It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. “They send for Charlotte through YOU?”
“No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.”
“Ah, but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, have been for them as one. He’s YOUR ambassador.” It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. “They’ve connected her with you — she’s treated as your appendage.”
“Oh, my ‘appendage,’” the Prince amusedly exclaimed —“cara mia, what a name! She’s treated, rather, say, as my ornament and my glory. And it’s so remarkable a case for a mother-inlaw that you surely can’t find fault with it.”
“You’ve ornaments enough, it seems to me — as you’ve certainly glories enough — without her. And she’s not the least little bit,” Mrs. Assingham observed, “your mother-inlaw. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then — then —!” She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision. “Then, then what?” he asked with perfect good-nature.
“She had better in such a case not be known at all.”
“But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,” said the young man, still amused, “if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself — that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have ‘success’? Besides,” he added as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it, “besides, there IS always the fact that we’re of the same connection, of — what is your word?— the same ‘concern.’ We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat”— and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.
Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. “It only appears to me of great importance that — now that you all seem more settled here — Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the ‘same’ boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver’s boat.”
“And, pray, am I not in Mr. Verver’s boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver’s boat, I should have been by this time”— and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths —“away down, down, down.” She knew of course what he meant — how it had taken his father-inlaw’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with this reminder other things came to her — how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure SHE could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN’T suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly — but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father — this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.
“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-inlaw too. It’s as if he had saved us both — which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don’t you remember”— he kept it up —“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right — and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn’t it? Only — what she has got — something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better — once you allow her the way it’s to be taken. Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom — which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The ‘boat,’ you see”— the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly —“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same. It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock — one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track — for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination — call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable — and, above all, as not endangering life ............