第186章 Chapter 1(2)

The peace, it must be added, had become, as the days elapsed, a peace quite generally animated and peopled--thanks to that fact of the presence of "company" in which Maggie's ability to preserve an appearance had learned from so far back to find its best resource. It was n't inconspicuous, it was in fact striking, that this resource just now seemed to meet in the highest degree every one's need: quite as if every one were, by the multiplication of human objects in the scene, by the creation, by the confusion of fictive issues, hopeful of escaping somebody else's notice. It had reached the point in truth that the collective bosom might have been taken to heave with the knowledge of the descent upon adjacent shores, for a short period, of Mrs. Rance and the Lutches, still united, and still so divided, for conquest: the sense of the party showed at least, oddly (210) enough, as favourable to the fancy of the quaint turn that some near "week-end" might derive from their reappearance. This measured for Maggie the ground they had all travelled together since that unforgotten afternoon of the none so distant year, that determinant September Sunday when, sitting with her father in the park, as in commemoration of the climax both of their old order and of their old danger, she had proposed to him that they should "call in" Charlotte--call her in as a specialist might be summoned to an invalid's chair. Was n't it a sign of something rather portentous, their being ready to be beholden as for a diversion to the once despised Kitty and Dotty? That had already had its application, in truth, to her invocation of the Castledeans and several other members again of the historic Matcham week, made before she left town, and made, always consistently, with an idea--since she was never henceforth to approach these people without an idea, and since that lurid element of their intercourse grew and grew for her with each occasion. The flame with which it burned afresh during these particular days, the way it held up the torch to everything, to everything that MIGHT have occurred as the climax of revels springing from traditions so vivified--this by itself justified her private motive and reconsecrated her diplomacy. She had already produced by the aid of these people something of the effect she sought--that of being "good" for whatever her companions were good for, and of not asking either of them to give up any one or anything for her sake. There was moreover frankly a sharpness of point in it that she (211) enjoyed; it gave an accent to the truth she wished to illustrate--the truth that the surface of her recent life, thick-sown with the flower of earnest endeavour, with every form of the unruffled and the undoubting, suffered no symptom anywhere to peep out. It was as if under her pressure neither party could get rid of the complicity, as it might be figured, of the other; as if in a word she saw Amerigo and Charlotte committed, for fear of betrayals on their own side, to a kind of wan consistency on the subject of Lady Castledean's "set," and this latter group by the same stroke compelled to assist at attestations the extent and bearing of which they rather failed to grasp and which left them indeed, in spite of hereditary high spirits, a trifle bewildered and even a trifle scared.

They made none the less at Fawns for number, for movement, for sound--they played their parts during a crisis that must have hovered for them, in the long passages of the old house, after the fashion of the established ghost, felt, through the dark hours, as a constant possibility, rather than have menaced them in the form of a daylight bore, one of the perceived outsiders who are liable to be met in the drawing-room or to be sat next to at dinner. If the Princess moreover had failed of her occult use for so much of the machinery of diversion, she would still have had a sense not other than sympathetic for the advantage now extracted from it by Fanny Assingham's bruised philosophy. This good friend's relation to it was actually the revanche, she sufficiently indicated, of her obscured lustre at Matcham, where (212) she had known her way about so much less than most of the others.

She knew it at Fawns, through the pathless wild of the right tone, positively better than any one, Maggie could note for her; and her revenge had the magnanimity of a brave pointing out of it to every one else, a wonderful irresistible conscious and almost compassionate patronage. Here was a house, she triumphantly caused it to be noted, in which she so bristled with values that some of them might serve, by her amused willingness to share, for such of the temporarily vague, among her fellow guests, such of the dimly disconcerted, as had lost the key to their own. It may have been partly through the effect of this especial strain of community with her old friend that Maggie found herself one evening moved to take up again their dropped directness of reference. They had remained downstairs together late; the other women of the party had filed, singly or in couples, up the "grand" staircase on which, from the equally grand hall, these retreats and advances could always be pleasantly observed; the men had apparently taken their way to the smoking-room; while the Princess, in possession thus of a rare reach of view, had lingered as if to enjoy it. Then she saw that Mrs. Assingham was remaining a little--and as for the appreciation of her enjoyment; upon which they stood looking at each other across the cleared prospect until the elder woman, only vaguely expressive and tentative now, came nearer.

It was like the act of asking if there were anything she could yet do, and that question was answered by her immediately feeling, on this closer view, as she (213) had felt when presenting herself in Portland Place after Maggie's last sharp summons. Their understanding was taken up by these new snatched moments where that occasion had left it.