I've been, my dear," she went on, "to the British Museum--which you know I always adore. And I've been to the National Gallery and to a dozen old booksellers', coming across treasures, and I've lunched, on some strange nastiness, at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it was too far--my old man urged that; and I'd have gone to the Zoo if it had n't been too wet--which he also (304) begged me to observe. But you would n't believe--I did put in Saint Paul's. Such days," she wound up, "are expensive; for, besides the cab, I've bought quantities of books."
She immediately passed at any rate to another point. "I can't help wondering when you must last have laid eyes on them." And then as it had apparently for her companion an effect of abruptness: "Maggie, I mean, and the child.
For I suppose you know he's with her."
"Oh yes, I know he's with her. I saw them this morning."
"And did they then announce their programme?"
"She told me she was taking him, as usual, da nonno."
"And for the whole day?"
He hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly shifted. "She did n't say. And I did n't ask."
"Well," she went on, "it can't have been later than half-past ten--I mean when you saw them. They had got to Eaton Square before eleven. You know we don't formally breakfast, Adam and I; we have tea in our rooms--at least I have; but luncheon's early, and I saw my husband this morning by twelve; he was showing the child a picture-book. Maggie had been there with them, had left them settled together. Then she had gone out--taking the carriage for something he had been intending, but that she offered to do instead."
The Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest. "Taking, you mean, YOUR carriage?"
"I don't know which, and it does n't matter. It's not a question," she smiled, "of a carriage the more or (305) the less. It's not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It's so beautiful," she said, "that it's not a question of anything vulgar or horrid." Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was rather remarkably as if he fell in. "I went out--I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important.
It has BEEN--it IS important. I know as I have n't known before the way they feel. I could n't in any other way have made so sure of it."
"They feel a confidence," the Prince observed.
He had indeed said it for her. "They feel a confidence." And she proceeded with lucidity to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble had witnessed her return--for curiosity and even really a little from anxiety--to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key rarely used: it had always irritated Adam--one of the few things that did--to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home in the small hours after parties. "So I had but to slip in each time with my cab at the door and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went--without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose," she asked, "becomes of one?--not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that does n't matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maitresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They (306) must even in their odd way," she declared, "have SOME idea."
"Oh they've a great deal of idea," said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. "They think so much of us. They think in particular so much of you."
"Ah don't put it all on 'me'!" she smiled.
But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place.
"It's a matter of your known character."
"Ah thank you for 'known'!" she still smiled.
"It's a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It's a matter of what those things have done for you in the world--I mean in THIS world and this place. You're a Personage for them--and Personages do go and come."
"Oh no, my dear; there you're quite wrong." And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. "That's exactly what Personages don't do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they have n't latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in 'growlers' it makes a greater noise still. It's you, caro mio," she said, "who, so far as that goes, are the Personage."
"Ah," he in turn protested, "don't put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home," he added, "shall you say that you've been doing?"
"I shall say, beautifully, that I've been here."
"All day?"
"Yes--all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything," she went on, "without really seeing that this is what they (307) must like to think I do for you?--just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are."
He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out: "How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?" And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect: "They'd have done the same for one of yours."
"Ah if I could have had one--! I hoped and I believed," said Charlotte, "that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck--that it might have been. I'm sure he hoped and intended so. It's not, at any rate," she went on, "my fault. There it is." She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete.
"And now I'm too sure. It will never be."
He waited for a moment. "Never?"