‘They’re not good days, you know,’ he had said to Fanny Assingham after declaring himself grateful for finding her, and then, with his cup of tea, putting her in possession of the latest news – the documents signed an hour ago, de part et d’autre,1 and the telegram from his backers, who had reached Paris the morning before, and who, pausing there a little, poor dears, seemed to think the whole thing a tremendous lark. ‘We’re very simple folk, mere country cousins compared with you,’ he had also observed, ‘and Paris, for my sister and her husband, is the end of the world. London therefore will be more or less another planet. It has always been, as with so many of us, quite their Mecca, but this is their first real caravan; they’ve mainly known “old England”2 as a shop for articles in india-rubber and leather, in which they’ve dressed themselves as much as possible. Which all means, however, that you’ll see them, all of them, wreathed in smiles. We must be very easy with them. Maggie’s too wonderful – her preparations are on a scale! She insists on taking in the sposi3 and my uncle. The others will come to me. I’ve been engaging their rooms at the hotel, and with all those solemn signatures of an hour ago that brings the case home to me.’
‘Do you mean you’re afraid?’ his hostess had amusedly asked.
‘Terribly afraid. I’ve now but to wait to see the monster come. They’re not good days; they’re neither one thing nor the other. I’ve really got nothing, yet I’ve everything to lose. One doesn’t know what still may happen.’
The way she laughed at him was for an instant almost irritating; it came out, for his fancy, from behind the white curtain. It was a sign, that is, of her deep serenity, which worried instead of soothing him. And to be soothed, after all, to be tided over, in his mystic impatience, to be told what he could understand and believe – that was what he had come for. ‘Marriage then,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘is what you call the monster? I admit it’s a fearful thing at the best; but, for heaven’s sake, if that’s what you’re thinking of, don’t run away from it.’
‘Ah to run away from it would be to run away from you,’ the Prince replied; ‘and I’ve already told you often enough how I depend on you to see me through.’ He so liked the way she took this, from the corner of her sofa, that he gave his sincerity – for it was sincerity – fuller expression. ‘I’m starting on the great voyage – across the unknown sea; my ship’s all rigged and appointed, the cargo’s stowed away and the company complete. But what seems the matter with me is that I can’t sail alone; my ship must be one of a pair, must have, in the waste of waters, a – what do you call it? – a consort. I don’t ask you to stay on board with me, but I must keep your sail in sight for orientation. I don’t in the least myself know, I assure you, the points of the compass. But with a lead I can perfectly follow. You must be my lead.’
‘How can you be sure,’ she asked, ‘where I should take you?’
‘Why from your having brought me safely thus far. I should never have got here without you. You’ve provided the ship itself, and if you’ve not quite seen me aboard you’ve attended me ever so kindly to the dock. Your own vessel is all conveniently in the next berth, and you can’t desert me now.’
She showed him again her amusement, which struck him even as excessive, as if, to his surprise, he made her also a little nervous; she treated him in fine as if he were not uttering truths but making pretty figures for her diversion. ‘My vessel, dear Prince?’ she smiled. ‘What vessel in the world have I? This little house is all our ship, Bob’s and mine – and thankful we are now to have it. We’ve wandered far, living, as you may say, from hand to mouth, without rest for the soles of our feet. But the time has come for us at last to draw in.’
He made at this, the young man, an indignant protest. ‘You talk about rest – it’s too selfish! – when you’re just launching me on adventures?’
She shook her head with her kind lucidity. ‘Not adventures – heaven forbid! You’ve had yours – as I’ve had mine; and my idea has been all along that we should neither of us begin again. My own last, precisely, has been doing for you all you so prettily mention. But it consists simply in having conducted you to rest. You talk about ships, but they’re not the comparison. Your tossings are over – you’re practically in port. The port,’ she concluded, ‘of the Golden Isles.’4
He looked about, to put himself more in relation with the place; then after an hesitation seemed to speak certain words instead of certain others. ‘Oh I know where I am –! I do decline to be left, but what I came for of course was to thank you. If to-day has seemed for the first time the end of preliminaries, I feel how little there would have been any at all without you. The first were wholly yours.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘they were remarkably easy. I’ve seen them, I’ve had them,’ she smiled, ‘more difficult. Everything, you must feel, went of itself. So, you must feel, everything still goes.’
The Prince quickly agreed. ‘Oh beautifully! But you had the conception.’
‘Ah Prince, so had you!’
He looked at her harder a moment. ‘You had it first. You had it most.’
She returned his look as if it had made her wonder. ‘I liked it, if that’s what you mean. But you liked it surely yourself. I protest that I had easy work with you. I had only at last – when I thought it was time – to speak for you.’
‘All that’s 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 enquiry. 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!’5 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 quattrocento6 is like the “lightning elevator”7 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!’8 she simply exclaimed.
