Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. "I don't make mistakes. But I perpetrate--in thought--crimes." And she spoke with all intensity. "I'm a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I'd do it again--feel that I'd do things myself."
"Ah my dear!" the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.
"Yes, if you had driven me back on my 'nature.' Luckily for you you never have. You've done everything else, but you've never done that. But what I really don't a bit want," she declared, "is to abet them or to protect them."
Her companion turned this over. "What is there to protect them from?--if, by your now so settled faith, they've done nothing that justly exposes them."
And it in fact half-pulled her up. "Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think."
"Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing--?"
She waited again. "It is n't my 'whole' idea. Nothing's my 'whole' idea--for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there's so much in the air."
(373) "Oh in the air--!" the Colonel dryly breathed.
"Well, what's in the air always HAS--has n't it?--to come down to the earth. And Maggie," Mrs. Assingham continued, "is a very curious little person. Since I was 'in,' this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done--well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I had n't yet felt it."
"For 'some' reason? For what reason?" And then as his wife at first said nothing: "Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?"
"She's always so different from any one else in the world that it's hard to say when she's different from herself. But she has made me," said Fanny after an instant, "think of her differently. She drove me home."
"Home here?"
"First to Portland Place--on her leaving her father: since she does once in a while leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer.
But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived--if they HAVE arrived--expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know--she has clothes."
The Colonel did n't in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. "Oh you mean a change?"
"Twenty changes if you like--all sorts of things. She dresses really, Maggie does, as much for her father--and she always did--as for her husband (374) or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married--and just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up."
It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob Assingham could more or less enter. "Maggie and the child spread so?"
"Maggie and the child spread so."
Well, he considered. "It IS rather rum."
"That's all I claim"--she seemed thankful for the word. "I don't say it's anything more--but it IS distinctly 'rum.'"
Which after an instant the Colonel took up. "'More'? What more COULD it be?"
"It could be that she's unhappy and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she WERE unhappy"--Mrs. Assingham had figured it out--"that's just the way I'm convinced she WOULD take. But how can she be unhappy, since--as I'm also convinced--she in the midst of everything adores her husband as much as ever?"
The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. "Then if she's so happy please what's the matter?"
It made his wife almost spring at him. "You think then she's secretly wretched?"
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. "Ah my dear, I give them up to you. I've nothing more to suggest."
(375) "Then it's not sweet of you." She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. "You admit that it IS 'rum.'"
And this indeed fixed again for a moment his intention. "Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?"
"Never, that I know of, a word. It is n't the sort of thing she does.
And whom has she after all," Mrs. Assingham added, "to complain to?"
"Has n't she always you?"
"Oh 'me'! Charlotte and I, nowadays--!" She spoke as of a chapter closed.
"Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me more and more as extraordinary."
A deeper shade, at the re-echo of the word, had come into the Colonel's face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then, is n't that why one must just resign one's self to wash one's hands of them--to be lost?" Her face however so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for--her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back alertly enough to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. "Has n't she then, Charlotte, always her husband--?"
"To complain to? She'd rather die."