The resemblance had not been present to her on first coming out into the hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon — only the second Sunday, of all the summer, when the party of six, the party of seven including the Principino, had practically been without accessions or invasions; but within sight of Charlotte, seated far away, very much where she had expected to find her, the Princess fell to wondering if her friend wouldn’t be affected quite as she herself had been, that night on the terrace, under Mrs. Verver’s perceptive pursuit. The relation, today, had turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come, through patches of lingering noon, quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through the starless dark; and there was a moment, that of her waiting a little as they thus met across the distance, when the interval was bridged by a recognition not less soundless, and to all appearance not less charged with strange meanings, than that of the other occasion. The point, however, was that they had changed places; Maggie had from her window, seen her stepmother leave the house — at so unlikely an hour, three o’clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove — and had thereupon felt her impulse determined with the same sharpness that had made the spring of her companion’s three weeks before. It was the hottest day of the season, and the shaded siesta, for people all at their ease, would certainly rather have been prescribed; but our young woman had perhaps not yet felt it so fully brought home that such refinements of repose, among them, constituted the empty chair at the feast. This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great bedimmed dining-room, the cool, ceremonious semblance of luncheon, had just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had been represented but by the plea of a bad headache, not reported to the rest of the company by her husband, but offered directly to Mr. Verver himself, on their having assembled, by her maid, deputed for the effect and solemnly producing it.
Maggie had sat down, with the others, to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions — poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene — relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken, for a week or two, the light neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie’s munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the house. HE conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell — conversed mainly with the indefinite, wandering smile of the entertainers, and the Princess’s power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having, from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his guidance. She asked herself at times if he suspected how more than subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes that he had guessed nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently served him — made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. Some day in some happier season, she would confess to him that she hadn’t confessed, though taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her weak, stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression. Something grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her choice of suppositions: her heart stood still when she wondered above all if the cord mightn’t at last have snapped between her husband and her father. She shut her eyes for dismay at the possibility of such a passage — there moved before them the procession of ugly forms it might have taken. “Find out for yourself!” she had thrown to Amerigo, for her last word, on the question of who else “knew,” that night of the breaking of the Bowl; and she flattered herself that she hadn’t since then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she had given him, all these weeks, to be busy with, and she had again and again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his uncertainty ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity. She had handed him over to an ignorance that couldn’t even try to become indifferent and that yet wouldn’t project itself, either, into the cleared air of conviction. In proportion as he was generous it had bitten into his spirit, and more than once she had said to herself that to break the spell she had cast upon him and that the polished old ivory of her father’s inattackable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit some mistake or some violence, smash some windowpane for air, fail even of one of his blest inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he would have put himself in the wrong — blighting by a single false step the perfection of his outward show.
These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions — to the idea, in particular, of a change, such a change as she didn’t dare to face, in the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities, as it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things of evil when one’s nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of any one; anything, almost, of poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father’s wine; anything, verily, yes, of the good priest, as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert — he eyed them, half-obliquely, as if THEY might have met him today, for conversation, better than any one present. But the Princess had her fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte — some approach he would have attempted with her, that very morning perhaps, to the circumstance of an apparent detachment, recently noted in her, from any practice of devotion. He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference — taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and pointed, naturally, the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed contrition — he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman’s own act had devoted her at her all so deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses. The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do — she could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything, and all the more that it was wrapped so in confidence. She had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption — so that wouldn’t there have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell’s, depths of practical derision of her success?
The question was provisionally answered, at all events, by the time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse — with Maggie’s version of Mrs. Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest’s eyes before they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her, in abysmal softness: “Go to Mrs. Verver, my child — YOU go: you’ll find that you can help her.” This didn’t come, however; nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon. Nothing came but the receding backs of each of the others — her father’s slightly bent shoulders, in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the force of habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been present. Her husband indeed was present to feel anything there might be to feel — which was perhaps exactly why this personage was moved promptly to emulate so definite an example of “sloping.” He had his occupations — books to arrange perhaps even at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all the conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie, was, in the event, left alone for a minute with Mrs. Assingham, who, after waiting for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage of “talking over” had long passed for them; when they communicated now it was on quite ultimate facts; but Fanny desired to testify to the existence, on her part, of an attention that nothing escaped. She was like the kind lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the overworked little trapezist girl — the acrobatic support presumably of embarrassed and exacting parents — and gives her, as an obscure and meritorious artist, assurance of benevolent interest. What was clearest, always, in our young woman’s imaginings, was the sense of being herself left, for any occasion, in the breach. She was essentially there to bear the burden, in the last resort, of surrounding omissions and evasions, and it was eminently to that office she had been today abandoned — with this one alleviation, as appeared, of Mrs. Assingham’s keeping up with her. Mrs. Assingham suggested that she too was still on the ramparts — though her gallantry proved indeed after a moment to consist not a little of her curiosity. She had looked about and seen their companions beyond earshot.
