he could neglect. He edited, for their general economy, the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His connection with it was really a master-piece of editing. This was in fact, to come back, very much the process he might have been proposing to apply to Mrs. Assingham’s view of what was now before them; that is to their connection with Charlotte Stant’s possibilities. They wouldn’t lavish on them all their little fortune of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn’t spend their cherished savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte, moreover, who was a smooth and compact inmate, and whom he felt as, with her instincts that made against waste, much more of his own sort than his wife. He could talk with her about Fanny almost better than he could talk with Fanny about Charlotte. However, he made at present the best of the latter necessity, even to the pressing of the question he has been noted as having last uttered. “If you can’t think what to be afraid of, wait till you can think. Then you’ll do it much better. Or otherwise, if that’s waiting too long, find out from HER. Don’t try to find out from ME. Ask her herself.”
Mrs. Assingham denied, as we know, that her husband had a play of mind; so that she could, on her side, treat these remarks only as if they had been senseless physical gestures or nervous facial movements. She overlooked them as from habit and kindness; yet there was no one to whom she talked so persistently of such intimate things. “It’s her friendship with Maggie that’s the immense complication. Because THAT,” she audibly mused, “is so natural.”
“Then why can’t she have come out for it?”
“She came out,” Mrs. Assingham continued to meditate, “because she hates America. There was no place for her there—she didn’t fit in. She wasn’t in sympathy—no more were the people she saw. Then it’s hideously dear; she can’t, on her means, begin to live there. Not at all as she can, in a way, here.”
“In the way, you mean, of living with US?”
“Of living with anyone. She can’t live by visits alone—and she doesn’t want to. She’s too good for it even if she could. But she will—she MUST, sooner or later—stay with THEM. Maggie will want her—Maggie will make her. Besides, she’ll want to herself.”
“Then why won’t that do,” the Colonel asked, “for you to think it’s what she has come for?”
“How will it do, HOW?”—she went on as without hearing him.
“That’s what one keeps feeling.”
“Why shouldn’t it do beautifully?”
“That anything of the past,” she brooded, “should come back NOW? How will it do, how will it do?”
“It will do, I daresay, without your wringing your hands over it. When, my dear,” the Colonel pursued as he smoked, “have you ever seen anything of yours—anything that you’ve done—NOT do?”
“Ah, I didn’t do this!” It brought her answer straight. “I didn’t bring her back.”
“Did you expect her to stay over there all her days to oblige you?”
“Not a bit—for I shouldn’t have minded her coming after their marriage. It’s her coming, this way, before.” To which she added with inconsequence: “I’m too sorry for her—of course she can’t enjoy it. But I don’t see what perversity rides her. She needn’t have looked it all so in the face—as she doesn’t do it, I suppose, simply for discipline. It’s almost—that’s the bore of it—discipline to ME.”
“Perhaps then,” said Bob Assingham, “that’s what has been her idea. Take it, for God’s sake, as discipline to you and have done with it. It will do,” he added, “for discipline to me as well.”
She was far, however, from having done with it; it was a situation with such different sides, as she said, and to none of which one could, in justice, be blind. “It isn’t in the least, you know, for instance, that I believe she’s bad. Never, never,” Mrs. Assingham declared. “I don’t think that of her.”
“Then why isn’t that enough?”
Nothing was enough, Mrs. Assingham signified, but that she should develop her thought. “She doesn’t deliberately intend, she doesn’t consciously wish, the least complication. It’s perfectly true that she thinks Maggie a dear—as who doesn’t? She’s incapable of any PLAN to hurt a hair of her head. Yet here she is—and there THEY are,” she wound up.
Her husband again, for a little, smoked in silence. “What in the world, between them, ever took place?”
“Between Charlotte and the Prince? Why, nothing—except their having to recognise that nothing COULD. That was their little romance—it was even their little tragedy.”
“But what the deuce did they DO?”
“Do? They fell in love with each other—but, seeing it wasn’t possible, gave each other up.”
“Then where was the romance?”
“Why, in their frustration, in their having the courage to look the facts in the face.”
“What facts?” the Colonel went on.
“Well, to begin with, that of their neither of them having the means to marry. If she had had even a little—a little, I mean, for two—I believe he would bravely have done it.” After which, as her husband but emitted an odd vague sound, she corrected herself. “I mean if he himself had had only a little—or a little more than a little, a little for a prince. They would have done what they could”—she did them justice”—if there had been a way. But there wasn’t a way, and Charlotte, quite to her honour, I consider, understood it. He HAD to have money—it was a question of life and death. It wouldn’t have been a bit amusing, either, to marry him as a pauper—I mean leaving him one. That was what she had—as HE had—the reason to see.”
“And their reason is what you call their romance?”
She looked at him a moment. “What do you want more?”
“Didn’t HE,” the Colonel inquired, “want anything more? Or didn’t, for that matter, poor Charlotte herself?”
She kept her eyes on him; there was a manner in it that half answered. “They were thoroughly in love. She might have been his—” She checked herself; she even for a minute lost herself. “She might have been anything she liked—except his wife.”
“But she wasn’t,” said the Colonel very smokingly.
“She wasn’t,” Mrs. Assingham echoed.
The echo, not loud but deep, filled for a little the room. He seemed to listen to it die away; then he began again. “How are you sure?”
She waited before saying, but when she spoke it was definite. “There wasn’t time.”
He had a small laugh for her reason; he might have expected some other. “Does it take so much time?”
