she being, on her side, beautifully free - he would absolutely not be able, for any qualifying purpose, to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law's wife Mrs Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was, at the least, to bring her into the question - which would be by the same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie wouldn't open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he were not fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it was not till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he couldn't.

'You're apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small matters. Won't you perhaps feel, in fairness, that you're striking out, triumphing, or whatever I may call it, rather too easily - feel it when I perfectly admit that your smashed cup there does come back to me? I frankly confess, now, to the occasion, and to having wished not to speak of it to you at the time. We took two or three hours together, by

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arrangement; it was on the eve of my marriage - at the moment you say. But that put it on the eve of yours too, my dear - which was directly the point. It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some small wedding-present - a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could be of use. You were naturally not to be told - precisely because it was all for you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup - which I'm bound to say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from whatever good motive, should have treated so.' He had kept his hands in his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the achieved quietness of his explanation a long, deep breath of comparative relief. Behind everything, beneath everything, it was somehow a comfort to him at last to be talking with her - and he seemed to be proving to himself that he could talk. 'It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury - I think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn't believe in it, and we didn't take it.'

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of candour. 'Oh, you left it for me. But what did you take?'

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he might have been trying to forget. 'Nothing, I think - at that place.'

'What did you take then at any other? What did you get me - since that was your aim and end - for a wedding-gift?'

The Prince continued very nobly to bethink himself. 'Didn't we get you anything?'

Maggie waited a little; she had for some time, now, kept her eyes on him steadily; but they wandered, at this, to the fragments on her chimney. 'Yes; it comes round, after all, to your having got me the bowl. I myself was to come upon it, the other day, by so wonderful a chance; was to find it in the same place and to have it pressed upon me by the same little man, who does, as you say, understand Italian. I did "believe in it," you see - must have believed in it somehow instinctively; for I took it as soon as I saw it. Though I didn't know at all then,' she added, 'what I was taking with it.'

The Prince paid her for an instant, visibly, the deference of trying to imagine what this might have been. 'I agree with you that the coincidence is extraordinary - the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays. But I don't see, you must let me say, the importance or the connection - '

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'Of my having made the purchase where you failed of it?' She had quickly taken him up; but she had, with her eyes on him once more, another drop into the order of her thoughts, to which, through whatever he might say, she was still adhering. 'It's not my having gone into the place, at the end of four years, that makes the strangeness of the coincidence; for don't such chances as that, in London, easily occur? The strangeness,' she lucidly said, 'is in what my purchase was to represent to me after I had got it home; which value came,' she explained, 'from the wonder of my having found such a friend.'

' "Such a friend"?' As a wonder, assuredly, her husband could but take it.

'As the little man in the shop. He did for me more than he knew -I owe it to him. He took an interest in me,' Maggie said; 'and, taking that interest, he recalled your visit, he remembered you and spoke of you to me.'

On which the Prince passed the comment of a sceptical smile. 'Ah but, my dear, if extraordinary things come from people's taking an interest in you - '

'My life in that case,' she asked, 'must be very agitated? Well, he liked me, I mean - very particularly. It's only so I can account for my afterwards hearing from him - and in fact he gave me that today,' she pursued, 'he gave me it frankly as his reason.'

'Today?' the Prince inquiringly echoed.

But she was singularly able - it had been marvellously 'given' her, she afterwards said to herself- to abide, for her light, for her clue, by her own order. 'I inspired him with sympathy - there you are! But the miracle is that he should have a sympathy to offer that could be of use to me. That was really the oddity of my chance,' the Princess proceeded - 'that I should have been moved, in my ignorance, to go precisely to him.'

He saw her so keep her course that it was as if he could, at the best, but stand aside to watch her and let her pass; he only made a vague demonstration that was like an ineffective gesture. 'I'm sorry to say any ill of your friends, and the thing was a long time ago; besides which there was nothing to make me recur to it. But I remember the man's striking me as a decided little beast.'

She gave a slow headshake - as if, no, after consideration, not that way were an issue. 'I can only think of him as kind, for he had nothing to gain. He had in fact only to lose. It was what he came to tell me -that he had asked me too high a price, more than the object was really worth. There was a particular reason, which he hadn't mentioned,

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and which had made him consider and repent. He wrote for leave to see me again - wrote in such terms that I saw him here this afternoon.'

'Here?' - it made the Prince look about him.

