You like it, I know, but I've dreamed another dream." She held up her head now; her lighted eyes more triumphantly rested; she was finding, she was following her way. Maggie, by the same influence, sat in sight of it; there was something she was SAVING, some quantity of which she herself was judge; and it was for a long moment, even with the sacrifice the Princess had come to make, a good deal like watching her from the solid shore plunge into uncertain, into possibly treacherous depths. "I see something else," she went on; "I've an idea that greatly appeals to me--I've had it for a long time. It has come over me that we're wrong. Our real life is n't here."
Maggie held her breath. "'Ours'--?"
"My husband's and mine. I'm not speaking for you."
"Oh!" said Maggie, only praying not to be, not even to appear, stupid.
"I'm speaking for ourselves. I'm speaking," Charlotte brought out, "for HIM."
"I see. For my father."
"For your father. For whom else?" They looked at each other hard now, but Maggie's face took refuge in the intensity of her interest. She was n't at all events so stupid as to treat her companion's question as requiring an answer; a discretion that her controlled stillness had after an instant justified. "I must risk your thinking me selfish--for of course you know what it involves. Let me admit it--I AM selfish. I place my husband first."
(315) "Well," said Maggie, smiling and smiling, "since that's where I place mine--!"
"You mean you'll have no quarrel with me? So much the better then; for,"
Charlotte went on with a higher and higher flight, "My plan's completely formed."
Maggie waited--her glimmer had deepened; her chance somehow was at hand.
The only danger was her spoiling it; she felt herself skirting an abyss.
"What then, may I ask, what IS your plan?"
It hung fire but ten seconds; it came out sharp. "To take him home--to his real position. And not to wait."
"Do you mean--a--this season?"
"I mean immediately. And--I may as well tell you now--I mean for my own time. I want," Charlotte said, "to have him at last a little to myself;
I want, strange as it may seem to you"--and she gave it all its weight--"to KEEP the man I've married. And to do so I see I must act."
Maggie, with the effort still to follow the right line, felt herself colour to the eyes. "Immediately?" she thoughtfully echoed.
"As soon as we can get off.. The removal of everything is after all but a detail. That can always be done; with money, as he spends it, everything can. What I ask for," Charlotte declared, "is the definite break. And I wish it now." With which her head, like her voice, rose higher. "Oh," she added, "I know my difficulty!"
Far down below the level of attention, in she could scarce have said what sacred depths, Maggie's inspiration (316) had come, and it had trebled the next moment into sound. "Do you mean I'M your difficulty?"
"You and he together--since it's always with you that I've had to see him. But it's a difficulty that I'm facing, if you wish to know; that I've already faced; that I propose to myself to surmount. The struggle with it--none too pleasant--has n't been for me, as you may imagine, in itself charming; I've felt in it at times, if I must tell you all, too great and too strange an ugliness. Yet I believe it may succeed."
She had risen with this, Mrs. Verver, and had moved for the emphasis of it a few steps away; while Maggie, motionless at first, but sat and looked at her. "You want to take my father FROM me?"
The sharp successful almost primitive wail in it made Charlotte turn, and this movement attested for the Princess the felicity of her deceit.
Something in her throbbed as it had throbbed the night she stood in the drawing-room and denied that she had suffered. She was ready to lie again if her companion would but give her the opening. Then she should know she had done all. Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare her face with her note of resentment; and Maggie, feeling this, met it with the signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of defeat. "I want really to possess him," said Mrs. Verver. "I happen also to feel that he's worth it."
Maggie rose as if to receive her. "Oh--worth it!" she wonderfully threw off.
The tone, she instantly saw, again had its effect: Charlotte flamed aloft--might truly have been believing (317) in her passionate parade.
"You've thought you've known what he's worth?"
"Indeed then, my dear, I believe I have--as I believe I still do."
She had given it, Maggie, straight back, and again it had n't missed.
Charlotte for another moment only looked at her; then broke into the words--Maggie had known they would come--of which she had pressed the spring. "How I see that you loathed our marriage!"
"Do you ASK me?" Maggie after an instant demanded.
Charlotte had looked about her, picked up the parasol she had laid on a bench, possessed herself mechanically of one of the volumes of the relegated novel and then more consciously flung it down again: she was in presence, visibly, of her last word. She opened her sunshade with a click; she twirled it on her shoulder in her pride. "'Ask' you? Do I need? How I see," she broke out, "that you've worked against me!"
"Oh, oh, oh!" the Princess exclaimed.
Her companion, leaving her, had reached one of the archways, but on this turned round with a flare. "You have n't worked against me?"
Maggie took it and for a moment kept it; held it, with closed eyes, as if it had been some captured fluttering bird pressed by both hands to her breast. Then she opened her eyes to speak. "What does it matter--if I've failed?"
"You recognise then that you've failed?" asked Charlotte from the threshold.
(318) Maggie waited; she looked, as her companion had done a moment before, at the two books on the seat; she put them together and laid them down; then she made up her mind. "I've failed!" she sounded out before Charlotte, having given her time, walked away. She watched her, splendid and erect, float down the long vista; then she sank upon a seat. Yes, she had done all.