"How much?" She seemed to consider--as if it were between quarts and gallons--how best to express the quantity. "She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her."
"And what HAD Charlotte told her?"
"Very little."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Why this--that she COULD N'T tell her." And she explained a little what she meant. "There are things, my dear--have n't you felt it yourself, coarse as you (78) are?--that no one could tell Maggie. There are things that, upon my word, I should n't care to attempt to tell her now."
The Colonel smoked on it. "She'd be so scandalised?"
"She'd be so frightened. She'd be, in her strange little way, so hurt.
She was n't born to know evil. She must never know it."
Bob Assingham had a queer grim laugh; the sound of which in fact fixed his wife before him. "We're taking grand ways to prevent it."
But she stood there to protest. "We're not taking any ways. The ways are all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage that day in Villa Borghese--the second or third of her days in Rome, when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr. Verver, and the Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a street-corner as we passed, that one of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo: which--as you probably don't know, however, even after a lifetime of me--was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the thought of any (79) connexion with him can even now thrill our artless breasts."
The Colonel's grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his wife's not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even at the present moment not directly lighted by an enquiry that managed to be curious without being apologetic. "But where does the connexion come in?"
She had it ready. "By the women--that is by some obliging woman, of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to as an ancestress.
A branch of the other family had become great--great enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is at any rate that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince was from the start helped with the dear Ververs by HIS wearing it. The connexion became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague. ' By that sign,' I quite said to myself, 'he'll conquer'--with his good fortune, of course, of having the other necessary signs too. It really," said Mrs. Assingham, "WAS, practically, the fine side of the wedge.
Which struck me as also," she wound up, "a lovely note for the candour of the Ververs."
The Colonel had followed, but his comment was (80) prosaic. "He knew, Amerigo, what he was about. And I don't mean the OLD one."
"I know what you mean!" his wife bravely threw off.
"The old one"--he pointed his effect--"isn't the only discoverer in the family."
"Oh as much as you like! If he discovered America--or got himself honoured as if he had--his successors were in due time to discover the Americans.
And it was one of them in particular, doubtless, who was to discover how patriotic we are."
"Wouldn't this be the same one," the Colonel asked, "who really discovered what you call the connexion?"
She gave him a look. "The connexion's a true thing--the connexion's perfectly historic. Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind. Don't you understand," she asked, "that the history of such people is known root and branch, at every moment of its course?"
"Oh it's all right," said Bob Assingham.
"Go to the British Museum," his companion continued with spirit.
"And what am I to do there?"
"There's a whole immense room, or recess, or department, or whatever, filled with books written about HIS family alone. You can see for yourself?"
"Have you seen for YOUR self?"
She faltered but an instant. "Certainly--I went one day with Maggie.
We looked him up, so to say. They were most civil." And she fell again into the current her husband had slightly ruffled. "The effect (81) was produced, the charm began to work at all events, in Rome, from that hour of the Prince's drive with us. My only course afterwards had to be to make the best of it. It was certainly good enough for that," Mrs. Assingham hastened to add, "and I did n't in the least see my duty in making the worst. In the same situation to-day I would n't act differently. I entered into the case as it then appeared to me--and as for the matter of that it still does. I LIKED it, I thought all sorts of good of it, and nothing can even now," she said with some intensity, "make me think anything else."
"Nothing can ever make you think anything you don't want to," the Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. "You've got a precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What happened," he went on, "was that you fell violently in love with the Prince yourself, and that as you could n't get ME out of the way you had to take some roundabout course. YOU could n't marry him, any more than Charlotte could--that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody else--it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to your little friend, to whom there were no objections."