A Novel

by Henry James

1886


Contents

 BOOK FIRST
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII
 IX
 X
 XI

 BOOK SECOND
 XII
 XIII
 XIV
 XV
 XVI
 XVII
 XVIII
 XIX
 XX
 XXI

 BOOK THIRD
 XXII
 XXIII
 XXIV
 XXV
 XXVI
 XXVII
 XXVIII

 BOOK FOURTH
 XXIX
 XXX
 XXXI
 XXXII
 XXXIII
 XXXIV
 XXXV
 XXXVI
 XXXVII

 BOOK FIFTH
 XXXVIII
 XXXIX
 XL
 XLI
 XLII

 BOOK SIXTH
 XLIII
 XLIV
 XLV
 XLVI
 XLVII




BOOK FIRST




I


“Oh yes, I dare say I can find the child, if you would like to see
him,” Miss Pynsent said; she had a fluttering wish to assent to every
suggestion made by her visitor, whom she regarded as a high and rather
terrible personage. To look for the little boy she came out of her
small parlour, which she had been ashamed to exhibit in so untidy a
state, with paper ‘patterns’ lying about on the furniture and snippings
of stuff scattered over the carpet—she came out of this somewhat stuffy
sanctuary, dedicated at once to social intercourse and to the ingenious
art to which her life had been devoted, and, opening the house-door,
turned her eyes up and down the little street. It would presently be
tea-time, and she knew that at that solemn hour Hyacinth narrowed the
circle of his wanderings. She was anxious and impatient, and in a fever
of excitement and complacency, not wanting to keep Mrs Bowerbank
waiting, though she sat there, heavily and consideringly, as if she
meant to stay; and wondering not a little whether the object of her
quest would have a dirty face. Mrs Bowerbank had intimated so
definitely that she thought it remarkable on Miss Pynsent’s part to
have taken care of him gratuitously for so many years, that the humble
dressmaker, whose imagination took flights about every one but herself,
and who had never been conscious of an exemplary benevolence, suddenly
aspired to appear, throughout, as devoted to the child as she had
struck her solemn, substantial guest as being, and felt how much she
should like him to come in fresh and frank, and looking as pretty as he
sometimes did. Miss Pynsent, who blinked confusedly as she surveyed the
outer prospect, was very much flushed, partly with the agitation of
what Mrs Bowerbank had told her, and partly because, when she offered
that lady a drop of something refreshing, at the end of so long an
expedition, she had said she couldn’t think of touching anything unless
Miss Pynsent would keep her company. The cheffonier (as Amanda was
always careful to call it), beside the fireplace, yielded up a small
bottle which had formerly contained eau-de-cologne and which now
exhibited half a pint of a rich gold-coloured liquid. Miss Pynsent was
very delicate; she lived on tea and watercress, and she kept the little
bottle in the cheffonier only for great emergencies. She didn’t like
hot brandy and water, with a lump or two of sugar, but she partook of
half a tumbler on the present occasion, which was of a highly
exceptional kind. At this time of day the boy was often planted in
front of the little sweet-shop on the other side of the street, an
establishment where periodical literature, as well as tough toffy and
hard lollipops, was dispensed, and where song-books and pictorial
sheets were attractively exhibited in the small-paned, dirty window. He
used to stand there for half an hour at a time, spelling out the first
page of the romances in the _Family Herald_ and the _London Journal_,
and admiring the obligatory illustration in which the noble characters
(they were always of the highest birth) were presented to the carnal
eye. When he had a penny he spent only a fraction of it on stale
sugar-candy; with the remaining halfpenny he always bought a ballad,
with a vivid woodcut at the top. Now, however, he was not at his post
of contemplation; nor was he visible anywhere to Miss Pynsent’s
impatient glance.

“Millicent Henning, tell me quickly, have you seen my child?” These
words were addressed by Miss Pynsent to a little girl who sat on the
doorstep of the adjacent house, nursing a dingy doll, and who had an
extraordinary luxuriance of dark brown hair, surmounted by a torn straw
hat. Miss Pynsent pronounced her name Enning.

The child looked up from her dandling and patting, and after a stare of
which the blankness was somewhat exaggerated, replied: “Law no, Miss
Pynsent, I never see him.”

“Aren’t you always messing about with him, you naughty little girl?”
the dressmaker returned, with sharpness. “Isn’t he round the corner,
playing marbles, or—or some jumping game?” Miss Pynsent went on, trying
to be suggestive.

“I assure _you_, he never plays nothing,” said Millicent Henning, with
a mature manner which she bore out by adding, “And I don’t know why I
should be called naughty, neither.”

“Well, if you want to be called good, please go and find him and tell
him there’s a lady here come on purpose to see him, this very instant.”
Miss Pynsent waited a moment, to see if her injunction would be obeyed,
but she got no satisfaction beyond another gaze of deliberation, which
made her feel that the child’s perversity was as great as the beauty,
somewhat soiled and dimmed, of her insolent little face. She turned
back into the house, with an exclamation of despair, and as soon as she
had disappeared Millicent Henning sprang erect and began to race down
the street in the direction of another, which crossed it. I take no
unfair advantage of the innocence of childhood in saying that the
motive of this young lady’s flight was not a desire to be agreeable to
Miss Pynsent, but an extreme curiosity on the subject of the visitor
who wanted to see Hyacinth Robinson. She wished to participate, if only
in imagination, in the interview that might take place, and she was
moved also by a quick revival of friendly feeling for the boy, from
whom she had parted only half an hour before with considerable
asperity. She was not a very clinging little creature, and there was no
one in her own domestic circle to whom she was much attached; but she
liked to kiss Hyacinth when he didn’t push her away and tell her she
was tiresome. It was in this action and epithet he had indulged half an
hour ago; but she had reflected rapidly (while she stared at Miss
Pynsent) that this was the worst he had ever done. Millicent Henning
was only eight years of age, but she knew there was worse in the world
than that.

Mrs Bowerbank, in a leisurely, roundabout way, wandered off to her
sister, Mrs Chipperfield, whom she had come into that part of the world
to see, and the whole history of the dropsical tendencies of whose
husband, an undertaker with a business that had been a blessing because
you could always count on it, she unfolded to Miss Pynsent between the
sips of a second glass. She was a high-shouldered, towering woman, and
suggested squareness as well as a pervasion of the upper air, so that
Amanda reflected that she must be very difficult to fit, and had a
sinking at the idea of the number of pins she would take. Her sister
had nine children and she herself had seven, the eldest of whom she
left in charge of the others when she went to her service. She was on
duty at the prison only during the day; she had to be there at seven in
the morning, but she got her evenings at home, quite regular and
comfortable. Miss Pynsent thought it wonderful she could talk of
comfort in such a life as that, but could easily imagine she should be
glad to get away at night, for at that time the place must be much more
terrible.

“And aren’t you frightened of them—ever?” she inquired, looking up at
her visitor with her little heated face.

Mrs Bowerbank was very slow, and considered her so long before
replying, that she felt herself to be, in an alarming degree, in the
eye of the law; for who could be more closely connected with the
administration of justice than a female turnkey, especially so big and
majestic a one? “I expect they are more frightened of me,” she replied
at last; and it was an idea into which Miss Pynsent could easily enter.

“And at night I suppose they rave, quite awful,” the little dressmaker
suggested, feeling vaguely that prisons and madhouses came very much to
the same.

“Well, if they do, we hush ’em up,” Mrs Bowerbank remarked, rather
portentously; while Miss Pynsent fidgeted to the door again, without
results, to see if the child had become visible. She observed to her
guest that she couldn’t call it anything but contrary that he should
not turn up, when he knew so well, most days in the week, when his tea
was ready. To which Mrs Bowerbank rejoined, fixing her companion again
with the steady orb of justice, “And do he have his tea, that way, by
himself, like a little gentleman?”

“Well, I try to give it to him tidy-like, at a suitable hour,” said
Miss Pynsent, guiltily. “And there might be some who would say that,
for the matter of that, he _is_ a little gentleman,” she added, with an
effort at mitigation which, as she immediately became conscious, only
involved her more deeply.

“There are people silly enough to say anything. If it’s your parents
that settle your station, the child hasn’t much to be thankful for,”
Mrs Bowerbank went on, in the manner of a woman accustomed to looking
facts in the face.

Miss Pynsent was very timid, but she adored the aristocracy, and there
were elements in the boy’s life which she was not prepared to sacrifice
even to a person who represented such a possibility of grating bolts
and clanking chains. “I suppose we oughtn’t to forget that his father
was very high,” she suggested, appealingly, with her hands clasped
tightly in her lap.

“His father? Who knows who _he_ was? He doesn’t set up for having a
father, does he?”

“But, surely, wasn’t it proved that Lord Frederick—?”

“My dear woman, nothing was proved except that she stabbed his lordship
in the back with a very long knife, that he died of the blow, and that
she got the full sentence. What does such a piece as that know about
fathers? The less said about the poor child’s ancestors the better!”

This view of the case caused Miss Pynsent fairly to gasp, for it pushed
over with a touch a certain tall imaginative structure which she had
been piling up for years. Even as she heard it crash around her she
couldn’t forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material.
“Really—really,” she panted, “she never had to do with any one but the
nobility!”

Mrs Bowerbank surveyed her hostess with an expressionless eye. “My dear
young lady, what does a respectable little body like you, that sits all
day with her needle and scissors, know about the doings of a wicked low
foreigner that carries a knife? I was there when she came in, and I
know to what she had sunk. Her conversation was choice, I assure you.”

“Oh, it’s very dreadful, and of course I know nothing in particular,”
Miss Pynsent quavered. “But she wasn’t low when I worked at the same
place with her, and she often told me she would do nothing for any one
that wasn’t at the very top.”

“She might have talked to you of something that would have done you
both more good,” Mrs Bowerbank remarked, while the dressmaker felt
rebuked in the past as well as in the present. “At the very top, poor
thing! Well, she’s at the very bottom now. If she wasn’t low when she
worked, it’s a pity she didn’t stick to her work; and as for pride of
birth, that’s an article I recommend your young friend to leave to
others. You had better believe what I say, because I’m a woman of the
world.”

Indeed she was, as Miss Pynsent felt, to whom all this was very
terrible, letting in the cold light of the penal system on a dear, dim
little theory. She had cared for the child because maternity was in her
nature, and this was the only manner in which fortune had put it in her
path to become a mother. She had as few belongings as the baby, and it
had seemed to her that he would add to her importance in the little
world of Lomax Place (if she kept it a secret how she came by him),
quite in the proportion in which she should contribute to his
maintenance. Her weakness and loneliness went out to his, and in the
course of time this united desolation was peopled by the dressmaker’s
romantic mind with a hundred consoling evocations. The boy proved
neither a dunce nor a reprobate; but what endeared him to her most was
her conviction that he belonged, ‘by the left hand’, as she had read in
a novel, to an ancient and exalted race, the list of whose
representatives and the record of whose alliances she had once (when
she took home some work and was made to wait, alone, in a lady’s
boudoir) had the opportunity of reading in a fat red book, eagerly and
tremblingly consulted. She bent her head before Mrs Bowerbank’s
overwhelming logic, but she felt in her heart that she shouldn’t give
the child up for all that, that she believed in him still, and that she
recognised, as distinctly as she revered, the quality of her betters.
To believe in Hyacinth, for Miss Pynsent, was to believe that he _was_
the son of the extremely immoral Lord Frederick. She had, from his
earliest age, made him feel that there was a grandeur in his past, and
as Mrs Bowerbank would be sure not to approve of such aberrations Miss
Pynsent prayed she might not question her on that part of the business.
It was not that, when it was necessary, the little dressmaker had any
scruple about using the arts of prevarication; she was a kind and
innocent creature, but she told fibs as freely as she invented
trimmings. She had, however, not yet been questioned by an emissary of
the law, and her heart beat faster when Mrs Bowerbank said to her, in
deep tones, with an effect of abruptness, “And pray, Miss Pynsent, does
the child know it?”

“Know about Lord Frederick?” Miss Pynsent palpitated.

“Bother Lord Frederick! Know about his mother.”

“Oh, I can’t say that. I have never told him.”

“But has any one else told him?”

To this inquiry Miss Pynsent’s answer was more prompt and more proud;
it was with an agreeable sense of having conducted herself with
extraordinary wisdom and propriety that she replied, “How could any one
know? I have never breathed it to a creature!”

Mrs Bowerbank gave utterance to no commendation; she only put down her
empty glass and wiped her large mouth with much thoroughness and
deliberation. Then she said, as if it were as cheerful an idea as, in
the premises, she was capable of expressing, “Ah, well, there’ll be
plenty, later on, to give him all information!”

“I pray God he may live and die without knowing it!” Miss Pynsent
cried, with eagerness.

Her companion gazed at her with a kind of professional patience. “You
don’t keep your ideas together. How can he go to her, then, if he’s
never to know?”

“Oh, did you mean she would tell him?” Miss Pynsent responded,
plaintively.

“Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and
gives him—what she told me.”

“What she told you?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed.

“The kiss her lips have been famished for, for years.”

“Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured, with her
pity gushing up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she
pursued, simply. Then she added, with an inspiration more brilliant,
“We might tell him she’s his aunt!”

“You may tell him she’s his grandmother, if you like. But it’s all in
the family.”

“Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent, musingly and irrepressibly.
“And will she speak French?” she inquired. “In that case he won’t
understand.”

“Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs
Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort. But
she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which
bristled with dangers, “Of course, it’s just according to your own
conscience. You needn’t bring the child at all, unless you like.
There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.”

“And would nothing be done to me, if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent
asked, unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the
arm of the law that was stretched out to touch her.

“The only thing that could happen to you would be that _he_ might throw
it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed, with a
gloomy impartiality.

“Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.”

“Oh, he’d be sure to know, one of these days. We see a great deal of
that—the way things come out,” said Mrs Bowerbank, whose view of life
seemed to abound in cheerless contingencies. “You must remember that it
is her dying wish, and that you may have it on your conscience.”

“That’s a thing I _never_ could abide!” the little dressmaker
exclaimed, with great emphasis and a visible shiver; after which she
picked up various scattered remnants of muslin and cut paper and began
to roll them together with a desperate and mechanical haste. “It’s
quite awful, to know what to do—if you are very sure she _is_ dying.”

“Do you mean she’s shamming? we have plenty of that—but we know how to
treat ’em.”

“Lord, I suppose so,” murmured Miss Pynsent; while her visitor went on
to say that the unfortunate person on whose behalf she had undertaken
this solemn pilgrimage might live a week and might live a fortnight,
but if she lived a month, would violate (as Mrs Bowerbank might express
herself) every established law of nature, being reduced to skin and
bone, with nothing left of her but the main desire to see her child.

“If you’re afraid of her talking, it isn’t much she’d be able to say.
And we shouldn’t allow you more than about eight minutes,” Mrs
Bowerbank pursued, in a tone that seemed to refer itself to an iron
discipline.

“I’m sure I shouldn’t want more; that would be enough to last me many a
year,” said Miss Pynsent, accommodatingly. And then she added, with
another illumination, “Don’t you think he might throw it up against me
that I _did_ take him? People might tell him about her in later years;
but if he hadn’t seen her he wouldn’t be obliged to believe them.”

Mrs Bowerbank considered this a moment, as if it were rather a
super-subtle argument, and then answered, quite in the spirit of her
official pessimism, “There is one thing you may be sure of: whatever
you decide to do, as soon as ever he grows up he will make you wish you
had done the opposite.” Mrs Bowerbank called it oppo_site_.

“Oh, dear, then, I’m glad it will be a long time.”

“It will be ever so long, if once he gets it into his head! At any
rate, you must do as you think best. Only, if you come, you mustn’t
come when it’s all over.”

“It’s too impossible to decide.”

“It is, indeed,” said Mrs Bowerbank, with superior consistency. And she
seemed more placidly grim than ever when she remarked, gathering up her
loosened shawl, that she was much obliged to Miss Pynsent for her
civility, and had been quite freshened up: her visit had so completely
deprived her hostess of that sort of calm. Miss Pynsent gave the
fullest expression to her perplexity in the supreme exclamation—

“If you could only wait and see the child, I’m sure it would help you
to judge!”

“My dear woman, I don’t want to judge—it’s none of our business!” Mrs
Bowerbank exclaimed; and she had no sooner uttered the words than the
door of the room creaked open and a small boy stood there gazing at
her. Her eyes rested on him a moment, and then, most unexpectedly, she
gave an inconsequent cry. “Is that the child? Oh, Lord o’ mercy, don’t
take _him!_”

“Now _ain’t_ he shrinking and sensitive?” demanded Miss Pynsent, who
had pounced upon him, and, holding him an instant at arm’s length,
appealed eagerly to her visitor. “Ain’t he delicate and high-bred, and
wouldn’t he be thrown into a state?” Delicate as he might be the little
dressmaker shook him smartly for his naughtiness in being out of the
way when he was wanted, and brought him to the big, square-faced,
deep-voiced lady who took up, as it were, all that side of the room.
But Mrs Bowerbank laid no hand upon him; she only dropped her gaze from
a tremendous height, and her forbearance seemed a tribute to that
fragility of constitution on which Miss Pynsent desired to insist, just
as her continued gravity was an implication that this scrupulous woman
might well not know what to do.

“Speak to the lady nicely, and tell her you are very sorry to have kept
her waiting.”

The child hesitated a moment, while he reciprocated Mrs Bowerbank’s
inspection, and then he said, with a strange, cool, conscious
indifference (Miss Pynsent instantly recognised it as his aristocratic
manner), “I don’t think she can have been in a very great hurry.”

There was irony in the words, for it is a remarkable fact that even at
the age of ten Hyacinth Robinson was ironical; but the subject of his
allusion, who was not nimble withal, appeared not to interpret it; so
that she rejoined only by remarking, over his head, to Miss Pynsent,
“It’s the very face of her over again!”

“Of _her?_ But what do you say to Lord Frederick?”

“I _have_ seen lords that wasn’t so dainty!”

Miss Pynsent had seen very few lords, but she entered, with a
passionate thrill, into this generalisation; controlling herself,
however, for she remembered the child was tremendously sharp,
sufficiently to declare, in an edifying tone, that he would look more
like what he ought to if his face were a little cleaner.

“It was probably Millicent Henning dirtied my face, when she kissed
me,” the boy announced, with slow gravity, looking all the while at Mrs
Bowerbank. He exhibited not a symptom of shyness.

“Millicent Henning is a very bad little girl; she’ll come to no good,”
said Miss Pynsent, with familiar decision, and also, considering that
the young lady in question had been her effective messenger, with
marked ingratitude.

Against this qualification the child instantly protested. “Why is she
bad? I don’t think she is bad; I like her very much.” It came over him
that he had too hastily shifted to her shoulders the responsibility of
his unseemly appearance, and he wished to make up to her for that
betrayal. He dimly felt that nothing but that particular accusation
could have pushed him to it, for he hated people who were not fresh,
who had smutches and streaks. Millicent Henning generally had two or
three, which she borrowed from her doll, into whom she was always
rubbing her nose and whose dinginess was contagious. It was quite
inevitable she should have left her mark under his own nose when she
claimed her reward for coming to tell him about the lady who wanted
him.

Miss Pynsent held the boy against her knee, trying to present him so
that Mrs Bowerbank should agree with her about his having the air of
race. He was exceedingly diminutive, even for his years, and though his
appearance was not positively sickly it seemed written in his
attenuated little person that he would never be either tall or strong.
His dark blue eyes were separated by a wide interval, which increased
the fairness and sweetness of his face, and his abundant curly hair,
which grew thick and long, had the golden brownness predestined to
elicit exclamations of delight from ladies when they take the inventory
of a child. His features were smooth and pretty; his head was set upon
a slim little neck; his expression, grave and clear, showed a quick
perception as well as a great credulity; and he was altogether, in his
innocent smallness, a refined and interesting figure.

“Yes, he’s one that would be sure to remember,” said Mrs Bowerbank,
mentally contrasting him with the undeveloped members of her own brood,
who had never been retentive of anything but the halfpence which they
occasionally contrived to filch from her. Her eyes descended to the
details of his toilet: the careful mending of his short breeches and
his long, coloured stockings, which she was in a position to
appreciate, as well as the knot of bright ribbon which the dressmaker
had passed into his collar, slightly crumpled by Miss Henning’s
embrace. Of course Miss Pynsent had only one to look after, but her
visitor was obliged to recognise that she had the highest standard in
respect to buttons. “And you _do_ turn him out so it’s a pleasure,” she
went on, noting the ingenious patches in the child’s shoes, which, to
her mind, were repaired for all the world like those of a little
nobleman.

“I’m sure you’re very civil,” said Miss Pynsent, in a state of severe
exaltation. “There’s never a needle but mine has come near him. That’s
exactly what I think: the impression would go so deep.”

“Do you want to see me only to look at me?” Hyacinth inquired, with a
candour which, though unstudied, had again much of the force of satire.

“I’m sure it’s very kind of the lady to notice you at all!” cried his
protectress, giving him an ineffectual jerk. “You’re no bigger than a
flea; there are many that wouldn’t spy you out.”

“You’ll find he’s big enough, I expect, when he begins to go,” Mrs
Bowerbank remarked, tranquilly; and she added that now she saw how he
was turned out she couldn’t but feel that the other side was to be
considered. In her effort to be discreet, on account of his being
present (and so precociously attentive), she became slightly
enigmatical; but Miss Pynsent gathered her meaning, which was that it
was very true the child would take everything in and keep it: but at
the same time it was precisely his being so attractive that made it a
kind of sin not to gratify the poor woman, who, if she knew what he
looked like to-day, wouldn’t forgive his adoptive mamma for not
producing him. “Certainly, in her place, I should go off easier if I
had seen them curls,” Mrs Bowerbank declared, with a flight of maternal
imagination which brought her to her feet, while Miss Pynsent felt that
she was leaving her dreadfully ploughed up, and without any really
fertilising seed having been sown. The little dressmaker packed the
child upstairs to tidy himself for his tea, and while she accompanied
her visitor to the door told her that if she would have a little more
patience with her she would think a day or two longer what was best and
write to her when she should have decided. Mrs Bowerbank continued to
move in a realm superior to poor Miss Pynsent’s vacillations and
timidities, and her impartiality gave her hostess a high idea of her
respectability; but the way was a little smoothed when, after Amanda
had moaned once more, on the threshold, helplessly and irrelevantly,
“Ain’t it a pity she’s so bad?” the ponderous lady from the prison
rejoined, in those tones which seemed meant to resound through
corridors of stone, “I assure you there’s a many that’s much worse!”




II


Miss Pynsent, when she found herself alone, felt that she was really
quite upside down; for the event that had just occurred had never
entered into her calculations: the very nature of the case had seemed
to preclude it. All she knew, and all she wished to know, was that in
one of the dreadful institutions constructed for such purposes her
quondam comrade was serving out the sentence that had been substituted
for the other (the unspeakable horror) almost when the halter was
already round her neck. As there was no question of _that_ concession
being stretched any further, poor Florentine seemed only a little more
dead than other people, having no decent tombstone to mark the place
where she lay. Miss Pynsent had therefore never thought of her dying
again; she had no idea to what prison she had been committed on being
removed from Newgate (she wished to keep her mind a blank about the
matter, in the interest of the child), and it could not occur to her
that out of such silence and darkness a second voice would reach her,
especially a voice that she should really have to listen to. Miss
Pynsent would have said, before Mrs Bowerbank’s visit, that she had no
account to render to any one; that she had taken up the child (who
might have starved in the gutter) out of charity, and had brought him
up, poor and precarious as her own subsistence had been, without a
penny’s help from another source; that the mother had forfeited every
right and title; and that this had been understood between them—if
anything, in so dreadful an hour, could have been said to be
understood—when she went to see her at Newgate (that terrible episode,
nine years before, overshadowed all Miss Pynsent’s other memories):
went to see her because Florentine had sent for her (a name, face and
address coming up out of the still recent but sharply separated past of
their working-girl years) as the one friend to whom she could appeal
with some chance of a pitying answer. The effect of violent emotion,
with Miss Pynsent, was not to make her sit with idle hands or fidget
about to no purpose; under its influence, on the contrary, she threw
herself into little jobs, as a fugitive takes to by-paths, and clipped
and cut, and stitched and basted, as if she were running a race with
hysterics. And while her hands, her scissors, her needle flew, an
infinite succession of fantastic possibilities trotted through her
confused little head; she had a furious imagination, and the act of
reflection, in her mind, was always a panorama of figures and scenes.
She had had her picture of the future, painted in rather rosy hues,
hung up before her now for a good many years; but it seemed to her that
Mrs Bowerbank’s heavy hand had suddenly punched a hole in the canvas.
It must be added, however, that if Amanda’s thoughts were apt to be
bewildering visions they sometimes led her to make up her mind, and on
this particular September evening she arrived at a momentous decision.
What she made up her mind to was to take advice, and in pursuance of
this view she rushed downstairs, and, jerking Hyacinth away from his
simple but unfinished repast, packed him across the street to tell Mr
Vetch (if he had not yet started for the theatre) that she begged he
would come in to see her when he came home that night, as she had
something very particular she wished to say to him. It didn’t matter if
he should be very late, he could come in at any hour—he would see her
light in the window—and he would do her a real mercy. Miss Pynsent knew
it would be of no use for her to go to bed; she felt as if she should
never close her eyes again. Mr Vetch was her most distinguished friend;
she had an immense appreciation of his cleverness and knowledge of the
world, as well as of the purity of his taste in matters of conduct and
opinion; and she had already consulted him about Hyacinth’s education.
The boy needed no urging to go on such an errand, for he, too, had his
ideas about the little fiddler, the second violin in the orchestra of
the Bloomsbury Theatre. Mr Vetch had once obtained for the pair an
order for two seats at a pantomime, and for Hyacinth the impression of
that ecstatic evening had consecrated him, placed him for ever in the
golden glow of the footlights. There were things in life of which, even
at the age of ten, it was a conviction of the boy’s that it would be
his fate never to see enough, and one of them was the wonder-world
illuminated by those playhouse lamps. But there would be chances,
perhaps, if one didn’t lose sight of Mr Vetch; he might open the door
again; he was a privileged, magical mortal, who went to the play every
night.

He came in to see Miss Pynsent about midnight; as soon as she heard the
lame tinkle of the bell she went to the door to let him in. He was an
original, in the fullest sense of the word: a lonely, disappointed,
embittered, cynical little man, whose musical organisation had been
sterile, who had the nerves, the sensibilities, of a gentleman, and
whose fate had condemned him, for the last ten years, to play a fiddle
at a second-rate theatre for a few shillings a week. He had ideas of
his own about everything, and they were not always very improving. For
Amanda Pynsent he represented art, literature (the literature of the
play-bill) and philosophy, and she always felt about him as if he
belonged to a higher social sphere, though his earnings were hardly
greater than her own and he lived in a single back-room, in a house
where she had never seen a window washed. He had, for her, the glamour
of reduced gentility and fallen fortunes; she was conscious that he
spoke a different language (though she couldn’t have said in what the
difference consisted) from the other members of her humble, almost
suburban circle; and the shape of his hands was distinctly
aristocratic. (Miss Pynsent, as I have intimated, was immensely
preoccupied with that element in life.) Mr Vetch displeased her only by
one of the facets of his character—his blasphemous republican, radical
views, and the contemptuous manner in which he expressed himself about
the nobility. On that ground he worried her extremely, though he never
seemed to her so clever as when he horrified her most. These dreadful
theories (expressed so brilliantly that, really, they might have been
dangerous if Miss Pynsent had not known her own place so well)
constituted no presumption against his refined origin; they were
explained, rather, to a certain extent, by a just resentment at finding
himself excluded from his proper place. Mr Vetch was short, fat and
bald, though he was not much older than Miss Pynsent, who was not much
older than some people who called themselves forty-five; he always went
to the theatre in evening-dress, with a flower in his button-hole, and
wore a glass in one eye. He looked placid and genial, and as if he
would fidget at the most about the ‘get up’ of his linen; you would
have thought him finical but superficial, and never have suspected that
he was a revolutionist, or even a critic of life. Sometimes, when he
could get away from the theatre early enough, he went with a pianist, a
friend of his, to play dance-music at small parties; and after such
expeditions he was particularly cynical and startling; he indulged in
diatribes against the British middle-class, its Philistinism, its
snobbery. He seldom had much conversation with Miss Pynsent without
telling her that she had the intellectual outlook of a caterpillar; but
this was his privilege after a friendship now of seven years’ standing,
which had begun (the year after he came to live in Lomax Place) with
her going over to nurse him, on learning from the milk-woman that he
was alone at Number 17—laid up with an attack of gastritis. He always
compared her to an insect or a bird, and she didn’t mind, because she
knew he liked her, and she herself liked all winged creatures. How
indeed could she complain, after hearing him call the Queen a
superannuated form and the Archbishop of Canterbury a grotesque
superstition?

He laid his violin-case on the table, which was covered with a
confusion of fashion-plates and pincushions, and glanced toward the
fire, where a kettle was gently hissing. Miss Pynsent, who had put it
on half an hour before, read his glance, and reflected with complacency
that Mrs Bowerbank had not absolutely drained the little bottle in the
_cheffonier_. She placed it on the table again, this time with a single
glass, and told her visitor that, as a great exception, he might light
his pipe. In fact, she always made the exception, and he always replied
to the gracious speech by inquiring whether she supposed the
greengrocers’ wives, the butchers’ daughters, for whom she worked, had
fine enough noses to smell, in the garments she sent home, the fumes of
his tobacco. He knew her ‘connection’ was confined to small
shopkeepers, but she didn’t wish others to know it, and would have
liked them to believe it was important that the poor little stuffs she
made up (into very queer fashions, I am afraid) should not surprise the
feminine nostril. But it had always been impossible to impose on Mr
Vetch; he guessed the truth, the untrimmed truth, about everything in a
moment. She was sure he would do so now, in regard to this solemn
question which had come up about Hyacinth; he would see that though she
was agreeably flurried at finding herself whirled in the last eddies of
a case that had been so celebrated in its day, her secret wish was to
shirk her duty (if it _was_ a duty): to keep the child from ever
knowing his mother’s unmentionable history, the shame that attached to
his origin, the opportunity she had had of letting him see the wretched
woman before she died. She knew Mr Vetch would read her troubled
thoughts, but she hoped he would say they were natural and just; she
reflected that as he took an interest in Hyacinth he wouldn’t desire
him to be subjected to a mortification that might rankle for ever and
perhaps even crush him to the earth. She related Mrs Bowerbank’s visit,
while he sat upon the sofa in the very place where that majestic woman
had reposed, and puffed his smoke-wreaths into the dusky little room.
He knew the story of the child’s birth, had known it years before, so
she had no startling revelation to make. He was not in the least
agitated at learning that Florentine was dying in prison and had
managed to get a message conveyed to Amanda; he thought this so much in
the usual course that he said to Miss Pynsent, “Did you expect her to
live on there for ever, working out her terrible sentence, just to
spare you the annoyance of a dilemma, or any reminder of her miserable
existence, which you have preferred to forget?” That was just the sort
of question Mr Vetch was sure to ask, and he inquired, further, of his
dismayed hostess, whether she were sure her friend’s message (he called
the unhappy creature her friend) had come to her in the regular way.
The warders, surely, had no authority to introduce visitors to their
captives; and was it a question of her going off to the prison on the
sole authority of Mrs Bowerbank? The little dressmaker explained that
this lady had merely come to sound her, Florentine had begged so hard.
She had been in Mrs Bowerbank’s ward before her removal to the
infirmary, where she now lay ebbing away, and she had communicated her
desire to the Catholic chaplain, who had undertaken that some
satisfaction—of inquiry, at least—should be given her. He had thought
it best to ascertain first whether the person in charge of the child
would be willing to bring him, such a course being perfectly optional,
and he had some talk with Mrs Bowerbank on the subject, in which it was
agreed between them that if she would approach Miss Pynsent and explain
to her the situation, leaving her to do what she thought best, he would
answer for it that the consent of the governor of the prison should be
given to the interview. Miss Pynsent had lived for fourteen years in
Lomax Place, and Florentine had never forgotten that this was her
address at the time she came to her at Newgate (before her dreadful
sentence had been commuted), and promised, in an outgush of pity for
one whom she had known in the days of her honesty and brightness, that
she would save the child, rescue it from the workhouse and the streets,
keep it from the fate that had swallowed up the mother. Mrs Bowerbank
had a half-holiday, and a sister living also in the north of London, to
whom she had been for some time intending a visit; so that after her
domestic duty had been performed it had been possible for her to drop
in on Miss Pynsent in a natural, casual way and put the case before
her. It would be just as she might be disposed to view it. She was to
think it over a day or two, but not long, because the woman was so ill,
and then write to Mrs Bowerbank, at the prison. If she should consent,
Mrs Bowerbank would tell the chaplain, and the chaplain would obtain
the order from the governor and send it to Lomax Place; after which
Amanda would immediately set out with her unconscious victim. But
should she—_must_ she—consent? That was the terrible, the heart-shaking
question, with which Miss Pynsent’s unaided wisdom had been unable to
grapple.

“After all, he isn’t hers any more—he’s mine, mine only, and mine
always. I should like to know if all I have done for him doesn’t make
him so!” It was in this manner that Amanda Pynsent delivered herself,
while she plied her needle, faster than ever, in a piece of stuff that
was pinned to her knee.

Mr Vetch watched her awhile, blowing silently at his pipe, with his
head thrown back on the high, stiff, old-fashioned sofa, and his little
legs crossed under him like a Turk’s. “It’s true you have done a good
deal for him. You are a good little woman, my dear Pinnie, after all.”
He said ‘after all’, because that was a part of his tone. In reality he
had never had a moment’s doubt that she was the best little woman in
the north of London.

“I have done what I could, and I don’t want no fuss made about it. Only
it does make a difference when you come to look at it—about taking him
off to see another woman. And _such_ another woman—and in such a place!
I think it’s hardly right to take an innocent child.”

“I don’t know about that; there are people that would tell you it would
do him good. If he didn’t like the place as a child, he would take more
care to keep out of it later.”

“Lord, Mr Vetch, how can you think? And him such a perfect little
gentleman!” Miss Pynsent cried.

“Is it you that have made him one?” the fiddler asked. “It doesn’t run
in the family, you’d say.”

“Family? what do you know about that?” she replied, quickly, catching
at her dearest, her only hobby.

