第188章 Chapter 1(4)

It held poor Fanny again in wonder. "To Charlotte--yes: if there's so much beneath it for you and if it's all such a plan. That makes it hang together--it makes YOU hang together." She fairly exhaled her admiration.

"You're like nobody else--you're extraordinary."

Maggie met it with appreciation, but with a reserve. "No, I'm not extraordinary--but I AM, for every one, quiet."

"Well, that's just what IS extraordinary. 'Quiet' is more than I am, and you leave me far behind." With which again for an instant Mrs. Assingham frankly brooded. "'Now that I understand,' you say--but there's one thing I don't understand." And the next minute, while her companion waited, (218) she had mentioned it. "How can Charlotte after all not have pressed him, not have attacked him about it? How can she not have asked him--asked him on his honour, I mean--if you know?"

"How can she 'not'? Why of course," said the Princess limpidly, "she MUST!"

"Well then--?"

"Well then you think he must have told her? Why exactly what I mean," said Maggie, "is that he will have done nothing of the sort; will, as I say, have maintained the contrary."

Fanny Assingham weighed it. "Under her direct appeal for the truth?"

"Under her direct appeal for the truth."

"Her appeal to his honour?"

"Her appeal to his honour. That's my point."

Fanny Assingham braved it. "For the truth as from him to HER?"

"From him to any one."

Mrs. Assingham's face lighted. "He'll simply, he'll insistently have lied?"

Maggie brought it out roundly. "He'll simply, he'll insistently have lied."

It held again her companion, who next, however, with a single movement, throwing herself on her neck, overflowed. "Oh if you knew how you help me!"

Maggie had liked her to understand so far as this was possible, but had n't been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound. This inability in her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as we have seen, was only now (219) in a position to boast of touching bottom.

Maggie inwardly lived in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was for that matter still going on. They had been duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination--that, no doubt, was what might at present be said for them. She had looked into them on the eve of her leaving town almost without penetration: she had made out in those hours, and also of a truth during the days which immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation having for its chief mark--whether to be prolonged or not--the absence of any "intimate" result of the crisis she had invited her husband to recognise. They had dealt with this crisis again face to face, very briefly, the morning after the scene in her room--but with the odd consequence of her having appeared merely to leave it on his hands. He had received it from her as he might have received a bunch of keys or a list of commissions--attentive to her instructions about them, but only putting them for the time very carefully and safely into his pocket.

The instructions had seemed from day to day to make so little difference for his behaviour--that is for his speech or his silence; to produce as yet so little of the fruit of action. He had taken from her on the spot in a word, before going to dress for dinner, all she then had to give--after which, on the morrow, he had asked her for more, a good deal as if she might have renewed her supply during the night; but he had had at his command for this latter purpose an air of extraordinary detachment and discretion, an air amounting really (220) to an appeal which, if she could have brought herself to describe it vulgarly, she would have noted as cool, just as he himself would have described it in any one else as "cheeky"; a suggestion that she should trust him on the particular ground since she did n't on the general. Neither his speech nor his silence struck her as signifying more or signifying less, under this pressure, than they had seemed to signify for weeks past; yet if her sense had n't been absolutely closed to the possibility in him of any thought of wounding her she might have taken his undisturbed manner, the perfection of his appearance of having recovered himself, for one of those intentions of high impertinence by the aid of which great people, les grands seigneurs, persons of her husband's class and type, always know how to re-establish a violated order.