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 would 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 hesitated. “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was quite as if, as an appeal to one’s intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded.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 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 there with 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; 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 forebearance 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.