第56章 Chapter 3(3)

However that might be the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily recognised--and not least by herself--as filling in the intimate little circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she had taken, with her kind melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of leisure. It naturally led, her position in the household as she called it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form of protest. She was there to keep him quiet--it was Amerigo's own description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit. Fanny herself limited indeed, she minimised, her office; you did n't need a jailor, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon. This was n't an animal to be controlled--it was an animal to be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was educative--which Maggie was so aware that she herself inevitably was n't; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge of was his mere intelligence. (162) This left, goodness knew, plenty of different calls for Maggie to meet--in a case in which so much pink ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature. What it all amounted to at any rate was that Mrs. Assingham would be keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with them there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of people, strange English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so little as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she had n't yet learned to see him as meeting such exposure in her absence. How did he move and walk, how above all did he, or how WOULD he, look--he who with his so nobly handsome face could look such wonderful things--in case of being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder? There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie herself had her own odd way--which did n't moreover the least irritate him--of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused himself with declaring, this love of chinoiseries; but she actually this evening did n't mind--he might deal with her Chinese as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener occurred, the impression made (163) on her by a word of Mrs. Assingham's, a word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory which we have just found in our path. It was n't that the Princess could be indebted to another person, even to so clever a one as this friend, for SEEING anything in her husband that she might n't see unaided; but she had ever, hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude any better description of a felt truth than her little limits--terribly marked, she knew, in the direction of saying the right things--enabled her to make. Thus it was at any rate that she was able to live more or less in the light of the fact expressed so lucidly by their common comforter--the fact that the Prince was saving up, for some very mysterious but very fine eventual purpose, all the wisdom, all the answers to his questions, all the impressions and generalisations he gathered; putting them away and packing them down because he wanted his great gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to fire it off. He wanted first to make sure of the WHOLE of the subject that was unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he had collected would find their use. He knew what he was about--trust him at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big noise. And Mrs. Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was about. It was the happy form of this assurance that had remained with Maggie; it could always come in for her that Amerigo knew what he was about. He might at moments seem vague, seem absent, seem even bored: this when, away from her father, with whom it was impossible for him to appear anything but respectfully occupied, he let his (164) native gaiety go in outbreaks of song, or even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at times reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills, which she had at the time of their engagement seen and yearned over, and the Castello proper, described by him always as the "perched" place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head and front of the princedom.