He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed this time the sharpest spring of response. "Never, never--it was n't a time to 'ask.' Asking is suggesting--and it was n't a time to suggest. One had to make up one's mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as--for so proud a creature--almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her (280) for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due."
"That is to Mrs. Assingham?"
She said nothing for a little--there were after all alternatives. "Maggie herself of course--astonishing little Maggie."
"Is Maggie then astonishing too?"--and he gloomed out of his window.
His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look.
"I'm not sure I don't begin to see more in her than--dear little person as I've always thought--I ever supposed there was. I'm not sure that, putting a good many things together, I'm not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary."
"You certainly will if you can," the Colonel resignedly remarked.
Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out. "In fact--I do begin to feel it--Maggie's the great comfort. I'm getting hold of it.
It will be SHE who'll see us through. In fact she'll have to. And she'll be able."
Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband's general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr. Verver. "Oh Lordy, Lordy!"
"If she is, however," Mrs. Assingham continued, "she'll be extraordinary enough--and that's what (281) I'm thinking of. But I'm not indeed so very sure," she added, "of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I mean I'm not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife."
"I should n't think you would be, love," the Colonel with some promptness responded. "Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist--!"
His cigar in short once more could alone express it.
"Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?"--this memory, for the full view, Fanny found herself also invoking.
It made her companion in truth slightly gape. <'An incredible little idealist--Charlotte herself?"
"And she was sincere," his wife simply proceeded--"she was unmistakeably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it."
"And that--I see--happens to be another of the questions you can't ask her. You have to do it all," said Bob Assingham, "as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up--though who's to come down on you if you break them I don't quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses--like forfeits on Christmas Eve?" To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her he further added: "How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?"
"I shall go on," Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, "while there's a scrap as big as your nail. But we're not yet, luckily, reduced only to that." She had another pause, holding the while the thread of (282) that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver's obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. "Even if her debt was n't to the others-- even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight.
For what really did the Prince do," she asked herself, "but generously trust her? What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong? That creates for her, upon my word," Mrs. Assingham pursued, "a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which--well, which she'll be really a fiend if she does n't make the law of her conduct. I mean of course his trust that she would n't interfere with him--expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time."
The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel's next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united for the most part but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally at the best his note. He at present however actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps.
He literally asked in short an intelligent, well-nigh a sympathising, question.
"Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel--THAT, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?"
"Taking it in the right way." Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.
"But does n't it rather depend on what she may most feel to BE the right way?"
(283) "No--it depends on nothing. Because there's only one way--for duty or delicacy."
"Oh--delicacy!" Bob Assingham rather crudely murmured.
"I mean the highest kind--moral. Charlotte's perfectly capable of appreciating that. By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone."
"Then you've made up your mind it's all poor Charlotte?" he asked with an effect of abruptness.
The effect, whether intended or not, reached her-- brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which the bottom somehow dropped out of her recovered comfort. "Then you've made up yours differently? It really struck you that there IS something?"
The movement itself apparently made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question. "Perhaps that's just what she's doing: showing him how much she's letting him alone--pointing it out to him from day to day."