The Golden Bowl - Complete

Mrs. Assingham turned it over. 'Then it all depends on that object that you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?'

'I think I may say that I depend on it. I can't,' said Maggie, 'treat it as nothing now.'

Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney—quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her companion's vision. She looked at the precious thing—if precious it was—found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie's knowledge. It was brave and rich and firm, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable. She didn't touch it, but if after a minute she turned away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of doing so. 'Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your future does? For that's what it comes to, I judge.'

'What it comes to,' Maggie presently returned, 'is what that thing has put me, so almost miraculously, in the way of learning: how far they had originally gone together. If there was so much between them before, there can't—with all the other appearances—not be a great deal more now.' And she went on and on; she steadily made her points. 'If such things were already then between them they make all the difference for possible doubt of what may have been between them since. If there had been nothing before there might be explanations. But it makes to-day too much to explain. I mean to explain away,' she said.

Fanny Assingham was there to explain away—of this she was duly conscious; for that at least had been true up to now. In the light, however, of Maggie's demonstration the quantity, even without her taking as yet a more exact measure, might well seem larger than ever. Besides which, with or without exactness, the effect of each successive minute in the place was to put her more in presence of what Maggie herself saw. Maggie herself saw the truth, and that was really, while they remained there together, enough for Mrs. Assingham's relation to it. There was a force in the Princess's mere manner about it that made the detail of what she knew a matter of minor importance. Fanny had in fact something like a momentary shame over her own need of asking for this detail. 'I don't pretend to repudiate,' she said after a little, 'my own impressions of the different times I suppose you speak of; any more,' she added, 'than I can forget what difficulties and, as it constantly seemed to me, what dangers, every course of action—whatever I should decide upon—made for me. I tried, I tried hard, to act for the best. And, you know,' she next pursued, while, at the sound of her own statement, a slow courage and even a faint warmth of conviction came back to her—'and, you know, I believe it's what I shall turn out to have done.'

This produced a minute during which their interchange, though quickened and deepened, was that of silence only, and the long, charged look; all of which found virtual consecration when Maggie at last spoke. 'I'm sure you tried to act for the best.'

It kept Fanny Assingham again a minute in silence. 'I never thought, dearest, you weren't an angel.'

Not, however, that this alone was much help! 'It was up to the very eve, you see,' the Princess went on—'up to within two or three days of our marriage. That, THAT, you know—!' And she broke down for strangely smiling.

'Yes, as I say, it was while she was with me. But I didn't know it. That is,' said Fanny Assingham, 'I didn't know of anything in particular.' It sounded weak—that she felt; but she had really her point to make. 'What I mean is that I don't know, for knowledge, now, anything I didn't then. That's how I am.' She still, however, floundered. 'I mean it's how I WAS.'

'But don't they, how you were and how you are,' Maggie asked, 'come practically to the same thing?' The elder woman's words had struck her own ear as in the tone, now mistimed, of their recent, but all too factitious understanding, arrived at in hours when, as there was nothing susceptible of proof, there was nothing definitely to disprove. The situation had changed by—well, by whatever there was, by the outbreak of the definite; and this could keep Maggie at least firm. She was firm enough as she pursued. 'It was ON the whole thing that Amerigo married me.' With which her eyes had their turn again at her damnatory piece. 'And it was on that—it was on that!' But they came back to her visitor. 'And it was on it all that father married HER.'

Her visitor took it as might be. 'They both married—ah, that you must believe!—with the highest intentions.'

'Father did certainly!' And then, at the renewal of this consciousness, it all rolled over her. 'Ah, to thrust such things on us, to do them here between us and with us, day after day, and in return, in return—! To do it to HIM—to him, to him!'

Fanny hesitated. 'You mean it's for him you most suffer?' And then as the Princess, after a look, but turned away, moving about the room—which made the question somehow seem a blunder—'I ask,' she continued, 'because I think everything, everything we now speak of, may be for him, really may be MADE for him, quite as if it hadn't been.'

But Maggie had, the next moment faced about as if without hearing her. 'Father did it for ME—did it all and only for me.'

Mrs. Assingham, with a certain promptness, threw up her head; but she faltered again before she spoke. 'Well—!'

It was only an intended word, but Maggie showed after an instant that it had reached her. 'Do you mean that that's the reason, that that's A reason—?'

Fanny at first, however, feeling the response in this, didn't say all she meant; she said for the moment something else instead. 'He did it for you—largely at least for you. And it was for you that I did, in my smaller, interested way—well, what I could do. For I could do something,' she continued; 'I thought I saw your interest as he himself saw it. And I thought I saw Charlotte's. I believed in her.'

'And I believed in her,' said Maggie.

Mrs. Assingham waited again; but she presently pushed on. 'She believed then in herself.'

'Ah?' Maggie murmured.

Something exquisite, faintly eager, in the prompt simplicity of it, supported her friend further. 'And the Prince believed. His belief was real. Just as he believed in himself.'

Maggie spent a minute in taking it from her. 'He believed in himself?'

'Just as I too believed in him. For I absolutely did, Maggie.' To which Fanny then added: 'And I believe in him yet. I mean,' she subjoined—'well, I mean I DO.'

Maggie again took it from her; after which she was again, restlessly, set afloat. Then when this had come to an