'Downstairs - in the little red room. While he was waiting he looked at the few photographs that stand about there and recognised two of them. Though it was so long ago, he remembered the visit made him by the lady and the gentleman, and that gave him his connection. It gave me mine, for he remembered everything and told me everything. You see you too had produced your effect; only, unlike you, he had thought of it again - he had recurred to it. He told me of your having wished to make each other presents - but of that's not having come off. The lady was greatly taken with the piece I had bought of him, but you had your reason against receiving it from her, and you had been right. He would think that of you more than ever now,' Maggie went on; 'he would see how wisely you had guessed the flaw and how easily the bowl could be broken. I had bought it myself, you see, for a present - he knew I was doing that. This was what had worked in him - especially after the price I had paid.'

Her story had dropped an instant; she still brought it out in small waves of energy, each of which spent its force; so that he had an opportunity to speak before this force was renewed. But the quaint thing was what he now said. 'And what, pray, was the price?'

She paused again a little. 'It was high, certainly - for those fragments. I think I feel, as I look at them there, rather ashamed to say.'

The Prince then again looked at them, he might have been growing used to the sight. 'But shall you at least get your money back?'

'Oh, I'm far from wanting it back - I feel so that I'm getting its worth.' With which, before he could reply, she had a quick transition. 'The great fact about the day we're talking of seems to me to have been, quite remarkably, that no present was then made me. If your undertaking had been for that, that was not at least what came of it.'

'You received then nothing at all?' The Prince looked vague and grave, almost retrospectively concerned.

'Nothing but an apology for empty hands and empty pockets; which was made me - as if it mattered a mite! - ever so frankly, ever so beautifully and touchingly.'

This Amerigo heard with interest, yet not with confusion. 'Ah, of course you couldn't have minded!' Distinctly, as she went on, he was getting the better of the mere awkwardness of his arrest; quite as if

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making out that he need suffer arrest from her now - before they should go forth to show themselves in the world together - in no greater quantity than an occasion ill-chosen at the best for a scene might decendy make room for. He looked at his watch; their engagement, all the while, remained before him. 'But I don't make out, you see, what case against me you rest - '

'On everything I'm telling you? Why, the whole case - the case of your having for so long so successfully deceived me. The idea of your finding something for me - charming as that would have been - was what had least to do with your taking a morning together at that moment. What had really to do with it,' said Maggie, 'was that you had to: you couldn't not, from the moment you were again face to face. And the reason of that was that there had been so much between you before - before / came between you at all.'

Her husband had been for tliese last moments moving about under her eyes; but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still. 'You've never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour - unless perhaps you've become so at this one.'

The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in him; his eyes met her own so, for the declaration, that it was as if somediing cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still, however, under that. 'Oh, the thing I've known best of all is that you've never wanted, together, to offend us. You've wanted quite intensely not to, and the precautions you've had to take for it have been for a long time one of die strongest of my impressions. That, I think,' she added, 'is the way I've best known.'

'Known?' he repeated after a moment.

'Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were things that hadn't been told me - and that gave their meaning, little by little, to other things that were before me.'

'Would diey have made a difference, in the matter of our marriage,' the Prince presendy asked, 'if you had known them?'

She took her time to think. 'I grant you not - in the matter of ours.'' And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn't keep down: 'The question is so much bigger than that. You see how much what I know makes of it for me.' That was what acted on him, diis iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity, of die various bearings of which, he couldn't on die spot trust himself to pretend, in any high way, to go. What her claim, as she made it, represented for him - that he couldn't help betraying, if only as a

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consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct 'know, know,' on his nerves. She was capable of being sorry for his nerves at a time when he should need diem for dining out, pompously, rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she was not to let that prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme clearness. 'I didn't force this upon you, you must recollect, and it probably wouldn't have happened for you if you hadn't come in.'

'Ah,' said the Prince, 'I was liable to come in, you know.'

'I didn't think you were this evening.'

'And why not?'

'Well,' she answered, 'you have many liabilities - of different sorts.' With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham. 'And then you're so deep.'

It produced in his features, in spite of his control of diem, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race. 'It's you, cava, who are deep.'

Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at last that it was true. 'Then I shall have need of it all.'

'But what would you have done,' he was by diis time asking, 'if I hadn't come in?'

'I don't know.' She had hesitated. 'What would you?'

'Oh, io^9s - that isn't the question. I depend upon you. I go on. You would have spoken tomorrow?'

'I think I would have waited.'

'And for what?' he asked.

'To see what difference it would make for myself. My possession at last, I mean, of real knowledge.'

'Oh!' said the Prince.

'My only point now, at any rate,' she went on, 'is the difference, as I say, diat it may make for you. Your knowing was - from die moment you did come in - all I had in view.' And she sounded it again - he should have it once more. 'Your knowing that I've ceased - '

'That you've ceased - ?' With her pause, in fact, she had fairly made him press her for it.