“Don’t you really want us to go —?”
Maggie found a faint smile. “Do you really want to —?”
It made her friend colour. “Well then — no. But we WOULD, you know, at a look from you. We’d pack up and be off — as a sacrifice.”
“Ah, make no sacrifice,” said Maggie. “See me through.”
“That’s it — that’s all I want. I should be too base —! Besides,” Fanny went on, “you’re too splendid.”
“Splendid?”
“Splendid. Also, you know, you ARE all but ‘through.’ You’ve done it,” said Mrs. Assingham. But Maggie only half took it from her.
“What does it strike you that I’ve done?”
“What you wanted. They’re going.”
Maggie continued to look at her. “Is that what I wanted?”
“Oh, it wasn’t for you to say. That was his business.”
“My father’s?” Maggie asked after an hesitation.
“Your father’s. He has chosen — and now she knows. She sees it all before her — and she can’t speak, or resist, or move a little finger. That’s what’s the matter with HER,” said Fanny Assingham.
It made a picture, somehow, for the Princess, as they stood there — the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own. She saw, round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature — saw Charlotte, somewhere in it, virtually at bay, and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate. “Has she told you?” she then asked.
Her companion smiled superior. “I don’t need to be told — either! I see something, thank God, every day.” And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance: “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State — which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see THEM at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end — and I see them never come back. But NEVER— simply. I see the extraordinary ‘interesting’ place — which I’ve never been to, you know, and you have — and the exact degree in which she will be expected to be interested.”
“She WILL be,” Maggie presently replied. “Expected?”
“Interested.”
For a little, after this, their eyes met on it; at the end of which Fanny said: “She’ll be-yes — what she’ll HAVE to be. And it will be-won’t it? for ever and ever.” She spoke as abounding in her friend’s sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her.
These were large words and large visions — all the more that now, really, they spread and spread. In the midst of them, however, Mrs. Assingham had soon enough continued. “When I talk of ‘knowing,’ indeed, I don’t mean it as you would have a right to do. You know because you see — and I don’t see HIM. I don’t make him out,” she almost crudely confessed.
Maggie again hesitated. “You mean you don’t make out Amerigo?”
But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one’s intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion, and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had taken that, without delay, from her eyes — with a discretion, still, that fell short but by an inch. “You know how he feels.”
Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake. “I know nothing.”
“You know how YOU feel.”
But again she denied it. “I know nothing. If I did —!”
“Well, if you did?” Fanny asked as she faltered.
She had had enough, however. “I should die,” she said as she turned away.
She went to her room, through the quiet house; she roamed there a moment, picking up, pointlessly, a different fan, and then took her way to the shaded apartments in which, at this hour, the Principino would be enjoying his nap. She passed through the first empty room, the day nursery, and paused at an open door. The inner room, large, dim and cool, was equally calm; her boy’s ample, antique, historical, royal crib, consecrated, reputedly, by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent, and a gift, early in his career, from his grandfather, ruled the scene from the centre, in the stillness of which she could almost hear the child’s soft breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside him; her father sat there with as little motion — with head thrown back and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine foot that was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the other knee, with the unfathomable heart folded in the constant flawless freshness of the white waistcoat that could always receive in its armholes the firm prehensile thumbs. Mrs. Noble had majestically melted, and the whole place signed her temporary abdication; yet the actual situation was regular, and Maggie lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the top of which was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her father really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet. Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this — his forebearance from any question — only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events, for a minute, watched his immobility — then, as if once more renewing her total submission, returned, without a sound, to her own quarters.
A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it was not, for her part, the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could have slept that morning, days before, when she had watched the first dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back and the charm she always found in her seemingly perched position — as if her outlook, from above the high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods — all of which drowsed below her, at this hour, in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have appeared to stir in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, had not caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. It passed down from the terrace, receding, at a distance, from sight, and carried, naturally, so as to conceal the head and back of its bearer; but Maggie had quickly recognised the white dress and the particular motion of this adventurer — had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had chosen the glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens,............