"Your father's. He has chosen--and now she knows. She sees it all before her--and she can't speak or resist or move a little finger. That's what's the matter with HER," said Fanny Assingham.
It made a picture somehow for the Princess as they stood there--the picture that the words of others, whatever they might be, always made for her, even when her vision was already charged, better than any words of her own. She saw round about her, through the chinks of the shutters, the hard glare of nature--saw Charlotte somewhere in it virtually at bay and yet denied the last grace of any protecting truth. She saw her off somewhere all unaided, pale in her silence and taking in her fate. "Has she told you?" she then asked.
Her companion smiled superior. "I don't need to be told--either! I see something, thank God, every day." And then as Maggie might appear to be wondering what, for instance: "I see the long miles of (304) ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State--which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see THEM at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end--and I see them never come back. But NEVER--simply.
I see the extraordinary 'interesting' place--which I've never been to, you know, and you have--and the exact degree in which she'll be expected to be interested."
"She WILL be," Maggie presently replied.
"Expected?"
"Interested."
For a little after this their eyes met on it; at the end of which Fanny said: "She'll be--yes--what she'll HAVE to be. And it will be--won't it?--for ever and ever." She spoke as abounding in her friend's sense, but it made Maggie still only look at her. These were large words and large visions--all the more that now really they spread and spread. In the midst of them however Mrs. Assingham had soon enough continued. "When I talk of 'knowing' indeed I don't mean it as you'd have a right to do. You know because you see--and I don't see HIM. I don't make him out," she almost crudely confessed.
Maggie again took time. "You mean you don't make out Amerigo?"
But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one's intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs. Assingham had taken that without delay from (305) her eyes--with a discretion still that fell short but by an inch. "You know how he feels."
Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake. "I know nothing."
"You know how YOU feel."
But again she denied it. "I know nothing. If I did--!"
"Well, if you did?" Fanny asked as she faltered.
She had had enough, however. "I should die," she said as she turned away.
She went to her room through the quiet house; she roamed there a moment, picking up pointlessly a different fan, and then took her way to the shaded apartments in which at this hour the Principino would be enjoying his nap.
She passed through the first empty room, the day nursery, and paused at an open door. The inner room, large dim and cool, was equally calm; her boy's ample antique historical royal crib, consecrated reputedly by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent and a gift early in his career from his grandfather, ruled the scene from the centre, in the stillness of which she could almost hear the child's soft breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside him; her father sat therewith as little motion--with head thrown back and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine foot that was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the other knee, with the unfathomable heart folded in the constant flawless freshness of the white waistcoat that could always receive in its armholes the firm prehensile thumbs. Mrs. Noble had majestically melted, and the whole place signed her temporary abdication; (306) yet the actual situation was regular, and Maggie lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the top of which was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her father really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet.
Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this--his forbearance from any question--only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events for a minute watched his immobility--then, as if once more renewing her total submission, returned without a sound to her own quarters.
A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it was n't, for her part, the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could have slept that morning, days before, when she had watched the first dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back and the charm she always found in her seemingly perched position--as if her outlook, from above the high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods--all of which drowsed below her at this hour in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have appeared to stir in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, had n't caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. It Passed down from the terrace, receding at (307) a distance, from sight and carried, naturally, so as to conceal the head and back of its bearer; but Maggie had quickly recognised the white dress and the particular motion of this adventurer--had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had chosen the glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens and that she could be betaking herself only to some unvisited quarter deep in them or beyond them that she had already marked as a superior refuge.