“Yes, indeed, what does any one know? what did she know herself?” And
then Miss Pynsent’s visitor added, irrelevantly, “Why should you have
taken him on your back? Why did you want to be so good? No one else
thinks it necessary.”

“I didn’t want to be good. That is, I do want to, of course, in a
general way: but that wasn’t the reason then. But I had nothing of my
own—I had nothing in the world but my thimble.”

“That would have seemed to most people a reason for not adopting a
prostitute’s bastard.”

“Well, I went to see him at the place where he was (just where she had
left him, with the woman of the house), and I saw what kind of a shop
_that_ was, and felt it was a shame an innocent child should grow up in
such a place.” Miss Pynsent defended herself as earnestly as if her
inconsistency had been of a criminal cast. “And he wouldn’t have grown
up, neither. _They_ wouldn’t have troubled themselves long with a
helpless baby. _They’d_ have played some trick on him, if it was only
to send him to the workhouse. Besides, I always was fond of tiny
creatures, and I have been fond of this one,” she went on, speaking as
if with a consciousness, on her own part, of almost heroic proportions.
“He was in my way the first two or three years, and it was a good deal
of a pull to look after the business and him together. But now he’s
like the business—he seems to go of himself.”

“Oh, if he flourishes as the business flourishes, you can just enjoy
your peace of mind,” said the fiddler, still with his manner of making
a small dry joke of everything.

“That’s all very well, but it doesn’t close my eyes to that poor woman
lying there and moaning just for the touch of his little ’and before
she passes away. Mrs Bowerbank says she believes I will bring him.”

“Who believes? Mrs Bowerbank?”

“I wonder if there’s anything in life holy enough for you to take it
seriously,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, snapping off a thread, with temper.
“The day you stop laughing I should like to be there.”

“So long as you are there, I shall never stop. What is it you want me
to advise you? to take the child, or to leave the mother to groan
herself out?”

“I want you to tell me whether he’ll curse me when he grows older.”

“That depends upon what you do. However, he will probably do it in
either case.”

“You don’t believe that, because you like him,” said Amanda, with
acuteness.

“Precisely; and he’ll curse me too. He’ll curse every one. He won’t be
happy.”

“I don’t know how you think I bring him up,” the little dressmaker
remarked, with dignity.

“You don’t bring him up; he brings you up.”

“That’s what you have always said; but you don’t know. If you mean that
he does as he likes, then he ought to be happy. It ain’t kind of you to
say he won’t be,” Miss Pynsent added, reproachfully.

“I would say anything you like, if what I say would help the matter.
He’s a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of
imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more
of life than he will find in it. That’s why he won’t be happy.”

Miss Pynsent listened to this description of her _protégé_ with an
appearance of criticising it mentally; but in reality she didn’t know
what ‘morbid’ meant, and didn’t like to ask. “He’s the cleverest person
I know, except yourself,” she said in a moment, for Mr Vetch’s words
had been in the key of what she thought most remarkable in him. What
that was she would have been unable to say.

“Thank you very much for putting me first,” the fiddler rejoined, after
a series of puffs. “The youngster is interesting, one sees that he has
a mind, and in that respect he is—I won’t say unique, but peculiar. I
shall watch him with curiosity, to see what he grows into. But I shall
always be glad that I’m a selfish brute of a bachelor; that I never
invested in that class of goods.”

“Well, you _are_ comforting. You would spoil him more than I do,” said
Amanda.

“Possibly, but it would be in a different way. I wouldn’t tell him
every three minutes that his father was a duke.”

“A duke I never mentioned!” the little dressmaker cried, with
eagerness. “I never specified any rank, nor said a word about any one
in particular. I never so much as insinuated the name of his lordship.
But I may have said that if the truth was to be found out, he might be
proved to be connected—in the way of cousinship, or something of the
kind—with the highest in the land. I should have thought myself wanting
if I hadn’t given him a glimpse of that. But there is one thing I have
always added—that the truth never _is_ found out.”

“You are still more comforting than I!” Mr Vetch exclaimed. He
continued to watch her, with his charitable, round-faced smile, and
then he said, “You won’t do what I say; so what is the use of my
telling you?”

“I assure you I will, if you say you believe it’s the only right.”

“Do I often say anything so asinine? Right—right? what have you to do
with that? If you want the only right, you are very particular.”

“Please, then, what am I to go by?” the dressmaker asked, bewildered.

“You are to go by this, by what will take the youngster down.”

“Take him down, my poor little pet?”

“Your poor little pet thinks himself the flower of creation. I don’t
say there is any harm in that: a fine, blooming, odoriferous conceit is
a natural appendage of youth and cleverness. I don’t say there is any
great harm in it, but if you want a guide as to how you are to treat a
boy, that’s as good a guide as any other.”

“You want me to arrange the interview, then?”

“I don’t want you to do anything but give me another sip of brandy. I
just say this: that I think it’s a great gain, early in life, to know
the worst; then we don’t live in a fool’s paradise. I did that till I
was nearly forty; then I woke up and found I was in Lomax Place.”
Whenever Mr Vetch said anything that could be construed as a reference
to a former position which had had elements of distinction, Miss
Pynsent observed a respectful, a tasteful, silence, and that is why she
did not challenge him now, though she wanted very much to say that
Hyacinth was no more ‘presumptuous’ (that was the term she should have
used) than he had reason to be, with his genteel figure and his
wonderful intelligence; and that as for thinking himself a ‘flower’ of
any kind, he knew but too well that he lived in a small black-faced
house, miles away from the West End, rented by a poor little woman who
took lodgers, and who, as they were of such a class that they were not
always to be depended upon to settle her weekly account, had a strain
to make two ends meet, in spite of the sign between her windows—

MISS AMANDA PYNSENT.
_Modes et Robes_.
DRESSMAKING IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. COURT-DRESSES,
MANTLES AND FASHIONABLE BONNETS.


Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to
interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts) and remarked
that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his
actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world,
without one’s wanting him to be any lower. “But by the time he’s
twenty, he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that
your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar,
and that when an old friend came to see you late at night it was not
your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll
teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.”

“Do you mean he’ll forget _me_, he’ll deny me?” cried Miss Pynsent,
stopping the movement of her needle, short off, for the first time.

“As the person designated in that attractive blazonry on the outside of
your house, decidedly he will; and me, equally, as a bald-headed,
pot-bellied fiddler, who regarded you as the most graceful and refined
of his acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never
knew you: I don’t think he will ever be such an odious little cad as
that; he probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some
love, and possibly even some gratitude, in him. But he will, in his
imagination (and that will always persuade him), subject you to some
extraordinary metamorphosis; he will dress you up.”

“He’ll dress me up!” Amanda ejaculated, quite ceasing to follow the
train of Mr Vetch’s demonstration. “Do you mean that he’ll have the
property—that his relations will take him up?”

“My dear, delightful, idiotic Pinnie, I am speaking in a figurative
manner. I don’t pretend to say what his precise position will be when
we are relegated; but I affirm that relegation will be our fate.
Therefore don’t stuff him with any more illusions than are necessary to
keep him alive; he will be sure to pick up enough on the way. On the
contrary, give him a good stiff dose of the truth at the start.”

“Dear me, dear me, of course you see much further into it than I could
ever do,” Pinnie murmured, as she threaded a needle.

Mr Vetch paused a minute, but apparently not out of deference to this
amiable interruption. He went on suddenly, with a ring of feeling in
his voice. “Let him know, because it will be useful to him later, the
state of the account between society and himself; he can then conduct
himself accordingly. If he is the illegitimate child of a French
good-for-naught who murdered one of her numerous lovers, don’t shuffle
out of sight so important a fact. I regard that as a most valuable
origin.”

“Lord, Mr Vetch, how you talk!” cried Miss Pynsent, staring. “I don’t
know what one would think, to hear you.”

“Surely, my dear lady, and for this reason: that those are the people
with whom society has to count. It hasn’t with you and me.” Miss
Pynsent gave a sigh which might have meant either that she was well
aware of that, or that Mr Vetch had a terrible way of enlarging a
subject, especially when it was already too big for her; and her
philosophic visitor went on: “Poor little devil, let him see her, let
him see her.”

“And if later, when he’s twenty, he says to me that if I hadn’t meddled
in it he need never have known, he need never have had that shame, pray
what am I to say to him then? That’s what I can’t get out my head.”

“You can say to him that a young man who is sorry for having gone to
his mother when, in her last hours, she lay groaning for him on a
pallet in a penitentiary, deserves more than the sharpest pang he can
possibly feel.” And the little fiddler, getting up, went over to the
fireplace and shook out the ashes of his pipe.

“Well, I am sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent,
folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated
her throughout the evening.

“I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly; that’s not the
worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly, in this
sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea
or two, and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull
acceptance, the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density.” Here
Mr Vetch stopped short; his hostess stood before him with eyes of
entreaty, with clasped hands.

“Now, Anastasius Vetch, don’t go off into them dreadful wild theories!”
she cried, always ungrammatical when she was strongly moved. “You
always fly away over the house-tops. I thought you liked him better—the
dear little unfortunate.”

Anastasius Vetch had pocketed his pipe; he put on his hat with the
freedom of old acquaintance and of Lomax Place, and took up his small
coffin-like fiddle-case. “My good Pinnie, I don’t think you understand
a word I say. It’s no use talking—do as you like!”

“Well, I must say I don’t think it was worth your coming in at midnight
only to tell me that. I don’t like anything—I hate the whole dreadful
business!”

He bent over, in his short plumpness, to kiss her hand, as he had seen
people do on the stage. “My dear friend, we have different ideas, and I
never shall succeed in driving mine into your head. It’s because I _am_
fond of him, poor little devil; but you will never understand that. I
want him to know everything, and especially the worst—the worst, as I
have said. If I were in his position, I shouldn’t thank you for trying
to make a fool of me!”

“A fool of you? as if I thought of anything but his ’appiness!” Amanda
Pynsent exclaimed. She stood looking at him, but following her own
reflections; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She
remembered, what she had noticed before, in other occurrences, that his
reasons were always more extraordinary than his behaviour itself; if
you only considered his life you wouldn’t have thought him so fanciful.
“Very likely I think too much of that,” she added. “She wants him and
cries for him: that’s what keeps coming back to me.” She took up her
lamp to light Mr Vetch to the door (for the dim luminary in the passage
had long since been extinguished), and before he left the house he
turned, suddenly, stopping short, and said, his composed face taking a
strange expression from the quizzical glimmer of his little round eyes—

“What does it matter after all, and why do you worry? What difference
can it make what happens—on either side—to such low people?”




III


Mrs Bowerbank had let her know she would meet her, almost at the
threshold of the dreadful place; and this thought had sustained Miss
Pynsent in her long and devious journey, performed partly on foot,
partly in a succession of omnibuses. She had had ideas about a cab, but
she decided to reserve the cab for the return, as then, very likely,
she should be so shaken with emotion, so overpoweringly affected, that
it would be a comfort to escape from observation. She had no confidence
that if once she passed the door of the prison she should ever be
restored to liberty and her customers; it seemed to her an adventure as
dangerous as it was dismal, and she was immensely touched by the
clear-faced eagerness of the child at her side, who strained forward as
brightly as he had done on another occasion, still celebrated in Miss
Pynsent’s industrious annals, a certain sultry Saturday in August, when
she had taken him to the Tower. It had been a terrible question with
her, when once she made up her mind, what she should tell him about the
nature of their errand. She determined to tell him as little as
possible, to say only that she was going to see a poor woman who was in
prison on account of a crime she had committed years before, and who
had sent for her, and caused her to be told at the same time that if
there was any child she could see—as children (if they were good) were
bright and cheering—it would make her very happy that such a little
visitor should come as well. It was very difficult, with Hyacinth, to
make reservations or mysteries; he wanted to know everything about
everything, and he projected the light of a hundred questions upon Miss
Pynsent’s incarcerated friend. She had to admit that she had been her
friend (for where else was the obligation to go to see her?); but she
spoke of the acquaintance as if it were of the slightest (it had
survived in the memory of the prisoner only because every one else—the
world was so very hard!—had turned away from her), and she
congratulated herself on a happy inspiration when she represented the
crime for which such a penalty had been exacted as the theft of a gold
watch, in a moment of irresistible temptation. The woman had had a
wicked husband, who maltreated and deserted her, and she was very poor,
almost starving, dreadfully pressed. Hyacinth listened to her history
with absorbed attention, and then he said—

“And hadn’t she any children—hadn’t she a little boy?”

This inquiry seemed to Miss Pynsent a portent of future embarrassments,
but she met it as bravely as she could, and replied that she believed
the wretched victim of the law had had (once upon a time) a very small
baby, but she was afraid she had completely lost sight of it. He must
know they didn’t allow babies in prisons. To this Hyacinth rejoined
that of course they would allow him, because he was—really—big. Miss
Pynsent fortified herself with the memory of her other pilgrimage, to
Newgate, upwards of ten years before; she had escaped from that ordeal,
and had even had the comfort of knowing that in its fruits the
interview had been beneficent. The responsibility, however, was much
greater now, and, after all, it was not on her own account she was in a
nervous tremor, but on that of the urchin over whom the shadow of the
house of shame might cast itself.

They made the last part of their approach on foot, having got
themselves deposited as near as possible to the river and keeping
beside it (according to advice elicited by Miss Pynsent, on the way, in
a dozen confidential interviews with policemen, conductors of
omnibuses, and small shopkeepers), till they came to a big, dark
building with towers, which they would know as soon as they looked at
it. They knew it, in fact, soon enough, when they saw it lift its dusky
mass from the bank of the Thames, lying there and sprawling over the
whole neighbourhood, with brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly,
truncated pinnacles, and a character unspeakably sad and stern. It
looked very sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent’s eyes, and she
wondered why a prison should have such an evil face if it was erected
in the interest of justice and order—an expression of the righteous
forces of society. This particular penitentiary struck her as about as
bad and wrong as those who were in it; it threw a blight over the whole
place and made the river look foul and poisonous, and the opposite
bank, with its protrusion of long-necked chimneys, unsightly gasometers
and deposits of rubbish, wear the aspect of a region at whose expense
the jail had been populated. She looked up at the dull, closed gates,
tightening her grasp of Hyacinth’s small hand; and if it was hard to
believe anything so blind and deaf and closely fastened would relax
itself to let her in, there was a dreadful premonitory sinking of the
heart attached to the idea of its taking the same trouble to let her
out. As she hung back, murmuring vague ejaculations, at the very goal
of her journey, an incident occurred which fanned all her scruples and
reluctances into life again. The child suddenly jerked his hand out of
her own, and placing it behind him, in the clutch of the other, said to
her respectfully but resolutely, while he planted himself at a
considerable distance—

“I don’t like this place.”

“Neither do I like it, my darling,” cried the dressmaker, pitifully.
“Oh, if you knew how little!”

“Then we will go away. I won’t go in.”

She would have embraced this proposition with alacrity if it had not
become very vivid to her while she stood there, in the midst of her
shrinking, that behind those sullen walls the mother who bore him was
even then counting the minutes. She was alive, in that huge, dark tomb,
and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that they had already entered into
relation with her. They were near her, and she knew it; in a few
minutes she would taste the cup of the only mercy (except the reprieve
from hanging!) she had known since her fall. A few, a very few minutes
would do it, and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that if she should fail of
her charity now the watches of the night, in Lomax Place, would be
haunted with remorse—perhaps even with something worse. There was
something inside that waited and listened, something that would burst,
with an awful sound, a shriek, or a curse, if she were to lead the boy
away. She looked into his pale face for a moment, perfectly conscious
that it would be vain for her to take the tone of command; besides,
that would have seemed to her shocking. She had another inspiration,
and she said to him in a manner in which she had had occasion to speak
before—

“The reason why we have come is only to be kind. If we are kind we
shan’t mind its being disagreeable.”

“Why should we be kind, if she’s a bad woman?” Hyacinth inquired. “She
must be very low; I don’t want to know her.”

“Hush, hush,” groaned poor Amanda, edging toward him with clasped
hands. “She is not bad now; it has all been washed away—it has been
expiated.”

“What’s expiated?” asked the child, while she almost kneeled down in
the dust, catching him to her bosom.

“It’s when you have suffered terribly—suffered so much that it has made
you good again.”

“Has _she_ suffered very much?”

“For years and years. And now she is dying. It proves she is very good
now, that she should want to see us.”

“Do you mean because _we_ are good?” Hyacinth went on, probing the
matter in a way that made his companion quiver, and gazing away from
her, very seriously, across the river, at the dreary waste of
Battersea.

“We shall be good if we are pitiful, if we make an effort,” said the
dressmaker, seeming to look up at him rather than down.

“But if she is dying? I don’t want to see any one die.”

Miss Pynsent was bewildered, but she rejoined, desperately, “If we go
to her, perhaps she won’t. Maybe we shall save her.”

He transferred his remarkable little eyes—eyes which always appeared to
her to belong to a person older than herself, to her face; and then he
inquired, “Why should I save her, if I don’t like her?”

“If she likes you, that will be enough.”

At this Miss Pynsent began to see that he was moved. “Will she like me
very much?”

“More, much more than any one.”

“More than you, now?”

“Oh,” said Amanda quickly, “I mean more than she likes any one.”

Hyacinth had slipped his hands into the pockets of his scanty
knickerbockers, and, with his legs slightly apart, he looked from his
companion back to the immense dreary jail. A great deal, to Miss
Pynsent’s sense, depended on that moment. “Oh, well,” he said, at last,
“I’ll just step in.”

“Deary, deary!” the dressmaker murmured to herself, as they crossed the
bare semicircle which separated the gateway from the unfrequented
street. She exerted herself to pull the bell, which seemed to her
terribly big and stiff, and while she waited, again, for the
consequences of this effort, the boy broke out, abruptly—

“How can she like me so much if she doesn’t know me?”

Miss Pynsent wished the gate would open before an answer to this
question should become imperative, but the people within were a long
time arriving, and their delay gave Hyacinth an opportunity to repeat
it. So the dressmaker rejoined, seizing the first pretext that came
into her head, “It’s because the little baby she had, of old, was also
named Hyacinth.”

“That’s a queer reason,” the boy murmured, staring across again at the
Battersea shore.

A moment afterwards they found themselves in a vast interior dimness,
with a grinding of keys and bolts going on behind them. Hereupon Miss
Pynsent gave herself up to an overruling providence, and she
remembered, later, no circumstance of what happened to her until the
great person of Mrs Bowerbank loomed before her in the narrowness of a
strange, dark corridor. She only had a confused impression of being
surrounded with high black walls, whose inner face was more dreadful
than the other, the one that overlooked the river; of passing through
gray, stony courts, in some of which dreadful figures, scarcely female,
in hideous brown, misfitting uniforms and perfect frights of hoods,
were marching round in a circle; of squeezing up steep, unlighted
staircases at the heels of a woman who had taken possession of her at
the first stage, and who made incomprehensible remarks to other women,
of lumpish aspect, as she saw them erect themselves, suddenly and
spectrally, with dowdy untied bonnets, in uncanny corners and recesses
of the draughty labyrinth. If the place had seemed cruel to the poor
little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike
her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her tortuous way into the
circular shafts of cells, where she had an opportunity of looking at
captives through grated peepholes and of edging past others who had
temporarily been turned into the corridors—silent women, with fixed
eyes, who flattened themselves against the stone walls at the brush of
the visitor’s dress and whom Miss Pynsent was afraid to glance at. She
never had felt so immured, so made sure of; there were walls within
walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its
colour, and you couldn’t imagine what o’clock it was. Mrs Bowerbank
appeared to have failed her, and that made her feel worse; a panic
seized her, as she went, in regard to the child. On him, too, the
horror of the place would have fallen, and she had a sickening
prevision that he would have convulsions after they got home. It was a
most improper place to have brought him, no matter who had sent for him
and no matter who was dying. The stillness would terrify him, she was
sure—the penitential dumbness of the clustered or isolated women. She
clasped his hand more tightly, and she felt him keep close to her,
without speaking a word. At last, in an open doorway, darkened by her
ample person, Mrs Bowerbank revealed herself, and Miss Pynsent thought
it (afterwards) a sign of her place and power that she should not
condescend to apologise for not having appeared till that moment, or to
explain why she had not met the bewildered pilgrims near the principal
entrance, according to her promise. Miss Pynsent could not embrace the
state of mind of people who didn’t apologise, though she vaguely envied
and admired it, she herself spending much of her time in making excuses
for obnoxious acts she had not committed. Mrs Bowerbank, however, was
not arrogant, she was only massive and muscular; and after she had
taken her timorous friends in tow the dressmaker was able to comfort
herself with the reflection that even so masterful a woman couldn’t
inflict anything gratuitously disagreeable on a person who had made her
visit in Lomax Place pass off so pleasantly.

It was on the outskirts of the infirmary that she had been hovering,
and it was into certain dismal chambers dedicated to sick criminals,
that she presently ushered her companions. These chambers were naked
and grated, like all the rest of the place, and caused Miss Pynsent to
say to herself that it must be a blessing to be ill in such a hole,
because you couldn’t possibly pick up again, and then your case was
simple. Such simplification, however, had for the moment been offered
to very few of Florentine’s fellow-sufferers, for only three of the
small, stiff beds were occupied—occupied by white-faced women in tight,
sordid caps, on whom, in the stale, ugly room, the sallow light itself
seemed to rest without pity. Mrs Bowerbank discreetly paid no attention
whatever to Hyacinth; she only said to Miss Pynsent, with her hoarse
distinctness, “You’ll find her very low; she wouldn’t have waited
another day.” And she guided them, through a still further door, to the
smallest room of all, where there were but three beds, placed in a row.
Miss Pynsent’s frightened eyes rather faltered than inquired, but she
became aware that a woman was lying on the middle bed, and that her
face was turned toward the door. Mrs Bowerbank led the way straight up
to her, and, giving a business-like pat to her pillow, looked
invitation and encouragement to the visitors, who clung together not
far within the threshold. Their conductress reminded them that very few
minutes were allowed them, and that they had better not dawdle them
away; whereupon, as the boy still hung back, the little dressmaker
advanced alone, looking at the sick woman with what courage she could
muster. It seemed to her that she was approaching a perfect stranger,
so completely had nine years of prison transformed Florentine. She
felt, immediately, that it was a mercy she hadn’t told Hyacinth she was
pretty (as she used to be), for there was no beauty left in the hollow,
bloodless mask that presented itself without a movement. She _had_ told
him that the poor woman was good, but she didn’t look so, nor,
evidently, was he struck with it as he stared back at her across the
interval he declined to traverse, kept (at the same time) from
retreating by her strange, fixed eyes, the only portion of all her
wasted person in which there was still any appearance of life. She
looked unnatural to Amanda Pynsent, and terribly old; a speechless,
motionless creature, dazed and stupid, whereas Florentine Vivier, in
the obliterated past, had been her idea of personal, as distinguished
from social, brilliancy. Above all she seemed disfigured and ugly,
cruelly misrepresented by her coarse cap and short, rough hair. Amanda,
as she stood beside her, thought with a sort of scared elation that
Hyacinth would never guess that a person in whom there was so little
trace of smartness—or of cleverness of any kind—was his mother. At the
very most it might occur to him, as Mrs Bowerbank had suggested, that
she was his grandmother. Mrs Bowerbank seated herself on the further
bed, with folded hands, like a monumental timekeeper, and remarked, in
the manner of one speaking from a sense of duty, that the poor thing
wouldn’t get much good of the child unless he showed more confidence.
This observation was evidently lost upon the boy; he was too intensely
absorbed in watching the prisoner. A chair had been placed at the head
of her bed, and Miss Pynsent sat down without her appearing to notice
it. In a moment, however, she lifted her hand a little, pushing it out
from under the coverlet, and the dressmaker laid her own hand softly
upon it. This gesture elicited no response, but after a little, still
gazing at the boy, Florentine murmured, in words no one present was in
a position to understand—

“_Dieu de Dieu, qu’il est beau!_”

“She won’t speak nothing but French since she has been so bad—you can’t
get a natural word out of her,” Mrs Bowerbank said.

“It used to be so pretty when she spoke English—and so very amusing,”
Miss Pynsent ventured to announce, with a feeble attempt to brighten up
the scene. “I suppose she has forgotten it all.”

“She may well have forgotten it—she never gave her tongue much
exercise. There was little enough trouble to keep _her_ from
chattering,” Mrs Bowerbank rejoined, giving a twitch to the prisoner’s
counterpane. Miss Pynsent settled it a little on the other side and
considered, in the same train, that this separation of language was
indeed a mercy; for how could it ever come into her small companion’s
head that he was the offspring of a person who couldn’t so much as say
good morning to him? She felt, at the same time, that the scene might
have been somewhat less painful if they had been able to communicate
with the object of their compassion. As it was, they had too much the
air of having been brought together simply to look at each other, and
there was a grewsome awkwardness in that, considering the delicacy of
Florentine’s position. Not, indeed, that she looked much at her old
comrade; it was as if she were conscious of Miss Pynsent’s being there,
and would have been glad to thank her for it—glad even to examine her
for her own sake, and see what change, for her, too, the horrible years
had brought, but felt, more than this, that she had but the thinnest
pulse of energy left and that not a moment that could still be of use
to her was too much to take in her child. She took him in with all the
glazed entreaty of her eyes, quite giving up his poor little
protectress, who evidently would have to take her gratitude for
granted. Hyacinth, on his side, after some moments of embarrassing
silence—there was nothing audible but Mrs Bowerbank’s breathing—had
satisfied himself, and he turned about to look for a place of patience
while Miss Pynsent should finish her business, which as yet made so
little show. He appeared to wish not to leave the room altogether, as
that would be a confession of a vanquished spirit, but to take some
attitude that should express his complete disapproval of the unpleasant
situation. He was not in sympathy, and he could not have made it more
clear than by the way he presently went and placed himself on a low
stool, in a corner, near the door by which they had entered.

“_Est-il possible, mon Dieu, qu’il soit gentil comme ça?_” his mother
moaned, just above her breath.

“We are very glad you should have cared—that they look after you so
well,” said Miss Pynsent, confusedly, at random; feeling, first, that
Hyacinth’s coldness was perhaps excessive and his scepticism too
marked, and then that allusions to the way the poor woman was looked
after were not exactly happy. They didn’t matter, however, for she
evidently heard nothing, giving no sign of interest even when Mrs
Bowerbank, in a tone between a desire to make the interview more lively
and an idea of showing that she knew how to treat the young, referred
herself to the little boy.

“Is there nothing the little gentleman would like to say, now, to the
unfortunate? Hasn’t he any pleasant remark to make to her about his
coming so far to see her when she’s so sunk? It isn’t often that
children are shown over the place (as the little man has been), and
there’s many that would think they were lucky if they could see what he
has seen.”

“_Mon pauvre joujou, mon pauvre chéri_,” the prisoner went on, in her
tender, tragic whisper.

“He only wants to be very good; he always sits that way at home,” said
Miss Pynsent, alarmed at Mrs Bowerbank’s address and hoping there
wouldn’t be a scene.

“He might have stayed at home then—with this wretched person moaning
after him,” Mrs Bowerbank remarked, with some sternness. She plainly
felt that the occasion threatened to be wanting in brilliancy, and
wished to intimate that though she was to be trusted for discipline,
she thought they were all getting off too easily.

“I came because Pinnie brought me,” Hyacinth declared, from his low
perch. “I thought at first it would be pleasant. But it ain’t
pleasant—I don’t like prisons.” And he placed his little feet on the
cross-piece of the stool, as if to touch the institution at as few
points as possible.

The woman in bed continued her strange, almost whining plaint. “_Il ne
veut pas s’approcher, il a honte de moi_.”

“There’s a many that begin like that!” laughed Mrs Bowerbank, who was
irritated by the boy’s contempt for one of her Majesty’s finest
establishments.

Hyacinth’s little white face exhibited no confusion; he only turned it
to the prisoner again, and Miss Pynsent felt that some extraordinary
dumb exchange of meanings was taking place between them. “She used to
be so elegant; she _was_ a fine woman,” she observed, gently and
helplessly.

“_Il a honte de moi—il a honte, Dieu le pardonne!_” Florentine Vivier
went on, never moving her eyes.

“She’s asking for something, in her language. I used to know a few
words,” said Miss Pynsent, stroking down the bed, very nervously.

“Who is that woman? what does she want?” Hyacinth asked, his small,
clear voice ringing over the dreary room.

“She wants you to come near her, she wants to kiss you, sir,” said Mrs
Bowerbank, as if it were more than he deserved.

“I won’t kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!” the child answered
with resolution.

“Oh, you dreadful—how could you ever?” cried Pinnie, blushing all over
and starting out of her chair.

It was partly Amanda’s agitation, perhaps, which, by the jolt it
administered, gave an impulse to the sick woman, and partly the
penetrating and expressive tone in which Hyacinth announced his
repugnance: at any rate, Florentine, in the most unexpected and violent
manner, jerked herself up from her pillow, and, with dilated eyes and
waving hands, shrieked out, “_Ah, quelle infamie!_ I never stole a
watch, I never stole anything—anything! _Ah, par exemple!_” Then she
fell back, sobbing with the passion that had given her a moment’s
strength.

“I’m sure you needn’t put more on her than she has by rights,” said Mrs
Bowerbank, with dignity, to the dressmaker, laying a large red hand
upon the patient, to keep her in her place.

“Mercy, more? I thought it so much less!” cried Miss Pynsent, convulsed
with confusion and jerking herself, in a wild tremor, from the mother
to the child, as if she wished to fling herself upon one for contrition
and upon the other for revenge.

“_Il a honte de moi—il a honte de moi!_” Florentine repeated, in the
misery of her sobs, “_Dieu de bonté, quelle horreur!_”

Miss Pynsent dropped on her knees beside the bed and, trying to possess
herself of Florentine’s hand again, protested with a passion almost
equal to that of the prisoner (she felt that her nerves had been
screwed up to the snapping-point, and now they were all in shreds) that
she hadn’t meant what she had told the child, that he hadn’t
understood, that Florentine herself hadn’t understood, that she had
only said she had been accused and meant that no one had ever believed
it. The Frenchwoman paid no attention to her whatever, and Amanda
buried her face and her embarrassment in the side of the hard little
prison-bed, while, above the sound of their common lamentation, she
heard the judicial tones of Mrs Bowerbank.

“The child is delicate, you might well say! I’m disappointed in the
effect—I was in hopes you’d hearten her up. The doctor’ll be down on
_me_, of course; so we’ll just pass out again.”

“I’m very sorry I made you cry. And you must excuse Pinnie—I asked her
so many questions.”

These words came from close beside the prostrate dressmaker, who,
lifting herself quickly, found the little boy had advanced to her elbow
and was taking a nearer view of the mysterious captive. They produced
upon the latter an effect even more powerful than his unfortunate
speech of a moment before; for she found strength to raise herself,
partly, in her bed again, and to hold out her arms to him, with the
same thrilling sobs. She was talking still, but she had become quite
inarticulate, and Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white, ravaged
face, with the hollows of its eyes and the rude crop of her hair.
Amanda caught the child with an eagerness almost as great as
Florentine’s, and drawing him to the head of the bed, pushed him into
his mother’s arms. “Kiss her—kiss her, and we’ll go home!” she
whispered desperately, while they closed about him, and the poor
dishonoured head pressed itself against his young cheek. It was a
terrible, irresistible embrace, to which Hyacinth submitted with
instant patience. Mrs Bowerbank had tried at first to keep her
_protégée_ from rising, evidently wishing to abbreviate the scene;
then, as the child was enfolded, she accepted the situation and gave
judicious support from behind, with an eye to clearing the room as soon
as this effort should have spent itself. She propped up her patient
with a vigorous arm; Miss Pynsent rose from her knees and turned away,
and there was a minute’s stillness, during which the boy accommodated
himself as he might to his strange ordeal. What thoughts were begotten
at that moment in his wondering little mind Miss Pynsent was destined
to learn at another time. Before she had faced round to the bed again
she was swept out of the room by Mrs Bowerbank, who had lowered the
prisoner, exhausted, with closed eyes, to her pillow, and given
Hyacinth a business-like little push, which sent him on in advance.
Miss Pynsent went home in a cab—she was so shaken; though she
reflected, very nervously, on getting into it, on the opportunities it
would give Hyacinth for the exercise of inquisitorial rights. To her
surprise, however, he completely neglected them; he sat in silence,
looking out of the window, till they re-entered Lomax Place.




IV


“Well, you’ll have to guess my name before I’ll tell you,” the girl
said, with a free laugh, pushing her way into the narrow hall and
leaning against the tattered wall-paper, which, representing blocks of
marble with bevelled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and gray,
had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As
Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor was so resolute, the
light filtered in from the street, through the narrow, dusty glass
above it, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to
Millicent; a kind of musty dimness, with the vision of a small, steep
staircase at the end, covered with a strip of oilcloth which she
recognised, and made a little less dark by a window in the bend (you
could see it from the hall), from which you could almost bump your head
against the house behind. Nothing was changed except Miss Pynsent, and
of course the girl herself. She had noticed, outside, that the sign
between the windows had not even been touched up; there was still the
same preposterous announcement of ‘fashionable bonnets’—as if the poor
little dressmaker had the slightest acquaintance with that style of
head-dress, of which Miss Henning’s own knowledge was now so complete.
She could see Miss Pynsent was looking at her hat, which was a
wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had travelled up
and down Millicent’s whole person, but they rested in fascination upon
this ornament. The girl had forgotten how small the dressmaker was; she
barely came up to her shoulder. She had lost her hair, and wore a cap,
which Millicent noticed in return, wondering if that were a specimen of
what she thought the fashion. Miss Pynsent stared up at her as if she
had been six feet high; but she was used to that sort of surprised
admiration, being perfectly conscious that she was a magnificent young
woman.

“Won’t you take me into your shop?” she asked. “I don’t want to order
anything; I only want to inquire after your ’ealth; and isn’t this
rather an awkward place to talk?” She made her way further in, without
waiting for permission, seeing that her startled hostess had not yet
guessed.

