"Oh!"--and Bob Assingham's face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. "Has n't she the Prince then?"
"For such matters? Oh he does n't count."
(376) "I thought that was just what--as the basis of our agitation--he does do!"
Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. "Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of my agitation is exactly that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!" And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver's superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head--as marked a tribute to that lady's general grace, in all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had ever received.
"Ah only Maggie!" With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.
"No--not ONLY Maggie. A great many people in London--and small wonder!--bore him."
"Maggie only worst then?" But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. "You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte 'if they HAVE arrived.' You think it then possible that they really won't have returned?"
His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from entertaining it. "I think there's nothing they're not now capable of--in their so intense good faith."
"Good faith?"--he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.
"Their false position. It comes to the same thing."
(377) And she bore down with her decision the superficial lack of sequence.
"They may very possibly, for a demonstration--as I see them--not have come back."
He could but wonder, at this, how she did see them. "May have bolted somewhere together?"
"May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done," Fanny Assingham continued, "God knows what!" She went on suddenly with more emotion--which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress imperfectly smothered. "Whatever they've done I shall never know. Never, never--because I don't want to and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like. But I've worked for them ALL!" She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She passed into the dusky drawing-room where during his own prowl shortly previous he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might have been trying to guess what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she COULD have committed herself. But to hear her cry and yet do her best not to was quickly enough too much for him; he had known her (378) at other times quite not make the repressive effort, and that had n't been so bad. He went to her and put his arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped, she let it stay a little--all with a patience that presently stilled her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny's drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone--the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last once for all defined itself. What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved--so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them? It did save them somehow for Fanny's troubled mind--for that was (379) the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had sufficiently got the tip and that the tip was all he had wanted. This remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie. "I don't altogether see, you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything." When he so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths.
