Chapter 17

Charlotte had for a moment a pause; it had continued to come to her that really to have her case “out,” as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate difficulties had oftenest referred themselves, would help her, on the whole, more than hinder; and under that feeling all her opportunity, with nothing kept back; with a thing or two perhaps even thrust forward, seemed temptingly to open. Besides, didn’t Fanny at bottom half expect, absolutely at the bottom half WANT, things?—so that she would be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn’t get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have “gone too far” in her irrepressible interest in other lives. What had just happened—it pieced itself together for Charlotte—was that the Assingham pair, drifting like everyone else, had had somewhere in the gallery, in the rooms, an accidental concussion; had it after the Colonel, over his balustrade, had observed, in the favouring high light, her public junction with the Prince. His very dryness, in this encounter, had, as always, struck a spark from his wife’s curiosity, and, familiar, on his side, with all that she saw in things, he had thrown her, as a fine little bone to pick, some report of the way one of her young friends was “going on” with another. He knew perfectly—such at least was Charlotte’s liberal assumption—that she wasn’t going on with anyone, but she also knew that, given the circumstances, she was inevitably to be sacrificed, in some form or another, to the humorous intercourse of the inimitable couple. The Prince meanwhile had also, under coercion, sacrificed her; the Ambassador had come up to him with a message from Royalty, to whom he was led away; after which she had talked for five minutes with Sir John Brinder, who had been of the Ambassador’s company and who had rather artlessly remained with her. Fanny had then arrived in sight of them at the same moment as someone else she didn’t know, someone who knew Mrs. Assingham and also knew Sir John. Charlotte had left it to her friend’s competence to throw the two others immediately together and to find a way for entertaining her in closer quarters. This was the little history of the vision, in her, that was now rapidly helping her to recognise a precious chance, the chance that mightn’t again soon be so good for the vivid making of a point. Her point was before her; it was sharp, bright, true; above all it was her own. She had reached it quite by herself; no one, not even Amerigo—Amerigo least of all, who would have nothing to do with it—had given her aid. To make it now with force for Fanny Assingham’s benefit would see her further, in the direction in which the light had dawned, than any other spring she should, yet awhile, doubtless, be able to press. The direction was that of her greater freedom—which was all in the world she had in mind. Her opportunity had accordingly, after a few minutes of Mrs. Assingham’s almost imprudently interested expression of face, positively acquired such a price for her that she may, for ourselves, while the intensity lasted, rather resemble a person holding out a small mirror at arm’s length and consulting it with a special turn of the head. It was, in a word, with this value of her chance that she was intelligently playing when she said in answer to Fanny’s last question: “Don’t you remember what you told me, on the occasion of something or other, the other day? That you believe there’s nothing I’m afraid of? So, my dear, don’t ask me!”

“Mayn’t I ask you,” Mrs. Assingham returned, “how the case stands with your poor husband?”

“Certainly, dear. Only, when you ask me as if I mightn’t perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to think.”

Mrs. Assingham hesitated; then, blinking a little, she took her risk. “You didn’t think that if it was a question of anyone’s returning to him, in his trouble, it would be better you yourself should have gone?”

Well, Charlotte’s answer to this inquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the REAL truth. “If we couldn’t be perfectly frank and dear with each other, it would be ever so much better, wouldn’t it? that we shouldn’t talk about anything at all; which, however, would be dreadful—and we certainly, at any rate, haven’t yet come to it. You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because, don’t you see? you can’t upset me.”

“I’m sure, my dear Charlotte,” Fanny Assingham laughed, “I don’t want to upset you.”

“Indeed, love, you simply COULDN’T even if you thought it necessary—that’s all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I’m, by no merit of my own, just fixed—fixed as fast as a pin stuck, up to its head, in a cushion. I’m placed—I can’t imagine anyone MORE placed. There I AM!”

Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. “I dare say—but your statement of your position, however you see it, isn’t an answer to my inquiry. It seems to me, at the same time, I confess,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being ‘frank.’ How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay, and if she’s willing to leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren’t the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable?”

“If they’re not,” Charlotte replied, “it’s only from their being, in a way, too evident. They’re not grounds for me—they weren’t when I accepted Adam’s preference that I should come to-night without him: just as I accept, absolutely, as a fixed rule, ALL his preferences. But that doesn’t alter the fact, of course, that my husband’s daughter, rather than his wife, should have felt SHE could, after all, be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour—seeing, especially, that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field.” With which she produced, as it were, her explanation. “I’ve simply to see the truth of the matter—see that Maggie thinks more, on the whole, of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such,” she went on, “that this becomes immediately, don’t you understand? a thing I have to count with.”