“The show-room is on the right hand,” said Miss Pynsent, with her
professional manner, which was intended, evidently, to mark a
difference. She spoke as if on the other side, where the horizon was
bounded by the partition of the next house, there were labyrinths of
apartments. Passing in after her guest she found the young lady already
spread out upon the sofa, the everlasting sofa, in the right-hand
corner as you faced the window, covered with a light, shrunken shroud
of a strange yellow stuff, the tinge of which revealed years of
washing, and surmounted by a coloured print of Rebekah at the Well,
balancing, in the opposite quarter, with a portrait of the Empress of
the French, taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed
in the manner of 1853. Millicent looked about her, asking herself what
Miss Pynsent had to show and acting perfectly the part of the most
brilliant figure the place had ever contained. The old implements were
there on the table: the pincushions and needle-books; the pink
measuring-tape with which, as children, she and Hyacinth used to take
each other’s height; and the same collection of fashion-plates (she
could see in a minute), crumpled, sallow and fly-blown. The little
dressmaker bristled, as she used to do, with needles and pins (they
were stuck all over the front of her dress), but there were no rustling
fabrics tossed in heaps about the room—nothing but the skirt of a
shabby dress (it might have been her own), which she was evidently
repairing and had flung upon the table when she came to the door. Miss
Henning speedily arrived at the conclusion that her hostess’s business
had not increased, and felt a kind of good-humoured, luxurious scorn of
a person who knew so little what was to be got out of London. It was
Millicent’s belief that she herself was already perfectly acquainted
with the resources of the metropolis.

“Now tell me, how is Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,” she
remarked, extending a pair of large protrusive feet and supporting
herself on the sofa by her hands.

“Hyacinth?” Miss Pynsent repeated, with majestic blankness, as if she
had never heard of such a person. She felt that the girl was cruelly,
scathingly, well dressed; she couldn’t imagine who she was, nor with
what design she could have presented herself.

“Perhaps you call him Mr Robinson, to-day—you always wanted him to hold
himself so high. But to his face, at any rate, I’ll call him as I used
to: you see if I don’t!”

“Bless my soul, you must be the little ’Enning!” Miss Pynsent
exclaimed, planted before her and going now into every detail.

“Well, I’m glad you have made up your mind. I thought you’d know me
directly. I had a call to make in this part, and it came into my ’ead
to look you up. I don’t like to lose sight of old friends.”

“I never knew you—you’ve improved so,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, with a
candour justified by her age and her consciousness of respectability.

“Well, _you_ haven’t changed; you were always calling me something
horrid.”

“I dare say it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the
dressmaker, seating herself, but quite unable to take up her work,
absorbed as she was in the examination of her visitor.

“Oh, I’m all right now,” Miss Henning replied, with the air of one who
had nothing to fear from human judgments.

“You were a pretty child—I never said the contrary to that; but I had
no idea you’d turn out like this. You’re too tall for a woman,” Miss
Pynsent added, much divided between an old prejudice and a new
appreciation.

“Well, I enjoy beautiful ’ealth,” said the young lady; “every one
thinks I’m twenty.” She spoke with a certain artless pride in her
bigness and her bloom, and as if, to show her development, she would
have taken off her jacket or let you feel her upper arm. She was very
handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine, free, facial
oval, an abundance of brown hair, and a smile which showed the
whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set upon a fair, strong neck, and
her tall young figure was rich in feminine curves. Her gloves, covering
her wrists insufficiently, showed the redness of those parts, in the
interstices of the numerous silver bracelets that encircled them, and
Miss Pynsent made the observation that her hands were not more delicate
than her feet. She was not graceful, and even the little dressmaker,
whose preference for distinguished forms never deserted her, indulged
in the mental reflection that she was common, for all her magnificence;
but there was something about her indescribably fresh, successful and
satisfying. She was, to her blunt, expanded finger-tips, a daughter of
London, of the crowded streets and hustling traffic of the great city;
she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy courts and foggy
thoroughfares, and peopled its parks and squares and crescents with her
ambitions; it had entered into her blood and her bone, the sound of her
voice and the carriage of her head; she understood it by instinct and
loved it with passion; she represented its immense vulgarities and
curiosities, its brutality and its knowingness, its good-nature and its
impudence, and might have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a
kind of glorified townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a
flower of the accumulated parishes, the genius of urban civilisation,
the muse of cockneyism. The restrictions under which Miss Pynsent
regarded her would have cost the dressmaker some fewer scruples if she
had guessed the impression she made upon Millicent, and how the whole
place seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and
failure. Her childish image of Miss Pynsent had represented her as
delicate and dainty, with round loops of hair fastened on her temples
by combs, and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant
manipulation of precious stuffs—tissues at least which Millicent
regarded with envy. But the little woman before her was bald and white
and pinched; she looked shrunken and sickly and insufficiently
nourished; her small eyes were sharp and suspicious, and her hideous
cap did not disguise her meagreness. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as
she had often done before, that she had not been obliged to get _her_
living by drudging over needlework year after year in that
undiscoverable street, in a dismal little room where nothing had been
changed for ages; the absence of change had such an exasperating effect
upon her vigorous young nature. She reflected with complacency upon her
good fortune in being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic,
department of the dressmaking business, and noticed that though it was
already November there was no fire in the neatly-kept grate beneath the
chimney-piece, on which a design, partly architectural, partly
botanical, executed in the hair of Miss Pynsent’s parents, was flanked
by a pair of vases, under glass, containing muslin flowers.

If she thought Miss Pynsent’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that
this lady felt very much upon her guard in the presence of so
unexpected and undesired a reminder of one of the least honourable
episodes in the annals of Lomax Place. Miss Pynsent esteemed people in
proportion to their success in constituting a family circle—in cases,
that is, when the materials were under their hand. This success, among
the various members of the house of Henning, had been of the scantiest,
and the domestic broils in the establishment adjacent to her own, whose
vicissitudes she was able to follow, as she sat at her window at work,
by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind her—these
scenes, amid which the crash of crockery and the imprecations of the
wounded were frequently audible, had long been the scandal of a humble
but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr Henning was supposed to occupy a place
of confidence in a brush-factory, while his wife, at home, occupied
herself with the washing and mending of a considerable brood, mainly of
sons. But economy and sobriety, and indeed a virtue more important
still, had never presided at their councils. The freedom and frequency
of Mrs Henning’s relations with a stove-polisher in the Euston Road
were at least not a secret to a person who lived next door and looked
up from her work so often that it was a wonder it was always finished
so quickly. The little Hennings, unwashed and unchidden, spent most of
their time either in pushing each other into the gutter or in running
to the public-house at the corner for a pennyworth of gin, and the
borrowing propensities of their elders were a theme for exclamation.
There was no object of personal or domestic use which Mrs Henning had
not at one time or another endeavoured to elicit from the dressmaker;
beginning with a mattress, on an occasion when she was about to take to
her bed for a considerable period, and ending with a flannel petticoat
and a pewter teapot. Lomax Place had, eventually, from its over-peeping
windows and doorways, been present at the seizure, by a long-suffering
landlord, of the chattels of this interesting family and at the
ejectment of the whole insolvent group, who departed in a straggling,
jeering, unabashed, cynical manner, carrying with them but little of
the sympathy of the street. Millicent, whose childish intimacy with
Hyacinth Robinson Miss Pynsent had always viewed with vague anxiety—she
thought the girl a ‘nasty little thing’, and was afraid she would teach
the innocent orphan low ways—Millicent, with her luxuriant tresses, her
precocious beauty, her staring, mocking manner on the doorstep, was at
this time twelve years of age. She vanished with her vanishing
companions; Lomax Place saw them turn the corner, and returned to its
occupations with a conviction that they would make shipwreck on the
outer reefs. But neither spar nor splinter floated back to their former
haunts, and they were engulfed altogether in the fathomless deeps of
the town. Miss Pynsent drew a long breath; it was her conviction that
none of them would come to any good, and Millicent least of all.

When, therefore, this young lady reappeared, with all the signs of
accomplished survival, she could not fail to ask herself whether, under
a specious seeming, the phenomenon did not simply represent the triumph
of vice. She was alarmed, but she would have given her silver thimble
to know the girl’s history, and between her alarm and her curiosity she
passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt that the familiar,
mysterious creature was playing with her; revenging herself for former
animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a peering
little spinster who now could make no figure beside her. If it was not
the triumph of vice it was at least the triumph of impertinence, as
well as of youth, health, and a greater acquaintance with the art of
dress than Miss Pynsent could boast, for all her ridiculous signboards.
She perceived, or she believed she perceived, that Millicent wanted to
scare her, to make her think she had come after Hyacinth; that she
wished to inveigle, to corrupt him. I should be sorry to impute to Miss
Henning any motive more complicated than the desire to amuse herself,
of a Saturday afternoon, by a ramble which her vigorous legs had no
occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed that when it occurred
to her that Miss Pynsent regarded her as a ravening wolf and her early
playmate as an unspotted lamb, she laughed out, in her hostess’s
anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly, without deigning to
explain. But what, indeed, had she come for, if she had not come after
Hyacinth? It was not for the love of the dressmaker’s pretty ways. She
remembered the boy and some of their tender passages, and in the
wantonness of her full-blown freedom—her attachment, also, to any
tolerable pretext for wandering through the streets of London and
gazing into shop-windows—she had said to herself that she would
dedicate an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, would revisit the
scenes of her childhood. She considered that her childhood had ended
with the departure of her family from Lomax Place. If the tenants of
that obscure locality never learned what their banished fellows went
through, Millicent retained a deep impression of those horrible
intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone down-hill, to the
very bottom; and in her humbler moments Millicent sometimes wondered
what lucky star had checked her own descent, and indeed enabled her to
mount the slope again. In her humbler moments, I say, for as a general
thing she was provided with an explanation of any good fortune that
might befall her. What was more natural than that a girl should do well
when she was at once so handsome and so clever? Millicent thought with
compassion of the young persons whom a niggardly fate had endowed with
only one of these advantages. She was good-natured, but she had no idea
of gratifying Miss Pynsent’s curiosity; it seemed to her quite a
sufficient kindness to stimulate it.

She told the dressmaker that she had a high position at a great
haberdasher’s in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace; she was in the
department for jackets and mantles; she put on all these articles to
show them off to the customers, and on her person they appeared to such
advantage that nothing she took up ever failed to go off. Miss Pynsent
could imagine, from this, how highly her services were prized. She had
had a splendid offer from another establishment, in Oxford Street, and
she was just thinking whether she should accept it. “We have to be
beautifully dressed, but I don’t care, because I like to look nice,”
she remarked to her hostess, who at the end of half an hour, very
grave, behind the clumsy glasses which she had been obliged to wear of
late years, seemed still not to know what to make of her. On the
subject of her family, of her history during the interval that was to
be accounted for, the girl was large and vague, and Miss Pynsent saw
that the domestic circle had not even a shadow of sanctity for her. She
stood on her own feet, and she stood very firm. Her staying so long,
her remaining over the half-hour, proved to the dressmaker that she had
come for Hyacinth; for poor Amanda gave her as little information as
was decent, told her nothing that would encourage or attract. She
simply mentioned that Mr Robinson (she was careful to speak of him in
that manner) had given his attention to bookbinding, and had served an
apprenticeship at an establishment where they turned out the best work
of that kind that was to be found in London.

“A bookbindery? Laws!” said Miss Henning. “Do you mean they get them up
for the shops? Well, I always thought he would have something to do
with books.” Then she added, “But I didn’t think he would ever follow a
trade.”

“A trade?” cried Miss Pynsent. “You should hear Mr Robinson speak of
it. He considers it one of the fine arts.”

Millicent smiled, as if she knew how people often considered things,
and remarked that very likely it was tidy, comfortable work, but she
couldn’t believe there was much to be seen in it. “Perhaps you will say
there is more than there is here,” she went on, finding at last an
effect of irritation, of reprehension, an implication of aggressive
respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker, sitting for so
many years in her close, brown little den, with the foggy familiarities
of Lomax Place on the other side of the pane. Millicent liked to think
that she herself was strong, and she was not strong enough for that.

This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very
cruel; but she reflected that it was natural one should be insulted if
one talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner
of a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference
between them she was right in feeling it to be in her favour. Miss
Pynsent’s ‘cut’, as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and in
the application of gimp and the distribution of ornament she was not to
be trusted; but, morally, she had the best taste in the world. “I
haven’t so much work as I used to have, if that’s what you mean. My
eyes are not so good, and my health has failed with advancing years.”

I know not to what extent Millicent was touched by the dignity of this
admission, but she replied, without embarrassment, that what Miss
Pynsent wanted was a smart young assistant, some nice girl with a
pretty taste, who would brighten up the business and give her new
ideas. “I can see you have got the same old ones, always: I can tell
that by the way you have stuck the braid on that dress;” and she
directed a poke of her neat little umbrella to the drapery in the
dressmaker’s lap. She continued to patronise and exasperate her, and to
offer her consolation and encouragement with the heaviest hand that had
ever been applied to Miss Pynsent’s sensitive surface. Poor Amanda
ended by gazing at her as if she were a public performer of some kind,
a ballad-singer or a conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself
whether the hussy could be (in her own mind) the ‘nice girl’ who was to
regild the tarnished sign. Miss Pynsent had had assistants, in the
past—she had even, once, for a few months, had a ‘forewoman’; and some
of these damsels had been precious specimens, whose misdemeanours lived
vividly in her memory. Never, all the same, in her worst hour of
delusion, had she trusted her interests to such an extravagant baggage
as this. She was quickly reassured as to Millicent’s own views,
perceiving more and more that she was a tremendous highflyer, who
required a much larger field of action than the musty bower she now
honoured, heaven only knew why, with her presence. Miss Pynsent held
her tongue, as she always did, when the sorrow of her life had been
touched, the thought of the slow, inexorable decline on which she had
entered that day, nearly ten years before, when her hesitations and
scruples resolved themselves into a hideous mistake. The deep
conviction of error, on that unspeakably important occasion, had ached
and throbbed within her ever since like an incurable disease. She had
sown in her boy’s mind the seeds of shame and rancour; she had made him
conscious of his stigma, of his exquisitely vulnerable spot, and
condemned him to know that for him the sun would never shine as it
shone for most others. By the time he was sixteen years old she had
learned—or believed she had learned—the judgment he passed upon her,
and at that period she had lived through a series of horrible months,
an ordeal in which every element of her old prosperity perished. She
cried her eyes out, on coming to a sense of her aberration, blinded and
weakened herself with weeping, so that for a moment it seemed as if she
should never be able to touch a needle again. She lost all interest in
her work, and that artistic imagination which had always been her pride
deserted her, together with the reputation of keeping the tidiest
lodgings in Lomax Place. A couple of commercial gentlemen and a Welsh
plumber, of religious tendencies, who for several years had made her
establishment their home, withdrew their patronage on the ground that
the airing of her beds was not what it used to be, and disseminated
cruelly this injurious legend. She ceased to notice or to care how
sleeves were worn, and on the question of flounces and gores her mind
was a blank. She fell into a grievous debility, and then into a long,
low, languid fever, during which Hyacinth tended her with a devotion
which only made the wrong she had done him seem more bitter, and in
which, so soon as she was able to hold up her head a little, Mr Vetch
came and sat with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She
re-established to a certain extent, after a while, her connection, so
far as the letting of her rooms was concerned (from the other
department of her activity the tide had ebbed apparently forever); but
nothing was the same again, and she knew it was the beginning of the
end. So it had gone on, and she watched the end approach; she felt it
was very near indeed when a child she had seen playing in the gutters
came to flaunt it over her in silk and lace. She gave a low, inaudible
sigh of relief when at last Millicent got up and stood before her,
smoothing the glossy cylinder of her umbrella.

“Mind you give my love to Hyacinth,” the girl said, with an assurance
which showed all her insensibility to tacit protests. “I don’t care if
you do guess that if I have stopped so long it was in the hope he would
be dropping in to his tea. You can tell him I sat an hour, on purpose,
if you like; there’s no shame in my wanting to see my little friend. He
may know I call him that!” Millicent continued, with her show-room
laugh, as Miss Pynsent judged it to be; conferring these permissions,
successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do give him my love,
and tell him I hope he’ll come and see me. I see you won’t tell him
anything. I don’t know what you’re afraid of; but I’ll leave my card
for him, all the same.” She drew forth a little bright-coloured
pocket-book, and it was with amazement that Miss Pynsent saw her
extract from it a morsel of engraved pasteboard—so monstrous did it
seem that one of the squalid little Hennings should have lived to
display this emblem of social consideration. Millicent enjoyed the
effect she produced as she laid the card on the table, and gave another
ringing peal of merriment at the sight of her hostess’s half-angry,
half-astonished look. “What _do_ you think I want to do with him? I
could swallow him at a single bite!” she cried.

Poor Amanda gave no second glance at the document on the table, though
she had perceived it contained, in the corner, her visitor’s address,
which Millicent had amused herself, ingeniously, with not mentioning:
she only got up, laying down her work with a trembling hand, so that
she should be able to see Miss Henning well out of the house. “You
needn’t think I shall put myself out to keep him in the dark. I shall
certainly tell him you have been here, and exactly how you strike me.”

“Of course you’ll say something nasty—like you used to when I was a
child. You let me ’ave it then, you know!”

“Ah, well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at being reminded of an acerbity
which the girl’s present development caused to appear ridiculously
ineffectual, “you are very different now, when I think what you’ve come
from.”

“What I’ve come from?” Millicent threw back her head, and opened her
eyes very wide, while all her feathers and ribbons nodded. “Did you
want me to stick fast in this low place for the rest of my days? You
have had to stay in it yourself, so you might speak civilly of it.” She
coloured, and raised her voice, and looked magnificent in her scorn.
“And pray what have you come from yourself, and what has _he_ come
from—the mysterious ‘Mr Robinson’, that used to be such a puzzle to the
whole Place? I thought perhaps I might clear it up, but you haven’t
told me that yet!”

Miss Pynsent turned straight away, covering her ears with her hands. “I
have nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried,
with a trembling voice.




V


It was in this way that the dressmaker failed either to see or to hear
the opening of the door of the room, which obeyed a slow, apparently
cautious impulse given it from the hall, and revealed the figure of a
young man standing there with a short pipe in his teeth. There was
something in his face which immediately told Millicent Henning that he
had heard, outside, her last resounding tones. He entered as if, young
as he was, he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called
upon to be headlong, and evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s
brilliant adversary might be. She recognised on the instant her old
playmate, and without reflection, confusion or diplomacy, in the
fullness of her vulgarity and sociability, she exclaimed, in no lower
pitch, “Gracious, Hyacinth Robinson, is _that_ your form?”

Miss Pynsent turned round, in a flash, but kept silent; then, very
white and trembling, took up her work again and seated herself in her
window.

Hyacinth Robinson stood staring; then he blushed all over. He knew who
she was, but he didn’t say so; he only asked, in a voice which struck
the girl as quite different from the old one—the one in which he used
to tell her she was beastly tiresome—“Is it of me you were speaking
just now?”

“When I asked where you had come from? That was because we ’eard you in
the ’all,” said Millicent, smiling. “I suppose you have come from your
work.”

“You used to live in the Place—you always wanted to kiss me,” the young
man remarked, with an effort not to show all the surprise and agitation
that he felt. “Didn’t she live in the Place, Pinnie!”

Pinnie, for all answer, fixed a pair of strange, pleading eyes upon
him, and Millicent broke out, with her recurrent laugh, in which the
dressmaker had been right in discovering the note of affectation, “Do
you want to know what you look like? You look for all the world like a
little Frenchman! Don’t he look like a little Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?”
she went on, as if she were on the best possible terms with the
mistress of the establishment.

Hyacinth exchanged a look with that afflicted woman; he saw something
in her face which he knew very well by this time, and the sight of
which always gave him an odd, perverse, unholy satisfaction. It seemed
to say that she prostrated herself, that she did penance in the dust,
that she was his to trample upon, to spit upon. He did neither of these
things, but she was constantly offering herself, and her permanent
humility, her perpetual abjection, was a sort of counter-irritant to
the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever, which had often made him
cry with rage at night, in his little room under the roof. Pinnie meant
that, to-day, as a matter of course, and she could only especially mean
it in the presence of Miss Henning’s remark about his looking like a
Frenchman. He knew he looked like a Frenchman, he had often been told
so before, and a large part of the time he felt like one—like one of
those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle. He had picked up the
French tongue with the most extraordinary facility, with the aid of one
of his mates, a refugee from Paris, in the workroom, and of a
second-hand dog’s-eared dictionary, bought for a shilling in the
Brompton Road, in one of his interminable, restless, melancholy, moody,
yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it (as he believed)
as if by instinct, caught the accent, the gesture, the movement of
eyebrow and shoulder; so that if it should become necessary in certain
contingencies that he should pass for a foreigner he had an idea that
he might do so triumphantly, once he could borrow a blouse. He had
never seen a blouse in his life, but he knew exactly the form and
colour of such a garment, and how it was worn. What these contingencies
might be which should compel him to assume the disguise of a person of
a social station lower still than his own, Hyacinth would not for the
world have mentioned to you; but as they were very present to the mind
of our imaginative, ingenious youth we shall catch a glimpse of them in
the course of a further acquaintance with him. At the present moment,
when there was no question of masquerading, it made him blush again
that such a note should be struck by a loud, laughing, handsome girl,
who came back out of his past. There was more in Pinnie’s weak eyes,
now, than her usual profession; there was a dumb intimation, almost as
pathetic as the other, that if he cared to let her off easily he would
not detain their terrible visitor very long. He had no wish to do that;
he kept the door open, on purpose; he didn’t enjoy talking to girls
under Pinnie’s eyes, and he could see that this one had every
disposition to talk. So without responding to her observation about his
appearance he said, not knowing exactly what to say, “Have you come
back to live in the Place?”

“Heaven forbid I should ever do that!” cried Miss Henning, with genuine
emotion. “I have to live near the establishment in which I’m employed.”

“And what establishment is that, now?” the young man asked, gaining
confidence and perceiving, in detail, how handsome she was. He hadn’t
roamed about London for nothing, and he knew that when a girl was so
handsome as that, a jocular tone of address, a pleasing freedom, was
_de rigueur;_ so he added, “Is it the Bull and Gate, or the Elephant
and Castle?”

“A public house! Well, you haven’t got the politeness of a Frenchman,
at all events!” Her good-nature had come back to her perfectly, and her
resentment of his imputation of her looking like a bar-maid—a blowzy
beauty who handled pewter—was tempered by her more and more curious
consideration of Hyacinth’s form. He was exceedingly ‘rum’, but this
quality took her fancy, and since he remembered so well that she had
been fond of kissing him, in their early days she would have liked to
say to him that she stood prepared to repeat this form of attention.
But she reminded herself, in time, that her line should be,
religiously, the ladylike, and she was content to exclaim, simply, “I
don’t care what a man looks like so long as he’s clever. That’s the
form _I_ like!”

Miss Pynsent had promised herself the satisfaction of taking no further
notice of her brilliant invader; but the temptation was great to expose
her to Hyacinth, as a mitigation of her brilliancy, by remarking
sarcastically, according to opportunity, “Miss ’Enning wouldn’t live in
Lomax Place for the world. She thinks it too abominably low.”

“So it is; it’s a beastly hole,” said the young man.

The poor dressmaker’s little dart fell to the ground, and Millicent
exclaimed, jovially, “Right you are!” while she directed to the object
of her childhood’s admiration a smile that put him more and more at his
ease.

“Don’t you suppose I’m clever?” he asked, planted before her with his
little legs slightly apart, while, with his hands behind him, he made
the open door waver to and fro.

“You? Oh, I don’t care whether you are or not!” said Millicent Henning;
and Hyacinth was at any rate quick-witted enough to see what she meant
by that. If she meant he was so good-looking that he might pass on this
score alone her judgment was conceivable, though many women would
strongly have dissented from it. He was as small as he had
threatened—he had never got his growth—and she could easily see that he
was not what she, at least, would call strong. His bones were small,
his chest was narrow, his complexion pale, his whole figure almost
childishly slight; and Millicent perceived afterward that he had a very
delicate hand—the hand, as she said to herself, of a gentleman. What
she liked was his face, and something jaunty and entertaining, almost
theatrical in his whole little person. Miss Henning was not acquainted
with any member of the dramatic profession, but she supposed, vaguely,
that that was the way an actor would look in private life. Hyacinth’s
features were perfect; his eyes, large and much divided, had as their
usual expression a kind of witty candour, and a small, soft, fair
moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a way that made him
look as if he were smiling even when his heart was heavy. The waves of
his dense, fine hair clustered round a forehead which was high enough
to suggest remarkable things, and Miss Henning had observed that when
he first appeared he wore his little soft circular hat in a way that
left these frontal locks very visible. He was dressed in an old brown
velveteen jacket, and wore exactly the bright-coloured necktie which
Miss Pynsent’s quick fingers used of old to shape out of hoarded
remnants of silk and muslin. He was shabby and work-stained, but the
observant eye would have noted an idea in his dress (his appearance was
plainly not a matter of indifference to himself), and a painter (not of
the heroic) would have liked to make a sketch of him. There was
something exotic about him, and yet, with his sharp young face,
destitute of bloom, but not of sweetness, and a certain conscious
cockneyism which pervaded him, he was as strikingly as Millicent, in
her own degree, a product of the London streets and the London air. He
looked both ingenuous and slightly wasted, amused, amusing, and
indefinably sad. Women had always found him touching; yet he made
them—so they had repeatedly assured him—die of laughing.

“I think you had better shut the door,” said Miss Pynsent, meaning that
he had better shut their departing visitor out.

“Did you come here on purpose to see us?” Hyacinth asked, not heeding
this injunction, of which he divined the spirit, and wishing the girl
would take her leave, so that he might go out again with her. He should
like talking with her much better away from Pinnie, who evidently was
ready to stick a bodkin into her, for reasons he perfectly understood.
He had seen plenty of them before, Pinnie’s reasons, even where girls
were concerned who were not nearly so good-looking as this one. She was
always in a fearful ‘funk’ about some woman getting hold of him, and
persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station. His
station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself, and Miss Pynsent, what
it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly enough, and
wondered how in the world he could marry ‘beneath’ it. He would never
marry at all—to that his mind was absolutely made up; he would never
hand on to another the burden which had made his own young spirit so
intolerably sore, the inheritance which had darkened the whole
threshold of his manhood. All the more reason why he should have his
compensation; why, if the soft society of women was to be enjoyed on
other terms, he should cultivate it with a bold, free mind.

“I thought I would just give a look at the old shop; I had an
engagement not far off,” Millicent said. “But I wouldn’t have believed
any one who had told me I should find you just where I left you.”

“We needed you to look after us!” Miss Pynsent exclaimed,
irrepressibly.

“Oh, you’re such a swell yourself!” Hyacinth observed, without heeding
the dressmaker.

“None of your impudence! I’m as good a girl as there is in London!” And
to corroborate this, Miss Henning went on: “If you were to offer to see
me a part of the way home, I should tell you I don’t knock about that
way with gentlemen.”

“I’ll go with you as far as you like,” Hyacinth replied, simply, as if
he knew how to treat that sort of speech.

“Well, it’s only because I knew you as a baby!” And they went out
together, Hyacinth careful not to look at poor Pinnie at all (he felt
her glaring whitely and tearfully at him out of her dim corner—it had
by this time grown too dusky to work without a lamp), and his companion
giving her an outrageously friendly nod of farewell over her shoulder.

It was a long walk from Lomax Place to the quarter of the town in which
(to be near the haberdasher’s in the Buckingham Palace Road) Miss
Henning occupied a modest back-room; but the influences of the hour
were such as to make the excursion very agreeable to our young man, who
liked the streets at all times, but especially at nightfall, in the
autumn, of a Saturday, when, in the vulgar districts, the smaller shops
and open-air industries were doubly active, and big, clumsy torches
flared and smoked over hand-carts and costermongers’ barrows, drawn up
in the gutters. Hyacinth had roamed through the great city since he was
an urchin, but his imagination had never ceased to be stirred by the
preparations for Sunday that went on in the evening among the toilers
and spinners, his brothers and sisters, and he lost himself in all the
quickened crowding and pushing and staring at lighted windows and
chaffering at the stalls of fishmongers and hucksters. He liked the
people who looked as if they had got their week’s wage and were
prepared to lay it out discreetly; and even those whose use of it would
plainly be extravagant and intemperate; and, best of all, those who
evidently hadn’t received it at all and who wandered about,
disinterestedly, vaguely, with their hands in empty pockets, watching
others make their bargains and fill their satchels, or staring at the
striated sides of bacon, at the golden cubes and triangles of cheese,
at the graceful festoons of sausage, in the most brilliant of the
windows. He liked the reflection of the lamps on the wet pavements, the
feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter
fog blurred and suffused the whole place, made it seem bigger and more
crowded, produced halos and dim radiations, trickles and evaporations,
on the plates of glass. He moved in the midst of these impressions this
evening, but he enjoyed them in silence, with an attention taken up
mainly by his companion, and pleased to be already so intimate with a
young lady whom people turned round to look at. She herself affected to
speak of the rush and crush of the week’s end with disgust: she said
she liked the streets, but she liked the respectable ones; she couldn’t
abide the smell of fish, and the whole place seemed full of it, so that
she hoped they would soon get into the Edgware Road, towards which they
tended and which was a proper street for a lady. To Hyacinth she
appeared to have no connection with the long-haired little girl who, in
Lomax Place, years before, was always hugging a smutty doll and
courting his society; she was like a stranger, a new acquaintance, and
he observed her curiously, wondering by what transitions she had
reached her present pitch.

She enlightened him but little on this point, though she talked a great
deal on a variety of subjects, and mentioned to him her habits, her
aspirations, her likes and dislikes. The latter were very numerous. She
was tremendously particular, difficult to please, he could see that;
and she assured him that she never put up with anything a moment after
it had ceased to be agreeable to her. Especially was she particular
about gentlemen’s society, and she made it plain that a young fellow
who wanted to have anything to say to her must be in receipt of wages
amounting at the least to fifty shillings a week. Hyacinth told her
that he didn’t earn that, as yet; and she remarked again that she made
an exception for him, because she knew all about him (or if not all, at
least a great deal), and he could see that her good-nature was equal to
her beauty. She made such an exception that when, after they were
moving down the Edgware Road (which had still the brightness of late
closing, but with more nobleness), he proposed that she should enter a
coffee-house with him and ‘take something’ (he could hardly tell
himself, afterwards, what brought him to this point), she acceded
without a demur—without a demur even on the ground of his slender
earnings. Slender as they were, Hyacinth had them in his pocket (they
had been destined in some degree for Pinnie), and he felt equal to the
occasion. Millicent partook profusely of tea and bread and butter, with
a relish of raspberry jam, and thought the place most comfortable,
though he himself, after finding himself ensconced, was visited by
doubts as to its respectability, suggested, among other things, by
photographs, on the walls, of young ladies in tights. Hyacinth himself
was hungry, he had not yet had his tea, but he was too excited, too
preoccupied, to eat; the situation made him restless and gave him
palpitations; it seemed to be the beginning of something new. He had
never yet ‘stood’ even a glass of beer to a girl of Millicent’s stamp—a
girl who rustled and glittered and smelt of musk—and if she should turn
out as jolly a specimen of the sex as she seemed it might make a great
difference in his leisure hours, in his evenings, which were often very
dull. That it would also make a difference in his savings (he was under
a pledge to Pinnie and to Mr Vetch to put by something every week) it
didn’t concern him, for the moment, to reflect; and indeed, though he
thought it odious and insufferable to be poor, the ways and means of
becoming rich had hitherto not greatly occupied him. He knew what
Millicent’s age must be, but felt, nevertheless, as if she were older,
much older, than himself—she appeared to know so much about London and
about life; and this made it still more of a sensation to be
entertaining her like a young swell. He thought of it, too, in
connection with the question of the respectability of the
establishment; if this element was deficient she would perceive it as
soon as he, and very likely it would be a part of the general
initiation she had given him an impression of that she shouldn’t mind
it so long as the tea was strong and the bread and butter thick. She
described to him what had passed between Miss Pynsent and herself (she
didn’t call her Pinnie, and he was glad, for he wouldn’t have liked it)
before he came in, and let him know that she should never dare to come
to the place again, as his mother would tear her eyes out. Then she
checked herself. “Of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I
keep forgetting.”

Hyacinth had long since convinced himself that he had acquired a manner
with which he could meet allusions of this kind: he had had, first and
last, so many opportunities to practise it. Therefore he looked at his
companion very steadily while he said, “My mother died many years ago;
she was a great invalid. But Pinnie has been awfully good to me.”

“My mother’s dead, too,” Miss Henning remarked. “She died very
suddenly. I dare say you remember her in the Place.” Then, while
Hyacinth disengaged from the past the wavering figure of Mrs Henning,
of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him as dirty, the
girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment, “But I have had no
Pinnie.”

“You look as if you could take care of yourself.”

“Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked what
had become of Mr Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was your
mamma, he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss
Pynsent’s young man.”

“He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth said. “He’s our best friend—or
supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle,
as he used to do.”

Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she remarked,
“I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.”

“At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t play any
instrument.”

“I don’t mean in the orchestra, you gaby! You would look very nice in a
fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table, and her shoulders
lifted, in an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of
replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go
through life in his own character; but he checked himself, with the
reflection that this was exactly what, apparently, he was destined not
to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as
possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle; he
was to be, every day and every hour, an actor. Suddenly, with the
utmost irrelevance, Miss Henning inquired, “Is Miss Pynsent some
relation? What gave her any right over you?”

Hyacinth had an answer ready for this question; he had determined to
say, as he had several times said before, “Miss Pynsent is an old
friend of my family. My mother was very fond of her, and she was very
fond of my mother.” He repeated the formula now, looking at Millicent
with the same inscrutable calmness (as he fancied), though what he
would have liked to say to her would have been that his mother was none
of her business. But she was too handsome to talk that way to, and she
presented her large fair face to him, across the table, with an air of
solicitation to be cosy and comfortable. There were things in his heart
and a torment and a hidden passion in his life which he should be glad
enough to lay open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would
be the cure ultimately; that in return for something he might drop,
syllable by syllable, into a listening feminine ear, certain other
words would be spoken to him which would make his pain for ever less
sharp. But what woman could he trust, what ear would be safe? The
answer was not in this loud, fresh laughing creature, whose sympathy
couldn’t have the fineness he was looking for, since her curiosity was
vulgar. Hyacinth objected to the vulgar as much as Miss Pynsent
herself; in this respect she had long since discovered that he was
after her own heart. He had not taken up the subject of Mrs Henning’s
death; he felt himself incapable of inquiring about that lady, and had
no desire for knowledge of Millicent’s relationships. Moreover he
always suffered, to sickness, when people began to hover about the
question of his origin, the reasons why Pinnie had had the care of him
from a baby. Mrs Henning had been untidy, but at least her daughter
could speak of her. “Mr Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved out of
No. 17, three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t
stand the other people in the house; there was a man that played the
accordeon.”

Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote, and
she wanted to know why people should like Mr Vetch’s fiddle any better.
Then she added, “And I think that while he was about it he might have
put you into something better than a bookbinder’s.”

“He wasn’t obliged to put me into anything. It’s a very good place.”

“All the same, it isn’t where I should have looked to find you,”
Millicent declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to pay him a
compliment as of resentment at having miscalculated.

“Where should you have looked to find me? In the House of Commons? It’s
a pity you couldn’t have told me in advance what you would have liked
me to be.”

She looked at him, over her cup, while she drank, in several sips. “Do
you know what they used to say in the Place? That your father was a
lord.”

“Very likely. That’s the kind of rot they talk in that precious hole,”
the young man said, without blenching.

“Well, perhaps he was,” Millicent ventured.

“He may have been a prince, for all the good it has done me.”

“Fancy your talking as if you didn’t know!” said Millicent.

“Finish your tea—don’t mind how I talk.”

“Well, you _’ave_ got a temper!” the girl exclaimed, archly. “I should
have thought you’d be a clerk at a banker’s.”

“Do they select them for their tempers?”

“You know what I mean. You used to be too clever to follow a trade.”

“Well, I’m not clever enough to live on air.”

“You might be, really, for all the tea you drink! Why didn’t you go in
for some high profession?”

“How was I to go in? Who the devil was to help me?” Hyacinth inquired,
with a certain vibration.

“Haven’t you got any relations?” said Millicent, after a moment.

“What are you doing? Are you trying to make me swagger?”

When he spoke sharply she only laughed, not in the least ruffled, and
by the way she looked at him seemed to like it. “Well, I’m sorry you’re
only a journeyman,” she went on, pushing away her cup.

“So am I,” Hyacinth rejoined; but he called for the bill as if he had
been an employer of labour. Then, while it was being brought, he
remarked to his companion that he didn’t believe she had an idea of
what his work was and how charming it could be. “Yes, I get up books
for the shops,” he said, when she had retorted that she perfectly
understood. “But the art of the binder is an exquisite art.”

“So Miss Pynsent told me. She said you had some samples at home. I
should like to see them.”

“You wouldn’t know how good they are,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

He expected that she would exclaim, in answer, that he was an impudent
wretch, and for a moment she seemed to be on the point of doing so. But
the words changed on her lips, and she replied, almost tenderly,
“That’s just the way you used to speak to me, years ago in the Plice.”

“I don’t care about that. I hate all that time.”

“Oh, so do I, if you come to that,” said Millicent, as if she could
rise to any breadth of view. And then she returned to her idea that he
had not done himself justice. “You used always to be reading: I never
thought you would work with your ’ands.”

This seemed to irritate him, and, having paid the bill and given
threepence, ostentatiously, to the young woman with a languid manner
and hair of an unnatural yellow, who had waited on them, he said, “You
may depend upon it I shan’t do it an hour longer than I can help.”

“What will you do then?”

“Oh, you’ll see, some day.” In the street, after they had begun to walk
again, he went on, “You speak as if I could have my pick. What was an
obscure little beggar to do, buried in a squalid corner of London,
under a million of idiots? I had no help, no influence, no acquaintance
of any kind with professional people, and no means of getting at them.
I had to do something; I couldn’t go on living on Pinnie. Thank God, I
help her now, a little. I took what I could get.” He spoke as if he had
been touched by the imputation of having derogated.

Millicent seemed to imply that he defended himself successfully when
she said, “You express yourself like a gentleman”—a speech to which he
made no response. But he began to talk again afterwards, and, the
evening having definitely set in, his companion took his arm for the
rest of the way home. By the time he reached her door he had confided
to her that, in secret, he wrote: he had a dream of literary
distinction. This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to
remark, with an irrelevance that characterised her, that she didn’t
care anything about a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she
thought families were played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave his
alone; and while they lingered in front of her house, before she went
in, he said—

“I have no doubt you’re a jolly girl, and I am very happy to have seen
you again. But you have awfully little tact.”

“_I_ have little tact? You should see me work off an old jacket!”

He was silent a moment, standing before her with his hands in his
pockets. “It’s a good job you’re so handsome.”

Millicent didn’t blush at this compliment, and probably didn’t
understand all it conveyed, but she looked into his eyes a while, with
a smile that showed her teeth, and then said, more inconsequently than
ever, “Come now, who are you?”

“Who am I? I’m a wretched little bookbinder.”

“I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” Miss Henning
exclaimed. Then she let him know that she couldn’t ask him in, as she
made it a point not to receive gentlemen, but she didn’t mind if she
took another walk with him and she didn’t care if she met him
somewhere—if it were handy. As she lived so far from Lomax Place she
didn’t care if she met him half-way. So, in the dusky by-street in
Pimlico, before separating, they took a casual tryst; the most
interesting, the young man felt, that had yet been—he could scarcely
call it granted him.




VI


One day, shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin was
absent, and sent no explanation, as was customary in case of illness or
domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place
whose non-appearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better
unexplained, and was an implication of moral feebleness; but as a
general thing Mr Crookenden’s establishment was a haunt of punctuality
and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of
asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever
craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary
Frenchman, an ardent stoic, a cold conspirator and an exquisite artist,
who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of his
acquaintance and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him
sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation!
Hyacinth had had plenty of that, and had endeared himself to the
passionate refugee—Poupin had come to England after the Commune of
1871, to escape the reprisals of the government of M. Thiers, and had
remained there in spite of amnesties and rehabilitations—by the
solemnity and candour of his attention. He was a Republican of the
old-fashioned sort, of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic,
infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly
surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in
the land of his exile. Poupin had a high claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem
and gratitude, for he had been his godfather, his protector at the
bindery. When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s
_protégé_ to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had
accidentally formed an acquaintance, that he found it.

When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr Vetch made him a present
of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume had
important consequences for Hyacinth. Anastasius Vetch was a poor man,
and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but when
once in a way he tasted it he liked the sensation to be pure. No man
knew better the difference between the common and the rare, or was more
capable of appreciating a book which opened well—of which the margin
was not hideously chopped and of which the lettering on the back was
sharp. It was only such a book that he could bring himself to offer
even to a poor little devil whom a fifth-rate dressmaker (he knew
Pinnie was fifth-rate) had rescued from the workhouse. So when it
became a question of fitting the great Elizabethan with a new coat—a
coat of full morocco, discreetly, delicately gilt—he went with his
little cloth-bound volume, a Pickering, straight to Mr Crookenden, whom
every one that knew anything about the matter knew to be a prince of
binders, though they also knew that his work, limited in quantity, was
mainly done for a particular bookseller and only through the latter’s
agency. Anastasius Vetch had no idea of paying the bookseller’s
commission, and though he could be lavish (for him) when he made a
present, he was capable of taking an immense deal of trouble to save
sixpence. He made his way into Mr Crookenden’s workshop, which was
situated in a small superannuated square in Soho, and where the
proposal of so slender a job was received at first with coldness. Mr
Vetch, however, insisted, and explained with irresistible frankness the
motive of his errand: the desire to obtain the best possible binding
for the least possible money. He made his conception of the best
possible binding so vivid, so exemplary, that the master of the shop at
last confessed to that disinterested sympathy which, under favouring
circumstances, establishes itself between the artist and the
connoisseur. Mr Vetch’s little book was put in hand as a particular
service to an eccentric gentleman whose visit had been a smile-stirring
interlude (for the circle of listening workmen) in a merely mechanical
day; and when he went back, three weeks later, to see whether it were
done, he had the pleasure of finding that his injunctions, punctually
complied with, had even been bettered. The work had been accomplished
with a perfection of skill which made him ask whom he was to thank for
it (he had been told that one man should do the whole of it), and in
this manner he made the acquaintance of the most brilliant craftsman in
the establishment, the incorruptible, the imaginative, the unerring
Eustache Poupin.

In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be _banal_ M.
Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments
in morocco, Russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens with which, for
the love of the art, he had amused his leisure hours and which he
should be happy to show his interlocutor if the latter would do him the
honour to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr Vetch made
a note of the address and, for the love of the art, went one Sunday
afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this occasion he
made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady with a
bristling moustache, the white cap of an _ouvrière_, a knowledge of her
husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable of
English save the words, “What you think, what you think?” which she
introduced with startling frequency. He also discovered that his new
acquaintance had been a political proscript and that he regarded the
iniquitous fabric of Church and State with an eye scarcely more
reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was a socialist, which
Anastasius Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of being
a mere scoffer at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist and a
visionary; he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of
the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses,
and embrace on both cheeks, and cover the globe with boulevards,
radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit, in groups, at
little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee (not tea, _par
exemple!_) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr Vetch neither
prefigured nor desired this organised felicity; he was fond of his cup
of tea, and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal
simplified; he thought it a much overrated system, but his heresies
rubbed shoulders, sociably, with those of the little bookbinder, and
his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelligent
foreigner whose conversation completes our culture. Poupin’s humanitary
zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and
the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to
discuss, which was much better than an unspeakable harmony. On several
other Sunday afternoons the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and
having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional
privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an
order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her
husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they
didn’t understand a word that was spoken, and consoled themselves by
gazing at their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure did not
arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda
Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies, lacked
female society, and Mr Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax
Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her
life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favourable
a specimen till she began to go wrong), adopted his suggestion, in the
hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose appearance would
doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally had done) the fine
taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder and his wife a
bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the relaxed, and was haunted,
long afterwards, by the memory of the lady’s calico jacket, her
uncorseted form and her carpet slippers.

The acquaintance, none the less, was sealed three months later by a
supper, one Sunday night, in Lisson Grove, to which Mr Vetch brought
his fiddle, at which Amanda presented to her hosts her adoptive son,
and which also revealed to her that Madame Poupin could dress a
Michaelmas goose, if she couldn’t dress a fat Frenchwoman. This lady
confided to the fiddler that she thought Miss Pynsent exceedingly
_comme il faut—dans le genre anglais;_ and neither Amanda nor Hyacinth
had ever passed an evening of such splendour. It took its place, in the
boy’s recollection, beside the visit, years before, to Mr Vetch’s
theatre. He drank in the conversation which passed between that
gentleman and M. Poupin. M. Poupin showed him his bindings, the most
precious trophies of his skill, and it seemed to Hyacinth that on the
spot he was initiated into a fascinating mystery. He handled the books
for half an hour; Anastasius Vetch watched him, without giving any
particular sign. When, therefore, presently, Miss Pynsent consulted her
friend for the twentieth time on the subject of Hyacinth’s ‘career’—she
spoke as if she were hesitating between the diplomatic service, the
army and the church—the fiddler replied with promptitude, “Make him, if
you can, what the Frenchman is.” At the mention of a handicraft poor
Pinnie always looked very solemn, yet when Mr Vetch asked her if she
were prepared to send the boy to one of the universities, or to pay the
premium required for his being articled to a solicitor, or to make
favour, on his behalf, with a bank-director or a mighty merchant, or,
yet again, to provide him with a comfortable home while he should woo
the muse and await the laurels of literature—when, I say, he put the
case before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity, she only sighed
and said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds,
which, as he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance
for evermore to take out of the bank. The fiddler had, in fact,
declared to her in a manner not to be mistaken that if she should
divest herself, on the boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old
age, he would wash his hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of
success for Hyacinth was vague, save on one point, as regards which she
was passionately, fiercely firm; she was perfectly determined he should
never go into a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a
costermonger than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a
grocer’s, or giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would
rather, she declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker
or a tailor.

A stationer in a neighbouring street had affixed to his window a
written notice that he was in want of a smart errand-boy, and Pinnie,
on hearing of it, had presented Hyacinth to his consideration. The
stationer was a dreadful bullying man, with a patch over his eye, who
seemed to think the boy would be richly remunerated with three
shillings a week; a contemptible measure, as it seemed to the
dressmaker, of his rare abilities and acquirements. His schooling had
been desultory, precarious, and had had a certain continuity mainly in
his early years, while he was under the care of an old lady who
combined with the functions of pew-opener at a neighbouring church the
manipulation, in the Place itself, where she resided with her sister, a
monthly nurse, of such pupils as could be spared (in their families)
from the more urgent exercise of holding the baby and fetching the
beer. Later, for a twelvemonth, Pinnie had paid five shillings a week
for him at an ‘Academy’ in a genteel part of Islington, where there was
an ‘instructor in the foreign languages’, a platform for oratory, and a
high social standard, but where Hyacinth suffered from the fact that
almost all his mates were the sons of dealers in edible
articles—pastry-cooks, grocers and fishmongers—and in this capacity
subjected him to pangs and ignominious contrasts by bringing to school,
for their exclusive consumption, or for exchange and barter, various
buns, oranges, spices, and marine animals, which the boy, with his
hands in his empty pockets and the sense of a savourless home in his
heart, was obliged to see devoured without his participation. Miss
Pynsent would not have pretended that he was highly educated, in the
technical sense of the word, but she believed that at fifteen he had
read almost every book in the world. The limits of his reading were, in
fact, only the limits of his opportunity. Mr Vetch, who talked with him
more and more as he grew older, knew this, and lent him every volume he
possessed or could pick up for the purpose. Reading was his happiness,
and the absence of any direct contact with a library his principal
source of discontent; that is, of that part of his discontent which he
could speak out. Mr Vetch knew that he was really clever, and therefore
thought it a woful pity that he could not have furtherance in some
liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still that so
bright a lad should be condemned to measure tape or cut slices of
cheese. He himself had no influence which he could bring into play, no
connection with the great world of capital or the market of labour.
That is, he touched these mighty institutions at but one very small
point—a point which, such as it was, he kept well in mind.

When Pinnie replied to the stationer round the corner, after he had
mentioned the ‘terms’ on which he was prepared to receive applications
from errand-boys, that, thank heaven, she hadn’t sunk so low as that—so
low as to sell her darling into slavery for three shillings a week—he
felt that she only gave more florid expression to his own sentiment. Of
course, if Hyacinth did not begin by carrying parcels he could not hope
to be promoted, through the more refined nimbleness of tying them up,
to a position as accountant or bookkeeper; but both the fiddler and his
friend—Miss Pynsent, indeed, only in the last resort—resigned
themselves to the forfeiture of this prospect. Mr Vetch saw clearly
that a charming handicraft was a finer thing than a vulgar ‘business’,
and one day, after his acquaintance with Eustache Poupin had gone a
considerable length, he inquired of the Frenchman whether there would
be a chance of the lad’s obtaining a footing, under his own wing, in Mr
Crookenden’s workshop. There could be no better place for him to
acquire a knowledge of the most delightful of the mechanical arts; and
to be received into such an establishment, and at the instance of such
an artist, would be a real start in life. M. Poupin meditated, and that
evening confided his meditations to the companion who reduplicated all
his thoughts and understood him better even than he understood himself.
The pair had no children, and had felt the defect; moreover, they had
heard from Mr Vetch the dolorous tale of the boy’s entrance into life.
He was one of the disinherited, one of the expropriated, one of the
exceptionally interesting; and, moreover he was one of themselves, a
child, as it were, of France, an offshoot of the sacred race. It is not
the most authenticated point in this veracious history, but there is
strong reason to believe that tears were shed that night, in Lisson
Grove, over poor little Hyacinth Robinson. In a day or two M. Poupin
replied to the fiddler that he had now been several years in Mr
Crookenden’s employ; that during that time he had done work for him
that he would have had _bien du mal_ to get done by another, and had
never asked for an indulgence, an allowance, a remission, an
augmentation. It was time, if only for the dignity of the thing, he
should ask for something, and he would make their little friend the
subject of his demand. “_La société lui doit bien cela_,” he remarked
afterwards, when, Mr Crookenden proving drily hospitable and the
arrangement being formally complete, Mr Vetch thanked him, in his
kindly, casual, bashful English way. He was paternal when Hyacinth
began to occupy a place in the malodorous chambers in Soho; he took him
in hand, made him a disciple, the recipient of a precious tradition,
discovered in him a susceptibility to philosophic as well as technic
truth. He taught him French and socialism, encouraged him to spend his
evenings in Lisson Grove, invited him to regard Madame Poupin as a
second, or rather as a third, mother, and in short made a very
considerable mark on the boy’s mind. He elicited the latent Gallicism
of his nature, and by the time he was twenty Hyacinth, who had
completely assimilated his influence, regarded him with a mixture of
veneration and amusement. M. Poupin was the person who consoled him
most when he was miserable; and he was very often miserable.

His staying away from his work was so rare that, in the afternoon,
before he went home, Hyacinth walked to Lisson Grove to see what ailed
him. He found his friend in bed, with a plaster on his chest, and
Madame Poupin making _tisane_ over the fire. The Frenchman took his
indisposition solemnly but resignedly, like a man who believed that all
illness was owing to the imperfect organisation of society, and lay
covered up to his chin, with a red cotton handkerchief bound round his
head. Near his bed sat a visitor, a young man unknown to Hyacinth.
Hyacinth, naturally, had never been to Paris, but he always supposed
that the _intérieur_ of his friends in Lisson Grove gave rather a vivid
idea of that city. The two small rooms which constituted their
establishment contained a great many mirrors, as well as little
portraits (old-fashioned prints) of revolutionary heroes. The
chimney-piece, in the bedroom, was muffled in some red drapery, which
appeared to Hyacinth extraordinarily magnificent; the principal
ornament of the salon was a group of small and highly-decorated cups,
on a tray, accompanied by gilt bottles and glasses, the latter still
more diminutive—the whole intended for black coffee and liqueurs. There
was no carpet on the floor, but rugs and mats, of various shapes and
sizes, disposed themselves at the feet of the chairs and sofas; and in
the sitting-room, where there was a wonderful gilt clock, of the
Empire, surmounted with a ‘subject’ representing Virtue receiving a
crown of laurel from the hands of Faith, Madame Poupin, with the aid of
a tiny stove, a handful of charcoal, and two or three saucepans,
carried on a triumphant _cuisine_. In the windows were curtains of
white muslin, much fluted and frilled, and tied with pink ribbon.




VII


“I am suffering extremely, but we must all suffer, so long as the
social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected,” Poupin
remarked, speaking French and rolling toward Hyacinth his salient,
excited-looking eyes, which always had the same proclaiming,
challenging expression, whatever his occupation or his topic. Hyacinth
had seated himself near his friend’s pillow, opposite the strange young
man, who had been accommodated with a chair at the foot of the bed.

“Ah, yes; with their filthy politics the situation of the _pauvre
monde_ is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed, from
the fire. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”

“It will go on till the measure of their imbecility, their infamy, is
full. It will go on till the day of justice, till the reintegration of
the despoiled and disinherited, is ushered in with an irresistible
force.”

“Oh, we always see things go on; we never see them change,” said Madame
Poupin, making a very cheerful clatter with a big spoon in a saucepan.

“We may not see it, but _they’ll_ see it,” her husband rejoined. “But
what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It’s before my
eyes, in its luminous reality, especially as I lie here—the
revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification.”

Hyacinth ceased to pay attention, not because he had a differing
opinion about what M. Poupin called the _avènement_ of the
disinherited, but, on the contrary, precisely on account of his
familiarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his French
friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of chronic
spiritual inflammation. For them the social question was always in
order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited always
present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their vivacity,
their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction and
prophecy which they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he
was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when the
social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs, which
would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of his
brothers and sisters in misery. They, however, were perpetually in the
breach, and perpetually consistent with themselves and, what is more,
with each other. Hyacinth had heard that the institution of marriage in
France was rather lightly considered, but he was struck with the
closeness and intimacy of the union in Lisson Grove, the passionate
identity of interest: especially on the day when M. Poupin informed
him, in a moment of extreme but not indiscreet expansion, that the lady
was his wife only in a spiritual, transcendental sense. There were
hypocritical concessions and debasing superstitions of which this
exalted pair wholly disapproved. Hyacinth knew their vocabulary by
heart, and could have said everything, in the same words, that on any
given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say. He knew that ‘they’, in
their phraseology, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the
world but the people—though who, exactly, in their length and breadth,
the people were was less definitely established. He himself was of this
sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and
so, of course, were the Frenchman and his consort, and so was Pinnie,
and so were most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in
old Crookenden’s shop. But was old Crookenden himself, who wore an
apron rather dirtier than the rest of them and was a master-hand at
‘forwarding’, but who, on the other side, was the occupant of a villa
almost detached, in Putney, with a wife known to have secret
aspirations toward a page in buttons? Above all, was Mr Vetch, who
earned a weekly wage, and not a large one, with his fiddle, but who had
mysterious affinities of another sort, reminiscences of a phase in
which he smoked cigars, had a hat-box and used cabs—besides visiting
Boulogne? Anastasius Vetch had interfered in his life, atrociously, in
a terrible crisis; but Hyacinth, who strove to cultivate justice in his
own conduct, believed he had acted conscientiously and tried to esteem
him, the more so as the fiddler evidently felt that he had something to
make up to him and had treated him with marked benevolence for years.
He believed, in short, that Mr Vetch took a sincere interest in him,
and if he should meddle again would meddle in a different way: he used
to see him sometimes looking at him with the kindest eyes. It would
make a difference, therefore, whether he were of the people or not,
inasmuch as in the day of the great revenge it would only be the people
who should be saved. It was for the people the world was made: whoever
was not of them was against them; and all others were cumberers,
usurpers, exploiters, _accapareurs_, as M. Poupin used to say. Hyacinth
had once put the question directly to Mr Vetch, who looked at him a
while through the fumes of his eternal pipe and then said, “Do you
think I’m an aristocrat?”

“I didn’t know but you were a _bourgeois_,” the young man answered.

“No, I’m neither. I’m a Bohemian.”

“With your evening dress, every night?”

“My dear boy,” said the fiddler, “those are the most confirmed.”

Hyacinth was only half satisfied with this, for it was by no means
definite to him that Bohemians were also to be saved; if he could be
sure, perhaps he would become one himself. Yet he never suspected Mr
Vetch of being a ‘spy’, though Eustache Poupin had told him that there
were a great many who looked a good deal like that: not, of course,
with any purpose of incriminating the fiddler, whom he had trusted from
the first and continued to trust. The middle-class spy became a very
familiar type to Hyacinth, and though he had never caught one of the
infamous brotherhood in the act, there were plenty of persons to whom,
on the very face of the matter, he had no hesitation in attributing the
character. There was nothing of the Bohemian, at any rate, about the
Poupins, whom Hyacinth had now known long enough not to be surprised at
the way they combined the socialistic passion, a red-hot impatience for
the general rectification, with an extraordinary decency of life and a
worship of proper work. The Frenchman spoke, habitually, as if the
great swindle practised upon the people were too impudent to be endured
a moment longer, and yet he found patience for the most exquisite
‘tooling’, and took a book in hand with the deliberation of one who
should believe that everything was immutably constituted. Hyacinth knew
what he thought of priests and theologies, but he had the religion of
conscientious craftsmanship, and he reduced the boy, on his side, to a
kind of prostration before his delicate, wonder-working fingers. “What
will you have? _J’ai la main parisienne_,” M. Poupin would reply
modestly, when Hyacinth’s admiration broke out; and he was good enough,
after he had seen a few specimens of what our hero could do, to inform
him that _he_ had the same happy conformation. “There is no reason why
you shouldn’t be a good workman, _il n’y a que ça;_” and his own life
was practically governed by this conviction. He delighted in the use of
his hands and his tools and the exercise of his taste, which was
faultless, and Hyacinth could easily imagine how it must torment him to
spend a day on his back. He ended by perceiving, however, that
consolation was, on this occasion, in some degree conveyed by the
presence of the young man who sat at the foot of the bed, and with whom
M. Poupin exhibited such signs of acquaintance as to make our hero
wonder why he had not seen him before, nor even heard of him.

“What do you mean by an irresistible force?” the young man inquired,
leaning back in his chair, with raised arms and his interlocked hands
behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had spoken French, which he
always preferred to do, the insular tongue being an immense tribulation
to him; but his visitor spoke English, and Hyacinth immediately
perceived that there was nothing French about _him_—M. Poupin could
never tell him he had _la main parisienne_.

“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars
and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps
of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.

“And in this country, I hope in their coal-bins. _Là-là_, we shall find
them even there,” his wife remarked.

“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would
have thought so if you had been there.”

“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here,
ten years ago,” the young man rejoined. He saw that Hyacinth was
watching him, and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that
added to our hero’s interest.

“_Pardon, pardon_, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his
improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they
resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out
laughing; whereupon his host declared, with a dignity which even his
recumbent position did not abate, that it was really frivolous of him
to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.

“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man, good-naturedly, lowering his
arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets, while he stretched his
long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”

“Oh, the trial will be on a great scale—_soyez tranquille!_ It will be
one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”

Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it
must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would
take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with
him—he could see that he was remarkable—and felt slightly aggrieved
that he should be a stranger: that is, that he should be, apparently, a
familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought
his young friend from Lomax Place worthy, up to this time, to be made
acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other
chair discovered these reflections in Hyacinth’s face, but after a
moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly
diffident way, a way our hero liked, “And do you know, too?”

“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth, wondering.

“Oh, if you did, you would!” the young man exclaimed, laughing again.
Such a rejoinder, from any one else, would have irritated our sensitive
hero, but it only made Hyacinth more curious about his interlocutor,
whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.

“_Mon ami_, you ought to present _ces messieurs_,” Madame Poupin
remarked.

“_Ah ça_, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband
cried out, without heeding her. Then he went on, in a different tone: “
M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, _un enfant très-doué_, in whom I take a
tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping
big one! Isn’t it so, _mon petit?_”

This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without
knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly, “Oh, I only want them
to let me alone!”

“He is very young,” said Eustache Poupin.

“He is the person we have seen in this country whom we like the best,”
his wife added.

“Perhaps you are French,” suggested the strange young man.

The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it
was as if a listening stillness had fallen upon them. He found it a
difficult moment, partly because there was something exciting and
embarrassing in the attention of the other visitor, and partly because
he had never yet had to decide that important question. He didn’t
really know whether he were French or English, or which of the two he
should prefer to be. His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien
land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumed her, in a
place, among a people, she must have execrated—all this made him
French; yet he was conscious at the same time of qualities that did not
mix with it. He had evolved, long ago, a legend about his mother, built
it up slowly, adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and
broodings, when his cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were
times when it wavered and faded, when it ceased to console him and he
ceased to trust it. He had had a father too, and his father had
suffered as well, and had fallen under a blow, and had paid with his
life; and him also he felt in his mind and his body, when the effort to
think it out did not simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging
still even while they baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any
rate, he seemed rooted in the place where his wretched parents had
expiated, and he knew nothing about any other. Moreover, when old
Poupin said, ‘M. Hyacinthe’, as he had often done before, he didn’t
altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well
enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser. Our young
friend was under a cloud and a stigma, but he was not yet prepared to
admit that he was ridiculous. “Oh, I dare say I ain’t anything,” he
replied in a moment.

“_En v’là des bêtises!_” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say you
are not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”

“We all have an account to settle, don’t you know?” said the strange
young man.

He evidently meant this to be encouraging to Hyacinth, whose quick
desire to avert M. Poupin’s allusions had not been lost upon him; but
our hero could see that he himself would be sure to be one of the first
to be paid. He would make society bankrupt, but he would be paid. He
was tall and fair and good-natured looking, but you couldn’t tell—or at
least Hyacinth couldn’t—whether he were handsome or ugly, with his
large head and square forehead, his thick, straight hair, his heavy
mouth and rather vulgar nose, his admirably clear, bright eye,
light-coloured and set very deep; for though there was a want of
fineness in some of its parts, his face had a marked expression of
intelligence and resolution, and denoted a kind of joyous moral health.
He was dressed like a workman in his Sunday toggery, having evidently
put on his best to call in Lisson Grove, where he was to meet a lady,
and wearing in particular a necktie which was both cheap and
pretentious, and of which Hyacinth, who noticed everything of that
kind, observed the crude, false blue. He had very big shoes—the shoes,
almost, of a country labourer—and spoke with a provincial accent, which
Hyacinth believed to be that of Lancashire. This didn’t suggest
cleverness, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from perceiving that he was
the reverse of stupid; that he probably, indeed, had a tremendous head.
Our little hero had a great desire to know superior people, and he
interested himself on the spot in this strong, humorous fellow, who had
the complexion of a ploughboy and the glance of a commander-in-chief
and who might have been (Hyacinth thought) a distinguished young
_savant_ in the disguise of an artisan. The disguise would have been
very complete, for he had several brown stains on his fingers.
Hyacinth’s curiosity, on this occasion, was both excited and gratified;
for after two or three allusions, which he didn’t understand, had been
made to a certain place where Poupin and the stranger had met and
expected to meet again, Madame Poupin exclaimed that it was a shame not
to take in M. Hyacinthe, who, she would answer for it, had in him the
making of one of the pure.

“All in good time, in good time, _ma bonne_,” the invalid replied. “M.
Hyacinthe knows that I count upon him, whether or no I make him an
_interne_ to-day or wait a while longer.”

“What do you mean by an _interne?_” Hyacinth asked.

“_Mon Dieu_, what shall I say!” and Eustache Poupin stared at him
solemnly, from his pillow. “You are very sympathetic, but I am afraid
you are too young.”

“One is never too young to contribute one’s _obole_,” said Madame
Poupin.

“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other visitor, smilingly.

“Is it a plot—a conspiracy?” Hyacinth broke out.

“He asks that as if he were asking if it’s a plum-pudding,” said M.
Poupin. “It isn’t good to eat, and we don’t do it for our amusement.
It’s terribly serious, my child.”

“It’s a kind of society, to which he and I and a good many others
belong. There is no harm in telling him that,” the young man went on.

“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she is quite in the old
ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her _tisane_.

Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in
Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you have some plan,
something to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told
me,” he remarked, in a moment, to Poupin.

The latter merely gazed at him a while; then he said to the strange
young man, “He is a little jealous of you. But there is no harm in
that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We will
tell you his history some other day; it will make you feel that he
belongs to us in fact. It is an accident that he hasn’t met you here
before.”

“How could _ces messieurs_ have met, when M. Paul never comes? He
doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.

“Well, you see I have my little sister at home to take care of, when I
ain’t at the shop,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a
chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”

“A lady—a real lady?”

“Oh yes, every inch,” said M. Paul, laughing.

“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that,
because you have the _désagrément_ of being poor? It seems to be the
custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame Poupin
continued. “I should like to see one of _ces dames_—the real
ones—coming in to sit with me!”

“Oh, you are not a cripple; you have got the use of your legs!”

“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.

“This lady looks after several others in our court, and she reads to my
sister.”

“Oh, well, you are patient, you English.”

“We shall never do anything without that,” said M. Paul, with
undisturbed good-humour.

“You are perfectly right; you can’t say that too often. It will be a
tremendous job, and only the strong will prevail,” his host murmured, a
little wearily, turning his eyes to Madame Poupin, who approached
slowly, holding the _tisane_ in a rather full bowl, and tasting it
again and yet again as she came.

Hyacinth had been watching his fellow-visitor with deepening interest;
a fact of which M. Paul apparently became aware, for he said,
presently, giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we
ought to know each other. I’m sure I have nothing against it. I like to
know folk, when they’re worth it!”

Hyacinth was too pleased with this even to take it up; it seemed to
him, for a moment, that he couldn’t touch it gracefully enough. But he
said, with sufficient eagerness, “Will you tell me all about your
plot?”

“Oh, it’s no plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.” And with his
mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M. Paul certainly had not much
the appearance of a conspirator.

“Isn’t it a new era?” asked Hyacinth, rather disappointed.

“Well, I don’t know; it’s just a little movement.”

“_Ah bien, voilà du propre;_ between us we have thrown him into a
fever!” cried Madame Poupin, who had put down her bowl on a table near
her husband’s bed and was bending over him, with her hand on his
forehead. Eustache was flushed, he had closed his eyes, and it was
evident there had been more than enough conversation. Madame Poupin
announced as much, with the addition that if the young men wished to
make acquaintance they must do it outside; the invalid must be
perfectly quiet. They accordingly withdrew, with apologies and promises
to return for further news on the morrow, and two minutes afterward
Hyacinth found himself standing face to face with his new friend on the
pavement in front of M. Poupin’s residence, under a street-lamp which
struggled ineffectually with the brown winter dusk.

“Is that your name—M. Paul?” he asked, looking up at him.

“Oh, bless you, no; that’s only her Frenchified way of putting it. My
name _is_ Paul, though—Paul Muniment.”

“And what’s your trade?” Hyacinth demanded, with a jump into
familiarity; for his companion seemed to have told him a great deal
more than was usually conveyed in that item of information.

Paul Muniment looked down at him from above broad shoulders. “I work at
a wholesale chemist’s, at Lambeth.”

“And where do you live?”

“I live over the water, too; in the far south of London.”

“And are you going home now?”

“Oh yes, I am going to toddle.”

“And may I toddle with you?”

Mr Muniment considered him further; then he gave a laugh. “I’ll carry
you, if you like.”

“Thank you; I expect I can walk as far as you,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, I admire your spirit, and I dare say I shall like your company.”

There was something in his face, taken in connection with the idea that
he was concerned in a little movement, which made Hyacinth feel the
desire to go with him till he dropped; and in a moment they started
away together and took the direction Muniment had mentioned. They
discoursed as they went, and exchanged a great many opinions and
anecdotes; but they reached the south-westerly court in which the young
chemist lived with his infirm sister before he had told Hyacinth
anything definite about his little movement, or Hyacinth, on his side,
had related to him the circumstances connected with his being,
according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t wish
to press him; he would not for the world have appeared to him
indiscreet; and, moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to
Muniment, he was not quite prepared, as yet, to be pressed. Therefore
it did not become very clear to him how his companion had made Poupin’s
acquaintance and how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless
was to a certain extent communicative about himself, and forewarned
Hyacinth that he lived in a very poor little corner. He had his sister
to keep—she could do nothing for herself; and he paid a low rent
because she had to have doctors, and doses, and all sorts of little
comforts. He spent a shilling a week for her on flowers. It was better,
too, when you got upstairs, and from the back windows you could see the
dome of St Paul’s. Audley Court, with its pretty name, which reminded
Hyacinth of Tennyson, proved to be a still dingier nook than Lomax
Place; and it had the further drawback that you had to pass through a
narrow alley, a passage between high, black walls, to enter it. At the
door of one of the houses the young men paused, lingering a little, and
then Muniment said, “I say, why shouldn’t you come up? I like you well
enough for that, and you can see my sister; her name is Rosy.” He spoke
as if this would be a great privilege, and added, humorously, that Rosy
enjoyed a call from a gentleman, of all things. Hyacinth needed no
urging, and he groped his way, at his companion’s heels, up a dark
staircase, which appeared to him—for they stopped only when they could
go no further—the longest and steepest he had ever ascended. At the top
Paul Muniment pushed open a door, but exclaimed, “Hullo, have you gone
to roost?” on perceiving that the room on the threshold of which they
stood was unlighted.

