"I don't quite see, my dear," Colonel Assingham said to his wife the night of Charlotte's arrival--"I don't quite see, I'm bound to say, why you take it, even at the worst, so ferociously hard. It is n't your fault, after all, is it? I'll be hanged at any rate if it's mine."
The hour was late, and the young lady who had disembarked at Southampton that morning to come up by the "steamer special," and who had then settled herself at an hotel only to re-settle herself a couple of hours later at a private house, was by this time, they might hope, peacefully resting from her exploits. There had been two men at dinner, rather battered brothers-in-arms, of his own period, casually picked up by her host the day before, and when the gentlemen, after the meal, rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room, Charlotte, pleading fatigue, had already excused herself. The beguiled warriors however had stayed till after eleven--Mrs. Assingham, though finally quite without illusions, as she said, about the military character, was always mistress of a spell to old soldiers; and as the Colonel had come in before dinner only in time to dress he had n't till this moment really been summoned to meet his companion over the situation that, as he was now to learn, their visitor's advent had created for them. It was actually more than midnight, the servants had been sent to bed, the rattle of the wheels had ceased to come in through a (64) window still open to the August air, and Robert Assingham had been steadily learning all the while what it thus behoved him to know. But the words just quoted from him presented themselves for the moment as the essence of his spirit and his attitude.
He disengaged, he would be damned if he did n't--they were both phrases he repeatedly used--his responsibility. The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language. His wife had once told him, in relation to his violence of speech, that such excesses on his part made her think of a retired General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husband's exaggerated emphasis was HIS box of toy soldiers, his military game. It harmlessly gratified in him, for his declining years, the military instinct; bad words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry. It was natural, it was delightful--the romance, and for her as well, of camp life and of the perpetual booming of guns. It was fighting to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed.
Less fortunate than she, nevertheless, in spite of his wealth of expression, he had n't yet found the image that described HER favourite game; all he could do was practically to leave it to her, emulating her own philosophy.
He had again and again sat up late to discuss those situations in which her finer consciousness abounded, but he had never failed to deny that anything (65) in life, anything of hers, could be a situation for himself.
She might be in fifty at once if she liked--and it was what women did like, at their ease, after all; there always being, when they had too much of any, some man, as they were well aware, to get them out. He would n't at any price have one, of any sort whatever, of his own, or even be in one along with her. He watched her accordingly in her favourite element very much as he had sometimes watched at the Aquarium the celebrated lady who, in a slight, though tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did tricks in the tank of water which looked so cold and uncomfortable to the non-amphibious.
He listened to his companion to-night, while he smoked his last pipe, he watched her through her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a shilling.
But it was true that, this being the case, he desired the value of his money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so bent on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was going to happen, and what, at the worst, could the poor girl do, even granting she wanted to do anything?
What at the worst for that matter could she be conceived to have in her head?
"If she had told me the moment she got here," Mrs. Assingham replied, "I should n't have my difficulty in finding out. But she was n't so obliging, and I see no sign at all of her becoming so. What's certain is that she did n't come for nothing. She wants"--she worked it out at her leisure--"to see the Prince again. THAT is n't what troubles me. I mean that such a fact, AS a fact, is n't. But what I ask myself is What does she want it FOR?"
(66) "What's the good of asking yourself if you know you don't know?"