"Never!" his wife inexorably repeated. And she went on without pity.
"Do you remember what I said to you long ago--that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?"
The smile with which he met this appeal was n't, it was to be feared, robust. "What have n't you, love, said in your time?"
"So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I declared, on that occasion, that Maggie was the creature in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed. That therefore," Fanny continued, "is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense will have to open."
"I see." He nodded. "To the wrong." He nodded again almost cheerfully--as if he had been keeping (385) the peace with a baby or a lunatic. "To the very, VERY wrong."
But his wife's spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher. "To what's called Evil--with a very big E: for the first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it." And she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure.
"To the harsh bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed"--and here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit--"unless indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough."
He considered. "But enough for what then, dear--if not enough to break her heart?"
"Enough to give her a shaking!" Mrs. Assingham rather oddly replied.
"To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won't break her heart.
It will make her," she explained--"well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world."
"But is n't it a pity," the Colonel asked, "that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?"
"Oh 'disagreeable'--? They'll have HAD to be disagreeable--to show her a little where she is. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live."
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved, he had lighted a cigarette, (386) for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to "time" her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes roll, for a minute, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife's words ideally implied. "Decide to live--ah yes!--for her child."
"Oh bother her child!"--and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. "To live, you poor dear, for her father--which is another pair of sleeves!" And Mrs. Assingham's whole ample ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. "Any idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She'll have to save HIM."
"To 'save' him--?"
"To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT"--and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband's very eyes--"will be work cut out!"
With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy.
"Good-night!"
There was something in her manner, however--or in the effect at least of this supreme demonstration--that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. "Ah but, you know, that's rather jolly!"
(387) "'Jolly'--?" She turned upon it again from the foot of the staircase.
"I mean it's rather charming."
"'Charming'--?" It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.
"I mean it's rather beautiful. You just said yourself it would be. Only," he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connexions hitherto dim--"only I don't quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so 'rum,' has n't also by the same stroke made her notice a little more what has been going on."
"Ah there you are! It's the question that I've all along been asking myself." She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued--she let him have it straight. "And it's the question of an idiot."
"An idiot--?"
"Well, the idiot that I'VE been in all sorts of ways--so often of late have I asked it. You're excuseable since you ask it but now. The answer I saw to-day has all the while been staring me in the face."
"Then what in the world is it?"
"Why the very intensity of her conscience about him--the very passion of her brave little piety. That's the way it has worked," Mrs. Assingham explained--"and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a way as possible. But it has been working from a 'rum' start. From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off and it then happened by an (388) extraordinary perversity that the very opposite effect was produced--!" With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.
"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That WAS a rum start. '