It would have made him, for a spectator of these passages between the pair, resemble not a little the artless child who hears his favourite story told for the twentieth time and enjoys it exactly because he knows what is next to happen. "What of course will pull them up if they turn out to have less imagination than you assume is the profit you can have found in furthering Mrs. Verver's marriage. You were n't at least in love with Charlotte."
"Oh," Mrs. Assingham, at this, always brought out, "my hand in that is easily accounted for by my desire to be agreeable to HIM."
"To Mr. Verver?"
"To the Prince--by preventing her in that way (129) from taking, as he was in danger of seeing her do, some husband with whom he would n't be able to open, to keep open, so large an account as with his father-in-law.
I've brought her near him, kept her within his reach, as she could never have remained either as a single woman or as the wife of a different man."
"Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress?"
"Kept her, on that sweet construction, to be his mistress." She brought it out grandly--it had always so, for her own ear as well as, visibly, for her husband's, its effect. "The facilities in the case, thanks to the particular conditions, being so quite ideal."
"Down even to the facility of your minding everything so little--from your own point of view--as to have supplied him with the enjoyment of TWO beautiful women."
"Down even to THAT--to the monstrosity of my folly. But not," Mrs. Assingham added, "'two' of anything. One beautiful woman--and one beautiful fortune.
That's what a creature of pure virtue exposes herself to when she suffers her pure virtue, suffers her sympathy, her disinterestedness, her exquisite sense for the lives of others, to carry her too far. Voila."
"I see. It's the way the Ververs have you."
"It's the way the Ververs 'have' me. It's in other words the way they would be able to make such a show to each other of having me--if Maggie were n't so divine."
"She lets you off?" He never failed to insist on all this to the very end; which was how he had become so versed in what she finally thought.
(130) "She lets me off. So that now, horrified and contrite at what I've done, I may work to help her out. And Mr. Verver," she was fond of adding, "lets me off too."
"Then you do believe he knows?"
It determined in her always there, with a significant pause, a deep immersion in her thought. "I believe he'd let me off if he did know--so that I might work to help HIM out. Or rather, really," she went on, "that I might work to help Maggie. That would be his motive, that would be his condition, in forgiving me; just as hers for me in fact, her motive and her condition, are my acting to spare her father. But it's with Maggie only that I'm directly concerned; nothing ever--not a breath, not a look, I'll guarantee--shall I have, whatever happens, from Mr. Verver himself.
So it is therefore that I shall probably by the closest possible shave escape the penalty of my crimes."
"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?"
(131) "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 is n'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 has n't 'arrived' at it, as you say, at all; that's exactly what she has n'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 (132) 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."