第92章 Chapter 3(4)

It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband's indurated conscience, it gave her full in her face the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful, truly then, the evocation. "So cleverly--THAT'S your idea?--that no one will be the wiser? It's your idea that we shall have done all that's required of us if we simply protect them "

The Colonel, still in his place, declined however to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one's way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable.

Still, none the less, he had his point to make--for which he took another instant. But he made it for the third time in (286) the same fashion. "They'll manage in their own way." With which he got out.

Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crush-hat, according to his wont, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance; so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters.

He looked at her across the interval, and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Was n't it simply what had been written in the Prince's own face BENEATH what he was saying?--did n't it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn't, in fine, the pledge that they would "manage in their own way" the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband's tone somehow fitted Amerigo's look--the one that had for her so strangely peeped from behind over the shoulder of the one in front. She had n't then read it--but was n't she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She was n't to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her "Well, what's the matter?" she also took time to remind herself that she had decided she could n't be frightened. The "matter"?--why it was sufficiently the matter, on (287) all this, that she felt a little sick. For it was n't the Prince she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had at the most perhaps postulated--it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with. Therefore if HE had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back and fairly drew her forth; after which, on the pavement, under the street-lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something grave--their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost resembled a return from a funeral--unless indeed it resembled more the hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home for but to inter, as decently as possible, her mistake?