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 (194) 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 did n't believe in it and we did n'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?"
"did n't we get you anything?" the prince had (195) 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 did n'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."
(196) "'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 today," 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; (197) besides which there was nothing to make me recur to it. But I remember 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 had n'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.