The Golden Bowl - Henry James [229]
‘Yes then – as was right for her. The point is,’ Fanny declared, ‘that whatever his knowledge it made all the way it went for his good faith.’
Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her successive movements. ‘Isn’t the point, very considerably, that his good faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in me as he himself took?’
Fanny Assingham thought. ‘He recognised, he adopted, your long friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness.’
‘No,’ said Maggie with still deeper consideration: ‘he counted her selfishness out almost as he counted his own.’
‘So you may say.’
‘Very well,’ Maggie went on; ‘if he had none of his own, he invited her, may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only since have found that out.’
Mrs Assingham looked blank. ‘Since –?’
‘And he may have become aware,’ Maggie pursued, ‘that she has found it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage,’ she explained, ‘of how much he had asked of her – more say than she had understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand was in the long run to affect her.’
‘He may have done many things,’ Mrs Assingham responded; ‘but there’s one thing he certainly won’t have done. He’ll never have shown that he expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to give.’
‘I’ve often wondered,’ Maggie mused, ‘what Charlotte really understood. But it’s one of the things she has never told me.’
‘Then as it’s one of the things she has never told me either we shall probably never know it, and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘that we shall never know.’
Maggie took it in with a long reflexion. ‘Never.’
‘But there are others,’ her friend went on, ‘that stare us in the face and that – under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour – may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.’
It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way, but she rallied to this with a rush. ‘Extraordinary.’
‘Magnificent,’ said Fanny Assingham.
Her companion held tight to it. ‘Magnificent.’
‘Then he’ll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he’ll do to the end. He didn’t undertake it to break down; in what – quiet patient exquisite as he is – did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won’t have done it on this occasion.’
‘Ah this occasion!’ – and Maggie’s wail showed her of a sudden thrown back on it. ‘Am I in the least sure that, with everything, he even knows what it is? And yet am I in the least sure he doesn’t?’
‘If he doesn’t then so much the better. Leave him alone.’
‘Do you mean give him up?’
‘Leave her,’ Fanny Assingham went on. ‘Leave her to him.’
Maggie looked at her darkly. ‘Do you mean leave him to her? After this?’
‘After everything. Aren’t they, for that matter, intimately together now?’
‘ “Intimately” –? How do I know?’
But Fanny kept it up. ‘Aren’t you and your husband – in spite of everything?’
Maggie’s eyes still further if possible dilated. ‘It remains to be seen!’
‘If you’re not then where’s your faith?’
‘In my husband –?’
Mrs Assingham but for an instant hesitated. ‘In your father. It all comes back to that. Rest on it.’
‘On his ignorance?’
Fanny met it again. ‘On whatever he may offer you. Take that.’
‘Take it –?’ Maggie stared.
Mrs Assingham held up her head. ‘And be grateful.’ On which for a minute she let the Princess face her. ‘Do you see?’
‘I see,’ said Maggie at last.
‘Then there you are.’ But Maggie had turned away, moving to the window as if still to keep something in her face from sight. She stood there with her eyes on the street while Mrs Assingham’s reverted to that complicating object on the chimney as to which her condition, so oddly even to herself, was that both of recurrent wonder and recurrent protest. She went over to it, looked at it afresh and yielded now to her impulse to feel it in her hands. She laid them on it, lifting it up, and was