“Oh, dear, no; we are sitting in the dark,” a small, bright voice
instantly replied. “Lady Aurora is so kind; she’s here still.”

The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker
was indistinguishable. “Dear me, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment
rejoined. “You’ll have a party, then, for I have brought some one else.
We are poor, you know, but I dare say we can manage a candle.”

At this, in the dim firelight, Hyacinth saw a tall figure erect
itself—a figure angular and slim, crowned with a large, vague hat,
surmounted, apparently, with a flowing veil. This unknown person gave a
singular laugh, and said, “Oh, I brought some candles; we could have
had a light if we had wished it.” Both the tone and the purport of the
words announced to Hyacinth that they proceeded from the lips of Lady
Aurora.




VIII


Paul Muniment took a match out of his pocket and lighted it on the sole
of his shoe; after which he applied it to a tallow candle which stood
in a tin receptacle on the low mantel-shelf. This enabled Hyacinth to
perceive a narrow bed in a corner, and a small figure stretched upon
it—a figure revealed to him mainly by the bright fixedness of a pair of
large eyes, of which the whites were sharply contrasted with the dark
pupil, and which gazed at him across a counterpane of gaudy patchwork.
The brown room seemed crowded with heterogeneous objects, and had,
moreover, for Hyacinth, thanks to a multitude of small prints, both
plain and coloured, fastened all over the walls, a highly-decorated
appearance. The little person in the corner had the air of having gone
to bed in a picture-gallery, and as soon as Hyacinth became aware of
this his impression deepened that Paul Muniment and his sister were
very remarkable people. Lady Aurora hovered before him with a kind of
drooping erectness, laughing a good deal, vaguely and shyly, as if
there were something rather awkward in her being found still on the
premises. “Rosy, girl, I’ve brought you a visitor,” Paul Muniment said.
“This young man has walked all the way from Lisson Grove to make your
acquaintance.” Rosy continued to look at Hyacinth from over her
counterpane, and he felt slightly embarrassed, for he had never yet
been presented to a young lady in her position. “You mustn’t mind her
being in bed—she’s always in bed,” her brother went on. “She’s in bed
just the same as a little trout is in the water.”

“Dear me, if I didn’t receive company because I was in bed, there
wouldn’t be much use, would there, Lady Aurora?”

Rosy made this inquiry in a light, gay tone, darting her brilliant eyes
at her companion, who replied instantly, with still greater hilarity,
and in a voice which struck Hyacinth as strange and affected, “Oh,
dear, no, it seems quite the natural place!” Then she added, “And it’s
such a pretty bed, such a comfortable bed!”

“Indeed it is, when your ladyship makes it up,” said Rosy; while
Hyacinth wondered at this strange phenomenon of a peer’s daughter (for
he knew she must be that) performing the functions of a housemaid.

“I say, now, you haven’t been doing that again to-day?” Muniment asked,
punching the mattress of the invalid with a vigorous hand.

“Pray, who would, if I didn’t?” Lady Aurora inquired. “It only takes a
minute, if one knows how.” Her manner was jocosely apologetic, and she
seemed to plead guilty to having been absurd; in the dim light Hyacinth
thought he saw her blush, as if she were much embarrassed. In spite of
her blushing, her appearance and manner suggested to him a personage in
a comedy. She sounded the letter _r_ peculiarly.

“I can do it, beautifully. I often do it, when Mrs Major doesn’t come
up,” Paul Muniment said, continuing to thump his sister’s couch in an
appreciative but somewhat subversive manner.

“Oh, I have no doubt whatever!” Lady Aurora exclaimed, quickly. “Mrs
Major must have so very much to do.”

“Not in the making-up of beds, I’m afraid; there are only two or three,
down there, for so many,” Paul Muniment remarked loudly, and with a
kind of incongruous cheerfulness.

“Yes, I have thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be
room for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time in a very serious
tone.

“There’s not much room for a family of that sort anywhere—thirteen
people of all ages and sizes,” the young man rejoined. “The world’s
pretty big, but there doesn’t seem room.”

“We are also thirteen at home;” said Lady Aurora, laughing again. “We
are also rather crowded.”

“Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy inquired eagerly, in her
dusky nook.

“I don’t know about Inglefield. I am so much in town.” Hyacinth could
see that Inglefield was a subject she wished to turn off, and to do so
she added, “We too are of all ages and sizes.”

“Well, it’s fortunate you are not all _your_ size!” Paul Muniment
exclaimed, with a freedom at which Hyacinth was rather shocked, and
which led him to suspect that, though his new friend was a very fine
fellow, a delicate tact was not his main characteristic. Later he
explained this by the fact that he was rural and provincial, and had
not had, like himself, the benefit of metropolitan culture; and later
still he asked himself what, after all, such a character as that had to
do with tact or with compliments, and why its work in the world was not
most properly performed by the simple exercise of a rude, manly
strength.

At this familiar allusion to her stature Lady Aurora turned hither and
thither, a little confusedly; Hyacinth saw her high, lean figure sway
to and fro in the dim little room. Her commotion carried her to the
door, and with ejaculations of which it was difficult to guess the
meaning she was about to depart, when Rosy detained her, having
evidently much more social art than Paul. “Don’t you see it’s only
because her ladyship is standing up that she’s so, you gawk? We are not
thirteen, at any rate, and we have got all the furniture we want, so
that there’s a chair for every one. Do be seated again, Lady Aurora,
and help me to entertain this gentleman. I don’t know your name, sir;
perhaps my brother will mention it when he has collected his wits. I am
very glad to see you, though I don’t see you very well. Why shouldn’t
we light one of her ladyship’s candles? It’s very different to that
common thing.”

Hyacinth thought Miss Muniment very charming: he had begun to make her
out better by this time, and he watched her little wan, pointed face,
framed, on the pillow, by thick black hair. She was a diminutive dark
person, pale and wasted with a lifelong infirmity; Hyacinth thought her
manner denoted high cleverness—he judged it impossible to tell her age.
Lady Aurora said she ought to have gone, long since; but she seated
herself, nevertheless, on the chair that Paul pushed towards her.

“Here’s a go!” this young man exclaimed. “You told me your name, but
I’ve clean forgotten it.” Then, when Paul had announced it again, he
said to his sister, “That won’t tell you much; there are bushels of
Robinsons in the north. But you’ll like him; he’s a very smart little
fellow; I met him at the Poupins.” ‘Puppin’ would represent the sound
by which he designated the French bookbinder, and that was the name by
which Hyacinth always heard him called at Mr Crookenden’s. Hyacinth
knew how much nearer to the right thing he himself came.

“Your name, like mine, represents a flower,” said the little woman in
the bed. “Mine is Rose Muniment, and her ladyship’s is Aurora Langrish.
That means the morning, or the dawn; it’s the most beautiful of all,
don’t you think so?” Rose Muniment addressed this inquiry to Hyacinth,
while Lady Aurora gazed at her shyly and mutely, as if she admired her
manner, her self-possession and flow of conversation. Her brother
lighted one of the visitor’s candles, and the girl went on, without
waiting for Hyacinth’s response: “Isn’t it right that she should be
called the dawn, when she brings light where she goes? The Puppins are
the charming foreigners I have told you about,” she explained to her
friend.

“Oh, it’s so pleasant knowing a few foreigners!” Lady Aurora exclaimed,
with a spasm of expression. “They are often so very fresh.”

“Mr Robinson’s a sort of foreigner, and he’s very fresh,” said Paul
Muniment. “He meets Mr Puppin quite on his own ground. If I had his
command of the lingo it would give me a lift.”

“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I feel
the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked, finely, and became
conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora
towards him; so that he wondered what he could go on to say, to keep at
that level. This was the first time he had encountered, socially, a
member of that aristocracy to which he had now for a good while known
it was Miss Pynsent’s theory that he belonged; and the occasion was
interesting, in spite of the lady’s appearing to have so few of the
qualities of her caste. She was about thirty years of age; her nose was
large and, in spite of the sudden retreat of her chin, her face was
long and lean. She had the manner of extreme near-sightedness; her
front teeth projected from her upper gums, which she revealed when she
smiled, and her fair hair, in tangled, silky skeins (Rose Muniment
thought it too lovely), drooped over her pink cheeks. Her clothes
looked as if she had worn them a good deal in the rain, and the note of
a certain disrepair in her apparel was given by a hole in one of her
black gloves, through which a white finger gleamed. She was plain and
diffident, and she might have been poor; but in the fine grain and
sloping, shrinking slimness of her whole person, the delicacy of her
curious features, and a kind of cultivated quality in her sweet, vague,
civil expression, there was a suggestion of race, of long transmission,
of an organism highly evolved. She was not a common woman; she was one
of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth did not define her in this
manner to himself, but he received from her the impression that, though
she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was not),
aristocracies were complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked that there
were many delightful books in French, and Hyacinth rejoined that it was
a torment to know that (as he did, very well) when you didn’t see your
way to getting hold of them. This led Lady Aurora to say, after a
moment’s hesitation, that she had a good lot of her own and that if he
liked she should be most happy to lend them to him. Hyacinth thanked
her—thanked her even too much, and felt both the kindness and the
brilliant promise of the offer (he knew the exasperation of having
volumes in his hands, for external treatment, which he couldn’t take
home at night, having tried that system, surreptitiously, during his
first weeks at Mr Crookenden’s and come very near losing his place in
consequence), while he wondered how it could be put into
practice—whether she would expect him to call at her house and wait in
the hall till the books were sent out to him. Rose Muniment exclaimed
that that was her ladyship all over—always wanting to make up to people
for being less fortunate than herself: she would take the shoes off her
feet for any one that might take a fancy to them. At this the visitor
declared that she would stop coming to see her, if the girl caught her
up, that way, for everything; and Rosy, without heeding this
remonstrance, explained to Hyacinth that she thought it the least she
could do to give what she had. She was so ashamed of being rich that
she wondered the lower classes didn’t break into Inglefield and take
possession of all the treasures in the Italian room. She was a
tremendous socialist; she was worse than any one—she was worse, even,
than Paul.

“I wonder if she is worse than me,” Hyacinth said, at a venture, not
understanding the allusions to Inglefield and the Italian room, which
Miss Muniment made as if she knew all about these places. After
Hyacinth knew more of the world he remembered this tone of Muniment’s
sister (he was to have plenty of observation of it on other occasions)
as that of a person who was in the habit of visiting the nobility at
their country-seats; she talked about Inglefield as if she had stayed
there.

“Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!” exclaimed Paul Muniment,
who had been sitting silent, sidewise, in a chair that was too narrow
for him, with his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been entertaining
an angel unawares?”

Hyacinth seemed to see that he was laughing at him, but he knew the way
to face that sort of thing was to exaggerate his meaning. “You didn’t
know I was advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about
me. I think I go about as far as it is possible to go.”

“I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,”
Paul Muniment said, with an air of derision which showed Hyacinth that
he wouldn’t put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same
time that it revealed to him that he himself had just been posturing a
little.

“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something very neat and
sharp to you, if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so
much in French.”

“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried
Rosy, in perfect good faith, clasping her hands in expectation.

The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the
consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the
words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now
that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration.
“I should like so very much to know—it would be so interesting—if you
don’t mind—how far exactly you do go.” She threw back her head very
far, and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more
adapted to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.

This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for Hyacinth
was far from having ascertained the extent of his advance. He replied,
however, with an earnestness with which he tried to make up as far as
possible for his vagueness: “Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I
see my way to conclusions, from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin
would shrink. Poupin, at any rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.”

“I should like so much to know Madame,” Lady Aurora murmured, as if
politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.

“Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,” said Muniment; “you can easily look over his
head! He has a sweet assortment of phrases—they are really pretty
things to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty
years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All
the same, he warms one up; he has got a spark of the sacred fire. The
principal conclusion that Mr Robinson sees his way to,” he added to
Lady Aurora, “is that your father ought to have his head chopped off
and carried on a pike.”

“Ah, yes, the French Revolution.”

“Lord, I don’t know anything about your father, my lady!” Hyacinth
interposed.

“Didn’t you ever hear of the Earl of Inglefield?” cried Rose Muniment.

“He is one of the best,” said Lady Aurora, as if she were pleading for
him.

“Very likely, but he is a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and a
park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we are bundled
together into this sort of kennel.” Hyacinth admired the young man’s
consistency until he saw that he was chaffing; after which he still
admired the way he mixed up merriment with the tremendous opinions our
hero was sure he entertained. In his own imagination Hyacinth
associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young
chemist, at the same time that he was planning far ahead, seemed
capable of turning revolutionists themselves into ridicule, even for
the entertainment of the revolutionised.

“Well, I have told you often enough that I don’t go with you at all,”
said Rose Muniment, whose recumbency appeared not in the least to
interfere with her sense of responsibility. “You’ll make a tremendous
mistake if you try to turn everything round. There ought to be
differences, and high and low, and there always will be, true as ever I
lie here. I think it’s against everything, pulling down them that’s
above.”

“Everything points to great changes in this country, but if once our
Rosy’s against them, how can you be sure? That’s the only thing that
makes me doubt,” her brother went on, looking at her with a placidity
which showed the habit of indulgence.

“Well, I may be ill, but I ain’t buried, and if I’m content with my
position—such a position as it is—surely other folk might be with
theirs. Her ladyship may think I’m as good as her, if she takes that
notion; but she’ll have a deal to do to make _me_ believe it.”

“I think you are much better than I, and I know very few people so good
as you,” Lady Aurora remarked, blushing, not for her opinions, but for
her timidity. It was easy to see that, though she was original, she
would have liked to be even more original than she was. She was
conscious, however, that such a declaration might appear rather gross
to persons who didn’t see exactly how she meant it; so she added, as
quickly as her hesitating manner permitted, to cover it up, “You know
there’s one thing you ought to remember, _à propos_ of revolutions and
changes and all that sort of thing; I just mention it because we were
talking of some of the dreadful things that were done in France. If
there were to be a great disturbance in this country—and of course one
hopes there won’t—it would be my impression that the people would
behave in a different way altogether.”

“What people do you mean?” Hyacinth allowed himself to inquire.

“Oh, the upper class, the people that have got all the things.”

“We don’t call them the people,” observed Hyacinth, reflecting the next
instant that his remark was a little primitive.

“I suppose you call them the wretches, the villains!” Rose Muniment
suggested, laughing merrily.

“All the things, but not all the brains,” her brother said.

“No, indeed, aren’t they stupid?” exclaimed her ladyship. “All the
same, I don’t think they would go abroad.”

“Go abroad?”

“I mean like the French nobles, who emigrated so much. They would stay
at home and resist; they would make more of a fight. I think they would
fight very hard.”

“I’m delighted to hear it, and I’m sure they would win!” cried Rosy.

“They wouldn’t collapse, don’t you know,” Lady Aurora continued. “They
would struggle till they were beaten.”

“And you think they would be beaten in the end?” Hyacinth asked.

“Oh dear, yes,” she replied, with a familiar brevity at which he was
greatly surprised. “But of course one hopes it won’t happen.”

“I infer from what you say that they talk it over a good deal among
themselves, to settle the line they will take,” said Paul Muniment.

But Rosy intruded before Lady Aurora could answer. “I think it’s wicked
to talk it over, and I’m sure we haven’t any business to talk it over
here! When her ladyship says that the aristocracy will make a fine
stand, I like to hear her say it, and I think she speaks in a manner
that becomes her own position. But there is something else in her tone
which, if I may be allowed to say so, I think a great mistake. If her
ladyship expects, in case of the lower classes coming up in that odious
manner, to be let off easily, for the sake of the concessions she may
have made in advance, I would just advise her to save herself the
disappointment and the trouble. They won’t be a bit the wiser, and they
won’t either know or care. If they are going to trample over their
betters, it isn’t on account of her having seemed to give up everything
to us here that they will let _her_ off. They will trample on her just
the same as on the others, and they’ll say that she has got to pay for
her title and her grand relations and her fine appearance. Therefore I
advise her not to waste her good nature in trying to let herself down.
When you’re up so high as that you’ve got to stay there; and if
Providence has made you a lady, the best thing you can do is to hold up
your head. I can promise your ladyship _I_ would!”

The close logic of this speech and the quaint self-possession with
which the little bedridden speaker delivered it struck Hyacinth as
amazing, and confirmed his idea that the brother and sister were a most
extraordinary pair. It had a terrible effect upon poor Lady Aurora, by
whom so stern a lesson from so humble a quarter had evidently not been
expected, and who sought refuge from her confusion in a series of
bewildered laughs, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density,
which was deliberate, and clever too, not seeing, or at any rate not
heeding, that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister,
inflicted a fresh humiliation by saying, “Rosy’s right, my lady. It’s
no use trying to buy yourself off. You can’t do enough; your sacrifices
don’t count. You spoil your fun now, and you don’t get it made up to
you later. To all you people nothing will ever be made up. Enjoy your
privileges while they last; it may not be for long.”

Lady Aurora listened to him with her eyes on his face; and as they
rested there Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of her expression.
Afterwards he thought he could attach a meaning to it. She got up
quickly when Muniment had ceased speaking; the movement suggested that
she had taken offence, and he would have liked to show her that he
thought she had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance,
not glancing at him for a moment. Then he saw that he was mistaken and
that, if she had flushed considerably, it was only with the excitement
of pleasure, the enjoyment of such original talk and of seeing her
friends at last as free and familiar as she wished them to be. “You are
the most delightful people—I wish every one could know you!” she broke
out. “But I must really be going.” She went to the bed, and bent over
Rosy and kissed her.

“Paul will see you as far as you like on your way home,” this young
woman remarked.

Lady Aurora protested against this, but Paul, without protesting in
return, only took up his hat and looked at her, smiling, as if he knew
his duty; upon which her ladyship said, “Well, you may see me
downstairs; I forgot it was so dark.”

“You must take her ladyship’s own candle, and you must call a cab,”
Rosy directed.

“Oh, I don’t go in cabs. I walk.”

“Well, you may go on the top of a ’bus, if you like; you can’t help
being superb,” Miss Muniment declared, watching her sympathetically.

“Superb? Oh, mercy!” cried the poor devoted, grotesque lady, leaving
the room with Paul, who asked Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She
neglected to bid good-night to our young man, and he asked himself what
was to be hoped from that sort of people, when even the best of
them—those that wished to be agreeable to the _demos_—reverted
inevitably to the supercilious. She had said no more about lending him
her books.




IX


“She lives in Belgrave Square; she has ever so many brothers and
sisters; one of her sisters is married to Lord Warmington,” Rose
Muniment instantly began, not apparently in the least discomposed at
being left alone with a strange young man in a room which was now half
dark again, thanks to her brother’s having carried off the second and
more brilliant candle. She was so interested, for the time, in telling
Hyacinth the history of Lady Aurora, that she appeared not to remember
how little she knew about himself. Her ladyship had dedicated her life
and her pocket-money to the poor and sick; she cared nothing for
parties, and races, and dances, and picnics, and life in great houses,
the usual amusements of the aristocracy; she was like one of the saints
of old come to life again out of a legend. She had made their
acquaintance, Paul’s and hers, about a year before, through a friend of
theirs, such a fine, brave, young woman, who was in St Thomas’s
Hospital for a surgical operation. She had been laid up there for
weeks, during which Lady Aurora, always looking out for those who
couldn’t help themselves, used to come and talk to her and read to her,
till the end of her time in the ward, when the poor girl, parting with
her kind friend, told her how she knew of another unfortunate creature
(for whom there was no place there, because she was incurable) who
would be mighty thankful for any little attention of that sort. She had
given Lady Aurora the address in Audley Court, and the very next day
her ladyship had knocked at their door. It wasn’t because she was
poor—though in all conscience they were pinched enough—but because she
had so little satisfaction in her limbs. Lady Aurora came very often,
for several months, without meeting Paul, because he was always at his
work; but one day he came home early, on purpose to find her, to thank
her for her goodness, and also to see (Miss Muniment rather shyly
intimated) whether she were really so good as his extravagant little
sister made her out. Rosy had a triumph after that: Paul had to admit
that her ladyship was beyond anything that any one in his waking senses
would believe. She seemed to want to give up everything to those who
were below her, and never to expect any thanks at all. And she wasn’t
always preaching and showing you your duty; she wanted to talk to you
sociable-like, as if you were just her own sister. And _her_ own
sisters were the highest in the land, and you might see her name in the
newspapers the day they were presented to the Queen. Lady Aurora had
been presented too, with feathers in her head and a long tail to her
gown; but she had turned her back upon it all with a kind of terror—a
sort of shivering, sinking feeling, which she had often described to
Miss Muniment. The day she had first seen Paul was the day they became
so intimate (the three of them together), if she might apply such a
word as that to such a peculiar connection. The little woman, the
little girl, as she lay there (Hyacinth scarcely knew how to
characterise her), told our young man a very great secret, in which he
found himself too much interested to think of criticising so headlong a
burst of confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had
ever seen in the world, her ladyship thought Rosy’s Paul the very
cleverest. And she had seen the greatest, the most famous, the
brightest of every kind, for they all came to stay at Inglefield,
thirty and forty of them at once. She had talked with them all and
heard them say their best (and you could fancy how they would try to
give it out at such a place as that, where there was nearly a mile of
conservatories and a hundred wax candles were lighted at time), and at
the end of it all she had made the remark to herself—and she had made
it to Rosy too—that there was none of them had such a head on his
shoulders as the young man in Audley Court. Rosy wouldn’t spread such a
rumour as that in the court itself, but she wanted every friend of her
brother’s (and she could see Hyacinth was that, by the way he listened)
to know what was thought of him by them that had an experience of
talent. She didn’t wish to give it out that her ladyship had lowered
herself in any manner to a person that earned his bread in a dirty shop
(clever as he _might_ be), but it was easy to see she minded what he
said as if he had been a bishop—or more, indeed, for she didn’t think
much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she
had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his
work before she had gone; and to-night Hyacinth could see for himself
how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would
let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave
Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative
hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely
excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling,
high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished,
of a poor north-country home, bedecked with penny ornaments and related
in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed
estates. He spent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd,
crippled, chattering, clever, trenchant sister, who gave him an
impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far
better than Pinnie, or than Millicent Henning), and who startled,
puzzled, and at the same time rather distressed, him by the manner in
which she referred herself to the most abject class—the class that
prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter in the presence of
its betters. That was Pinnie’s attitude, of course; but Hyacinth had
long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian
patience in her blood, and that though she had a tender soul she had
not a great one. He was more entertained than afflicted, however, by
Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and
familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered
about; this was the first time he had heard it described with that
degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually,
almost morbidly, conscious that the circle in which he lived was an
infinitesimally small, shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London,
and his imagination plunged again and again into the waves that whirled
past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter,
happier vision—the vision of societies in which, in splendid rooms,
with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were
both proud and gentle, talked about art, literature and history. When
Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject
of Lady Aurora, she became more quiet, asking, as yet, however, no
questions about Hyacinth, whom she seemed to take very much for
granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon
again, and he added, to explain this wish, “You know you seem to me
very curious people.”

Miss Muniment did not in the least repudiate the imputation. “Oh yes, I
dare say we seem very curious. I think we are generally thought so;
especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.” And she laughed
till her bed creaked again.

“Perhaps it’s lucky you are ill; perhaps if you had your health you
would be all over the place,” Hyacinth suggested. And he went on,
candidly, “I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.”

“I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you
had known my father and mother.”

“Were they such a rare lot?”

“I think you would say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in
the mines, where the filthy coal is dug out. That’s where my father
came from—he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He
never had a day’s schooling in his life; but he climbed up out of his
black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he
married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of
the pits and misery too. My father had no great figure, but _she_ was
magnificent—the finest woman in the country, and the bravest, and the
best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if
it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was as black as the coal
he worked in: I know I’m just his pattern, barring that _he_ did have
his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. But between him and my
mother, for grand, high intelligence there wasn’t much to choose. But
what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father
had even less of that than I, for with me it’s only the body that can’t
stand up, and with him it was the spirit. He discovered a kind of
wheel, and he sold it, at Bradford, for fifteen pounds: I mean the
whole right of it, and every hope and pride of his family. He was
always straying, and my mother was always bringing him back. She had
plenty to do, with me a puny, ailing brat from the moment I opened my
eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came back; or
only came back a loose, bloody bundle of clothes. He had fallen into a
gravel-pit; he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my
brother will never touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and
that I only have a drop once a week or so, in the way of a
strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more.
If she could have come to us before my mother went, that would have
been a saving! I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years
older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept
us decent—if such a useless little mess as me can be said to be decent.
At any rate, she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She
went to the wash-tub, and she might have been a queen, as she stood
there with her bare arms in the foul linen and her long hair braided on
her head. She was terrible handsome, but he would have been a bold man
that would have taken upon himself to tell her so. And it was from her
we got our education—she was determined we should rise above the
common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go
into such things; but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book.
She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t; and her idea,
for us, was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You
can see for yourself that that’s what has come about. How he got it is
more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of
course my mother’s cleverness wouldn’t have been of much use if he
hadn’t been clever himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a
boy that would learn more from a yellow placard pasted on a wall, or a
time-table at a railway station, than many a young fellow from a year
at college. That was his only college, poor lad—picking up what he
could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years
ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me
over, the goose of a thing—only that I’d have made a poor feast—and
just lay that gallant creature on her back. Well, she never again made
it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having
seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rose Muniment, in conclusion;
“but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had intellect, at
least, to give us.”

Hyacinth listened to this recital with the deepest interest, and
without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration;
inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it
would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very
way Rose Muniment sounded the word ‘intellect’ made him feel this; she
pronounced it as if she were distributing prizes for a high degree of
it. No doubt the tipsy inventor and the regal laundress had been fine
specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original
offspring. The girl’s insistence upon her mother’s virtues (even now
that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a
girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the
chord of melancholy, bitter, aimless wonder as to the difference it
would have made in _his_ spirit if there had been some pure, honourable
figure like that to shed her influence over it.

“Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired, after a little.

The eyes of his hostess glittered at him for a moment. “If you ever
quarrel with him, you’ll see whose side I’ll take.”

“Ah, before that I shall make you like _me_.”

“That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I’ll fling you over!”

“Why, then, do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the
people will come up?”

“Because I think he’ll get over them.”

“Never—never!” cried Hyacinth. “I have only known him an hour or two,
but I deny that, with all my strength.”

“Is that the way you are going to make me like you—contradicting me
so?” Miss Muniment inquired, with familiar archness.

“What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as
well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.”

“I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you are not, if you
want all the great people pulled down, and the most dreadful scenes
enacted.”

“Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for
the groaning, toiling millions—those who have been cheated and crushed
and bamboozled from the beginning of time?”

Hyacinth asked this question with considerable heat, but the effect of
it was to send his companion off into a new fit of laughter. “You say
that just like a man that my brother described to me three days ago; a
little man at some club, whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way he
glowered and screamed. I don’t mean that you scream, you know; but you
use almost the same words that he did.” Hyacinth scarcely knew what to
make of this allusion, or of the picture offered to him of Paul
Muniment casting ridicule upon those who spoke in the name of the
down-trodden. But Rosy went on, before he had time to do more than
reflect that there would evidently be a great deal more to learn about
her brother: “I haven’t the least objection to seeing the people
improved, but I don’t want to see the aristocracy lowered an inch. I
like so much to look at it up there.”

“You ought to know my aunt Pinnie—she’s just such another benighted
idolater!” Hyacinth exclaimed.

“Oh, you are making me like you very fast! And pray, who is your aunt
Pinnie?”

“She’s a dressmaker, and a charming little woman. I should like her to
come and see you.”

“I’m afraid I’m not in her line—I never had on a dress in my life. But,
as a charming woman, I should be delighted to see her.”

“I will bring her some day,” said Hyacinth. And then he added, rather
incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it
a shame that her sharpness should be enlisted on the wrong side, “Don’t
you want, for yourself, a better place to live in?”

She jerked herself up, and for a moment he thought she would jump out
of her bed at him. “A better place than this? Pray, how could there be
a better place? Every one thinks it’s lovely; you should see our view
by daylight—you should see everything I’ve got. Perhaps you are used to
something very fine, but Lady Aurora says that in all Belgrave Square
there isn’t such a cosy little room. If you think I’m not perfectly
content, you are very much mistaken!”

Such a sentiment as that could only exasperate Hyacinth, and his
exasperation made him indifferent to the fact that he had appeared to
cast discredit on Miss Muniment’s apartment. Pinnie herself, submissive
as she was, had spared him that sort of displeasure; she groaned over
the dinginess of Lomax Place sufficiently to remind him that she had
not been absolutely stultified by misery. “Don’t you sometimes make
your brother very angry?” he asked, smiling, of Rose Muniment.

“Angry? I don’t know what you take us for! I never saw him lose his
temper in his life.”

“He must be a rum customer! Doesn’t he really care for—for what we were
talking about?”

For a moment Rosy was silent; then she replied, “What my brother really
cares for—well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me.”

Hyacinth stared. “But isn’t he tremendously deep in—” He hesitated.

“Deep in what?”

“Well, in what’s going on, beneath the surface. Doesn’t he belong to
things?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to—you may ask him!” cried Rosy,
laughing gaily again, as the opening door readmitted the subject of
their conversation. “You must have crossed the water with her
ladyship,” she went on. “I wonder who enjoyed their walk most.”

“She’s a handy old girl, and she has a goodish stride,” said the young
man.

“I think she’s in love with you, simply, Mr Muniment.”

“Really, my dear, for an admirer of the aristocracy you allow yourself
a license,” Paul murmured, smiling at Hyacinth.

Hyacinth got up, feeling that really he had paid a long visit; his
curiosity was far from satisfied, but there was a limit to the time one
should spend in a young lady’s sleeping apartment. “Perhaps she is; why
not?” he remarked.

“Perhaps she is, then; she’s daft enough for anything.”

“There have been fine folks before who have patted the people on the
back and pretended to enter into their life,” Hyacinth said. “Is she
only playing with that idea, or is she in earnest?”

“In earnest—in terrible earnest, my dear fellow. I think she must be
rather crowded out at home.”

“Crowded out of Inglefield? Why, there’s room for three hundred!” Rosy
broke in.

“Well, if that’s the kind of mob that’s in possession, no wonder she
prefers Camberwell. We must be kind to the poor lady,” Paul added, in a
tone which Hyacinth noticed. He attributed a remarkable meaning to it;
it seemed to say that people such as he were now so sure of their game
that they could afford to be magnanimous; or else it expressed a
prevision of the doom which hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment
asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had made friends, and the girl replied that
Mr Robinson had made himself very agreeable. “Then you must tell me all
about him after he goes, for you know I don’t know him much myself,”
said her brother.

“Oh yes, I’ll tell you everything; you know how I like describing.”

Hyacinth was laughing to himself at the young lady’s account of his
efforts to please her, the fact being that he had only listened to her
own eager discourse, without opening his mouth; but Paul, whether or no
he guessed the truth, said to him very pertinently, “It’s very
wonderful: she can describe things she has never seen. And they are
just like the reality.”

“There’s nothing I’ve never seen,” Rosy rejoined. “That’s the advantage
of my lying here in such a manner. I see everything in the world.”

“You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings—his secret societies and
clubs. You put that aside when I asked you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t ask her that sort of thing,” said Paul, lowering at
Hyacinth with a fierce frown—an expression which he perceived in a
moment to be humorously assumed.

“What am I to do, then, since you won’t tell me anything definite
yourself?”

“It will be definite enough when you get hanged for it!” Rosy
exclaimed, mockingly.

“Why do you want to poke your head into black holes?” Muniment asked,
laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder, and shaking it gently.

“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” said Hyacinth, solemnly.

“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!”
Paul cried, laughing, to his sister. “You must have got that precious
phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that
the party you want to belong to?” he went on, with his clear eyes
ranging over his diminutive friend.

“If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to
mind the newspapers,” Hyacinth pleaded. It was his view of himself, and
it was not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never beg
for a favour; but now he felt that in any relation he might have with
Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This man he could entreat,
pray to, go on his knees to, without a sense of humiliation.

“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul went on,
refusing to be serious.

“Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and
that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure
they are coming in to make a search for your papers,” Miss Muniment
lucidly interposed.

“The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up
and dance.”

“What did you ask me to come home with you for?” Hyacinth demanded,
twirling his hat. It was an effort for him, for a moment, to keep the
tears out of his eyes; he found himself forced to put such a different
construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy
impression that Muniment perceived in him a possible associate, of a
high type, in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of
things, and now it came over him that the real use he had been put to
was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and
he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service,
every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to
enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man, at the present
juncture, justified the high estimate that Lady Aurora Langrish had
formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s
question would have been, he invented, at the moment, a better one, and
said, at random, smiling, and not knowing exactly what his visitor had
meant—

“What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you would be
afraid.”

What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally
vague; but he rejoined, quickly enough, “I think you have only to try
me to see.”

“I’m sure if you introduce him to some of your low, wicked friends,
he’ll be quite satisfied after he has looked round a bit,” Miss
Muniment remarked, irrepressibly.

“Those are just the kind of people I want to know,” said Hyacinth,
ingenuously.

His ingenuousness appeared to touch Paul Muniment. “Well, I see you’re
a good ’un. Just meet me some night.”

“Where, where?” asked Hyacinth, eagerly.

“Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away from _her_,” said his friend,
laughing, but leading him out of the room again.




