第173章 Chapter 9(3)

"Ah I've known nothing about that!" And she said it with a braver assurance--clutching with comfort at something that was apparently new to her "That bowl," Maggie went on, "is, so strangely --too strangely almost to believe at this time of day--(162) the proof. They were together all the while--up to the very eve of our marriage. Don't you remember how just before that she came back so unexpectedly from America?"

The question had for Mrs. Assingham--and whether all consciously or not--the oddest pathos of simplicity. "Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America--and how she stayed with US, and what view one had of it."

Maggie's eyes still all the time pressed and penetrated; so that during a moment just here she might have given the little flare, have made the little pounce, of asking what then "one's" view had been. To the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood for her minute wittingly exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten--quite saw the Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of itself. She saw her--or believed she saw her--look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt herself with this fact hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery--since it was, however obscurely, a case of "discovery"--could make less needful. These seconds were brief--they rapidly passed; but they lasted long enough to renew our friend's sense of her own extraordinary undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of the (163) terms on which she was let off--her quantity of release having made its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte's old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed--ah so inspiringly when it came to that!--her steady view, clear from the first, of the beauty of her companion's motive. It was like a fresh sacrifice for a larger conquest--"Only see me through NOW, do it in the face of this and in spite of it, and I leave you a hand of which the freedom is n't to be said!" The aggravation of fear--or call it apparently of knowledge--had jumped straight into its place as an aggravation above all for her father; the effect of this being but to quicken to passion her reasons for making his protectedness, or in other words the forms of his ignorance, still the law of her attitude and the key to her solution. She kept as tight hold of these reasons and these forms, in her confirmed horror, as the rider of a plunging horse grasps his seat with his knees and she might absolutely have been putting it to her guest that she believed she could stay on if they should only "meet" nothing more. Though ignorant still of what she HAD definitely met Fanny yearned, within, over her spirit; and so, no word about it said, passed, through mere pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at cross-roads, with a lantern for the darkness and wavings-away for unadvised traffic, look out for alarms. There was accordingly no wait in Maggie's reply. "They spent together hours--spent at least a morning--the certainty of which has come back to me now, but that I did n't dream of at the time. That cup there has turned witness--(164) by the most wonderful of chances. That's why, since it has been here, I've stood it out for my husband to see; put it where it would meet him almost immediately if he should come into the room. I've wanted it to meet him," she went on, "and I've wanted him to meet IT, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that has n't taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here--yes in particular lately--he has n't showed today." It was with her managed quietness more and more that she talked--an achieved coherence that helped her evidently to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together. "It's quite as if he had an instinct--something that has warned him off or made him uneasy. He does n't understand, naturally, what has happened, but guesses, with his beautiful cleverness, that something has, and is n't in a hurry to be confronted with it. So in his vague fear he keeps off."

"But being meanwhile in the house--?"

"I've no idea--not having seen him to-day, by exception, since before luncheon. He spoke to me then," the Princess freely explained, "of a ballot, of great importance, at a club--for somebody, some personal friend, I think, who's coming up and is supposed to be in danger. To make an effort for him he thought he had better lunch there. You see the efforts he CAN make"--for which Maggie found a smile that went to her friend's heart. "He's in so many ways the kindest of men. But it was hours ago."