'And she was sincere,' his wife simply proceeded 'she was unmistakably 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 that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver's obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. 'Even if her debt was not 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 doesn't make the law of her conduct. I mean of course his trust that she wouldn'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 doesn't it rather depend on what she may most feel to BE the right way?'
'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, somehow, the bottom 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.'
'Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair-case in the manner you described to me?'
'I really, my dear, described to you a manner?' the Colonel, clearly, from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.
'Yes—for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn't tell me very much—THAT you couldn't for your life; but I saw for myself that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it.' She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion—confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even HE, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of it would escape—she should have it at hand for reference. 'Come, my dear—you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you couldn't resist thinking. I don't ask more of it than that. And your idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine—so that you can't pretend, as usual, that mine has run away with me. I haven't caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see,' she concluded, 'where you are, and I'm much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point de repere outside myself—which is where I like it. Now I can work round you.'
Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key, so that their household had gone to bed; and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob Assingham waited—conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn't turn his face, but he stared straight before him, and his wife had already perceived in the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire— proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. 'Leave it,' he at last remarked, 'to THEM.'
''Leave' it—?' She wondered.
'Let them alone. They'll manage.'
'They'll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah, there then you are!'
'They'll manage in their own way,' the Colonel almost cryptically repeated.
It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband's indurated conscience, it gave her, full in her face, the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful truly, then, the evocation. 'So cleverly—THAT'S your idea?—that no one will be the wiser? It's your idea that we shall have done all that's required of us if we simply protect them?'
The Colonel, still in his place, declined, however, to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one's way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, none the less, he had his point to make—for which he took another instant. But he made it, for the third time, in the same fashion. 'They'll manage in their own way.' With which he got out.
Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking
