'All that is quite true. But you're leaving me, all the same, you're leaving me—you're washing your hands of me,' he went on. 'However, that won't be easy; I won't BE left.' And he had turned his eyes about again, taking in the pretty room that she had just described as her final refuge, the place of peace for a world-worn couple, to which she had lately retired with 'Bob.' 'I shall keep this spot in sight. Say what you will, I shall need you. I'm not, you know,' he declared, 'going to give you up for anybody.'
'If you're afraid—which of course you're not—are you trying to make me the same?' she asked after a moment.
He waited a minute too, then answered her with a question. 'You say you 'liked' it, your undertaking to make my engagement possible. It remains beautiful for me that you did; it's charming and unforgettable. But, still more, it's mysterious and wonderful. WHY, you dear delightful woman, did you like it?'
'I scarce know what to make,' she said, 'of such an inquiry. If you haven't by this time found out yourself, what meaning can anything I say have for you? Don't you really after all feel,' she added while nothing came from him—'aren't you conscious every minute, of the perfection of the creature of whom I've put you into possession?'
'Every minute—gratefully conscious. But that's exactly the ground of my question. It wasn't only a matter of your handing me over—it was a matter of your handing her. It was a matter of HER fate still more than of mine. You thought all the good of her that one woman can think of another, and yet, by your account, you enjoyed assisting at her risk.'
She had kept her eyes on him while he spoke, and this was what, visibly, determined a repetition for her. 'Are you trying to frighten me?'
'Ah, that's a foolish view—I should be too vulgar. You apparently can't understand either my good faith or my humility. I'm awfully humble,' the young man insisted; 'that's the way I've been feeling to-day, with everything so finished and ready. And you won't take me for serious.'
She continued to face him as if he really troubled her a little. 'Oh, you deep old Italians!'
'There you are,' he returned—'it's what I wanted you to come to. That's the responsible note.'
'Yes,' she went on—'if you're 'humble' you MUST be dangerous.'
She had a pause while he only smiled; then she said: 'I don't in the least want to lose sight of you. But even if I did I shouldn't think it right.'
'Thank you for that—it's what I needed of you. I'm sure, after all, that the more you're with me the more I shall understand. It's the only thing in the world I want. I'm excellent, I really think, all round—except that I'm stupid. I can do pretty well anything I SEE. But I've got to see it first.' And he pursued his demonstration. 'I don't in the least mind its having to be shown me—in fact I like that better. Therefore it is that I want, that I shall always want, your eyes. Through THEM I wish to look—even at any risk of their showing me what I mayn't like. For then,' he wound up, 'I shall know. And of that I shall never be afraid.'
She might quite have been waiting to see what he would come to, but she spoke with a certain impatience. 'What on earth are you talking about?'
But he could perfectly say: 'Of my real, honest fear of being 'off' some day, of being wrong, WITHOUT knowing it. That's what I shall always trust you for—to tell me when I am. No—with you people it's a sense. We haven't got it—not as you have. Therefore—!' But he had said enough. 'Ecco!' he simply smiled.
It was not to be concealed that he worked upon her, but of course she had always liked him. 'I should be interested,' she presently remarked, 'to see some sense you don't possess.'
Well, he produced one on the spot. 'The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the `lightning elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.'
'Trusting,' Mrs. Assingham smiled, 'to get up some other way?'
'Yes—or not to have to get up at all. However,' he added, 'I told you that at the beginning.'
'Machiavelli!' she simply exclaimed.
'You do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius. However, if you really believe I have his perversity you wouldn't say it. But it's all right,' he gaily enough concluded; 'I shall always have you to come to.'
On this, for a little, they sat face to face; after which, without comment, she asked him if he would have more tea. All she would give him, he promptly signified; and he developed, making her laugh, his idea that the tea of the English race was somehow their morality, 'made,' with boiling water, in a little pot, so that the more of it one drank the more moral one would become. His drollery served as a transition, and she put to him several questions about his sister and the others, questions as to what Bob, in particular, Colonel Assingham, her husband, could do for the arriving gentlemen, whom, by the Prince's leave, he would immediately go to see. He was funny, while they talked, about his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known. This, Mrs. Assingham professed, was exactly what would endear them to her, and that, in turn, drew from her visitor a fresh declaration of all the comfort of his being able so to depend on her. He had been with her, at this point, some twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits, and he stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciation. He stayed moreover—THAT was really the sign of the hour—in spite of the nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth much rather fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently meant to soothe it. She had not soothed him, and there arrived, remarkably, a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out. He had not frightened her, as she called it—he felt that; yet she was herself not at ease. She had been nervous, though trying to disguise it; the sight of him, following on the announcement of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This conviction, for the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the effect, too, of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in calling, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow IMPORTANT—that was what it was—that there should be at this hour something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in all their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know, of a truth, that there was something the matter with HIM; since strangely, with so little to go upon—his heart had positively begun to beat to the tune of suspense. It fairly befell at last, for a climax, that they almost ceased to pretend—to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis—neither could have said how long it lasted—during which they were reduced, for all interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-
