The Golden Bowl - Henry James [213]
‘You mean being held responsible.’
‘I mean being held responsible. My advantage will be that Maggie’s such a trump.’
‘Such a trump that, as you say, she’ll stick to you.’
‘Stick to me, on our understanding – stick to me. For our understanding’s signed and sealed.’ And to brood over it again was ever for Mrs Assingham to break out again with exaltation. ‘It’s a grand high compact. She has solemnly promised.’
‘But in words –?’
‘Oh yes, in words enough – since it’s a matter of words. To keep up her lie so long as I keep up mine.’
‘And what do you call “her” lie?’
‘Why the pretence that she believes me. Believes they’re innocent.’
‘She positively believes then they’re guilty? She has arrived at that, she’s really content with it, in the absence of proof?’
It was here each time that Fanny Assingham most faltered; but always at last to get the matter for her own sense and with a long sigh sufficiently straight. ‘It isn’t a question of belief or of proof, absent or present; it’s inevitably with her a question of natural perception, of insurmountable feeling. She irresistibly knows that there’s something between them. But she hasn’t “arrived” at it, as you say, at all; that’s exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do. She stands off and off, so as not to arrive; she keeps out to sea and away from the rocks, and what she most wants of me is to keep at a safe distance with her – as I, for my own skin, only ask not to come nearer.’ After which, invariably, she let him have it all. ‘So far from wanting proof – which she must get, in a manner, by my siding with her – she wants disproof, as against herself, and has appealed to me, so extraordinarily, to side against her. It’s really magnificent when you come to think of it, the spirit of her appeal. If I’ll but cover them up brazenly enough, the others, so as to show, round and about them, as happy as a bird, she on her side will do what she can. If I’ll keep them quiet, in a word, it will enable her to gain time – time as against any idea of her father’s – and so somehow come out. If I’ll take care of Charlotte in particular she’ll take care of the Prince; and it’s beautiful and wonderful, really pathetic and exquisite, to see what she feels time may do for her.’
‘Ah but what does she call, poor little thing, “time”?’
‘Well, this summer at Fawns to begin with. She can live as yet of course but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself, I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. There the lovers – if they are lovers! – will have to mind. They’ll feel it for themselves, unless things are too utterly far gone with them.’
‘And things are not too utterly far gone with them?’
She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article she would have put down her last shilling. ‘No.’
It made him always grin at her. ‘Is that a lie?’
‘Do you think you’re worth lying to? If it weren’t the truth for me,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t have accepted for Fawns. I can, I believe, keep the wretches quiet.’
‘But how – at the worst?’
‘Oh “the worst” – don’t talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work from week to week of itself. You’ll see.’
He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide –! ‘Yet if it doesn’t work?’
‘Ah that’s talking about the worst!’
Well, it might be; but what were they doing from morning to night at this crisis but talk? ‘Who’ll keep the others?’
‘The others –?’
‘Who’ll keep them quiet? If your couple have had a life together they can’t have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons,