Charlotte looked at her splendidly hard. "You're perfectly sure it's ALL my mistake?"
"All I can say is that you've received a false impression."
"Ah then--so much the better! From the moment I HAD received it I knew I must sooner or later speak of it--for that, you see, is systematically my way. And now," Charlotte added, "you make me glad I've spoken. I thank you very much."
It was strange how for Maggie too with this the difficulty seemed to sink. Her companion's acceptance of her denial was like a general pledge not to keep things any worse for her than they essentially had to be; it positively helped her to build up her falsehood--to which accordingly she contributed another block. "I've affected you evidently--quite accidentally--in some way of which I've been all unaware. I've NOT felt at any time that you've wronged me."
"How could I come within a mile," Charlotte enquired, "of such a possibility?"
Maggie, with her eyes on her more easily now, (250) made no attempt to say; she said after a little something more to the present point. "I accuse you--I accuse you of nothing."
"Ah that's lucky!"
Charlotte had brought this out with the richness almost of gaiety; and Maggie, to go on, had to think with her own intensity of Amerigo--to think how he on his side had had to go through with his lie to her, how it was for his wife he had done so, and how his doing so had given her the clue and set her the example. He must have had his own difficulty about it, and she was n't after all falling below him. It was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which covered the last inch of the ground.
He had given her something to conform to, and she had n't unintelligently turned on him, "gone back on" him, as he would have said, by not conforming.
They were together thus, he and she, close, close together--whereas Charlotte, though rising there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of the Princess swelled accordingly even in her abasement; she had kept in tune with the right, and something certainly, something that might resemble a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right--yes, it took this extraordinary form of humbugging, as she had called it, to the end. It was only a question of not by a hair's breadth deflecting (251) into the truth. So supremely was she braced. "You must take it from me that your anxiety rests quite on a misconception. You must take it from me that I've never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you." And marvellously she kept it up--not only kept it up but improved on it. "You must take it from me that I've never thought of you but as beautiful, wonderful and good. Which is all, I think, that you can possibly ask."
Charlotte held her a moment longer: she needed--not then to have appeared only tactless--the last word. "It's much more, my dear, than I dreamed of asking. I only wanted your denial."
"Well then you have it."
"Upon your honour?"
"Upon my honour."
And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away. Her grip of her shawl had loosened--she had let it fall behind her; but she stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted. With which she saw soon enough what more was to come. She saw it in Charlotte's face and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury. "Will you kiss me on it then?"
She could n't say yes, but she did n't say no; what availed her still however was to measure in her passivity how much too far Charlotte had come to retreat. But there was something different also, something for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her opportunity--the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards to join (252) the absent members of their party, had reached the open door at the end of the room and flagrantly stopped short in presence of the demonstration that awaited them. Her husband and her father were in front, and Charlotte's embrace of her--which was n't to be distinguished for them either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte--took on with their arrival a high publicity.
