"I can't say more," this made his companion reply, "than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best--and her very best, poor duck, is very good---to be quiet and natural. It's when one sees people who always ARE natural making little pale pathetic blinking efforts for it--then it is that one knows something's the matter. I can't describe my impression--you'd have had it for yourself. And the only thing that ever CAN be the matter with Maggie is that. By 'that' I mean her beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time," Mrs. Assingham wound up, "of her wonderful little judgement of her wonderful little world."
It was impressive, Fanny's vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. "To doubt of fidelity--to doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But she'll put it all," he concluded, "on Charlotte."
Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake.
"She won't 'put' it anywhere. She won't do with it anything any one else would. She'll take it all herself."
"You mean she'll make it out her own fault?"
"Yes--she'll find means somehow to arrive at (381) "Ah then," the Colonel dutifully declared, "she's indeed a little brick!"
"Oh," his wife returned, "you'll see in one way or another to what tune!"
And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation--so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. "She'll see me somehow through!"
"See YOU--?"
"Yes, me. I'm the worst. For," said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, "I did it all. I recognise that--I accept it. She won't cast it up at me--she won't cast up anything. So I throw myself upon her--she'll bear me up." She spoke almost volubly--she held him with her sudden sharpness.
"She'll carry the whole weight of us."
There was still nevertheless wonder in it. "You mean she won't mind?
I SAY, love--!" And he not unkindly stared. "Then where's the difficulty?"
"There is n't any!" Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis.
It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer.
"Ah you mean there is n't any for US!"
She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern for their own surface at any cost. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was after all what they had most to consider. "Not," she said with dignity, "if we properly keep our heads."
She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now.
This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis. "Do you remember what you (382) said to me that night of my first REAL anxiety--after the Foreign Office party?"
"In the carriage--as we came home?" Yes--he could recall it. "Leave them to pull through?"
"Precisely. 'Trust their own wit,' you practically said, 'to save all appearances.' Well, I've trusted it. I HAVE left them to pull through."
He considered. "And your point is that they're not doing so?"
"I've left them," she went on, "but now I see how and where. I've been leaving them all the while, with out knowing it, to HER."
"To the Princess?"
"And that's what I mean," Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. "That's what happened to me with her to-day," she continued to explain. "It came home to me that that's what I've really been doing."
"Oh I see."
"I need n't torment myself. She has taken them over."
The Colonel declared that he "saw"; yet it was as if, at this, he a little sightlessly stared. "But what then has happened, from one day to the other, to HER? What has opened her eyes?"
"They were never really shut. She misses him."
"Then why has n't she missed him before?"
Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out. "She did--but she would n't let herself know it. She had her reason--she wore her blind. Now at last her situation has come to a head. To-day she does know it. (383) And that's illuminating. It has been,"
Mrs. Assingham wound up, "illuminating to ME."
Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. "Poor dear little girl!"
"Ah no--don't pity her!"
This nevertheless pulled him up. "We may n't even be sorry for her?"
"Not now--or at least not yet. It's too soon--that is if it is n't very much too late. This will depend," Mrs. Assingham went on; "at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before--for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now however she has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me--"
But again she projected her vision.
"The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she'll like it!"
"The way it comes to me is that she WILL live. The way it comes to me is that she'll triumph."
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. "Ah then we must back her!"
"No--we must n't touch her. We may n't touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile," said Mrs. Assingham, "we must bear it as we can. That's where we are--and it serves us right. We're in presence."
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. "In presence of what?"
(384) "Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off."
She had paused there before him while he wondered. "You mean she'll get the Prince back?"
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. "It is n't a question of recovery. It won't be a question of any vulgar struggle. To 'get him back' she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him." With which Fanny shook her head.
"What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that all the while she really HAS N'T had him. Never."
"Ah my dear--!" the poor Colonel panted.