X


Several months after Hyacinth had made the acquaintance of Paul
Muniment, Millicent Henning remarked to him that it was high time he
should take her to some place of amusement. He proposed the Canterbury
Music Hall; whereupon she tossed her head and affirmed that when a
young lady had done for a young man what she had done for him, the
least he could do was to take her to some theatre in the Strand.
Hyacinth would have been a good deal at a loss to say exactly what she
had done for him, but it was familiar to him by this time that she
regarded him as under great obligations. From the day she came to look
him up in Lomax Place she had taken a position, largely, in his life,
and he had seen poor Pinnie’s wan countenance grow several degrees more
blank. Amanda Pynsent’s forebodings had been answered to the letter;
that bold-faced apparition had become a permanent influence. She never
spoke to him about Millicent but once, several weeks after her
interview with the girl; and this was not in a tone of rebuke, for she
had divested herself for ever of any maternal prerogative. Tearful,
tremulous, deferential inquiry was now her only weapon, and nothing
could be more humble and circumspect than the manner in which she made
use of it. He was never at home of an evening, at present, and he had
mysterious ways of spending his Sundays, with which church-going had
nothing to do. The time had been when, often, after tea, he sat near
the lamp with the dressmaker, and, while her fingers flew, read out to
her the works of Dickens and of Scott; happy hours when he appeared to
have forgotten the wrong she had done him and she almost forgot it
herself. But now he gulped down his tea so fast that he hardly took off
his hat while he sat there, and Pinnie, with her quick eye for all
matters of costume, noticed that he wore it still more gracefully askew
than usual, with a little victorious, exalted air. He hummed to
himself; he fingered his moustache; he looked out of the window when
there was nothing to look at; he seemed pre-occupied, absorbed in
intellectual excursions, half anxious and half delighted. During the
whole winter Miss Pynsent explained everything by three words murmured
beneath her breath: “That forward jade!” On the single occasion,
however, on which she sought relief from her agitation in an appeal to
Hyacinth, she did not trust herself to designate the girl by any
epithet or title.

“There is only one thing I want to know,” she said to him, in a manner
which might have seemed casual if in her silence, knowing her as well
as he did, he had not already perceived the implication of her thought.
“Does she expect you to marry her, dearest?”

“Does who expect me? I should like to see the woman who does!”

“Of course you know who I mean. The one that came after you—and picked
you right up—from the other end of London.” And at the remembrance of
that insufferable scene poor Pinnie flamed up for a moment. “Isn’t
there plenty of young fellows down in that low part where she lives,
without her ravaging over here? Why can’t she stick to her own beat, I
should like to know?” Hyacinth had flushed at this inquiry, and she saw
something in his face which made her change her tone. “Just promise me
this, my precious child: that if you get into any sort of mess with
that piece you’ll immediately confide it to your poor old Pinnie.”

“My poor old Pinnie sometimes makes me quite sick,” Hyacinth remarked,
for answer. “What sort of a mess do you suppose I’ll get into?”

“Well, suppose she does come it over you that you promised to marry
her?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. She doesn’t want to marry
any one to-day.”

“Then what does she want to do?”

“Do you imagine I would tell a lady’s secrets?” the young man inquired.

“Dear me, if she was a lady, I shouldn’t be afraid!” said Pinnie.

“Every woman’s a lady when she has placed herself under one’s
protection,” Hyacinth rejoined, with his little manner of a man of the
world.

“Under your protection? Laws!” cried Pinnie, staring. “And pray, who’s
to protect _you?_”

As soon as she had said this she repented, because it seemed just the
sort of exclamation that would have made Hyacinth bite her head off.
One of the things she loved him for, however, was that he gave you
touching surprises in this line, had sudden inconsistencies of temper
that were all for your advantage. He was by no means always mild when
he ought to have been, but he was sometimes so when there was no
obligation. At such moments Pinnie wanted to kiss him, and she had
often tried to make Mr Vetch understand what a fascinating trait of
character this was on the part of their young friend. It was rather
difficult to describe, and Mr Vetch never would admit that he
understood, or that he had observed anything that seemed to correspond
to the dressmaker’s somewhat confused psychological sketch. It was a
comfort to her in these days, and almost the only one she had, that she
was sure Anastasius Vetch understood a good deal more than he felt
bound to acknowledge. He was always up to his old game of being a great
deal cleverer than cleverness itself required; and it consoled her
present weak, pinched feeling to know that, although he still talked of
the boy as if it would be a pity to take him too seriously, that wasn’t
the way he thought of him. He also took him seriously, and he had even
a certain sense of duty in regard to him. Miss Pynsent went so far as
to say to herself that the fiddler probably had savings, and that no
one had ever known of any one else belonging to him. She wouldn’t have
mentioned it to Hyacinth for the world, for fear of leading up to a
disappointment; but she had visions of a foolscap sheet, folded away in
some queer little bachelor’s box (she couldn’t fancy what men kept in
such places), on which Hyacinth’s name would have been written down, in
very big letters, before a solicitor.

“Oh, I’m unprotected, in the nature of things,” he replied, smiling at
his too scrupulous companion. Then he added, “At any rate, it isn’t
from that girl any danger will come to me.”

“I can’t think why you like her,” Pinnie remarked, as if she had spent
on the subject treasures of impartiality.

“It’s jolly to hear one woman on the subject of another,” Hyacinth
said. “You’re kind and good, and yet you’re ready—” He gave a
philosophic sigh.

“Well, what am I ready to do? I’m not ready to see you gobbled up
before my eyes!”

“You needn’t be afraid; she won’t drag me to the altar.”

“And pray, doesn’t she think you good enough—for one of the beautiful
Hennings?”

“You don’t understand, my poor Pinnie,” said Hyacinth, wearily. “I
sometimes think there isn’t a single thing in life that you understand.
One of these days she’ll marry an alderman.”

“An alderman—that creature?”

“An alderman, or a banker, or a bishop, or some one of that kind. She
doesn’t want to end her career to-day; she wants to begin it.”

“Well, I wish she would take you later!” the dressmaker exclaimed.

Hyacinth said nothing for a moment; then he broke out: “What are you
afraid of? Look here, we had better clear this up, once for all. Are
you afraid of my marrying a girl out of a shop?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” cried Pinnie, with a kind of
conciliatory eagerness. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk!”

“Do you think I would marry any one who would marry me?” Hyacinth went
on. “The kind of girl who would look at me is the kind of girl I
wouldn’t look at.” He struck Pinnie as having thought it all out; which
did not surprise her, as she had been familiar, from his youth, with
his way of following things up. But she was always delighted when he
made a remark which showed he was conscious of being of fine
clay—flashed out an allusion to his not being what he seemed. He was
not what he seemed, but even with Pinnie’s valuable assistance he had
not succeeded in representing to himself, very definitely, what he was.
She had placed at his disposal, for this purpose, a passionate idealism
which, employed in some case where it could have consequences, might
have been termed profligate, and which never cost her a scruple or a
compunction.

“I’m sure a princess might look at you and be none the worse!” she
declared, in her delight at this assurance, more positive than any she
had yet received, that he was safe from the worst danger. This the
dressmaker considered to be the chance of his marrying some person like
herself. Still it came over her that his taste might be lowered, and
before the subject was dropped, on this occasion, she said to him that
of course he must be quite aware of all that was wanting to such a girl
as Millicent Henning—she pronounced her name at last.

“Oh, I don’t bother about what’s wanting to her; I’m content with what
she has.”

“Content, dearest—how do you mean?” the little dressmaker quavered.
“Content to make an intimate friend of her?”

“It is impossible I should discuss these matters with you,” Hyacinth
replied, grandly.

“Of course I see that. But I should think she would bore you
sometimes,” Miss Pynsent murmured, cunningly.

“She does, I assure you, to extinction!”

“Then why do you spend every evening with her?”

“Where should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly
public-house—or at the Italian opera?” His association with Miss
Henning was not so close as that, but nevertheless he wouldn’t take the
trouble to prove to poor Pinnie that he enjoyed her society only two or
three times a week; that on other evenings he simply strolled about the
streets (this boyish habit clung to him), and that he had even
occasionally the resource of going to the Poupins’, or of gossiping and
smoking a pipe at some open house-door, when the night was not cold,
with a fellow-mechanic. Later in the winter, after he had made Paul
Muniment’s acquaintance, the aspect of his life changed considerably,
though Millicent continued to be exceedingly mixed up with it. He hated
the taste of liquor and still more the taste of the places where it was
sold; besides which the types of misery and vice that one was liable to
see collected in them frightened and harrowed him, made him ask himself
questions that pierced the deeper because they were met by no answer.
It was both a blessing and a drawback to him that the delicate,
charming character of the work he did at Mr Crookenden’s, under
Eustache Poupin’s influence, was a kind of education of the taste,
trained him in the finest discriminations, in the perception of beauty
and the hatred of ugliness. This made the brutal, garish, stodgy
decoration of public-houses, with their deluge of gaslight, their
glittering brass and pewter, their lumpish woodwork and false colours,
detestable to him; he was still very young when the ‘gin-palace’ ceased
to convey to him an idea of the palatial.

For this unfortunate but remarkably organised youth, every displeasure
or gratification of the visual sense coloured his whole mind, and
though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor
and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, it may be
said of him that what was most important in life for him was simply his
impressions. They came from everything he touched, they kept him
thrilling and throbbing during a considerable part of his waking
consciousness, and they constituted, as yet, the principal events and
stages of his career. Fortunately, they were sometimes very delightful.
Everything in the field of observation suggested this or that;
everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had, in a word, more
impressions than he knew what to do with—felt sometimes as if they
would consume or asphyxiate him. He liked to talk about them, but it
was only a few, here and there, that he could discuss with Millicent
Henning. He let Miss Pynsent imagine that his hours of leisure were
almost exclusively dedicated to this young lady, because, as he said to
himself, if he were to account to her for every evening in the week it
would make no difference—she would stick to her suspicion; and he
referred this perversity to the general weight of misconception under
which (at this crude period of his growth) he held it was his lot to
languish. It didn’t matter to one whether one were a little more or a
little less misunderstood. He might have remembered that it mattered to
Pinnie, who, after her first relief at hearing him express himself so
properly on the subject of a matrimonial connection with Miss Henning,
allowed her faded, kind, weak face, little by little, to lengthen out
to its old solemnity. This came as the days went on, for it wasn’t much
comfort that he didn’t want to marry the young woman in Pimlico, when
he allowed himself to be held as tight as if he did. For the present,
indeed, she simply said, “Oh, well, if you see her as she is, I don’t
care what you do”—a sentiment implying a certain moral recklessness on
the part of the good little dressmaker. She was irreproachable herself,
but she had lived for more than fifty years in a world of wickedness;
like an immense number of London women of her class and kind, she had
acquired a certain innocent cynicism, and she judged it quite a minor
evil that Millicent should be left lamenting, if only Hyacinth might
get out of the scrape. Between a forsaken maiden and a premature,
lowering marriage for her beloved little boy, she very well knew which
she preferred. It should be added that her impression of Millicent’s
power to take care of herself was such as to make it absurd to pity her
in advance. Pinnie thought Hyacinth the cleverest young man in the
world, but her state of mind implied somehow that the young lady in
Pimlico was cleverer. Her ability, at any rate, was of a kind that
precluded the idea of suffering, whereas Hyacinth’s was rather
associated with it.

By the time he had enjoyed for three months the acquaintance of the
brother and sister in Audley Court the whole complexion of his life
seemed changed; it was pervaded by an interest, an excitement, which
overshadowed, though it by no means supplanted, the brilliant figure of
Miss Henning. It was pitched in a higher key, altogether, and appeared
to command a view of horizons equally fresh and vast. Millicent,
therefore, shared her dominion, without knowing exactly what it was
that drew her old play-fellow off, and without indeed demanding of him
an account which, on her own side, she was not prepared to give.
Hyacinth was, in the language of the circle in which she moved, her
fancy, and she was content to occupy, as regards himself, the same
graceful and somewhat irresponsible position. She had an idea that she
was a most beneficent friend: fond of him and careful of him as an
elder sister might be; warning him as no one else could do against the
dangers of the town; putting that stiff common sense, of which she was
convinced that she possessed an extraordinary supply, at the service of
his incurable verdancy; and looking after him, generally, as no one,
poor child, had ever done. Millicent made light of the little
dressmaker, in this view of Hyacinth’s past (she thought Pinnie no
better than a starved cat), and enjoyed herself immensely in the
character of guide and philosopher, while she pushed the young man with
a robust elbow or said to him, “Well, you _are_ a sharp one, you are!”
Her theory of herself, as we know, was that she was the sweetest girl
in the world, as well as the cleverest and handsomest, and there could
be no better proof of her kindness of heart than her disinterested
affection for a snippet of a bookbinder. Her sociability was certainly
great, and so were her vanity, her grossness, her presumption, her
appetite for beer, for buns, for entertainment of every kind. She
represented, for Hyacinth, during this period, the eternal feminine,
and his taste, considering that he was fastidious, will be wondered at;
it will be judged that she did not represent it very favourably.

It may easily be believed that he scrutinised his infatuation even
while he gave himself up to it, and that he often wondered he should
care for a girl in whom he found so much to object to. She was vulgar,
clumsy and grotesquely ignorant; her conceit was proportionate, and she
had not a grain of tact or of quick perception. And yet there was
something so fine about her, to his imagination, and she carried with
such an air the advantages she did possess, that her figure constantly
mingled itself even with those bright visions that hovered before him
after Paul Muniment had opened a mysterious window. She was bold, and
free, and generous, and if she was coarse she was neither false nor
cruel. She laughed with the laugh of the people, and if you hit her
hard enough she would cry with its tears. When Hyacinth was not letting
his imagination wander among the haunts of the aristocracy, and
fancying himself stretched in the shadow of an ancestral beech, reading
the last number of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, he was occupied with
contemplations of a very different kind; he was absorbed in the
struggles and sufferings of the millions whose life flowed in the same
current as his, and who, though they constantly excited his disgust,
and made him shrink and turn away, had the power to chain his sympathy,
to make it glow to a kind of ecstasy, to convince him, for the time at
least, that real success in the world would be to do something with
them and for them. All this, strange to say, was never so vivid to him
as when he was in Millicent’s company; which is a proof of his
fantastic, erratic way of seeing things. She had no such ideas about
herself; they were almost the only ideas she didn’t have. She had no
theories about redeeming or uplifting the people; she simply loathed
them, because they were so dirty, with the outspoken violence of one
who had known poverty, and the strange bedfellows it makes, in a very
different degree from Hyacinth, brought up, comparatively, with Pinnie
to put sugar in his tea, and keep him supplied with neckties, like a
little swell.

Millicent, to hear her talk, only wanted to keep her skirts clear and
marry some respectable tea-merchant. But for our hero she was
magnificently plebeian, in the sense that implied a kind of loud
recklessness of danger and the qualities that shine forth in a row. She
summed up the sociable, humorous, ignorant chatter of the masses, their
capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive
perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it;
and as much as any of this, their ideal of something smug and
prosperous, where washed hands, and plates in rows on dressers, and
stuffed birds under glass, and family photographs, would symbolise
success. She was none the less plucky for being at bottom a shameless
Philistine, ambitious of a front-garden with rockwork; and she
presented the plebeian character in none the less plastic a form.
Having the history of the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends,
Hyacinth could easily see her (if there should ever be barricades in
the streets of London) with a red cap of liberty on her head and her
white throat bared so that she should be able to shout the louder the
Marseillaise of that hour, whatever it might be. If the festival of the
Goddess of Reason should ever be enacted in the British metropolis (and
Hyacinth could consider such possibilities without a smile, so much was
it a part of the little religion he had to remember, always, that there
was no knowing what might happen)—if this solemnity, I say, should be
revived in Hyde Park, who was better designated than Miss Henning to
figure in a grand statuesque manner, as the heroine of the occasion? It
was plain that she had laid her inconsequent admirer under a peculiar
spell, since he could associate her with such scenes as that while she
consumed beer and buns at his expense. If she had a weakness, it was
for prawns; and she had, all winter, a plan for his taking her down to
Gravesend, where this luxury was cheap and abundant, when the fine long
days should arrive. She was never so frank and facetious as when she
dwelt on the details of a project of this kind; and then Hyacinth was
reminded afresh that it was an immense good fortune for her that she
was handsome. If she had been ugly he couldn’t have listened to her;
but her beauty glorified even her accent, interfused her cockney genius
with prismatic hues, gave her a large and constant impunity.




XI


She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier
level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their conversation
was condemned, for the most part, to go forward in the streets, the
wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in
their perpetual obscurity, and in which everything was covered with
damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning.
Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation, and was
still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops,
before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the
articles she shouldn’t mind calling her own. Hyacinth always pronounced
the objects of her selection hideous, and made no scruple to tell her
that she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing that he
could say to her affronted her so much, as her pretensions in the way
of a cultivated judgment were boundless. Had not, indeed, her natural
aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace
(there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of
which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products
of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn, and
told her there was nothing in it, from top to bottom, that a real
artist would look at. She inquired, with answering derision, if this
were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was
fascinated, as much as she was provoked, by his air of being difficult
to please, of seeing indescribable differences among things. She had
given herself out, originally, as very knowing, but he could make her
feel stupid. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he
condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops
in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed
at nightfall) she stared, bruised him more or less with her elbow, and
declared that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she
would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good
as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she could not
rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his
opinion, and she was angry at not finding herself as positive as any
one. But Hyacinth replied that it was no use attempting to tell her;
she wouldn’t understand, and she had better continue to admire the
insipid productions of an age which had lost the sense of quality—a
phrase which she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of
it, on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.

When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a
view of strengthening the tie which united him to his childhood’s
friend; but the effect followed, on Millicent’s side, and the girl was
proud to think that she was in possession of a young man whose
knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite
of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be
full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea that it might be to
her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the
same time, when, in consideration, for instance, of a jeweller’s
gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for
five minutes in perfect silence, while she delivered herself according
to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing
the feelings which made it impossible for him to speak. She could long
for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing
them, and say it was a regular shame (she called it a _shime_); draw
brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have
them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous
inductions, to some other topic, equally intimate and personal. The
sense of privation, with her, was often extremely acute; but she could
always put her finger on the remedy. With the imaginative,
irresponsible little bookbinder the case was very different; the
remedy, with him, was terribly vague and impracticable. He was liable
to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all that he would have
liked most to enjoy in life settled upon him like a pall. They had a
bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of
vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of
paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflection, in which he felt
that in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the
spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and that a sordid
struggle, in which one should go down to the grave without having
tasted them, was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull
demoralisation it would entail.

In such hours the great, roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to
him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition;
and then its vulgarest ornaments, the windows of third-rate jewellers,
the young man in a white tie and a crush-hat who dandled by, on his way
to a dinner-party, in a hansom that nearly ran over one—these familiar
phenomena became symbolic, insolent, defiant, took upon themselves to
make him smart with the sense that _he_ was out of it. He felt,
moreover, that there was no consolation or refutation in saying to
himself that the immense majority of mankind were out of it with him,
and appeared to put up well enough with the annoyance. That was their
own affair; he knew nothing of their reasons or their resignation, and
if they chose neither to rebel nor to compare, he, at least, among the
disinherited, would keep up the standard. When these fits were upon the
young man, his brothers of the people fared, collectively, badly at his
hands; their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely
the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only
acknowledgment one owed them was for the completeness of the
illustration. Everything which, in a great city, could touch the
sentient faculty of a youth on whom nothing was lost ministered to his
conviction that there was no possible good fortune in life of too
‘quiet’ an order for him to appreciate—no privilege, no opportunity, no
luxury, to which he should not do justice. It was not so much that he
wished to enjoy as that he wished to know; his desire was not to be
pampered, but to be initiated. Sometimes, of a Saturday, in the long
evenings of June and July, he made his way into Hyde Park at the hour
when the throng of carriages, of riders, of brilliant pedestrians, was
thickest; and though lately, on two or three of these occasions, he had
been accompanied by Miss Henning, whose criticism of the scene was rich
and distinct, a tremendous little drama had taken place, privately, in
his soul. He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every
horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place.
In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class
whom the upper ten thousand, as they passed, didn’t so much as rest
their eyes upon for a quarter of a second. They looked at Millicent,
who was safe to be looked at anywhere, and was one of the handsomest
girls in any company, but they only reminded him of the high human
walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege
and dense layers of stupidity, which fenced him off from social
recognition.

And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a
jealousy that could not be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the
result of an exquisite admiration for what he had missed. There were
individuals whom he followed with his eyes, with his thoughts,
sometimes even with his steps; they seemed to tell him what it was to
be the flower of a high civilisation. At moments he was aghast when he
reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which
M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last
few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a
state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It
made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he
couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work, underground,
for the enthronement of the democracy, and continue to enjoy, in
however platonic a manner, a spectacle which rested on a hideous social
inequality. He must either suffer with the people, as he had suffered
before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near
doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near
when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple. Hyacinth
thought himself obliged, at present, to have reasons for his feelings;
his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a
good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at
his reasons, whenever he produced them, but he appeared to expect him,
nevertheless, to have them ready, on demand, and Hyacinth had an
immense desire to do what he expected. There were times when he said to
himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided, to the point
of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him in different
ways; for hadn’t he an extraordinarily mingled current in his blood,
and from the time he could remember was there not one half of him that
seemed to be always playing tricks on the other, or getting snubs and
pinches from it?

That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards
which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to
question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying
explanation had supplied him, first and last, with a hundred different
theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed, sickened him,
and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance
he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged
from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a
consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was
still only a child—on the memorable day which transformed the whole
face of his future. It was one January afternoon. He had come in from a
walk; she was seated at her lamp, as usual with her work, and she began
to tell him of a letter that one of the lodgers had got, describing the
manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop, at Nottingham, had been
rifled by burglars. He listened to her story, standing in front of her,
and then, by way of response, he said to her, “Who was that woman you
took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face, as
she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant, after so
many years—her strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never
forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which
she had repeated, “That woman?”

“That woman, in the prison, years ago—how old was I?—who was dying, and
who kissed me so—as I have never been kissed, as I never shall be
again! Who _was_ she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had
made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it lasted a
week; it was to leave her spent and sore for evermore, and before it
was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she
retracted the falsehoods with which she had tried to put him off, and
she made, at last, a confession, a report, which he had reason to
believe was as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have
told you why the crisis occurred on such a day, why his question broke
out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself
was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly;
that the haunting wonder, which now, as he looked back, appeared to
fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have
crept up to the air. It was only, of course, little by little that he
had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness;
little by little that he reconstructed his antecedents, took the
measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the
courage to disinter, in the _Times_, in the reading-room of the British
Museum, a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick
Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a _cause
célèbre;_ his resolution in sitting under that splendid dome, and, with
his head bent to hide his hot eyes, going through every syllable of the
ghastly record, had been an achievement of comparatively recent years.
There were certain things that Pinnie knew which appalled him; and
there were others, as to which he would have given his hand to have
some light, that it made his heart ache supremely to find she was
honestly ignorant of. He scarcely knew what sort of favour Mr Vetch
wished to make with him (as a compensation for the precious part he had
played in the business years before), when the fiddler permitted
himself to pass judgment on the family of the wretched young nobleman
for not having provided in some manner for the infant child of his
assassin. Why should they have provided, when it was evident that they
refused absolutely to recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie
had to admit this, under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she
could not pretend, with any show of evidence, that Lord Whiteroy and
the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them
still living) had, at the time of the trial, given any symptom of
believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he
had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One
couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no
effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the
established facts (few as they were, and poor and hideous) he regarded
himself, irresistibly, as the son of the recreant, sacrificial Lord
Frederick.

He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded
and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people
(all that Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine
had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father had fallen,
in the blood-stained streets of Paris, on a barricade, with his gun in
his hand); but on the other side it took an English aristocrat—though a
poor specimen, apparently, had to suffice—to account for him. This,
with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the
reflection that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the
reflection that he was a gentleman. He was conscious that he didn’t
hate the image of his father, as he might have been expected to do; and
he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a
penalty. It was in the exaction of that penalty that the moral proof,
for Hyacinth, resided; his mother would not have armed herself on
account of any injury less cruel than the episode of which her
miserable baby was the living sign. She had avenged herself because she
had been thrown over, and the bitterness of that wrong had been in the
fact that he, Hyacinth, lay there in her lap. _He_ was the one to have
been killed: that remark our young man often made to himself. That his
attitude on this whole subject was of a tolerably exalted, transcendent
character, and took little account of any refutation that might be
based on a vulgar glance at three or four obtrusive items, is proved by
the importance that he attached, for instance, to the name by which his
mother had told poor Pinnie (when this excellent creature consented to
take him) that she wished him to be called. Hyacinth had been the name
of her father, a republican clockmaker, the martyr of his opinions,
whose memory she professed to worship; and when Lord Frederick
insinuated himself into her confidence he had reasons for preferring to
be known as plain Mr Robinson—reasons, however, which, in spite of the
light thrown upon them at the trial, it was difficult, after so many
years, to enter into.

Hyacinth never knew that Mr Vetch had said more than once to Pinnie,
“If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true, why
didn’t she make the child bear his real name, instead of his false
one?”—an inquiry which the dressmaker answered with some ingenuity, by
remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, and
that she supposed the unhappy girl didn’t wish to publish to every one
the boy’s connection with a crime that had been so much talked about.
If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion it is needless to
say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his
judgment was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s
fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him
throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation
that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had
been surrounded, and of which he had never caught the meaning; they
having seemed but part and parcel of the habitual and promiscuous
divagations of his too constructive companion. When it came over him
that, for years, she had made a fool of him, to himself and to others,
he could have beaten her, for grief and shame; and yet, before he
administered this rebuke he had to remember that she only chattered
(though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter
which he spent nine-tenths of his time in brooding over. When she tried
to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on
the glory of the Purvises, and reminding him that he was related,
through them, to half the aristocracy of England, he felt that she was
turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none
the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born.
He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and
his stoicism on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep
dejection of her later years. If he had only let her idealise him a
little to himself she would have felt that she was making up, by so
much, for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s
relations in the newspaper, but he always turned away his eyes from it.
He had nothing to ask of them, and he wished to prove to himself that
he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat)
as completely as they ignored him. Decidedly, he cried to himself at
times, he was with the people, and every possible vengeance of the
people, as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he
was happy to feel that he had blood in his veins which would account
for the finest sensibilities.

He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand; Millicent
Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected
something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box, or a
couple of stalls at ten shillings apiece?” he asked of her, with a
frankness of irony which, with this young lady, fortunately, it was
perfectly possible to practise. She had answered that she would content
herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as
such a position involved an expenditure which he was still unable to
meet, he waited one night upon Mr Vetch, to whom he had already, more
than once, had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His
relations with the caustic fiddler were peculiar; they were much better
in fact than they were in theory. Mr Vetch had let him know—long before
this, and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost—the part he
had played when the question of the child’s being taken to Mrs
Bowerbank’s institution was so distressingly presented; and Hyacinth,
in the face of this information, had inquired, with some sublimity,
what the devil the fiddler had to do with his private affairs.
Anastasius Vetch had replied that it was not as an affair of his, but
as an affair of Pinnie’s, that he had considered the matter; and
Hyacinth afterwards had let the question drop, though he had never been
formally reconciled to his officious neighbour. Of course his feeling
about him had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr Vetch had taken
to get him a place with old Crookenden; and at the period of which I
write it had long been familiar to him that the fiddler didn’t care a
straw what he thought of his advice at the famous crisis, and
entertained himself with watching the career of a youth put together of
such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to perceive that
the old man’s interest was kindly; and to-day, at any rate, our hero
would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not
knowing the truth, horrible as the truth might be. His miserable
mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of
motive, and under the circumstances that was a benefit. What he chiefly
objected to in Mr Vetch was a certain air of still regarding him as
extremely juvenile; he would have got on with him much better if the
fiddler had consented to recognise the degree in which he was already a
man of the world. Vetch knew an immense deal about society, and he
seemed to know the more because he never swaggered—it was only little
by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as
if his chief entertainment resided in a private, diverting commentary
on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he himself
gave considerable evidence of liking his fellow-resident in Lomax Place
when he asked him to lend him half-a-crown. Somehow, circumstances, of
old, had tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little
bookbinder it also touched him; he had more than once solved the
problem of deciding how to behave (when the fiddler exasperated him) by
simply asking him some service. The old man had never refused. It was
satisfactory to Hyacinth to remember this, as he knocked at his door,
very late, after he had allowed him time to come home from the theatre.
He knew his habits: Mr Vetch never went straight to bed, but sat by his
fire an hour, smoking his pipe, mixing a grog, and reading some old
book. Hyacinth knew when to go up by the light in his window, which he
could see from a court behind.

“Oh, I know I haven’t been to see you for a long time,” he said, in
response to the remark with which the fiddler greeted him; “and I may
as well tell you immediately what has brought me at present—in addition
to the desire to ask after your health. I want to take a young lady to
the theatre.”

Mr Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt
strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear
he looked to our hero so plucked and blighted that on the spot Hyacinth
ceased to hesitate as to his claims in the event of a social
liquidation; he, too, was unmistakably a creditor. “I’m afraid you find
your young lady rather expensive.”

“I find everything expensive,” said Hyacinth, as if to finish that
subject.

“Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.”

“What do you mean by that?” the young man asked, staring.

“Why, you told me, in the autumn, that you were just about to join a
few.”

“A few? How many do you suppose?” And Hyacinth checked himself. “Do you
suppose if I had been serious I would tell?”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr Vetch murmured, with a sigh. Then he went on:
“You want to take her to my shop, eh?”

“I’m sorry to say she won’t go there. She wants something in the
Strand: that’s a great point. She wants very much to see the _Pearl of
Paraguay_. I don’t wish to pay anything, if possible; I am sorry to say
I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres, and I
have heard you say that you do each other little favours, from place to
place—_à charge de revanche_, as the French say—it occurred to me that
you might be able to get me an order. The piece has been running a long
time, and most people (except poor devils like me) must have seen it:
therefore there probably isn’t a rush.”

Mr Vetch listened in silence, and presently he said, “Do you want a
box?”

“Oh no; something more modest.”

“Why not a box?” asked the fiddler, in a tone which Hyacinth knew.

“Because I haven’t got the clothes that people wear in that sort of
place, if you must have such a definite reason.”

“And your young lady—has she got the clothes?”

“Oh, I dare say; she seems to have everything.”

“Where does she get them?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She belongs to a big shop; she has to be fine.”

“Won’t you have a pipe?” Mr Vetch asked, pushing an old tobacco-pouch
across the table to his visitor; and while the young man helped himself
he puffed a while in silence. “What will she do with you?” he inquired
at last.

“What will who do with me?”

“Your big beauty—Miss Henning. I know all about her from Pinnie.”

“Then you know what she’ll do with me!” Hyacinth returned, with rather
a scornful laugh.

“Yes, but, after all, it doesn’t very much matter.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, now the other matter—the International—are you very deep in
that?” the fiddler went on, as if he had not heard him.

“Did Pinnie tell you all about that?” his visitor asked.

“No, our friend Eustace has told me a good deal. He knows you have put
your head into something. Besides, I see it,” said Mr Vetch.

“How do you see it, pray?”

“You have got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you,
that you have become a nihilist, that you’re a member of a secret
society. You seem to say to every one, ‘Slow torture won’t induce me to
tell where it meets!’”

“You won’t get me an order, then?” Hyacinth said, in a moment.

“My dear boy, I offer you a box. I take the greatest interest in you.”

They smoked together a while, and at last Hyacinth remarked, “It has
nothing to do with the International.”

“Is it more terrible—more deadly secret?” his companion inquired,
looking at him with extreme seriousness.

“I thought you pretended to be a radical,” answered Hyacinth.

“Well, so I am—of the old-fashioned, constitutional, milk-and-water,
jog-trot sort. I’m not an exterminator.”

“We don’t know what we may be when the time comes,” Hyacinth rejoined,
more sententiously than he intended.

“Is the time coming, then, my dear boy?”

“I don’t think I have a right to give you any more of a warning than
that,” said our hero, smiling.

“It’s very kind of you to do so much, I’m sure, and to rush in here at
the small hours for the purpose. Meanwhile, in the few weeks, or
months, or years, or whatever they are, that are left, you wish to put
in as much enjoyment as you can squeeze, with the young ladies: that’s
a very natural inclination.” Then, irrelevantly, Mr Vetch inquired, “Do
you see many foreigners?”

“Yes, I see a good many.”

“And what do you think of them?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. I rather like Englishmen better.”

“Mr Muniment, for example?”

“I say, what do you know about him?” Hyacinth asked.

“I’ve seen him at Eustace’s. I know that you and he are as thick as
thieves.”

“He will distinguish himself some day, very much,” said Hyacinth, who
was perfectly willing, and indeed very proud, to be thought a close
ally of the chemist’s assistant.

“Very likely—very likely. And what will _he_ do with you?” the fiddler
inquired.

Hyacinth got up; the two men looked at each other for an instant. “Do
get me two good places in the second balcony,” said Hyacinth.

Mr Vetch replied that he would do what he could, and three days
afterwards he gave the coveted order to his young friend. As he placed
it in his hands he said, “You had better put in all the fun you can,
you know!”




BOOK SECOND




XII


Hyacinth and his companion took their seats with extreme promptitude
before the curtain rose upon the _Pearl of Paraguay_. Thanks to
Millicent’s eagerness not to be late they encountered the discomfort
which had constituted her main objection to going into the pit: they
waited for twenty minutes at the door of the theatre, in a tight,
stolid crowd, before the official hour of opening. Millicent,
bareheaded and very tightly laced, presented a most splendid appearance
and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a certain youthful, ingenuous pride
of possession in every respect save a tendency, while ingress was
denied them, to make her neighbours feel her elbows and to comment,
loudly and sarcastically, on the situation. It was more clear to him
even than it had been before that she was a young lady who in public
places might easily need a champion or an apologist. Hyacinth knew
there was only one way to apologise for a ‘female’, when the female was
attached very closely and heavily to one’s arm, and was reminded afresh
how little constitutional aversion Miss Henning had to a row. He had an
idea she might think his own taste ran even too little in that
direction, and had visions of violent, confused scenes, in which he
should in some way distinguish himself: he scarcely knew in what way,
and imagined himself more easily routing some hulking adversary by an
exquisite application of the retort courteous than by flying at him
with a pair of very small fists.

By the time they had reached their places in the balcony Millicent was
rather flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in
season for the rising of the curtain upon the farce which preceded the
melodrama and which the pair had had no intention of losing. At this
stage a more genial agitation took possession of her, and she
surrendered her sympathies to the horse-play of the traditional
prelude. Hyacinth found it less amusing, but the theatre, in any
conditions, was full of sweet deception for him. His imagination
projected itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured
the shabby canvas and battered accessories, and lost itself so
effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however
long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like a
stoppage of his personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to
the dramatic illusion. Millicent, as the audience thickened, rejoiced
more largely and loudly, held herself as a lady, surveyed the place as
if she knew all about it, leaned back and leaned forward, fanned
herself with majesty, gave her opinion upon the appearance and coiffure
of every woman within sight, abounded in question and conjecture, and
produced, from her pocket, a little paper of peppermint-drops, of
which, under cruel threats, she compelled Hyacinth to partake. She
followed with attention, though not always with success, the
complicated adventures of the Pearl of Paraguay, through scenes
luxuriantly tropical, in which the male characters wore sombreros and
stilettos, and the ladies either danced the cachucha or fled from
licentious pursuit; but her eyes wandered, during considerable periods,
to the occupants of the boxes and stalls, concerning several of whom
she had theories which she imparted to Hyacinth while the play went on,
greatly to his discomfiture, he being unable to conceive of such
levity. She had the pretension of knowing who every one was; not
individually and by name, but as regards their exact social station,
the quarter of London in which they lived, and the amount of money they
were prepared to spend in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace. She
had seen the whole town pass through her establishment there, and
though Hyacinth, from his infancy, had been watching it from his own
point of view, his companion made him feel that he had missed a
thousand characteristic points, so different were most of her
interpretations from his, and so very bold and irreverent. Miss
Henning’s observation of human society had not been of a nature to
impress her with its high moral tone, and she had a free off-hand
cynicism which imposed itself. She thought most ladies were hypocrites,
and had, in all ways, a low opinion of her own sex, which, more then
once, before this, she had justified to Hyacinth by narrating
observations of the most surprising kind, gathered during her career as
a shop-girl. There was a pleasing inconsequence, therefore, in her
being moved to tears in the third act of the play, when the Pearl of
Paraguay, dishevelled and distracted, dragging herself on her knees,
implored the stern hidalgo her father, to believe in her innocence in
spite of the circumstances which seemed to condemn her—a midnight
meeting with the wicked hero in the grove of cocoanuts. It was at this
crisis, none the less, that she asked Hyacinth who his friends were in
the principal box on the left of the stage, and let him know that a
gentleman seated there had been watching him, at intervals, for the
past half-hour.

“Watching _me!_ I like that!” said the young man. “When I want to be
watched I take you with me.”

“Of course he has looked at me,” Millicent answered, as if she had no
interest in denying that. “But you’re the one he wants to get hold of.”

“To get hold of!”

“Yes, you ninny: don’t hang back. He may make your fortune.”

“Well, if you would like him to come and sit by you I’ll go and take a
walk in the Strand,” said Hyacinth, entering into the humour of the
occasion but not seeing, from where he was placed, any gentleman in the
box. Millicent explained that the mysterious observer had just altered
his position; he had gone into the back of the box, which had
considerable depth. There were other persons in it, out of sight; she
and Hyacinth were too much on the same side. One of them was a lady,
concealed by the curtain; her arm, bare save for its bracelets, was
visible at moments on the cushioned ledge. Hyacinth saw it, in effect,
reappear there, and even while the play went on contemplated it with a
certain interest; but until the curtain fell at the end of the act
there was no further symptom that a gentleman wished to get hold of
him.

“Now do you say it’s me he’s after?” Millicent asked abruptly, giving
him a sidelong dig, as the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape
their instruments for the interlude.

“Of course; I am only the pretext,” Hyacinth replied, after he had
looked a moment, in a manner which he flattered himself was a proof of
quick self-possession. The gentleman designated by his companion was
once more at the front, leaning forward, with his arms on the edge.
Hyacinth saw that he was looking straight at him, and our young man
returned his gaze—an effort not rendered the more easy by the fact
that, after an instant, he recognised him.

“Well, if he knows us he might give some sign, and if he doesn’t he
might leave us alone,” Millicent declared, abandoning the distinction
she had made between herself and her companion. She had no sooner
spoken than the gentleman complied with the first mentioned of these
conditions; he smiled at Hyacinth across the house—he nodded to him
with unmistakable friendliness. Millicent, perceiving this, glanced at
the young man from Lomax Place and saw that the demonstration had
brought a deep colour to his cheek. He was blushing, flushing; whether
with pleasure or embarrassment was not immediately apparent to her. “I
say, I say—is it one of your grand relations?” she promptly exclaimed.
“Well, I can stare as well as him;” and she told Hyacinth it was a
‘shime’ to bring a young lady to the play when you hadn’t so much as an
opera-glass for her to look at the company. “Is he one of those lords
your aunt was always talking about in the Plice? Is he your uncle, or
your grandfather, or your first or second cousin? No, he’s too young
for your grandfather. What a pity I can’t see if he looks like you!”

At any other time Hyacinth would have thought these inquiries in the
worst possible taste, but now he was too much given up to other
reflections. It pleased him that the gentleman in the box should
recognise and notice him, because even so small a fact as this was an
extension of his social existence; but it also surprised and puzzled
him, and it produced, generally, in his easily-excited organism, an
agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the
appearance he presented to Millicent was the sign. They had met three
times, he and his fellow-spectator; but they had met under
circumstances which, to Hyacinth’s mind, would have made a furtive
wink, a mere tremor of the eyelid, a more judicious reference to the
fact than so public a salutation. Hyacinth would never have permitted
himself to greet him first; and this was not because the gentleman in
the box belonged—conspicuously as he did so—to a different walk of
society. He was apparently a man of forty, tall and lean and
loose-jointed; he fell into lounging, dawdling attitudes, and even at a
distance he looked lazy. He had a long, smooth, amused, contented face,
unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his brown hair parted itself
evenly over his forehead, and came forward on either temple in a rich,
well-brushed lock which gave his countenance a certain analogy to
portraits of English gentlemen about the year 1820. Millicent Henning
had a glance of such range and keenness that she was able to make out
the details of his evening-dress, of which she appreciated the ‘form’;
to observe the character of his large hands; and to note that he
appeared to be perpetually smiling, that his eyes were extraordinarily
light in colour, and that in spite of the dark, well-marked brows
arching over them, his fine skin never had produced, and never would
produce, a beard. Our young lady pronounced him mentally a ‘swell’ of
the first magnitude, and wondered more than ever where he had picked up
Hyacinth. Her companion seemed to echo her thought when he exclaimed,
with a little surprised sigh, almost an exhalation of awe, “Well, I had
no idea he was one of that lot!”

“You might at least tell me his name, so that I shall know what to call
him when he comes round to speak to us,” the girl said, provoked at her
companion’s incommunicativeness.

“Comes round to speak to us—a chap like that!” Hyacinth exclaimed.

“Well, I’m sure if he had been your own brother he couldn’t have
grinned at you more! He may want to make my acquaintance after all; he
won’t be the first.”

The gentleman had once more retreated from sight, and there was as much
evidence as that of the intention Millicent attributed to him. “I don’t
think I’m at all clear that I have a right to tell his name,” he
remarked, with sincerity, but with a considerable disposition at the
same time to magnify an incident which deepened the brilliancy of the
entertainment he had been able to offer Miss Henning. “I met him in a
place where he may not like to have it known that he goes.”

“Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your
political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from
Camberwell, Mr Monument (what do you call him?), fills your head with
ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there
doesn’t look as if he’d be on _your_ side.”

Hyacinth had indulged in this reflection himself; but the only answer
he made to Millicent was, “Well, then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!”

“Laws, I hope _she_ ain’t one of the aristocracy!” Millicent exclaimed,
with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes
Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in
the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible—not the one
who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an
ancient personage, muffled in a voluminous, crumpled white shawl—a
stout, odd, foreign-looking woman, whose head apparently was surmounted
with a light-coloured wig. She had a placid, patient air and a round,
wrinkled face, in which, however, a small, bright eye moved quickly
enough. Her rather soiled white gloves were too large for her, and
round her head, horizontally arranged, as if to keep her wig in its
place, she wore a narrow band of tinsel, decorated, in the middle of
the forehead, by a jewel which the rest of her appearance would lead
the spectator to suppose false. “Is the old woman his mother? Where did
she dig up her clothes? They look as if she had hired them for the
evening. Does _she_ come to your wonderful club, too? I dare say she
cuts it fine, don’t she?” Millicent went on; and when Hyacinth
suggested, sportively, that the old lady might be, not the gentleman’s
mother, but his wife or his ‘fancy’, she declared that in that case, if
he should come to see them, she wasn’t afraid. No wonder he wanted to
get out of _that_ box! The woman in the wig was sitting there on
purpose to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly
honoured by the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended that he
liked her appearance and thought her very handsome; he offered to bet
another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be
some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To
this Millicent replied, with an air of experience, that she had never
thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion
could see that she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for
his political friend and that she would be disappointed if he did not
come. This idea did not make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was
occupied with another side of the business; and if he offered sportive
suggestions it was because he was really excited, dazzled, by an
incident of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the
larger relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being
patronised by a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new
experience—a sensation for which he was always ready to exchange any
present boon; and he was convinced that if the gentleman with whom he
had conversed in a small occult back-room in Bloomsbury as Captain
Godfrey Sholto—the Captain had given him his card—had more positively
than in Millicent’s imagination come out of the stage-box to see him,
he would bring with him rare influences. This nervous presentiment,
lighting on our young man, was so keen that it constituted almost a
preparation; therefore, when at the end of a few minutes he became
aware that Millicent, with her head turned (her face was in his
direction), was taking the measure of some one who had come in behind
them, he felt that fate was doing for him, by way of a change, as much
as could be expected. He got up in his place, but not too soon to see
that Captain Sholto had been standing there a moment in contemplation
of Millicent, and that this young lady had performed with deliberation
the ceremony of taking his measure. The Captain had his hands in his
pockets, and wore a crush-hat, pushed a good deal backward. He laughed
at the young couple in the balcony in the friendliest way, as if he had
known them both for years, and Millicent could see, on a nearer view,
that he was a fine, distinguished, easy, genial gentleman, at least six
feet high, in spite of a habit, or an affectation, of carrying himself
in a casual, relaxed, familiar manner. Hyacinth felt a little, after
the first moment, as if he were treating them rather too much as a pair
of children whom he had stolen upon, to startle; but this impression
was speedily removed by the air with which he said, laying his hand on
our hero’s shoulder as he stood in the little passage at the end of the
bench where the holders of Mr Vetch’s order occupied the first seats,
“My dear fellow, I really thought I must come round and speak to you.
My spirits are all gone with this brute of a play. And those boxes are
fearfully stuffy, you know,” he added, as if Hyacinth had had at least
an equal experience of that part of the theatre.

“It’s hot here, too,” Millicent’s companion murmured. He had suddenly
become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his proximity to
the fierce chandelier, and he added that the plot of the play certainly
was unnatural, though he thought the piece rather well acted.

“Oh, it’s the good old stodgy British tradition. This is the only place
where you find it still, and even here it can’t last much longer; it
can’t survive old Baskerville and Mrs Ruffler. ’Gad, how old they are!
I remember her, long past her prime, when I used to be taken to the
play, as a boy, in the Christmas holidays. Between them, they must be
something like a hundred and eighty, eh? I believe one is supposed to
cry a good deal about the middle,” Captain Sholto continued, in the
same friendly, familiar, encouraging way, addressing himself to
Millicent, upon whom, indeed, his eyes had rested almost
uninterruptedly from the first. She sustained his glance with
composure, but with just enough of an expression of reserve to intimate
(what was perfectly true) that she was not in the habit of conversing
with gentlemen with whom she was not acquainted. She turned away her
face at this (she had already given the visitor the benefit of a good
deal of it) and left him, as in the little passage he leaned against
the parapet of the balcony with his back to the stage, confronted with
Hyacinth, who was now wondering, with rather more vivid a sense of the
relations of things, what he had come for. He wanted to do him honour,
in return for his civility, but he did not know what one could talk
about, at such short notice, to a person whom he immediately perceived
to be, in a most extensive, a really transcendent sense of the term, a
man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto did not take the play
seriously, so that he felt himself warned off that topic, on which,
otherwise, he might have had much to say. On the other hand he could
not, in the presence of a third person, allude to the matters they had
discussed at the ‘Sun and Moon’; nor could he suppose his visitor would
expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a man of humours and
whims, who was amusing himself with everything, including esoteric
socialism and a little bookbinder who had so much more of the gentleman
about him than one would expect. Captain Sholto may have been a little
embarrassed, now that he was completely launched in his attempt at
fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit a smile from
Millicent’s respectability; but he left to Hyacinth the burden of no
initiative, and went on to say that it was just this prospect of the
dying-out of the old British tradition that had brought him to-night.
He was with a friend, a lady who had lived much abroad, who had never
seen anything of the kind, and who liked everything that was
characteristic. “You know the foreign school of acting is a very
different affair,” he said, again to Millicent, who this time replied,
“Oh yes, of course,” and considering afresh the old lady in the box,
reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that
she, at least, hadn’t seen.

“We have never been abroad,” said Hyacinth, candidly, looking into his
friend’s curious light-coloured eyes, the palest in tint he had ever
encountered.

“Oh, well, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about that!” Captain Sholto
replied; while Hyacinth remained uncertain as to exactly what he
referred to, and Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.

“They are making a tremendous row on the stage. I should think it would
be very bad in those boxes.” There was a banging and thumping behind
the curtain, the sound of heavy scenery pushed about.

“Oh yes; it’s much better here, every way. I think you have the best
seats in the house,” said Captain Sholto. “I should like very much to
finish my evening beside you. The trouble is I have ladies—a pair of
them,” he went on, as if he were seriously considering this
possibility. Then, laying his hand again on Hyacinth’s shoulder, he
smiled at him a moment and indulged in a still greater burst of
frankness: “My dear fellow, that is just what, as a partial reason, has
brought me up here to see you. One of my ladies has a great desire to
make your acquaintance!”

“To make my acquaintance?” Hyacinth felt himself turning pale; the
first impulse he could have, in connection with such an announcement as
that—and it lay far down, in the depths of the unspeakable—was a
conjecture that it had something to do with his parentage on his
father’s side. Captain Sholto’s smooth, bright face, irradiating such
unexpected advances, seemed for an instant to swim before him. The
Captain went on to say that he had told the lady of the talks they had
had, that she was immensely interested in such matters—“You know what I
mean, she really is”—and that as a consequence of what he had said she
had begged him to come and ask his—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in
a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to descend into her
box for a little while.

“She has a tremendous desire to talk with some one who looks at the
whole business from your standpoint, don’t you see? And in her position
she scarcely ever has a chance, she doesn’t come across them—to her
great annoyance. So when I spotted you to-night she immediately said
that I must introduce you at any cost. I hope you don’t mind, for a
quarter of an hour. I ought perhaps to tell you that she is a person
who is used to having nothing refused her. ‘Go up and bring him down,’
you know, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. She is really
very much in earnest: I don’t mean about wishing to see you—that goes
without saying—but about the whole matter that you and I care for. Then
I should add—it doesn’t spoil anything—that she is the most charming
woman in the world, simply! Honestly, my dear boy, she is perhaps the
most remarkable woman in Europe.”

So Captain Sholto delivered himself, with the highest naturalness and
plausibility, and Hyacinth, listening, felt that he himself ought
perhaps to resent the idea of being served up for the entertainment of
imperious triflers, but that somehow he didn’t, and that it was more
worthy of the part he aspired to play in life to meet such occasions
calmly and urbanely than to take the trouble of dodging and going
roundabout. Of course the lady in the box couldn’t be sincere; she
might think she was, though even that was questionable; but you
couldn’t really care for the cause that was exemplified in the little
back-room in Bloomsbury if you came to the theatre in that style. It
was Captain Sholto’s style as well, but it had been by no means clear
to Hyacinth hitherto that _he_ really cared. All the same, this was no
time for going into the question of the lady’s sincerity, and at the
end of sixty seconds our young man had made up his mind that he could
afford to humour her. None the less, I must add, the whole proposal
continued to make things dance, to appear fictive, delusive; so that it
sounded, in comparison, like a note of reality when Millicent, who had
been looking from one of the men to the other, exclaimed—

“That’s all very well, but who is to look after me?” Her assumption of
the majestic had broken down, and this was the cry of nature.

Nothing could have been pleasanter and more indulgent of her alarm than
the manner in which Captain Sholto reassured her: “My dear young lady,
can you suppose I have been unmindful of that? I have been hoping that
after I have taken down our friend and introduced him you would allow
me to come back and, in his absence, occupy his seat.”

Hyacinth was preoccupied with the idea of meeting the most remarkable
woman in Europe; but at this juncture he looked at Millicent Henning
with some curiosity. She rose to the situation, and replied, “I am much
obliged to you, but I don’t know who you are.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you all about that!” the Captain exclaimed,
benevolently.

“Of course I should introduce you,” said Hyacinth, and he mentioned to
Miss Henning the name of his distinguished acquaintance.

“In the army?” the young lady inquired, as if she must have every
guarantee of social position.

“Yes—not in the navy! I have left the army, but it always sticks to
one.”

“Mr Robinson, is it your intention to leave me?” Millicent asked, in a
tone of the highest propriety.

Hyacinth’s imagination had taken such a flight that the idea of what he
owed to the beautiful girl who had placed herself under his care for
the evening had somehow effaced itself. Her words put it before him in
a manner that threw him quickly and consciously back upon his honour;
yet there was something in the way she uttered them that made him look
at her harder still before he replied, “Oh dear, no, of course it would
never do. I must defer to some other occasion the honour of making the
acquaintance of your friend,” he added, to Captain Sholto.

“Ah, my dear fellow, we might manage it so easily now,” this gentleman
murmured, with evident disappointment. “It is not as if
Miss—a—Miss—a—were to be alone.”

It flashed upon Hyacinth that the root of the project might be a desire
of Captain Sholto to insinuate himself into Millicent’s graces; then he
asked himself why the most remarkable woman in Europe should lend
herself to that design, consenting even to receive a visit from a
little bookbinder for the sake of furthering it. Perhaps, after all,
she was not the most remarkable; still, even at a lower estimate, of
what advantage could such a complication be to her? To Hyacinth’s
surprise, Millicent’s eye made acknowledgment of his implied
renunciation; and she said to Captain Sholto, as if she were
considering the matter very impartially, “Might one know the name of
the lady who sent you?”

“The Princess Casamassima.”

“Laws!” cried Millicent Henning. And then, quickly, as if to cover up
the crudity of this ejaculation, “And might one also know what it is,
as you say, that she wants to talk to him about?”

“About the lower orders, the rising democracy, the spread of nihilism,
and all that.”

“The lower orders? Does she think we belong to them?” the girl
demanded, with a strange, provoking laugh.

Captain Sholto was certainly the readiest of men. “If she could see
you, she would think you one of the first ladies in the land.”

“She’ll never see me!” Millicent replied, in a manner which made it
plain that she, at least, was not to be whistled for.

Being whistled for by a princess presented itself to Hyacinth as an
indignity endured gracefully enough by the heroes of several French
novels in which he had found a thrilling interest; nevertheless, he
said, incorruptibly, to the Captain, who hovered there like a
Mephistopheles converted to disinterested charity, “Having been in the
army, you will know that one can’t desert one’s post.”

The Captain, for the third time, laid his hand on his young friend’s
shoulder, and for a minute his smile rested, in silence, on Millicent
Henning. “If I tell you simply I want to talk with this young lady,
that certainly won’t help me, particularly, and there is no reason why
it should. Therefore I’ll tell you the whole truth: I want to talk with
her about _you!_” And he patted Hyacinth in a way which conveyed at
once that this idea must surely commend him to the young man’s
companion and that he himself liked him infinitely.

Hyacinth was conscious of the endearment, but he remarked to Millicent
that he would do just as she liked; he was determined not to let a
member of the bloated upper class suppose that he held any daughter of
the people cheap.

“Oh, I don’t care if you go,” said Miss Henning. “You had better
hurry—the curtain’s going to rise.”

“That’s charming of you! I’ll rejoin you in three minutes!” Captain
Sholto exclaimed.

He passed his hand into Hyacinth’s arm, and as our hero lingered still,
a little uneasy and questioning Millicent always with his eyes, the
girl went on, with her bright boldness, “That kind of princess—I should
like to hear all about her.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you that, too,” the Captain rejoined, with his
imperturbable pleasantness, as he led his young friend away. It must be
confessed that Hyacinth also rather wondered what kind of princess she
was, and his suspense on this point made his heart beat fast when,
after traversing steep staircases and winding corridors, they reached
the small door of the stage-box.




XIII


Hyacinth’s first consciousness, after his companion had opened it, was
of his nearness to the stage, on which the curtain had now risen again.
The play was in progress, the actors’ voices came straight into the
box, and it was impossible to speak without disturbing them. This at
least was his inference from the noiseless way his conductor drew him
in, and, without announcing or introducing him, simply pointed to a
chair and whispered, “Just drop into that; you’ll see and hear
beautifully.” He heard the door close behind him, and became aware that
Captain Sholto had already retreated. Millicent, at any rate, would not
be left to languish in solitude very long. Two ladies were seated in
the front of the box, which was so large that there was a considerable
space between them; and as he stood there, where Captain Sholto had
planted him—they appeared not to have noticed the opening of the
door—they turned their heads and looked at him. The one on whom his
eyes first rested was the old lady whom he had already contemplated at
a distance; she looked queerer still on a closer view, and gave him a
little friendly, jolly nod. Her companion was partly overshadowed by
the curtain of the box, which she had drawn forward with the intention
of shielding herself from the observation of the house; she had still
the air of youth, and the simplest way to express the instant effect
upon Hyacinth of her fair face of welcome is to say that she was
dazzling. He remained as Sholto had left him, staring rather confusedly
and not moving an inch; whereupon the younger lady put out her hand—it
was her left, the other rested on the ledge of the box—with the
expectation, as he perceived, to his extreme mortification, too late,
that he would give her his own. She converted the gesture into a sign
of invitation, and beckoned him, silently but graciously, to move his
chair forward. He did so, and seated himself between the two ladies;
then, for ten minutes, stared straight before him, at the stage, not
turning his eyes sufficiently even to glance up at Millicent in the
balcony. He looked at the play, but he was far from seeing it; he had
no sense of anything but the woman who sat there, close to him, on his
right, with a fragrance in her garments and a light about her which he
seemed to see even while his head was averted. The vision had been only
of a moment, but it hung before him, threw a vague white mist over the
proceedings on the stage. He was embarrassed, overturned, bewildered,
and he knew it; he made a great effort to collect himself, to consider
the situation lucidly. He wondered whether he ought to speak, to look
at her again, to behave differently, in some way; whether she would
take him for a clown, for an idiot; whether she were really as
beautiful as she had seemed or if it were only a superficial glamour,
which a renewed inspection would dissipate. While he asked himself
these questions the minutes went on, and neither of his hostesses
spoke; they watched the play in perfect stillness, so that Hyacinth
divined that this was the proper thing and that he himself must remain
dumb until a word should be bestowed upon him. Little by little he
recovered himself, took possession of his predicament, and at last
transferred his eyes to the Princess. She immediately perceived this,
and returned his glance, with a soft smile. She might well be a
princess—it was impossible to conform more to the finest evocations of
that romantic word. She was fair, brilliant, slender, with a kind of
effortless majesty. Her beauty had an air of perfection; it astonished
and lifted one up, the sight of it seemed a privilege, a reward. If the
first impression it had given Hyacinth was to make him feel strangely
transported, he need not have been too much agitated, for this was the
effect the Princess Casamassima produced upon persons of a wider
experience and greater pretensions. Her dark eyes, blue or gray,
something that was not brown, were as sweet as they were splendid, and
there was an extraordinary light nobleness in the way she held her
head. That head, where two or three diamond stars glittered in the
thick, delicate hair which defined its shape, suggested to Hyacinth
something antique and celebrated, which he had admired of old—the
memory was vague—in a statue, in a picture, in a museum. Purity of line
and form, of cheek and chin and lip and brow, a colour that seemed to
live and glow, a radiance of grace and eminence and success—these
things were seated in triumph in the face of the Princess, and
Hyacinth, as he held himself in his chair, trembling with the
revelation, wondered whether she were not altogether of some different
substance from the humanity he had hitherto known. She might be divine,
but he could see that she understood human needs—that she wished him to
be at his ease and happy; there was something familiar in her smile, as
if she had seen him many times before. Her dress was dark and rich; she
had pearls round her neck, and an old rococo fan in her hand. Hyacinth
took in all these things, and finally said to himself that if she
wanted nothing more of him than that, he was content, he would like it
to go on; so pleasant was it to sit with fine ladies, in a dusky,
spacious receptacle which framed the bright picture of the stage and
made one’s own situation seem a play within the play. The act was a
long one, and the repose in which his companions left him might have
been a calculated indulgence, to enable him to get used to them, to see
how harmless they were. He looked at Millicent, in the course of time,
and saw that Captain Sholto, seated beside her, had not the same
standard of propriety, inasmuch as he made a remark to her every few
minutes. Like himself, the young lady in the balcony was losing the
play, thanks to her eyes being fixed on her friend from Lomax Place,
whose position she thus endeavoured to gauge. Hyacinth had quite given
up the Paraguayan complications; by the end of the half-hour his
attention might have come back to them, had he not then been engaged in
wondering what the Princess would say to him after the descent of the
curtain—or whether she would say anything. The consideration of this
problem, as the moment of the solution drew nearer, made his heart
again beat faster. He watched the old lady on his left, and supposed it
was natural that a princess should have an attendant—he took for
granted she was an attendant—as different as possible from herself.
This ancient dame was without majesty or grace; huddled together, with
her hands folded on her stomach and her lips protruding, she solemnly
followed the performance. Several times, however, she turned her head
to Hyacinth, and then her expression changed; she repeated the jovial,
encouraging, almost motherly nod with which she had greeted him when he
made his bow, and by which she appeared to wish to intimate that,
better than the serene beauty on the other side, she could enter into
the oddity, the discomfort, of his situation. She seemed to say to him
that he must keep his head, and that if the worst should come to the
worst she was there to look after him. Even when, at last, the curtain
descended, it was some moments before the Princess spoke, though she
rested her smile upon Hyacinth as if she were considering what he would
best like her to say. He might at that instant have guessed what he
discovered later—that among this lady’s faults (he was destined to
learn that they were numerous) not the least eminent was an exaggerated
fear of the commonplace. He expected she would make some remark about
the play, but what she said was, very gently and kindly, “I like to
know all sorts of people.”

“I shouldn’t think you would find the least difficulty in that,”
Hyacinth replied.

“Oh, if one wants anything very much, it’s sure to be difficult. Every
one isn’t as obliging as you.”

Hyacinth could think, immediately, of no proper rejoinder to this; but
the old lady saved him the trouble by declaring, with a foreign accent,
“I think you were most extraordinarily good-natured. I had no idea you
would come—to two strange women.”

“Yes, we are strange women,” said the Princess, musingly.

“It’s not true that she finds things difficult; she makes every one do
everything,” her companion went on.

The Princess glanced at her; then remarked to Hyacinth, “Her name is
Madame Grandoni.” Her tone was not familiar, but there was a friendly
softness in it, as if he had really taken so much trouble for them that
it was only just he should be entertained a little at their expense. It
seemed to imply, also, that Madame Grandoni’s fitness for supplying
such entertainment was obvious.

“But I am not Italian—ah no!” the old lady cried. “In spite of my name,
I am an honest, ugly, unfortunate German. But it doesn’t matter. She
also, with such a name, isn’t Italian, either. It’s an accident; the
world is full of accidents. But she isn’t German, poor lady, any more.”
Madame Grandoni appeared to have entered into the Princess’s view, and
Hyacinth thought her exceedingly amusing. In a moment she added, “That
was a very charming person you were with.”

“Yes, she is very charming,” Hyacinth replied, not sorry to have a
chance to say it.

The Princess made no remark on this subject, and Hyacinth perceived not
only that from her position in the box she could have had no glimpse of
Millicent, but that she would never take up such an allusion as that.
It was as if she had not heard it that she asked, “Do you consider the
play very interesting?”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment, and then told the simple truth. “I must
confess that I have lost the whole of this last act.”

“Ah, poor bothered young man!” cried Madame Grandoni. “You see—you
see!”

“What do I see?” the Princess inquired. “If you are annoyed at being
here now, you will like us later; probably, at least. We take a great
interest in the things you care for. We take a great interest in the
people,” the Princess went on.

“Oh, allow me, allow me, and speak only for yourself!” the elder lady
interposed. “I take no interest in the people; I don’t understand them,
and I know nothing about them. An honourable nature, of any class, I
always respect it; but I will not pretend to a passion for the ignorant
masses, because I have it not. Moreover, that doesn’t touch the
gentleman.”

The Princess Casamassima had, evidently, a faculty of completely
ignoring things of which she wished to take no account; it was not in
the least the air of contempt, but a kind of thoughtful, tranquil
absence, after which she came back to the point where she wished to be.
She made no protest against her companion’s speech, but said to
Hyacinth, as if she were only vaguely conscious that the old lady had
been committing herself in some absurd way, “She lives with me; she is
everything to me; she is the best woman in the world.”

“Yes, fortunately, with many superficial defects, I am very good,”
Madame Grandoni remarked.

Hyacinth, by this time, was less embarrassed than when he presented
himself to the Princess Casamassima, but he was not less mystified; he
wondered afresh whether he were not being practised upon for some
inconceivable end; so strange did it seem to him that two such fine
ladies should, of their own movement, take the trouble to explain each
other to a miserable little bookbinder. This idea made him flush; it
was as if it had come over him that he had fallen into a trap. He was
conscious that he looked frightened, and he was conscious the moment
afterwards that the Princess noticed it. This was, apparently, what
made her say, “If you have lost so much of the play I ought to tell you
what has happened.”

“Do you think he would follow that any more?” Madame Grandoni
exclaimed.

“If you would tell me—if you would tell me—” And then Hyacinth stopped.
He had been going to say, ‘If you would tell me what all this means and
what you want of me, it would be more to the point!’ but the words died
on his lips, and he sat staring, for the woman at his right was simply
too beautiful. She was too beautiful to question, to judge by common
logic; and how could he know, moreover, what was natural to a person in
that exaltation of grace and splendour? Perhaps it was her habit to
send out every evening for some _naïf_ stranger, to amuse her; perhaps
that was the way the foreign aristocracy lived. There was no sharpness
in her face, at the present moment at least; there was nothing but
luminous sweetness, yet she looked as if she knew what was going on in
his mind. She made no eager attempt to reassure him, but there was a
world of delicate consideration in the tone in which she said, “Do you
know, I am afraid I have already forgotten what they have been doing in
the play? It’s terribly complicated; some one or other was hurled over
a precipice.”

“Ah, you’re a brilliant pair,” Madame Grandoni remarked, with a laugh
of long experience. “I could describe everything. The person who was
hurled over the precipice was the virtuous hero, and you will see, in
the next act, that he was only slightly bruised.”

“Don’t describe anything; I have so much to ask.” Hyacinth had looked
away, in tacit deprecation, at hearing himself ‘paired’ with the
Princess, and he felt that she was watching him. “What do you think of
Captain Sholto?” she went on, suddenly, to his surprise, if anything,
in his position, could excite that sentiment more than anything else;
and as he hesitated, not knowing what to say, she added, “Isn’t he a
very curious type?”

“I know him very little,” Hyacinth replied; and he had no sooner
uttered the words than it struck him they were far from brilliant—they
were poor and flat, and very little calculated to satisfy the Princess.
Indeed, he reflected that he had said nothing at all that could place
him in a favourable light; so he continued, at a venture: “I mean, I
have never seen him at home.” That sounded still more silly.

“At home? Oh, he is never at home; he is all over the world. To-night
he was as likely to have been in Paraguay, for instance, as here. He is
what they call a cosmopolite. I don’t know whether you know that
species; very modern, more and more frequent, and exceedingly tiresome.
I prefer the Chinese! He had told me he had had a great deal of
interesting talk with you. That was what made me say to him, ‘Oh, do
ask him to come in and see me. A little interesting talk, that would be
a change!’”

“She is very complimentary to me!” said Madame Grandoni.

“Ah, my dear, you and I, you know, we never talk: we understand each
other without that!” Then the Princess pursued, addressing herself to
Hyacinth, “Do you never admit women?”

“Admit women?”

“Into those _séances_—what do you call them?—those little meetings that
Captain Sholto described to me. I should like so much to be present.
Why not?”

“I haven’t seen any ladies,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t know whether it’s
a rule, but I have seen nothing but men;” and he added, smiling, though
he thought the dereliction rather serious, and couldn’t understand the
part Captain Sholto was playing, nor, considering the grand company he
kept, how he had originally secured admittance into the subversive
little circle in Bloomsbury, “You know I’m not sure Captain Sholto
ought to go about reporting our proceedings.”

“I see. Perhaps you think he’s a spy, or something of that sort.”

“No,” said Hyacinth, after a moment. “I think a spy would be more
careful—would disguise himself more. Besides, after all, he has heard
very little.” And Hyacinth smiled again.

“You mean he hasn’t really been behind the scenes?” the Princess asked,
bending forward a little, and now covering the young man steadily with
her deep, soft eyes, as if by this time he must have got used to her
and wouldn’t flinch from such attention. “Of course he hasn’t, and he
never will be; he knows that, and that it’s quite out of his power to
tell any real secrets. What he repeated to me was interesting, but of
course I could see that there was nothing the authorities, anywhere,
could put their hand on. It was mainly the talk he had had with you
which struck him so very much, and which struck me, as you see. Perhaps
you didn’t know how he was drawing you out.”

“I am afraid that’s rather easy,” said Hyacinth, with perfect candour,
as it came over him that he _had_ chattered, with a vengeance, in
Bloomsbury, and had thought it natural enough then that his sociable
fellow-visitor should offer him cigars and attach importance to the
views of a clever and original young artisan.