Mrs. Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. “If you mean such a thing as that she doesn’t adore the Prince—!”

“I don’t say she doesn’t adore him. What I say is that she doesn’t think of him. One of those conditions doesn’t always, at all stages, involve the other. This is just HOW she adores him,” Charlotte said. “And what reason is there, in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn’t, as you say, show together? We’ve shown together, my dear,” she smiled, “before.”

Her friend, for a little, only looked at her—speaking then with abruptness. “You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such GOOD people.”

The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face, however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had caused, the next instant, further to brighten. “Does one ever put into words anything so fatuously rash? It’s a thing that must be said, in prudence, FOR one—by somebody who’s so good as to take the responsibility: the more that it gives one always a chance to show one’s best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly, you’ll never have the distress, or whatever, of hearing me complain.”

“Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!” and the elder woman’s spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy.

To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. “With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up—still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him. She missed his company—a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can—a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments—which has, all the same, everything in its favour,” Charlotte hastened to declare, “makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house. To make sure she doesn’t fail of it she’s always arranging for it—which she didn’t have to do while they lived together. But she likes to arrange,” Charlotte steadily proceeded; “it peculiarly suits her; and the result of our separate households is really, for them, more contact and more intimacy. To-night, for instance, has been practically an arrangement. She likes him best alone. And it’s the way,” said our young woman, “in which he best likes HER. It’s what I mean therefore by being ‘placed.’ And the great thing is, as they say, to ‘know’ one’s place. Doesn’t it all strike you,” she wound up, “as rather placing the Prince too?”

Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. So she picked out, after consideration, a solitary plum. “So placed that YOU have to arrange?”

“Certainly I have to arrange.”

“And the Prince also—if the effect for him is the same?”

“Really, I think, not less.”

“And does he arrange,” Mrs. Assingham asked, “to make up HIS arrears?” The question had risen to her lips—it was as if another morsel, on the dish, had tempted her. The sound of it struck her own ear, immediately, as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended; but she quickly saw that she must follow it up, at any risk, with simplicity, and that what was simplest was the ease of boldness. “Make them up, I mean, by coming to see YOU?”

Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair. She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle. “He never comes.”

“Oh!” said Fanny Assingham: with which she felt a little stupid. “There it is. He might so well, you know, otherwise.”

“‘Otherwise’?”—and Fanny was still vague.

It passed, this time, over her companion, whose eyes, wandering, to a distance, found themselves held. The Prince was at hand again; the Ambassador was still at his side; they were stopped a moment by a uniformed personage, a little old man, of apparently the highest military character, bristling with medals and orders. This gave Charlotte time to go on. “He has not been for three months.” And then as with her friend’s last word in her ear: “‘Otherwise’—yes. He arranges otherwise. And in my position,” she added, “I might too. It’s too absurd we shouldn’t meet.”

“You’ve met, I gather,” said Fanny Assingham, “to-night.”

“Yes—as far as that goes. But what I mean is that I might—placed for it as we both are—go to see HIM.”

“And do you?” Fanny asked with almost mistaken solemnity.

The perception of this excess made Charlotte, whether for gravity or for irony, hang fire a minute. “I HAVE been. But that’s nothing,” she said, “in itself, and I tell you of it only to show you how our situation works. It essentially becomes one, a situation, for both of us. The Prince’s, however, is his own affair—I meant but to speak of mine.”

“Your situation’s perfect,” Mrs. Assingham presently declared.

“I don’t say it isn’t. Taken, in fact, all round, I think it is. And I don’t, as I tell you, complain of it. The only thing is that I have to act as it demands of me.”

“To ‘act’?” said Mrs. Assingham with an irrepressible quaver.

“Isn’t it acting, my dear, to accept it? I do accept it. What do you want me to do less?”

“I want you to believe that you’re a very fortunate person.”

“Do you call that LESS?” Charlotte asked with a smile. “From the point of view of my freedom I call it more. Let it take, my position, any name you like.”

“Don’t let it, at any rate”—and Mrs. Assingham’s impatience prevailed at last over her presence of mind—“don’t let it make you think too much of your freedom.”

“I don’t know what you call too much—for how can I not see it as it is? You’d see your own quickly enough if the Colonel gave you the same liberty—and I haven’t to tell you, with your so much greater knowledge of everything, what it is that gives such liberty most. For yourself personally of course,” Charlotte went on, “you only know the state of neither needing it nor missing it. Your husband doesn’t treat you as of less importance to him than some other woman.”

