These shadows rose and fell for her while Father Mitchell prattled; with other shadows as well, those that hung over Charlotte herself, those that marked her as a prey to equal suspicions--to the idea in particular of a change, such a change as she did n't dare to face, in the relations of the two men. Or there were yet other possibilities as it seemed to Maggie; there were always too many, and all of them things of evil when one's nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predicament of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has (300) no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of any one; anything almost of poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father's wine; anything verily, yes, of the good priest as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach.
The good priest looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert--he eyed them half-obliquely, as if THEY might have met him to-day for conversation better than any one present. But the Princess had her fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte--some approach he would have attempted with her that very morning perhaps to the circumstance of an apparent detachment recently noted in her from any practice of devotion.
He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference--taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and naturally pointed the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy.
He had possibly prescribed contrition--he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her at her all so deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses. The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do--she could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything, all the more that it was wrapped so in (301) confidence. She had to confirm day after day the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption--so that would n't there have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell's, depths of practical derision of her success?
The question was provisionally answered at all events by the time the party at luncheon had begun to disperse--with Maggie's version of Mrs.
Verver sharp to the point of representing her pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest's eyes before they separated, and priests were really at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her in abysmal softness: "Go to Mrs. Verver, my child--YOU go: you'll find you can help her." This did n't come, however; nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon.
Nothing came but the receding backs of each of the others--her father's slightly bent shoulders in especial, which seemed to weave his spell, by the force of habit, not less patiently than if his wife had been present.
Her own husband indeed was present to feel anything there might be to feel--which was perhaps exactly why this personage was moved promptly to emulate so definite an example of "sloping." He had his occupations--books to arrange perhaps even at Fawns; the idea of the siesta, moreover, in all the conditions, had no need to be loudly invoked. Maggie was in the event left alone for a minute with Mrs. Assingham, who, after waiting (302) for safety, appeared to have at heart to make a demonstration. The stage of "talking over" had long passed for them; when they communicated now it was on quite ultimate facts; but Fanny desired to testify to the existence, on her part, of an attention that nothing escaped. She was like the kind lady who, happening to linger at the circus while the rest of the spectators pour grossly through the exits, falls in with the overworked little trapezist girl--the acrobatic support presumably of embarrassed and exacting parents--and gives her, as an obscure and meritorious artist, assurance of charitable interest.
What was clearest always in our young woman's imaginings was the sense of being herself left for any occasion in the breach. She was essentially there to bear the burden, in the last resort, of surrounding omissions and evasions, and it was eminently to that office she had been to-day abandoned--with this one alleviation, as appeared, of Mrs. Assingham's keeping up with, her. Mrs. Assingham suggested that she too was still on the ramparts--though her gallantry proved indeed after a moment to consist not a little of her curiosity. She had looked about and seen their companions beyond earshot.
"Don't you really want us to go--?"
Maggie found a faint smile. "Do you really want to--?"
It made her friend colour. "Well then--no. But we WOULD, you know, at a look from you. We'd pack up and be off--as a sacrifice."
"Ah make no sacrifice," said Maggie. "See me through."
(303) "That's it--that's all I want. I should be too base--! Besides,"
Fanny went on, "you're too splendid."
"Splendid?"
"Splendid. Also, you know, you ARE all but 'through.' You've done it," said Mrs. Assingham.
But Maggie only took it from her. "What does it strike you I've done?"
"What you wanted. They're going."
Maggie continued to look at her. "Is that what I wanted?"
"Oh it was n't for you to say. That was HIS affair."
"My father's?" Maggie asked after an hesitation.