Book ONE Part 3 Chapter 24
“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”
“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. That’s where we are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. “In presence of what?”
“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off.”
She had paused there before him while he wondered. “You mean she’ll get the Prince back?
“To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT”—and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes—”will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. “Good night!”
There was something in her manner, however—or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather jolly!”
“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.
“I mean it’s rather charming.”
“‘Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.
“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be. Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim—”only I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on.”
[Fanny speaking]. “I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who COULD keep off ravening women—without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something, of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean—it looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face! But all I can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn’t quite make out either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting.”
[Fanny and Colonel] “And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent—?”
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. “Yes. That is they WERE—as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s were beautiful—of THAT I had my faith. They WERE—I’d go to the stake. Otherwise,” she added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”
[Fanny and Colonel] Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”
“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with expression, “he’s—beautifully—a case. They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be—and that’s what makes so much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”
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