‘You do me too much honour. I wish indeed I had his genius. However, if you really believed 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 rococo9 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 hadn’t soothed him, and there arrived remarkably a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out. He hadn’t 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 time 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-vivant.10
The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion – or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, æsthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs Assingham’s dark neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress – these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact however neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been recordedly her birthplace and ‘Europe’ punctually her discipline. She wore yellow and purple because she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba11 than like a revendeuse;12 she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the over-dressing. So she was covered and surrounded with ‘things’, which were frankly toys and shams, a part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to supply her friends. These friends were in the game – that of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the beholder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity of it, from under the lids of Jerusalem. With her false indolence, in short, her false leisure, her false pearls and palms and courts and fountains, she was a person for whom life was multitudinous detail, detail that left her, as it at any moment found her, unappalled and unwearied.
‘Sophisticated as I may appear’ – it was her frequent phrase – she had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do; it made her, as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt. One of these gaps in Mrs Assingham’s completeness was her want of children; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful how little either, in the fulness of time, came to show; sympathy and curiosity could render their objects practically filial, just as an English husband who in his military years had ‘run’ everything in his regiment could make economy blossom like the rose. Colonel Bob had, a few years after his marriage, left the army, which had clearly by that time done its laudable all for the enrichment of his personal experience, and he could thus give his whole time to the gardening in question. There reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things – such things as American girls accepted as ‘good enough’ – hadn’t begun to be; so that the pleasant pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage.13 Mrs Assingham knew better, knew there had been no historic hour, from that of Pocahontas14 down, when some young Englishman hadn’t precipitately believed and some American girl hadn’t, with a few more gradations, availed herself to the full of her incapacity to doubt; but she accepted resignedly the laurel of the founder, since she was in fact pretty well the doyenne,15 above ground, of her transplanted tribe, and since, above all, she had invented combinations, though she hadn’t invented Bob’s own. It was he who had done that, absolutely puzzled it out by himself from its first odd glimmer – resting upon it moreover, through the years to come, as proof enough in him by itself of the higher cleverness. If she kept her own cleverness up it was largely that he should have full credit. There were moments in truth when she privately felt how little – striking out as he had done – he could have afforded that she should show the common limits. But Mrs Assingham’s cleverness was in truth tested when her present visitor at last said to her: ‘I don’t think, you know, that you’re treating me quite right. You’ve something on your mind that you don’t tell me.’
It was positive too that her smile of reply was a trifle dim. ‘Am I obliged to tell you everything I have on my mind?’
‘It isn’t a question of everything, but it’s a question of anything that may particularly concern me. Then you shouldn’t keep it back. You know with what care I desire to proceed, taking everything into account and making no mistake that may possibly injure her.’
Mrs Assingham, at this, had after an instant an odd interrogation. ‘ “Her”?’
‘Her and him. Both our friends. Either Maggie or her father.’
‘I have something on my mind,’ Mrs Assingham presently returned; ‘something has happened for which I hadn’t been prepared. But it isn’t anything that properly concerns you.’
The Prince, with immediate gaiety, threw back his head. ‘What do you mean by “properly”? I somehow see volumes in it. It’s the way people put a thing when they put it – well, wrong. I put things right. What is it that has happened for me?’
His hostess had the next moment drawn spirit from his tone. ‘Oh I shall be delighted if you’ll take your share of it. Charlotte Stan’s in London. She has just been here.’
‘Miss Stant? Oh really?’ The Prince expressed clear surprise – a transparency through which his eyes met his friend’s with a certain hardness of concussion. ‘She has arrived from America?’ he then quickly asked.
‘She appears to have arrived this noon – coming up from Southampton – at an hotel. She dropped upon me after luncheon and was here for more than an hour.’
The young man heard with interest, though not with an interest too great for his gaiety. ‘You think then I’ve a share in it? What is my share?’
‘Why any you like – the one you seemed just now eager to take. It was you yourself who insisted.’
He looked at her on this with conscious inconsistency, and she could now see that he had changed colour. But he was always easy. ‘I didn’t know then what the matter was.’
‘You didn’t think it could be so bad?’
‘Do you call it very bad?’ the young man asked.
‘Only,’ she smiled, ‘because that’s the way it seems to affect you.’
He hesitated, still with the trace of his quickened colour, still looking at her, still adjusting his manner. ‘But you allowed you were upset.’
‘To the extent – yes – of not having in the least looked for her. Any more,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘than I judge Maggie to have done.’
The Prince thought; then as if glad to be able to say something very natural and true: ‘No – quite right. Maggie hasn’t looked for her. But I’m sure,’ he added, ‘she’ll be delighted to see her.’
‘That certainly’ – and his hostess spoke with a different shade of gravity.
‘She’ll be quite overjoyed,’ the Prince went on. ‘Has Miss Stant now gone to her?’
‘She has gone back to her hotel, to bring her things here. I can’t have her,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘alone at an hotel.’
‘No; I see.’
‘If she’s here at all she must stay with me.’
He quite took it in. ‘So she’s coming now?’
‘I expect her at any moment. If you wait you’ll see her.’
