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 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 – made for judging it quickly – by the 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, unmistakeably though confusedly, of something 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 the hot blood as a blow across the 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 that best; if it were a question of saying what she now apparently 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 rustling finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order – only to find however that she could carry but two of the fragments at once. She brought them over to the 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 this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing it with deliberation in the 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. As there was however nothing to hold them but Maggie’s hands during the few moments the latter were so employed, she could only lay the almost equal parts of the vessel carefully beside their 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 his silence had the gloss of the warning she doubtless 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 think – this 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 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 accordingly 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 addressed the place to 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 hadn’t 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 I 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 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 miles 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 connexion. 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; but the next instant it had all come to her and she had turned round on 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 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 reflexion 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 wasn’t 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 it at any rate that there is something for you if you don’t too blindly spoil your chance for it.’ He went on 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 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 – I 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 in fine emerging with the prospect a little 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 none the less came into sight as a betrayal 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: this enquiry 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’d 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.’
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 the one kind 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 understood; and the discomfort of his privation yearned at her 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 and 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 that, whatever he might have to take from her – she being, on her side, beautifully free – he absolutely wouldn’t 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 weren’t fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it wasn’t 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 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 ill.’ 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?’
‘Didn’t we get you anything?’ The Prince had his shade of surprise – he continued very nobly to bethink himself.
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 an instant the visible 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 connexion –’
‘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 to-day,’ she pursued, ‘he gave me it frankly, as his reason.’
‘To-day?’ the Prince enquiringly 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 remembered the man’s striking me as a horrid 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 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 connexion. 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’d think that of you more than ever now,’ Maggie went on; ‘he’d 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 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 decently make room for. He looked at his watch; their engagement remained all the while 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 I came between you at all.’
Her husband had been for these 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 something 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 the 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 they have made a difference in the matter of our marriage,’ the Prince presently 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, this iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity of the various bearings of which he couldn’t on the 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 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 them for dining out, pompously, rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she wasn’t 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, despite his control of them, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race. ‘It’s you, cara, 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 this time asking, ‘if I hadn’t come in?’
‘I don’t know.’ She had cast about. ‘What would you?’
‘Oh io – that isn’t the question. I depend on you. I go on. You’d have spoken to-morrow?’
‘I think I’d 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, that it may make for you. Your knowing was – from the 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 any one else know?’
It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him at that distance. ‘Any one –?’
‘Any one 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 of 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!’