"And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?"
"I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even," she said quite gaily, "go together down to Fawns."
"You could be so very content without me?" the Prince presently threw out.
"Yes, my own dear--if you could be content for a while with father.
That would keep me up. I might for the time," she went on, "go to stay there with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place."
"Oho!" said the Prince with cheerful vagueness "I should feel, you see," she continued, "that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness."
Amerigo thought. "The two of us? Charlotte and I?"
Maggie again took a moment. "You and I, darling."
"I see, I see"--he promptly understood. "And what reason shall I give--give I mean your father?"
(64) "For asking him to go off? Why the very simplest--if you conscientiously can. The desire," said Maggie, "to be agreeable to him. Just that only."
Something in this reply made her husband again reflect. "'Conscientiously'?
Why should n't I conscientiously? It would n't, by your own contention," he developed, "represent any surprise for him. I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him."
Ah there it was again, for Maggie--the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least, as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it in the others as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to Charlotte. Before she was well aware accordingly she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amerigo's last words. "You're the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him."
She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband's eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard--though his answer when it came was straight enough. "Why is n't that just what we've been talking about--that I've affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it," (65) the Prince went on, "by proposing to ME an excursion."
"And you'd go with him?" Maggie immediately asked.
He hung fire but an instant. "Per Dio!"
She also had her pause, but she broke it--since gaiety was in the air--with an intense smile. "You can say that safely because the proposal's one that he won t make of his own motion."
She could n't have narrated afterwards--and in fact was at a loss to tell herself--by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them. She felt it in the tone with which he repeated after her "'Safely'--?"
"Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all in such a case too long. He's a person to think you might easily feel yourself to be. So it won't," Maggie said, "come from father. He's too modest."
Their eyes continued to meet on it from corner to corner of the brougham.
"Oh your modesty, between you--!" But he still smiled for it. "So that unless I insist--?"
"We shall simply go on as we are."
"Well, we're going on beautifully," he answered--though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of attempted capture and achieved escape, had n't taken place. As Maggie said nothing none the less to gainsay his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious (66) of still another idea. "I wonder if it WOULD do. I mean for me to break in."
"'To break in'--?"
"Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way," he said--"we can make Charlotte ask him." And then as Maggie herself now wondered, echoing it again: "We can suggest to her to suggest to him that he shall let me take him off."
"Oh!" said Maggie.
"Then if he asks her why I so suddenly break out she'll be able to tell him the reason."
They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the house-door. "That you think it would be so charming?"
"That I think it would be so charming. That we've persuaded HER will be convincing."
"I see," Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out.
"I see," she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted. What she really saw of a sudden was that her stepmother might report her as above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her need that her father should n't think her concerned in any degree for anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat; her husband, to let her out, had passed before her and, a little in advance, awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high, that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose before her, and there was something in Amerigo's very face, while his eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a conscious (67) reminder of it. He had answered her distinctly just before, and it appeared to leave her nothing to say.
It was almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was almost as if--in the strangest way in the world--he were paying her back by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for the way she had slipped from him during their drive.