‘Oh,’ he promptly declared – ‘charming!’ But this word came out as if a little in sudden substitution for some other. It sounded accidental, whereas he wished to be firm. That accordingly was what he next showed himself. ‘If it wasn’t for what’s going on these next days Maggie would certainly want to have her. In fact,’ he lucidly continued, ‘isn’t what’s happening just a reason to make her want to?’ Mrs Assingham, for answer, only looked at him, and this the next instant had apparently had more effect than if she had spoken. For he asked a question that seemed incongruous. ‘What has she come for?’
It made his companion laugh. ‘Why, for just what you say. For your marriage.’
‘Mine?’ – He wondered.
‘Maggie’s – it’s the same thing. It’s “for” your great event. And then,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘she’s so lonely.’
‘Has she given you that as a reason?’
‘I scarcely remember – she gave me so many. She abounds, poor dear, in reasons. But there’s one that, whatever she does, I always remember for myself.’
‘And which is that?’ He looked as if he ought to guess but couldn’t.
‘Why the fact that she has no home – absolutely none whatever. She’s extraordinarily alone.’
Again he took it in. ‘And also has no great means.’
‘Very small ones. Which is not however, with the expense of railways and hotels, a reason for her running to and fro.’
‘On the contrary. But she doesn’t like her country.’
‘Hers, my dear man? – it’s little enough “hers”.’ The attribution for the moment amused his hostess. ‘She has rebounded now – but she has had little enough else to do with it.’
‘Oh I say hers,’ the Prince pleasantly explained, ‘very much as at this time of day I might say mine. I quite feel, I assure you, as if the great place already more or less belonged to me.’
‘That’s your good fortune and your point of view. You own – or you soon practically will own – so much of it. Charlotte owns almost nothing in the world, she tells me, but two colossal trunks – only one of which I’ve given her leave to introduce into this house. She’ll depreciate to you,’ Mrs Assingham added, ‘your property.’
He thought of these things, he thought of everything; but he had always his resource at hand of turning all to the easy. ‘Has she come with designs upon me?’ And then in a moment, as if even this were almost too grave, he sounded the note that had least to do with himself. ‘Est-elle toujours aussi belle?’16 That was the furthest point, somehow, to which Charlotte Stant could be relegated.
Mrs Assingham treated it freely. ‘Just the same. The person in the world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to appreciation. It’s all in the way she affects you. One admires her if one doesn’t happen not to. So, as well, one criticises her.’
‘Ah that’s not fair!’ said the Prince.
‘To criticise her? Then there you are! You’re answered.’
‘I’m answered.’ He took it, humorously, as his lesson – sank his previous self-consciousness, with excellent effect, in grateful docility. ‘I only meant that there are perhaps better things to be done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once you begin that, with any one –!’ He was vague and kind.
‘I quite agree that it’s better to keep out of it as long as one can. But when one must do it –’
‘Yes?’ he asked as she paused.
‘Then know what you mean.’
‘I see. Perhaps,’ he smiled, ‘I don’t know what I mean.’
‘Well, it’s what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should know.’ Mrs Assingham however made no more of this, having before anything else apparently a scruple about the tone she had just used. ‘I quite understand of course that, given her great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be present. She has acted impulsively – but she has acted generously.’
‘She has acted beautifully,’ said the Prince.
‘I say “generously” because I mean she hasn’t in any way counted the cost. She’ll have it to count in a manner now,’ his hostess continued. ‘But that doesn’t matter.’
He could see how little. ‘You’ll look after her.’
‘I’ll look after her.’
‘So it’s all right.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Assingham.
‘Then why are you troubled?’
It pulled her up – but only for a minute. ‘I’m not – any more than you.’
The Prince’s dark blue eyes were of the finest and, on occasion, precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look itself at such times suggested an image – that of some very noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself: always moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodically to be considered. The young man’s expression became after this fashion something vivid and concrete – a beautiful personal presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince was, for Mrs Assingham’s benefit, in view of the people. He seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years; he was beautiful innocent vague. ‘Oh well, I’m not!’ he rang out clear.
‘I should like to see you, sir!’ she said. ‘For you wouldn’t have a shadow of excuse.’ He showed how he agreed that he would have been at a loss for one, and the fact of their serenity was thus made as important as if some danger of its opposite had directly menaced them. The only thing was that if the evidence of their cheer was so established Mrs Assingham had a little to explain her original manner, and she came to this before they dropped the question. ‘My first impulse is always to behave about everything as if I feared complications. But I don’t fear them – I really like them. They’re quite my element.’
He deferred for her to this account of herself. ‘But still,’ he said, ‘if we’re not in the presence of a complication.’
She debated. ‘A handsome clever odd girl staying with one is always a complication.’
The young man weighed it almost as if the question were new to him. ‘And will she stay very long?’
His friend gave a laugh. ‘How in the world can I know? I’ve scarcely asked her.’
‘Ah yes. You can’t.’
But something in the tone of it amused her afresh. ‘Do you think you could?’
‘I?’ He wondered.
‘Do you think you could get it out of her for me – the probable length of her stay?’
He rose bravely enough to the occasion and the challenge. ‘I dare say if you were to give me the chance.’
‘Here it is then for you,’ she answered; for she had heard, within the minute, the stop of a cab at her door. ‘She’s back.’