This last advantage for her was however too sadly out of the question; her sole strength lay in her being able to see that if Charlotte would n't "want" the Assinghams it would be because that sentiment too would have motives and grounds. She had all the while command of one way of meeting any objection, any complaint, on his wife's part, reported to her by her father; it would be open to her to retort to his possible "What are your reasons, my dear?" by a lucidly produced "What are hers, love, please?--is n't that what we had better know? May n't her reasons be (107) a dislike, beautifully founded, of the presence and thereby of the observation of persons who perhaps know about her things it's inconvenient to her they should know?" That hideous card she might in mere logic play--being at this time, at her still swifter private pace, intimately familiar with all the fingered pasteboard in her pack. But she could play it only on the forbidden issue of sacrificing him; the issue so forbidden that it involved even a horror of finding out if he would really have consented to be sacrificed. What she must do she must do by keeping her hands off him; and nothing meanwhile, as we see, had less in common with THAT scruple than such a merciless manipulation of their yielding beneficiaries as her spirit so boldly revelled in. She saw herself in this connexion without detachment--saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If SHE could face the awkwardness of the persistence of her friends at Fawns in spite of Charlotte, she somehow looked to them for an inspiration of courage that would improve upon her own They were in short not only themselves to find a plausibility and an audacity, but were somehow by the way to pick up these forms for her, Maggie, as well. And she felt indeed that she was giving them scant time longer when one afternoon in Portland Place she broke out with an irrelevance that was merely superficial.
"What awfulness, in heaven's name, is there between them? What do you believe, what do you KNOW?"
(108) Oh if she went by faces her visitor's sudden whiteness at this might have carried her far! Fanny Assingham turned pale for it, but there was something in such an appearance, in the look it put into the eyes, that renewed Maggie's conviction of what this companion had been expecting.
She had been watching it come, come from afar, and now that it was there, after all, and the first convulsion over, they would doubtless soon find themselves in a more real relation. It was there because of the Sunday luncheon they had partaken of alone together; it was there, as strangely as one would, because of the bad weather, the cold perverse June rain, that was making the day wrong; it was there because it stood for the whole sum of the perplexities and duplicities among which our young woman felt herself lately to have picked her steps; it was there because Amerigo and Charlotte were again paying together alone a "week-end" visit which it had been Maggie's plan infernally to promote--just to see if this time they really would; it was there because she had kept Fanny, on her side, from paying one she would manifestly have been glad to pay, and had made her come instead, stupidly, vacantly, boringly, to luncheon; all in the spirit of celebrating the fact that the Prince and Mrs. Verver had thus put it into her own power to describe them exactly as they were. It had abruptly occurred in truth that Maggie required the preliminary help of determining how they were; though on the other hand before her guest had answered her question everything in the hour and the place, everything in all the conditions affected her as crying it out. Her guest's stare of ignorance above (109) all--that of itself first cried it out. "'between them'? What do you mean?"
"Anything there should n't be, there should n't have BEEN--all this time. Do you believe there is--or what's your idea?"
Fanny's idea was clearly, to begin with, that her young friend had taken her breath away; but she looked at her very straight and very hard. "Do you speak from a suspicion of your own?"
"I speak at last from a torment. Forgive me if it comes out. I've been thinking for months and months, and I've no one to turn to, no one to help me to make things out; no impression but my own, don't you see? to go by."
"You've been thinking for months and months?"--Mrs. Assingham took it in. "But WHAT then, dear Maggie, have you been thinking?"
"Well, horrible things--like a little beast that I perhaps am. That there may be something--something wrong and dreadful, something they cover up."
The elder woman's colour had begun to come back; she was able, though with a visible effort, to face the question less amazedly. "You imagine, poor child, that the wretches are in love? Is that it?"
But Maggie for a minute only stared back at her. "Help me to find out WHAT I imagine. I don't know--I've nothing but my perpetual anxiety. Have YOU any?--do you see what I mean? If you'll tell me truly, that at least, one way or the other, will do something for me."
Fanny's look had taken a peculiar gravity--a fulness (110) with which it seemed to shine. "Is what it comes to that you're jealous of Charlotte?"
"Do you mean whether I hate her?"--and Maggie thought. "No; not on account of father."
"Ah," Mrs. Assingham returned, "that is n't what one would suppose.
What I ask is if you're jealous on account of your husband."