Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was that she HAD in the past been active for these people to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded at first in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It would n't, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, (277) she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror. It had become, for the occasion preposterously terror--of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground. The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her; since she found on trying that, lurid as her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give it no name. The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw.
Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued; since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause she should surely be less vague about what she had produced. This, further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one s connexion with any matter was too indirect to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she had in fact recognised that she could n't be so curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent. But there had been a moment in the dim desert of Eaton Square when she broke into speech.
"It's only their defending themselves so much more than they need--it's only THAT that makes me wonder. It's their having so remarkably much to say for themselves."
Her husband had as usual lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. "You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?" To which, as she failed to answer, the (278) Colonel added: "What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man's in a position in which he has nothing in life to do."
Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband's company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him. "He has behaved beautifully--he did from the first. I've thought it all along wonderful of him; and I've more than once when I've had a chance told him so. Therefore, therefore--!" But it died away as she mused.
"Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?"
"It is n't a question of course however," she undivertedly went on, "of their behaving beautifully apart. It's a question of their doing as they should when together--which is another matter."
"And how do you think then," the Colonel asked with interest, "that when together they SHOULD do? The less they do, one would say, the better--if you see so much in it."
His wife appeared at this to hear him. "I don't see in it what YOU'D see. And don't, my dear," she further answered, "think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They're the last people really to make anything-of that sort come in right."
"I'm surely never horrid or low," he returned, "about any one but my extravagant wife. I can do (279) with all our friends--as I see them myself: what I can't do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up--!" But he exhaled it again in smoke.
"My additions don't matter when you've not to pay the bill." With which her meditation again bore her through the air. "The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he was n't afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was--if I had n't seen he was n't--so," said Mrs. Assingham, "could I. So," she declared, "WOULD I. It's perfectly true," she went on--"it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted. And I LIKED his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself could n't have faced it. Then--if SHE had n't had confidence--we might have talked. But she had it to any amount."
"Did you ask her how much?" Bob Assingham patiently growled.