“Ah, don’t talk to me of other women!” Fanny now overtly panted. “Do you call Mr. Verver’s perfectly natural interest in his daughter—?”

“The greatest affection of which he is capable?” Charlotte took it up in all readiness. “I do distinctly—and in spite of my having done all I could think of—to make him capable of a greater. I’ve done, earnestly, everything I could—I’ve made it, month after month, my study. But I haven’t succeeded—it has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However,” she pursued, “I’ve hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned.” And then as she met in her friend’s face the absence of any such remembrance: “He did tell me that he wanted me just BECAUSE I could be useful about her.” With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. “So you see I AM!”

It was on Fanny Assingham’s lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn’t see; she came in fact within an ace of saying: “You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work—since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?” But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was “more in it” than any admission she had made represented—and she had held herself familiar with admissions: so that, not to seem to understand where she couldn’t accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn’t approve, and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend’s consistency. The only thing was that, as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. “I can’t conceive, my dear, what you’re talking about!”

Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour, for the first time, perceptibly heightened. She looked, for the minute, as her companion had looked—as if twenty protests, blocking each other’s way, had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow. “You give me up then?”

“Give you up—?”

“You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend’s loyalty? If you do you’re not just, Fanny; you’re even, I think,” she went on, “rather cruel; and it’s least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.” She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases, with a perfection void of any vulgarity of triumph. She merely completed, for truth’s sake, her demonstration. “What is a quarrel with me but a quarrel with my right to recognise the conditions of my bargain? But I can carry them out alone,” she said as she turned away. She turned to meet the Ambassador and the Prince, who, their colloquy with their Field-Marshal ended, were now at hand and had already, between them, she was aware, addressed her a remark that failed to penetrate the golden glow in which her intelligence was temporarily bathed. She had made her point, the point she had foreseen she must make; she had made it thoroughly and once for all, so that no more making was required; and her success was reflected in the faces of the two men of distinction before her, unmistakably moved to admiration by her exceptional radiance. She at first but watched this reflection, taking no note of any less adequate form of it possibly presented by poor Fanny—poor Fanny left to stare at her incurred “score,” chalked up in so few strokes on the wall; then she took in what the Ambassador was saying, in French, what he was apparently repeating to her.

“A desire for your presence, Madame, has been expressed en tres-haut lieu, and I’ve let myself in for the responsibility, to say nothing of the honour, of seeing, as the most respectful of your friends, that so august an impatience is not kept waiting.” The greatest possible Personage had, in short, according to the odd formula of societies subject to the greatest personages possible, “sent for” her, and she asked, in her surprise, “What in the world does he want to do to me?” only to know, without looking, that Fanny’s bewilderment was called to a still larger application, and to hear the Prince say with authority, indeed with a certain prompt dryness: “You must go immediately—it’s a summons.” The Ambassador, using authority as well, had already somehow possessed himself of her hand, which he drew into his arm, and she was further conscious as she went off with him that, though still speaking for her benefit, Amerigo had turned to Fanny Assingham. He would explain afterwards—besides which she would understand for herself. To Fanny, however, he had laughed—as a mark, apparently, that for this infallible friend no explanation at all would be necessary.

XV

It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. “They send for Charlotte through YOU?”

“No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.”

“Ah, but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, have been for them as one. He’s YOUR ambassador.” It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. “They’ve connected her with you—she’s treated as your appendage.”

“Oh, my ‘appendage,’” the Prince amusedly exclaimed—“cara mia, what a name! She’s treated, rather, say, as my ornament and my glory. And it’s so remarkable a case for a mother-in-law that you surely can’t find fault with it.”

“You’ve ornaments enough, it seems to me—as you’ve certainly glories enough—without her. And she’s not the least little bit,” Mrs. Assingham observed, “your mother-in-law. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then—then—!” She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision. “Then, then what?” he asked with perfect good-nature.

“She had better in such a case not be known at all.”

“But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,” said the young man, still amused, “if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself—that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have ‘success’? Besides,” he added as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it, “besides, there IS always the fact that we’re of the same connection, of—what is your word?—the same ‘concern.’ We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat”—and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.

Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. “It only appears to me of great importance that—now that you all seem more settled here—Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the ‘same’ boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver’s boat.”

“And, pray, am _I_ not in Mr. Verver’s boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver’s boat, I should have been by this time”—and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths—“away down, down, down.” She knew of course what he meant—how it had taken his father-in-law’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with this reminder other things came to her—how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure SHE could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN’T suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly—but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father— this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.