'Why, to be as I was. Not to know.'

It was once more then, after a little, that he had had to stand receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still something of the same sort he was made to want. He had another hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed. 'Then does anyone else know?'

It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him at that distance. 'Anyone - ?'

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'Anyone, I mean, but Fanny Assingham.'

'I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of learning. I don't see,' she said, 'why you ask me.'

Then, after an instant - and only after an instant, as she saw - he made out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had known. The vision loomed, in this light, it fairly glared, for the few seconds - the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing! The picture flushed at the same time with all its essential colour - that of the so possible identity of her father's motive and principle with her own. He was 'deep,' as Amerigo called it, so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just as she had earned that description by making and by, for that matter, intending still to make, her care for his serenity; or at any rate for the firm outer shell of his dignity, all marvellous enamel, her paramount law. More strangely even than anything else her husband seemed to speak now but to help her in this. 'I know nothing but what you tell me.'

'Then I've told you all I intended. Find out the rest - !'

'Find it out - ?' He waited.

She stood before him a moment - it took that time to go on. Depth upon depth of her situation, as she met his face, surged and sank within her; but with the effect somehow, once more, that they rather lifted her than let her drop. She had her feet somewhere, through it all - it was her companion, absolutely, who was at sea. And she kept her feet; she pressed them to what was beneath her. She went over to the bell beside the chimney and gave a ring that he could but take as a summons for her maid. It stopped everything for the present; it was an intimation to him to go and dress. But she had to insist. 'Find out for yourself!'

PART FIFTH

Chapter 55

After the little party was again constituted at Fawns - which had taken, for completeness, some ten days - Maggie naturally felt herself still more possessed, in spirit, of everything that had last happened in London. There was a phrase that came back to her from old American years: she was having, by that idiom, the time of her life - she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognise or to hide. It was as if she had come out - that was'her most general consciousness; out of a dark tunnel, a dense wood, or even simply a smoky room, and had thereby, at least, for going on, the advantage of air in her lungs. It was as if she were somehow at last gathering in the fruits of patience; she had either been really more patient than she had known at the time, or had been so for longer: the change brought about by itself as great a difference of view as the shift of an inch in the position of a telescope. It was her telescope in fact that had gained in range - just as her danger lay in her exposing herself to the observation by the more charmed, and therefore the more reckless, use of this optical resource. Not under any provocation to produce it in public was her unremitted rule; but the difficulties of duplicity had not shrunk, while the need of it had doubled. Humbugging, which she had so practised with her father, had been a comparatively simple matter on the basis of mere doubt; but the ground to be covered was now greatly larger, and she felt not unlike some young woman of the theatre who, engaged for a minor part in the play and having mastered her cues with anxious effort, should find herself suddenly promoted to leading lady and expected to appear in every act of the five. She had made much to her husband, that last night, of her 'knowing'; but it was exactly this quantity she now knew that, from the moment she could only dissimulate it, added to her responsibility and made of the latter all a mere question of having something precious and precarious in charge. There was no one to help her with it - not even Fanny Assingham now; this good friend's presence having become, inevitably, with that climax of their last interview in

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Portland Place, a severely simplified function. She had her use, oh yes, a thousand times; but it could only consist henceforth in her quite conspicuously touching at no point whatever - assuredly, at least with Maggie - the matter they had discussed. She was there, inordinately, as a value, but as a value only for the clear negation of everything. She was their general sign, precisely, of unimpaired beatitude - and she was to live up to that somewhat arduous character, poor thing, as she might. She might privately lapse from it, if she must, with Amerigo or with Charlotte - only not, of course, ever, so much as for the wink of an eye, with the master of the house. Such lapses would be her own affair, which Maggie at present could take no thought of. She treated her young friend meanwhile, it was to be said, to no betrayal of such wavering; so that from the moment of her alighting at the door with the Colonel everything went on between them at concert pitch. What had she done, that last evening in Maggie's room, but bring the husband and wife more together than, as would seem, they had ever been? Therefore what indiscre­tion should she not show by attempting to go behind the grand appearance of her success? - which would be to court a doubt of her beneficent work. She knew accordingly nothing but harmony and diffused, restlessly, nothing but peace - an extravagant, expressive, aggressive peace, not incongruous, after all, with the solid calm of the place; a kind of helmeted, trident-shaking pax Britannica."

