"And things are NOT too utterly far gone with them?"
She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article she would have put down her last shilling. "No."
It made him always grin at her. "Is THAT a lie?"
"Do you think you're worth lying to? If it were n't the truth for me," she added, "I would n't have accepted for Fawns. I CAN, I believe, keep the wretches quiet."
"But how--at the worst?"
"Oh 'the worst'--don't talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work from week to week of itself. You'll see."
He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide--! "Yet if it does n't work?"
"Ah that's talking about the worst!"
Well, it might be; but what were they doing from (133) morning to night at this crisis but talk? "Who'll keep the others?"
"The others--?"
"Who'll keep THEM quiet? If your couple have had a life together they can't have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about them. They've had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they've had to arrange; for if they have n't met and have n't arranged and have n't thereby in some quarter or other had to give themselves away, why are we piling it up so? Therefore if there's evidence up and down London--"
"There must be people in possession of it? Ah it is n't all," she always remembered, "up and down London. Some of it must connect them--I mean," she musingly added, "it naturally WOULD--with other places, with who knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But whatever there may have been it will also all have been buried on the spot. Oh they've known HOW--too beautifully! But nothing all the same is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself."
"Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have been so squared?" And then inveterately, before she could say--he enjoyed so much coming to this: "What will have squared Lady Castledean?"
"The consciousness"--she had never lost her promptness--"of having no stones to throw at any one else's windows. She has enough to do to guard her own glass. That was what she was doing," Fanny (134) said, "that last morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be helped--if it was n't perhaps rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint, that HE might be. They put in together therefore of course that day; they got it clear--and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they did n't become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening." On this historic circumstance Mrs.
Assingham was always ready afresh to brood; but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add: "Only we know nothing whatever else--for which all our stars be thanked!"
The Colonel's gratitude was apt to be less marked. "What did they do for themselves, anyway, from the moment they got that free hand to the moment (long after dinner-time, have n't you told me?) of their turning up at their respective homes?"
"Well, it's none of your business!"
"I don't speak of it as mine, but it's only too much theirs. People are always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something sooner or later happens; somebody sooner or later breaks the holy calm.
Murder will out."
"Murder will--but this is n't murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I verily believe," she had her moments of adding, "that for the amusement of the row you'd prefer an explosion."
This however was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up for the most part, after a long contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. "What (135) I can't for my life make out is your idea of the old boy."
"Charlotte's too inconceivably funny husband? I HAVE no idea."
"I beg your pardon--you've just shown it. You never speak of him but AS too inconceivably funny."
"Well, he is," she always confessed. "That is he may be, for all I know, too inconceivably great. But that's not an idea. It represents only my weak necessity of feeling that he's beyond me--which is n't an idea either.
You see he may be stupid too."
"Precisely--there you are."
"Yet on the other hand," she always went on, "he may be sublime: sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But we shall never know." With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she did n't yearningly welcome. "THAT I can see."
"Oh I say--!" It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.
"I'm not sure even that Charlotte will."
"Oh my dear, what Charlotte does n't know--!"
But she brooded and brooded. "I'm not sure even that the Prince will."
It seemed privation in short for them all. "They'll be mystified, confounded, tormented. But they won't KNOW--and all their possible putting their heads together won't make them. That," said Fanny Assingham, "will be their punishment."
And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch. "It will probably also--if I get off with so little--be mine." (136) "And what," her husband liked to ask, "will be mine?"
"Nothing--you're not worthy of any. One's punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we SHALL feel." She was splendid with her "ours"; she flared up with this prophecy. "It will be Maggie herself who will mete it out."
"Maggie--?"
"SHE'LL know--about her father; everything. Everything," she repeated.
On the vision of which each time Mrs. Assingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. "But she'll never tell us."