Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea, dispatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab, for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their effects. The result of this for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day practically passed without fresh contact between them. They dined out together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back that they appeared on either side to have least to communicate. Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less 0 disposed than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his end of it. They had in general in these days longer pauses and more abrupt transitions; in one of which latter they found themselves, for a climax, launched at midnight. Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink overburdened, on the landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair--of which at first however she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become articulate. The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some old pilgrim (365) of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went by way of reconnoissance into the drawing-room. He visited according to his wont the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the eye all at once of the master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom for a moment he stood waiting.
But she herself continued for a time to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably.
There was in these minor manoeuvres and conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield on occasion to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly and just incoherently in the air that no trouble was at present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mrs. Assingham's face a mild perception of some finer sense--a sense for his wife's situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate--that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself all the afternoon to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakeably went on, with abstentions and discretions (366) that might almost have counted as solemnities. The solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing--to nothing beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had been out on these waters for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had n't quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had parted--THEN some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty. His present position, clearly, was that of seeing her in the centre of her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him did n't perhaps mean that her planks WERE now parting.
He held himself so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however--that is before he had uttered a question--he saw, not without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she stepped ashore. "We were all wrong. There's nothing."
"Nothing--?" It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
"Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy--but I'm satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There's nothing."
"But I thought," said Bob Assingham, "that that was just what you did persistently asseverate. You've guaranteed their straightness from the first."
(367) "No--I've never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to worry. I've never till now," Fanny went on gravely from her chair, "had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place--if I had, in my infatuation and my folly," she added with expression, "nothing else.
So I did see--I HAVE seen. And now I know." Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. "I know."
The Colonel took it--but took it at first in silence. "Do you mean they've TOLD you--?"
"No--I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I have n't asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter would n't count."
"Oh," said the Colonel with all his oddity, "they'd tell US."
It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt none the less that she kept her irony down. "Then when they've told you, you'll be perhaps so good as to let me know."
He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. "Ah I don't say that they'd necessarily tell me that they ARE over the traces."
"They'll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and I'm talking of them now as I take them for myself only. THAT'S enough for me--it's all I have to regard." With which, after an instant, "They're wonderful," said Fanny Assingham.
"Indeed," her husband concurred, "I really think they are."