The peace, it must be added, had become, as the days elapsed, a peace quite generally animated and peopled - thanks to that fact of the presence of 'company' in which Maggie's ability to preserve an appearance had learned, from so far back, to find its best resource. It was not inconspicuous, it was in fact striking, that this resource, just now, seemed to meet in the highest degree everyone's need: quite as if everyone were, by the multiplication of human objects in the scene, by the creation, by the confusion, of Active issues, hopeful of escaping somebody else's notice. It had reached the point, in truth, that the collective bosom might have been taken to heave with the knowledge of the descent upon adjacent shores, for a short period, of Mrs Ranee and the Lutches, still united, and still so divided, for conquest: the sense of the party showed at least, oddly enough, as favourable to the fancy of the quaint turn that some near 'week end' might derive from their reappearance. This measured for Maggie the ground they had all travelled together since that unforgotten afternoon of the none so distant year, that determinant September Sunday when, sitting with her father in the park, as in commemora­tion of the climax both of their old order and of their old danger, she

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had proposed to him that they should 'call in' Charlotte, - call her in as a specialist might be summoned to an invalid's chair. Wasn't it a sign of something rather portentous, their being ready to be beholden, as for a diversion, to the once despised Kitty and Dotty? That had already had its application, in truth, to her invocation of the Castledeans and several other members, again, of the historic Matcham week, made before she left town, and made, always consistently, with an idea - since she was never henceforth to approach these people without an idea, and since that lurid element of their intercourse grew and grew for her with each occasion. The flame with which it burned afresh during these particular days, the way it held up the torch to anything, to everything, that might have occurred as the climax of revels springing from traditions so vivified - this by itself justified her private motive and reconsecrated her diplomacy. She had already produced by the aid of these people something of the effect she sought - that of being 'good' for whatever her companions were good for, and of not asking either of them to give up anyone or anything for her sake. There was moreover, frankly, a sharpness of point in it that she enjoyed; it gave an accent to the truth she wished to illustrate - the truth that the surface of her recent life, thick-sown with the flower of earnest endeavour, with every form of the unruffled and the undoubting, suffered no symptom anywhere to peep out. It was as if, under her pressure, neither party could get rid of the complicity, as it might be figured, of the other; as if, in a word, she saw Amerigo and Charlotte committed, for fear of betrayals on their own side, to a kind of wan consistency on the subject of Lady Castledean's 'set,' and this latter group, by the same stroke, compelled to assist at attestations the extent and bearing of which they rather failed to grasp and which left them indeed, in spite of hereditary high spirits, a trifle bewildered and even a trifle scared.

They made, none die less, at Fawns, for number, for movement, for sound - they played their parts during a crisis that must have hovered for them, in the long passages of the old house, after the fashion of the established ghost, felt, through the dark hours as a constant possibility, rather than have menaced mem in the form of a daylight bore, one of the perceived outsiders who are liable to be met in the drawing-room or to be sat next to at dinner. If the Princess, moreover, had failed of her occult use for so much of die machinery of diversion, she would still have had a sense not other than sympathetic for the advantage now extracted from it by Fanny Assingham's bruised philosophy. This good friend's relation to it was

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actually the revanche, she sufficiently indicated, of her obscured lustre at Matcham, where she had known her way about so much less than most of the others. She knew it at Fawns, through the pathless wild of the right tone, positively better than anyone, Maggie could note for her; and her revenge had the magnanimity of a brave pointing out of it to everyone else, a wonderful irresistible, conscious, almost compassionate patronage. Here was a house, she triumphantly caused it to be noted, in which she so bristled with values that some of them might serve, by her amused willingness to share, for such of the temporarily vague, among her fellow-guests, such of the dimly disconcerted, as had lost the key to their own. It may have been partly through the effect of this especial strain of community with her old friend that Maggie found herself, one evening, moved to take up again their dropped directness of reference. They had remained downstairs together late; the other women of the party had filed, singly or in couples, up the 'grand' staircase on which, from the equally grand hall, these retreats and advances could always be pleasantly observed; the men had apparently taken their way to the smoking-room; while the Princess, in possession thus of a rare reach of view, had lingered as if to enjoy it. Then she saw that Mrs Assingham was remaining a little and as for the appreciation of her enjoyment; upon which they stood looking at each other across the cleared prospect until the elder woman, only vaguely expressive and tentative now, came nearer. It was like the act of asking if there were anything she could yet do, and that question was answered by her immediately feeling, on this closer view, as she had felt when presenting herself in Portland Place after Maggie's last sharp summons. Their understanding was taken up by these new snatched moments where that occasion had left it.

