(165) Mrs. Assingham thought. "The more danger then of his coming in and finding me here. I don't know, you see, what you now consider that you've ascertained; nor anything of the connexion with it of that object that you declare so damning." Her eyes rested on this odd acquisition and then quitted it, went back to it and again turned from it: it was inscrutable in its rather stupid elegance, and yet, from the moment one had thus appraised it, vivid and definite in its domination of the scene. Fanny could no more overlook it now than she could have overlooked a lighted Christmas-tree; but nervously and all in vain she dipped into her mind for some floating reminiscence of it. At the same time that this attempt left her blank she understood a good deal, she even not a little shared, the Prince's mystic apprehension. The golden bowl put on, under consideration, a sturdy, a conscious perversity; as a "document," somehow, it was ugly, though it might have a decorative grace. "His finding me here in presence of it might be more flagrantly disagreeable--for all of us--than you intend or than would necessarily help us. And I must take time truly to understand what it means."
"You're safe, as far as that goes," Maggie returned; "you may take it from me that he won't come in and that I shall only find him waiting for me below when I go down to the carriage."
Fanny Assingham took it from her, took it and more. "We're to sit together at the Ambassador's then--or at least you two are--with this new complication thrust up before you and all unexplained; (166) and to look at each other with faces that pretend for the ghastly hour not to be seeing it?"
Maggie looked at HER with a face that might have been the one she was preparing. "'Unexplained,' my dear? Quite the contrary--explained: fully, intensely, admirably explained, with nothing really to add. My own love"--she kept it up--"I don't want anything MORE. I've plenty to go upon and to do with as it is."
Fanny Assingham stood there in her comparative darkness, with her links verily still missing; and the most acceptable effect of this was, singularly, as yet, a cold fear of getting nearer the fact. "But when you come home--?
I mean he'll come up with you again. Won't he see it then?"
On which Maggie gave her, after an instant's visible thought, the strangest of slow headshakes. "I don't know. Perhaps he'll never see it--if it only stands there waiting for him. He may never again," said the Princess, "come into this room."
Fanny more deeply wondered. "Never again? Oh--!"
"Yes, it may be. How do I know? With THIS!" she quietly went on.
She had n't looked again at the incriminating piece, but there was a marvel to her friend in the way the little word representing it seemed to express and include for her the whole of her situation. "Then you intend not to speak to him--?"
Maggie waited. "To 'speak'--?"
"Well, about your having it and about what you consider that it represents."
(167) "Oh I don't know that I shall speak--if he does n't. But his keeping away from me because of that--what will that BE but to speak? He can't say or do more. It won't be for me to speak," Maggie added in a different tone, one of the tones that had already so penetrated her guest. "It will be for me to listen."
Mrs. Assingham turned it over. "Then it all depends on that object that you regard, for your reasons, as evidence?"
"I think I may say that I depend on it. I can't," said Maggie, "treat it as nothing now."
Mrs. Assingham, at this, went closer to the cup on the chimney--quite liking to feel that she did so, moreover, without going closer to her companion's vision. She looked at the precious thing--if precious it was--found herself in fact eyeing it as if, by her dim solicitation, to draw its secret from it rather than suffer the imposition of Maggie's knowledge. It was brave and firm and rich, with its bold deep hollow; and, without this queer torment about it, would, thanks to her love of plenty of yellow, figure to her as an enviable ornament, a possession really desirable. She did n't touch it, but if after a minute she turned away from it the reason was, rather oddly and suddenly, in her fear of doing so. "Then it all depends on the bowl? I mean your future does? For that's what it comes to, I judge."
"What it comes to," Maggie presently returned, "is what that thing has put me, so almost miraculously, in the way of learning: how far they had originally gone together. If there was so much between them before, there can't--with all the other (168) appearances--not be a great deal more now."
And she went on and on; she steadily made her points. "If such things were already then between them they make all the difference for possible doubt of what may have been between them since. If there had been nothing before there might be explanations. But it makes to-day too much to explain. I mean to explain away," she said.
