'Well, let ME, say, to begin with.'
'And should you mind that?'
He had a slight show of surprise. 'Shouldn't you?'
'Her letting you see? No,' said Charlotte; 'the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don't look out, may let HER see.' To which she added: 'You may let her see, you know, that you're afraid.'
'I'm only afraid of you, a little, at moments,' he presently returned. 'But I shan't let Fanny see that.'
It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Assingham's vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done. 'What in the world can she do against us? There's not a word that she can breathe. She's helpless; she can't speak; she would be herself the first to be dished by it.' And then as he seemed slow to follow: 'It all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything, from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage.'
The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. 'Mayn't she also be said, a good deal, to have made yours? That was intended, I think, wasn't it? for a kind of rectification.'
Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still. 'I don't mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I'm not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I'm speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day. She can't go to them and say 'It's very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.''
He took it in still, with his long look at her. 'All the more that she wasn't. She was right. Everything's right,' he went on, 'and everything will stay so.'
'Then that's all I say.'
But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. 'We're happy, and they're happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?'
'Ah, my dear,' said Charlotte, 'it's not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she's FIXED, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It's you who have seemed haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.' And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile. 'We ARE prepared—for anything, for everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She's condemned to consistency; she's doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore,' Mrs. Verver gently laughed, 'she has the chance of her life!'
'So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere?—may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?'
The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. 'You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel, at any rate, that I've nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It's enough for me that she'll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren't.' And Charlotte's face, with these words—to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them—fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption—so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn't heretofore by a hair's breadth deviated. 'If it didn't sound so vulgar I should say that we're— fatally, as it were—SAFE. Pardon the low expression—since it's what we happen to be. We're so because they are. And they're so because they can't be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn't now be able to bear herself if she didn't keep them so. That's the way she's inevitably WITH us,' said Charlotte over her smile. 'We hang, essentially, together.'
Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. 'Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together.'
His friend had a shrug—a shrug that had a grace. 'Cosa volete?' The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. 'Ah, beyond doubt, it's a case.'
He stood looking at her. 'It's a case. There can't,' he said, 'have been many.'
'Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,' she smiled, 'I confess I should like to think. Only ours.'
'Only ours—most probably. Speriamo.' To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added: 'Poor Fanny!' But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. Something in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air. 'Poor, poor Fanny!'
It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham breaking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of the social side of the process of repatriation with due presence of mind. It was impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with the Assinghams; it was impossible, for the same reasons, that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right tone for disposing of his elder friend's suggestion, an assumption in fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs. Verver had been, precisely, a part of Mrs. Assingham's mildness, and nothing could better have characterised her sense for social shades than her easy perception that the gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton Square might now confess, quite without indiscretion, to simultaneity of movement. She had made, for the four days, no direct appeal to the latter personage, but the Prince was accidental witness of her taking a fresh start at the moment the company were about to scatter for the last night of their stay. There had been, at this climax, the usual preparatory talk about hours and combinations, in the midst of which poor Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said 'You and the Prince, love,'—quite, apparently, without blinking; she took