'He has never told her that I know. Of that I'm at last satisfied.' And then as Mrs Assingham opened wide eyes: 'I've been in the dark since we came down, not understanding what he has been doing or intending - not making out what can have passed between them. But within a day or two I've begun to suspect, and this evening, for reasons - oh, too many to tell you! - I've been sure, since it explains. Nothing has passed between them - that's what has happened. It explains,' the Princess repeated with energy; 'it explains, it explains!' She spoke in a manner that her auditor was afterwards to describe to the Colonel, oddly enough, as that of the quietest excitement; she had turned back to the chimney-place, where, in honour of a damp day and a chill night, the piled logs had turned to flame and sunk to embers; and the evident intensity of her vision for the fact she

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imparted made Fanny Assingham wait upon her words. It explained, this striking fact, more indeed than her companion, though con­scious of fairly gaping with good-will, could swallow at once. The Princess, however, as for indulgence and confidence, quickly filled up the measure. 'He hasn't let her know that I know - and, clearly, doesn't mean to. He has made up his mind; he'll say nothing about it. Therefore, as she's quite unable to arrive at the knowledge by herself, she has no idea how much I'm really in possession. She believes,' said Maggie, 'and, so far as her own conviction goes, she knows, that I'm not in possession of anything. And that, somehow, for my own help seems to me immense.'

'Immense, my dear!' Mrs Assingham applausively murmured, though not quite, even as yet, seeing all the way. 'He's keeping quiet then on purpose?'

'On purpose.' Maggie's eyes lighted, at least, looked further than they had ever looked. 'He'll never tell her now.'

Fanny wondered; she cast about her; most of all she admired her little friend, in whom this annoimcement was evidently animated by an heroic lucidity. She stood there, in her full uniform, like some small erect commander of a siege, an anxious captain who has suddenly got news, replete with importance for him, of agitation, of division within the place. This importance breathed upon her comrade. 'So you're all right?'

'Oh, all right's a good deal to say. But I seem at least to see, as I haven't before, where I am with it.'

Fanny bountifully brooded; there was a point left vague. 'And you have it from him? - your husband himself has told you?'

' "Told" me - ?'

'Why, what you speak of. It isn't of an assurance received from him then that you do speak?'

At which Maggie had continued to stare. 'Dear me, no. Do you suppose I've asked him for an assurance?'

'Ah, you haven't?' Her companion smiled. 'That's what I supposed you might mean. Then, darling, what have you - ?'

'Asked him for? I've asked him for nothing.'

But this, in turn, made Fanny stare. 'Then nothing, that evening of the Embassy dinner, passed between you?'

'On the contrary, everything passed.'

'Everything - ?'

'Everything. I told him what I knew - and I told him how I knew it.'

Mrs Assingham waited. 'And that was all?'

'Wasn't it quite enough?'

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'Oh, love,' she bridled, 'that's for you to have judged!'

'Then I have judged,' said Maggie - 'I did judge. I made sure he understood - then I let him alone.'

Mrs Assingham wondered. 'But he didn't explain - ?'

'Explain? Thank God, no!' Maggie threw back her head as with horror at die thought; then, the next moment, added: 'And I didn't either.'

The decency of pride in it shed a cold little light - yet as from heights at the base of which her companion rather panted. 'But if he neither denies nor confesses - ?'

'He does what's a thousand times better - he lets it alone. He does,' Maggie went on, 'as he would do; as I see now that I was sure he would. He lets me alone.'

Fanny Assingham turned it over. 'Then how do you know so where, as you say, you "are"?'

'Why, just by that. I put him in possession of the difference; the difference made, about me, by the fact that I hadn't been, after all -though with a wonderful chance, I admitted, helping me - too stupid to have arrived at knowledge. He had to see that I'm changed for him - quite changed from the idea of me that he had so long been going on with. It became a question then of his really taking in the change - and what I now see is that he is doing so.'

Fanny followed as she could. 'Which he shows by letting you, as you say, alone?'

Maggie looked at her a minute. 'And by letting her.'

Mrs Assingham did what she might to embrace it - checked a little, however, by a thought that was die nearest approach she could have, in this almost too large air, to an inspiration. 'Ah, but does Charlotte let himV

'Oh, that's another affair - with which I've practically nothing to do. I dare say, however, she doesn't.' And the Princess had a more distant gaze for the image evoked by the question. 'I don't in fact well see how she can. But the point for me is that he understands.'

'Yes,' Fanny Assingham cooled, 'understands - ?'

'Well, what I want. I want a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger.'

'A brilliant, perfect surface - to begin with at least. I see.'

'The golden bowl - as it was to have been.' And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. 'The bowl with all happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.'

For Mrs Assingham too the image had its force, and the precious object shone before her again, reconstituted, plausible, presentable.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 743