"To stick to me fast, whatever she sees. If I stick to her--that is to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them ALL--she'll stand by me to the death. She won't give me away. For you know she easily can."
This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their (125) road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. "Easily?"
"She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that I was aware at the time of his marriage--as I had been aware at the time of her own--of the relations that had pre-existed between his wife and her husband."
"And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she's herself in ignorance of your knowledge?"
It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to say that about this exactly she proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity, something quite other: it could give itself a little the air still of a triumph over his coarseness. "By acting immediately with the blind resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred would act; and by so making Mr. Verver in turn act with the same natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred. They've only to agree about me," the poor lady said;
"they've only to feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured; they've only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it's I who have been, and who continue to be cheated--cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but they're not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either of us the benefit of anything. They'll be within their rights to lump us all together as a false cruel conspiring crew and, if (126) they can find the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch."
This on each occasion put the matter so at the worst that repetition even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed invariably the sense of making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his almost turning pale when their eyes met at this possibility of their compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man. "Conspiring--so far as YOU were concerned--to what end?"
"Why to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife--at Maggie's expense.
And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr. Verver's."
"Of rendering friendly services, yes--which have produced, as it turns out, complications. But from the moment you did n't do it FOR the complications, why should n't you have rendered them?"
It was extraordinary for her always, in this connexion, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the "worst," speak for herself. Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way. "Oh is n't what I may have meddled 'for'--so far as it can be proved I did meddle--open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver's and Maggie's? May n't they see my (127) motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?" She positively liked to keep it up. "May n't they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case and at any price, first; to 'place' him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? May n't it have all the air for them of a really equivocal sinister bargain between us--something quite unholy and louche?"
It infallibly produced in the poor Colonel the echo. "'Louche,' love--?"
"Why, have n't you said as much yourself?--have n't you put your finger on that awful possibility?"
She had a way now with his felicities that made him enjoy being reminded of them. "In speaking of your having always had such a 'mash'--?"
"Such a mash, precisely, for the man I was to help to put so splendidly at his ease. A motherly mash an impartial look at it would show it only as likely to have been--but we're not talking of course about impartial looks. We're talking of good innocent people deeply worked upon by a horrid discovery and going much further in their view of the lurid, as such people almost always do, than those who have been wider awake all round from the first. What I was to have got from my friend, in such a view, in exchange for what I had been able to do for him--well, that would have been an equivalent, of a kind best known to myself, for me shrewdly to consider." And she easily lost herself each time in the anxious satisfaction of filling out the picture.
It would have been seen, it would have been heard of before, the case of the (128) woman a man does n't want, or of whom he's tired, or for whom he has no use but SUCH uses, and who's capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all. Cela s'est vu my dear; and stranger things still--as I need n't tell YOU! Very good then," she wound up; "there's a perfectly possible conception of the behaviour of your sweet wife; since, as I say, no imagination's so lively, once it's started, as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are blases, are brought up from the first to prowling and mauling. It does give us, you'll admit, something to think about. My relief is luckily, however, in what I finally do think."
He was well enough aware by this time of what she finally did think, but he was n't without a sense again also for his amusement by the way.