“I am not sure that I find it so! However, I ought to tell you that you
needn’t have the least fear of Captain Sholto. He’s a perfectly honest
man, so far as he goes; and even if you had trusted him much more than
you appear to have done, he would be incapable of betraying you.
However, don’t trust him: not because he’s not safe, but because—No
matter, you will see for yourself. He has gone into that sort of thing
simply to please me. I should tell you, merely to make you understand,
that he would do anything for that. That’s his own affair. I wanted to
know something, to learn something, to ascertain what really is going
on; and for a woman everything of that sort is so difficult, especially
for a woman in my position, who is known, and to whom every sort of bad
faith is sure to be imputed. So Sholto said he would look into the
subject for me; poor man, he has had to look into so many subjects!
What I particularly wanted was that he should make friends with some of
the leading spirits, really characteristic types.” The Princess’s voice
was low and rather deep, and her tone very quick; her manner of
speaking was altogether new to her listener, for whom the pronunciation
of her words and the very punctuation of her sentences were a kind of
revelation of ‘society’.

“Surely Captain Sholto doesn’t suppose that _I_ am a leading spirit!”
Hyacinth exclaimed, with the determination not to be laughed at any
more than he could help.

The Princess hesitated a moment; then she said, “He told me you were
very original.”

“He doesn’t know, and—if you will allow me to say so—I don’t think you
know. How should you? I am one of many thousands of young men of my
class—you know, I suppose, what that is—in whose brains certain ideas
are fermenting. There is nothing original about me at all. I am very
young and very ignorant; it’s only a few months since I began to talk
of the possibility of a social revolution with men who have considered
the whole ground much more than I have done. I’m a mere particle in the
immensity of the people. All I pretend to is my good faith, and a great
desire that justice shall be done.”

The Princess listened to him intently, and her attitude made him feel
how little _he_, in comparison, expressed himself like a person who had
the habit of conversation; he seemed to himself to stammer and emit
common sounds. For a moment she said nothing, only looking at him with
her pure smile. “I do draw you out!” she exclaimed, at last. “You are
much more interesting to me than if you were an exception.” At these
last words Hyacinth flinched a hair’s breadth; the movement was shown
by his dropping his eyes. We know to what extent he really regarded
himself as of the stuff of the common herd. The Princess doubtless
guessed it as well, for she quickly added, “At the same time, I can see
that you are remarkable enough.”

“What do you think I am remarkable for?”

“Well, you have general ideas.”

“Every one has them to-day. They have them in Bloomsbury to a terrible
degree. I have a friend (who understands the matter much better than I)
who has no patience with them: he declares they are our danger and our
bane. A few very special ideas—if they are the right ones—are what we
want.”

“Who is your friend?” the Princess asked, abruptly.

“Ah, Christina, Christina,” Madame Grandoni murmured from the other
side of the box.

Christina took no notice of her, and Hyacinth, not understanding the
warning, and only remembering how personal women always are, replied,
“A young man who lives in Camberwell, an assistant at a wholesale
chemist’s.”

If he had expected that this description of his friend was a bigger
dose than his hostess would be able to digest, he was greatly mistaken.
She seemed to look tenderly at the picture suggested by his words, and
she immediately inquired whether the young man were also clever, and
whether she might not hope to know him. Hadn’t Captain Sholto seen him;
and if so, why hadn’t he spoken of him, too? When Hyacinth had replied
that Captain Sholto had probably seen him, but that he believed he had
had no particular conversation with him, the Princess inquired, with
startling frankness, whether her visitor wouldn’t bring his friend,
some day, to see her.

Hyacinth glanced at Madame Grandoni, but that worthy woman was engaged
in a survey of the house, through an old-fashioned eye-glass with a
long gilt handle. He had perceived, long before this, that the Princess
Casamassima had no desire for vain phrases, and he had the good taste
to feel that, from himself to such a personage, compliments, even if he
had wished to pay them, would have had no suitability. “I don’t know
whether he would be willing to come. He’s the sort of man that, in such
a case, you can’t answer for.”

“That makes me want to know him all the more. But you’ll come yourself,
at all events, eh?”

Poor Hyacinth murmured something about the unexpected honour; for,
after all, he had a French heredity, and it was not so easy for him to
make unadorned speeches. But Madame Grandoni, laying down her
eye-glass, almost took the words out of his mouth, with the cheerful
exhortation, “Go and see her—go and see her once or twice. She will
treat you like an angel.”

“You must think me very peculiar,” the Princess remarked, sadly.

“I don’t know what I think. It will take a good while.”

“I wish I could make you trust me—inspire you with confidence,” she
went on. “I don’t mean only you, personally, but others who think as
you do. You would find I would go with you—pretty far. I was answering
just now for Captain Sholto; but who in the world is to answer for me?”
And her sadness merged itself in a smile which appeared to Hyacinth
extraordinarily magnanimous and touching.

“Not I, my dear, I promise you!” her ancient companion ejaculated, with
a laugh which made the people in the stalls look up at the box.

Her mirth was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to her,
“I would trust _you_, if you did!” though he felt, the next minute,
that this was even a more familiar speech than if he had said he
wouldn’t trust her.

“It comes, then, to the same thing,” the Princess went on. “She would
not show herself with me in public if I were not respectable. If you
knew more about me you would understand what has led me to turn my
attention to the great social question. It is a long story, and the
details wouldn’t interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more
talk, you will put yourself a little in my place. I am very serious,
you know; I am not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I am
convinced that we are living in a fool’s paradise, that the ground is
heaving under our feet.”

“It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you that are turning somersaults,”
Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you
like to believe. I have to believe what I see.”

“She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to
enlighten it,” Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with
imperturbable gravity.

“I am sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young
man responded, in a glow. The pure, high dignity with which the
Princess had just spoken, and which appeared to cover a suppressed
tremor of passion, set Hyacinth’s pulses throbbing, and though he
scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations seeming so vague—her tone,
her voice, her wonderful face, showed that she had a generous soul.

She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a
melancholy head-shake. “I have no such pretensions, and my good old
friend is laughing at me. Of course that is very easy; for what, in
fact, can be more absurd, on the face of it, than for a woman with a
title, with diamonds, with a carriage, with servants, with a position,
as they call it, to sympathise with the upward struggles of those who
are below? ‘Give all that up, and we’ll believe you,’ you have a right
to say. I am ready to give them up the moment it will help the cause; I
assure you that’s the least difficulty. I don’t want to teach, I want
to learn; and, above all, I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_. Are we on
the eve of great changes, or are we not? Is everything that is
gathering force, underground, in the dark, in the night, in little
hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic
‘statesmen’—heaven save them!—is all this going to burst forth some
fine morning and set the world on fire? Or is it to sputter out and
spend itself in vain conspiracies, be dissipated in sterile heroisms
and abortive isolated movements? I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_,”
she repeated, fixing her visitor with more brilliant eyes, as if he
could tell her on the spot. Then, suddenly, she added in a totally
different tone, “Excuse me, I have an idea you speak French. Didn’t
Captain Sholto tell me so?”

“I have some little acquaintance with it,” Hyacinth murmured. “I have
French blood in my veins.”

She considered him as if he had proposed to her some kind of problem.
“Yes, I can see that you are not _le premier venu_. Now, your friend,
of whom you were speaking, is a chemist; and you, yourself—what is your
occupation?”

“I’m just a bookbinder.”

“That must be delightful. I wonder if you would bind some books for
me.”

“You would have to bring them to our shop, and I can do there only the
work that’s given out to me. I might manage it by myself, at home,”
Hyacinth added, smiling.

“I should like that better. And what do you call home?”

“The place I live in, in the north of London: a little street you
certainly never heard of.”

“What is it called?”

“Lomax Place, at your service,” said Hyacinth, laughing.

She laughed back at him, and he didn’t know whether her brightness or
her gravity were the more charming. “No, I don’t think I have heard of
it. I don’t know London very well; I haven’t lived here long. I have
spent most of my life abroad. My husband is a foreigner, an Italian. We
don’t live together much. I haven’t the manners of this country—not of
any class; have I, eh? Oh, this country—there is a great deal to be
said about it; and a great deal to be done, as you, of course,
understand better than any one. But I want to know London; it interests
me more than I can say—the huge, swarming, smoky, human city. I mean
real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions; not Park
Lane and Bond Street. Perhaps you can help me—it would be a great
kindness: that’s what I want to know men like you for. You see it isn’t
idle, my having given you so much trouble to-night.”

“I shall be very glad to show you all I know. But it isn’t much, and
above all it isn’t pretty,” said Hyacinth.

“Whom do you live with, in Lomax Place?” the Princess asked, by way of
rejoinder to this.

“Captain Sholto is leaving the young lady—he is coming back here,”
Madame Grandoni announced, inspecting the balcony with her instrument.
The orchestra had been for some time playing the overture to the
following act.

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “I live with a dressmaker.”

“With a dressmaker? Do you mean—do you mean—?” And the Princess paused.

“Do you mean she’s your wife?” asked Madame Grandoni, humorously.

“Perhaps she gives you rooms,” remarked the Princess.

“How many do you think I have? She gives me everything, or she has done
so in the past. She brought me up; she is the best little woman in the
world.”

“You had better command a dress!” exclaimed Madame Grandoni.

“And your family, where are they?” the Princess continued.

“I have no family.”

“None at all?”

“None at all. I never had.”

“But the French blood that you speak of, and which I see perfectly in
your face—you haven’t the English expression, or want of
expression—that must have come to you through some one.”

“Yes, through my mother.”

“And she is dead?”

“Long ago.”

“That’s a great loss, because French mothers are usually so much to
their sons.” The Princess looked at her painted fan a moment, as she
opened and closed it; after which she said, “Well, then, you’ll come
some day. We’ll arrange it.”

Hyacinth felt that the answer to this could be only a silent
inclination of his little person; and to make it he rose from his
chair. As he stood there, conscious that he had stayed long enough and
yet not knowing exactly how to withdraw, the Princess, with her fan
closed, resting upright on her knee, and her hands clasped on the end
of it, turned up her strange, lovely eyes at him, and said—

“Do you think anything will occur soon?”

“Will occur?”

“That there will be a crisis—that you’ll make yourselves felt?”

In this beautiful woman’s face there was to Hyacinth’s bewildered
perception something at once inspiring, tempting and mocking; and the
effect of her expression was to make him say, rather clumsily, “I’ll
try and ascertain;” as if she had asked him whether her carriage were
at the door.

“I don’t quite know what you are talking about; but please don’t have
it for another hour or two. I want to see what becomes of the Pearl!”
Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Remember what I told you: I would give up everything—everything!” the
Princess went on, looking up at the young man in the same way. Then she
held out her hand, and this time he knew sufficiently what he was about
to take it.

When he bade good-night to Madame Grandoni the old lady exclaimed to
him, with a comical sigh, “Well, she _is_ respectable!” and out in the
lobby, when he had closed the door of the box behind him, he found
himself echoing these words and repeating mechanically, “She _is_
respectable!” They were on his lips as he stood, suddenly, face to face
with Captain Sholto, who laid his hand on his shoulder once more and
shook him a little, in that free yet insinuating manner for which this
officer appeared to be remarkable.

“My dear fellow, you were born under a lucky star.”

“I never supposed it,” said Hyacinth, changing colour.

“Why, what in the world would you have? You have the faculty, the
precious faculty, of inspiring women with an interest—but an interest!”

“Yes, ask them in the box there! I behaved like a cretin,” Hyacinth
declared, overwhelmed now with a sense of opportunities missed.

“They won’t tell me that. And the lady upstairs?”

“Well,” said Hyacinth gravely, “what about her?”

The Captain considered him a moment. “She wouldn’t talk to me of
anything but you. You may imagine how I liked it!”

“I don’t like it, either. But I must go up.”

“Oh yes, she counts the minutes. Such a charming person!” Captain
Sholto added, with more propriety of tone. As Hyacinth left him he
called after him, “Don’t be afraid—you’ll go far.”

When the young man took his place in the balcony beside Millicent this
damsel gave him no greeting, nor asked any question about his
adventures in the more aristocratic part of the house. She only turned
her fine complexion upon him for some minutes, and as he himself was
not in the mood to begin to chatter, the silence continued—continued
till after the curtain had risen on the last act of the play.
Millicent’s attention was now, evidently, not at her disposal for the
stage, and in the midst of a violent scene, which included pistol-shots
and shrieks, she said at last to her companion, “She’s a tidy lot, your
Princess, by what I learn.”

“Pray, what do you know about her?”

“I know what that fellow told me.”

“And pray, what was that?”

“Well, she’s a bad ’un, as ever was. Her own husband has had to turn
her out of the house.”

Hyacinth remembered the allusion the lady herself had made to her
matrimonial situation; nevertheless, what he would have liked to reply
to Miss Henning was that he didn’t believe a word of it. He withheld
the doubt, and after a moment remarked quietly, “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care? Well, I do, then!” Millicent cried. And as it was
impossible, in view of the performance and the jealous attention of
their neighbours, to continue the conversation in this pitch, she
contented herself with ejaculating, in a somewhat lower key, at the end
of five minutes, during which she had been watching the stage,
“Gracious, what dreadful common stuff!”




XIV


Hyacinth did not mention to Pinnie or Mr Vetch that he had been taken
up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he
now confided a great many things. He had, at first, been in
considerable fear of his straight, loud, north-country friend, who
showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism to a degree that was
hostile to free conversation; but he discovered later that he was a man
to whom one could say anything in the world, if one didn’t think it of
more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a
revolutionist, he was strangely good-natured. The sight of all the
things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and
if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his pleasantry
was not bitter nor invidious; the fault that Hyacinth sometimes found
with it, rather, was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied
his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the
apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who,
on Sunday morning, has put on a clean shirt, and, not having taken the
gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a
happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest and Gravesend.
He was never sarcastic about his personal lot and his daily life; it
had not seemed to occur to him, for instance, that ‘society’ was really
responsible for the condition of his sister’s spinal column, though
Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient
as he) did everything they could to make him say so, believing,
evidently, that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for
women, talked of them rarely, and always decently, and had never a sign
of a sweetheart, unless Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He
never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear
tone, a fresh cheek and a smiling eye, and once excited on Hyacinth’s
part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and
credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny
gallery, at Astley’s, at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the
tawdry spectacle. He once told the young bookbinder that he was a
suggestive little beggar, and Hyacinth’s opinion of him, by this time,
was so exalted that the remark had almost the value of a patent of
nobility. Our hero treated himself to an unlimited belief in him; he
had always dreamed of having some grand friendship, and this was the
best opening he had ever encountered. No one could entertain a
sentiment of that sort better than Hyacinth, or cultivate a greater
luxury of confidence. It disappointed him, sometimes, that it was not
more richly repaid; that on certain important points of the socialistic
programme Muniment would never commit himself; and that he had not yet
shown the _fond du sac_, as Eustache Poupin called it, to so ardent an
admirer. He answered particular questions freely enough, and answered
them occasionally in a manner that made Hyacinth jump, as when, in
reply to an inquiry in regard to his view of capital punishment, he
said that, so far from wishing it abolished, he should go in for
extending it much further—he should impose it on those who habitually
lied or got drunk; but his friend had always a feeling that he kept
back his best card and that even in the listening circle in Bloomsbury,
when only the right men were present, there were unspoken conclusions
in his mind which he didn’t as yet think any one good enough to be
favoured with. So far, therefore, from suspecting him of
half-heartedness, Hyacinth was sure that he had extraordinary things in
his head; that he was thinking them out to the logical end, wherever it
might land him; and that the night he should produce them, with the
door of the club-room guarded and the company bound by a tremendous
oath, the others would look at each other and turn pale.

“She wants to see you; she asked me to bring you; she was very
serious,” Hyacinth said, relating his interview with the ladies in the
box at the play; which, however, now that he looked back upon it,
seemed as queer as a dream, and not much more likely than that sort of
experience to have a continuation in one’s waking hours.

“To bring me—to bring me where?” asked Muniment. “You talk as if I were
a sample out of your shop, or a little dog you had for sale. Has she
ever seen me? Does she think I’m smaller than you? What does she know
about me?”

“Well, principally, that you’re a friend of mine—that’s enough for
her.”

“Do you mean that it ought to be enough for me that she’s a friend of
yours? I have a notion you’ll have some queer ones before you’re done;
a good many more than I have time to talk to. And how can I go to see a
delicate female, with those paws?” Muniment inquired, exhibiting ten
work-stained fingers.

“Buy a pair of gloves,” said Hyacinth, who recognised the serious
character of this obstacle. But after a moment he added, “No, you
oughtn’t to do that; she wants to see dirty hands.”

“That’s easy enough; she needn’t send for me for the purpose. But isn’t
she making game of you?”

“It’s very possible, but I don’t see what good it can do her.”

“You are not obliged to find excuses for the pampered classes. Their
bloated luxury begets evil, impudent desires; they are capable of doing
harm for the sake of harm. Besides, is she genuine?”

“If she isn’t, what becomes of your explanation?” asked Hyacinth.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter; at night all cats are gray. Whatever she is,
she’s an idle, bedizened jade.”

“If you had seen her, you wouldn’t talk of her that way.”

“God forbid I should see her, then, if she’s going to corrupt me!”

“Do you suppose she’ll corrupt _me?_” Hyacinth demanded, with an
expression of face and a tone of voice which produced, on his friend’s
part, an explosion of mirth.

“How can she, after all, when you are already such a little mass of
corruption?”

“You don’t think that,” said Hyacinth, looking very grave.

“Do you mean that if I did I wouldn’t say it? Haven’t you noticed that
I say what I think?”

“No, you don’t, not half of it: you’re as close as a fish.”

Paul Muniment looked at his companion a moment, as if he were rather
struck with the penetration of that remark; then he said, “Well, then,
if I should give you the other half of my opinion of you, do you think
you’d fancy it?”

“I’ll save you the trouble. I’m a very clever, conscientious, promising
young chap, and any one would be proud to claim me as a friend.”

“Is that what your Princess told you? She must be a precious piece of
goods!” Paul Muniment exclaimed. “Did she pick your pocket meanwhile?”

“Oh yes; a few minutes later I missed a silver cigar-case, engraved
with the arms of the Robinsons. Seriously,” Hyacinth continued, “don’t
you consider it possible that a woman of that class should want to know
what is going on among the like of us?”

“It depends upon what class you mean.”

“Well, a woman with a lot of jewels and the manners of an angel. It’s
queer of course, but it’s conceivable; why not? There may be unselfish
natures; there may be disinterested feelings.”

“And there may be fine ladies in an awful funk about their jewels, and
even about their manners. Seriously, as you say, it’s perfectly
conceivable. I am not in the least surprised at the aristocracy being
curious to know what we are up to, and wanting very much to look into
it; in their place I should be very uneasy, and if I were a woman with
angelic manners very likely I too should be glad to get hold of a soft,
susceptible little bookbinder, and pump him dry, bless his heart!”

“Are you afraid I’ll tell her secrets?” cried Hyacinth, flushing with
virtuous indignation.

“Secrets? What secrets could you tell her, my pretty lad?”

Hyacinth stared a moment. “You don’t trust me—you never have.”

“We will, some day—don’t be afraid,” said Muniment, who, evidently, had
no intention of unkindness, a thing that appeared to be impossible to
him. “And when we do, you’ll cry with disappointment.”

“Well, _you_ won’t,” Hyacinth declared. And then he asked whether his
friend thought the Princess Casamassima a spy; and why, if she were in
that line, Mr Sholto was not—inasmuch as it must be supposed he was
not, since they had seen fit to let him walk in and out, at that rate,
in the place in Bloomsbury. Muniment did not even know whom he meant,
not having had any relations with the gentleman; but he summoned a
sufficient image when his companion had described the Captain’s
appearance. He then remarked, with his usual geniality, that he didn’t
take him for a spy—he took him for an ass; but even if he had edged
himself into the place with every intention to betray them, what handle
could he possibly get—what use, against them, could he make of anything
he had seen or heard? If he had a fancy to dip into working-men’s clubs
(Muniment remembered, now, the first night he came; he had been brought
by that German cabinet-maker, who had a stiff neck and smoked a pipe
with a bowl as big as a stove); if it amused him to put on a bad hat,
and inhale foul tobacco, and call his ‘inferiors’ ‘my dear fellow’; if
he thought that in doing so he was getting an insight into the people
and going half-way to meet them and preparing for what was coming—all
this was his own affair, and he was very welcome, though a man must be
a flat who would spend his evening in a hole like that when he might
enjoy his comfort in one of those flaming big shops, full of arm-chairs
and flunkies, in Pall Mall. And what did he see, after all, in
Bloomsbury? Nothing but a ‘social gathering’, where there were clay
pipes, and a sanded floor, and not half enough gas, and the principal
newspapers; and where the men, as any one would know, were advanced
radicals, and mostly advanced idiots. He could pat as many of them on
the back as he liked, and say the House of Lords wouldn’t last till
midsummer; but what discoveries would he make? He was simply on the
same lay as Hyacinth’s Princess; he was nervous and scared, and he
thought he would see for himself.

“Oh, he isn’t the same sort as the Princess. I’m sure he’s in a very
different line!” Hyacinth exclaimed.

“Different, of course: she’s a handsome woman, I suppose, and he’s an
ugly man; but I don’t think that either of them will save us or spoil
us. Their curiosity is natural, but I have got other things to do than
to show them over; therefore you can tell her serene highness that I’m
much obliged.”

Hyacinth reflected a moment, and then he said, “You show Lady Aurora
over; you seem to wish to give her the information she desires; and
what’s the difference? If it’s right for her to take an interest, why
isn’t it right for my Princess?”

“If she’s already yours, what more can she want?” Muniment asked. “All
I know of Lady Aurora, and all I look at, is that she comes and sits
with Rosy, and brings her tea, and waits upon her. If the Princess will
do as much I’ll tell her she’s a woman of genius; but apart from that I
shall never take a grain of interest in her interest in the masses—or
in this particular mass!” And Paul Muniment, with his discoloured
thumb, designated his own substantial person. His tone was
disappointing to Hyacinth, who was surprised at his not appearing to
think the episode at the theatre more remarkable and romantic. Muniment
seemed to regard his explanation of such a proceeding as
all-sufficient; but when, a moment later, he made use, in referring to
the mysterious lady, of the expression that she was ‘quaking’, Hyacinth
broke out—“Never in the world; she’s not afraid of anything!”

“Ah, my lad, not afraid of you, evidently!”

Hyacinth paid no attention to this coarse sally, but asked in a moment,
with a candour that was proof against further ridicule, “Do you think
she can do me a hurt of any kind, if we follow up our acquaintance?”

“Yes, very likely, but you must hit her back! That’s your line, you
know: to go in for what’s going, to live your life, to gratify the
women. I’m an ugly, grimy brute; I’ve got to watch the fires and mind
the shop; but you are one of those taking little beggars who ought to
run about and see the world; you ought to be an ornament to society,
like a young man in an illustrated story-book. Only,” Muniment added in
a moment, “you know, if she should hurt you very much, _then_ I would
go and see her!”

Hyacinth had been intending for some time to take Pinnie to call on the
prostrate damsel in Audley Court, to whom he had promised that his
benefactress (he had told Rose Muniment that she was ‘a kind of aunt’)
should pay this civility; but the affair had been delayed by wan
hesitations on the part of the dressmaker, for the poor woman had hard
work to imagine, to-day, that there were people in London so forlorn
that her countenance could be of value to them. Her social curiosities
had become very nearly extinct, and she knew that she no longer made
the same figure in public as when her command of the fashions enabled
her to illustrate them in her own little person, by the aid of a good
deal of whalebone. Moreover she felt that Hyacinth had strange friends
and still stranger opinions; she suspected that he took an unnatural
interest in politics and was somehow not on the right side, little as
she knew about parties or causes; and she had a vague conviction that
this kind of perversity only multiplied the troubles of the poor, who,
according to theories which Pinnie had never reasoned out, but which,
in her bosom, were as deep as religion, ought always to be of the same
way of thinking as the rich. They were unlike them enough in their
poverty, without trying to add other differences. When at last she
accompanied Hyacinth to Camberwell, one Saturday evening at midsummer,
it was in a sighing, sceptical, second-best manner; but if he had told
her he wished it she would have gone with him to a _soirée_ at a
scavenger’s. There was no more danger of Rose Muniment’s being out than
of one of the bronze couchant lions in Trafalgar Square having walked
down Whitehall; but he had let her know in advance, and he perceived,
as he opened her door in obedience to a quick, shrill summons, that she
had had the happy thought of inviting Lady Aurora to help her to
entertain Miss Pynsent. Such, at least, was the inference he drew from
seeing her ladyship’s memorable figure rise before him for the first
time since his own visit. He presented his companion to their reclining
hostess, and Rosy immediately repeated her name to the representative
of Belgrave Square. Pinnie curtsied down to the ground, as Lady Aurora
put out her hand to her, and slipped noiselessly into a chair beside
the bed. Lady Aurora laughed and fidgeted, in a friendly, cheerful, yet
at the same time rather pointless manner, and Hyacinth gathered that
she had no recollection of having met him before. His attention,
however, was mainly given to Pinnie: he watched her jealously, to see
whether, on this important occasion, she would not put forth a certain
stiff, quaint, polished politeness, of which she possessed the secret
and which made her resemble a pair of old-fashioned sugar-tongs. Not
only for Pinnie’s sake, but for his own as well, he wished her to pass
for a superior little woman, and he hoped she wouldn’t lose her head if
Rosy should begin to talk about Inglefield. She was, evidently, much
impressed by Rosy, and kept repeating, “Dear, dear!” under her breath,
as the small, strange person in the bed rapidly explained to her that
there was nothing in the world she would have liked so much as to
follow _her_ delightful profession, but that she couldn’t sit up to it,
and had never had a needle in her hand but once, when at the end of
three minutes it had dropped into the sheets and got into the mattress,
so that she had always been afraid it would work out again and stick
into her; but it hadn’t done so yet, and perhaps it never would—she lay
so quiet, she didn’t push it about much. “Perhaps you would think it’s
me that trimmed the little handkerchief I wear round my neck,” Miss
Muniment said; “perhaps you would think I couldn’t do less, lying here
all day long, with complete command of my time. Not a stitch of it. I’m
the finest lady in London; I never lift my finger for myself. It’s a
present from her ladyship—it’s her ladyship’s own beautiful needlework.
What do you think of that? Have you ever met any one so favoured
before? And the work—just look at the work, and tell me what you think
of that!” The girl pulled off the bit of muslin from her neck and
thrust it at Pinnie, who looked at it confusedly and exclaimed, “Dear,
dear, dear!” partly in sympathy, partly as if, in spite of the
consideration she owed every one, those were very strange proceedings.

“It’s very badly done; surely you see that,” said Lady Aurora. “It was
only a joke.”

“Oh yes, everything’s a joke!” cried the irrepressible
invalid—“everything except my state of health; that’s admitted to be
serious. When her ladyship sends me five shillings’ worth of coals it’s
only a joke; and when she brings me a bottle of the finest port, that’s
another; and when she climbs up seventy-seven stairs (there are
seventy-seven, I know perfectly, though I never go up or down), at the
height of the London season, to spend the evening with me, that’s the
best of all. I know all about the London season, though I never go out,
and I appreciate what her ladyship gives up. She is very jocular
indeed, but, fortunately, I know how to take it. You can see that it
wouldn’t do for me to be touchy, can’t you, Miss Pynsent?”

“Dear, dear, I should be so glad to make you anything myself; it would
be better—it would be better—” Pinnie murmured, hesitating.

“It would be better than my poor work. I don’t know how to do that sort
of thing, in the least,” said Lady Aurora.

“I’m sure I didn’t mean that, my lady—I only meant it would be more
convenient. Anything in the world she might fancy,” the dressmaker went
on, as if it were a question of the invalid’s appetite.

“Ah, you see I don’t wear things—only a flannel jacket, to be a bit
tidy,” Miss Muniment rejoined. “I go in only for smart counterpanes, as
you can see for yourself;” and she spread her white hands complacently
over her coverlet of brilliant patchwork. “Now doesn’t that look to
you, Miss Pynsent, as if it might be one of her ladyship’s jokes?”

“Oh, my good friend, how can you? I never went so far as that!” Lady
Aurora interposed, with visible anxiety.

“Well, you’ve given me almost everything; I sometimes forget. This only
cost me sixpence; so it comes to the same thing as if it had been a
present. Yes, only sixpence, in a raffle in a bazaar at Hackney, for
the benefit of the Wesleyan Chapel, three years ago. A young man who
works with my brother, and lives in that part, offered him a couple of
tickets; and he took one, and I took one. When I say ‘I’, of course I
mean that he took the two; for how should I find (by which I mean, of
course, how should _he_ find) a sixpence in that little cup on the
chimney-piece unless he had put it there first? Of course my ticket
took a prize, and of course, as my bed is my dwelling-place, the prize
was a beautiful counterpane, of every colour of the rainbow. Oh, there
never was such luck as mine!” Rosy exclaimed, flashing her gay, strange
eyes at Hyacinth, as if on purpose to irritate him with her
contradictious optimism.

“It’s very lovely; but if you would like another, for a change, I’ve
got a great many pieces,” Pinnie remarked, with a generosity which made
the young man feel that she was acquitting herself finely.

Rose Muniment laid her little hand on the dressmaker’s arm, and
responded, quickly, “No, not a change, not a change. How can there be a
change when there’s already everything? There’s everything here—every
colour that was ever seen, or composed, or dreamed of, since the world
began.” And with her other hand she stroked, affectionately, her
variegated quilt. “You have a great many pieces, but you haven’t as
many as there are here; and the more you should patch them together the
more the whole thing would resemble this dear, dazzling old friend. I
have another idea, very, very charming, and perhaps her ladyship can
guess what it is.” Rosy kept her fingers on Pinnie’s arm, and, smiling,
turned her brilliant eyes from one of her female companions to the
other, as if she wished to associate them as much as possible in their
interest in her. “In connection with what we were talking about a few
minutes ago—couldn’t your ladyship just go a little further, in the
same line?” Then, as Lady Aurora looked troubled and embarrassed,
blushing at being called upon to answer a conundrum, as it were, so
publicly, her infirm friend came to her assistance. “It will surprise
you at first, but it won’t when I have explained it: my idea is just
simply a pink dressing-gown!”

“A pink dressing-gown!” Lady Aurora repeated.

“With a neat black trimming! Don’t you see the connection with what we
were talking of before our good visitors came in?”

“That would be very pretty,” said Pinnie. “I have made them like that,
in my time. Or blue, trimmed with white.”

“No, pink and black, pink and black—to suit my complexion. Perhaps you
didn’t know I have a complexion; but there are very few things I
haven’t got! Anything at all I should fancy, you were so good as to
say. Well now, I fancy that! Your ladyship does see the connection by
this time, doesn’t she?”

Lady Aurora looked distressed, as if she felt that she certainly ought
to see it but was not sure that even yet it didn’t escape her, and as
if, at the same time, she were struck with the fact that this sudden
evocation might result in a strain on the little dressmaker’s
resources. “A pink dressing-gown would certainly be very becoming, and
Miss Pynsent would be very kind,” she said; while Hyacinth made the
mental comment that it was a largeish order, as Pinnie would have,
obviously, to furnish the materials as well as the labour. The amiable
coolness with which the invalid laid her under contribution was,
however, to his sense, quite in character, and he reflected that, after
all, when you were stretched on your back like that you had the right
to reach out your hands (it wasn’t far you could reach at best) and
seize what you could get. Pinnie declared that she knew just the
article Miss Muniment wanted, and that she would undertake to make a
sweet thing of it; and Rosy went on to say that she must explain of
what use such an article would be, but for this purpose there must be
another guess. She would give it to Miss Pynsent and Hyacinth—as many
times as they liked: What _had_ she and Lady Aurora been talking about
before they came in? She clasped her hands, and her eyes glittered with
her eagerness, while she continued to turn them from Lady Aurora to the
dressmaker. What would they imagine? What would they think natural,
delightful, magnificent—if one could only end, at last, by making out
the right place to put it? Hyacinth suggested, successively, a cage of
Java sparrows, a music-box and a shower-bath—or perhaps even a
full-length portrait of her ladyship; and Pinnie looked at him askance,
in a frightened way, as if perchance he were joking too broadly. Rosy
at last relieved their suspense and announced, “A sofa, just a sofa,
now! What do you say to that? Do you suppose that’s an idea that could
have come from any one but her ladyship? She must have all the credit
of it; she came out with it in the course of conversation. I believe we
were talking of the peculiar feeling that comes just under the
shoulder-blades if one never has a change. She mentioned it as she
might have mentioned a plaster, or another spoonful of that American
stuff. We are thinking it over, and one of these days, if we give
plenty of time to the question, we shall find the place, the very
nicest and snuggest of all, and no other. I hope _you_ see the
connection with the pink dressing-gown,” she remarked to Pinnie, “and I
hope you see the importance of the question, Shall anything go? I
should like you to look round a bit, and tell me what you would answer
if I were to say to you, _Can_ anything go?”




XV


“I’m sure there’s nothing _I_ should like to part with,” Pinnie
returned; and while she surveyed the scene Lady Aurora, with delicacy,
to lighten Amanda’s responsibility, got up and turned to the window,
which was open to the summer-evening and admitted still the last rays
of the long day. Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her,
looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the
small black houses, roofed with grimy tiles. The thick, warm air of a
London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar
of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again
became a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here and there,
in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a
clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver
star looked down. The sky was the same that, far away in the country,
bent over golden fields and purple hills and gardens where nightingales
sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was
ugly and sordid, and seemed to express, or to represent, the weariness
of toil. In an instant, to Hyacinth’s surprise, Lady Aurora said to
him, “You never came, after all, to get the books.”

“Those you kindly offered to lend me? I didn’t know it was an
understanding.”

Lady Aurora gave an uneasy laugh. “I have picked them out; they are
quite ready.”

“It’s very kind of you,” the young man rejoined. “I will come and get
them some day, with pleasure.” He was not very sure that he would; but
it was the least he could say.

“She’ll tell you where I live, you know,” Lady Aurora went on, with a
movement of her head in the direction of the bed, as if she were too
shy to mention it herself.

“Oh, I have no doubt she knows the way—she could tell me every street
and every turn!” Hyacinth exclaimed.

“She has made me describe to her, very often, how I come and go. I
think that few people know more about London than she. She never
forgets anything.”

“She’s a wonderful little witch—she terrifies me!” said Hyacinth.

Lady Aurora turned her modest eyes upon him. “Oh, she’s so good, she’s
so patient!”

“Yes, and so wise, and so self-possessed.”

“Oh, she’s immensely clever,” said her ladyship. “Which do you think
the cleverest?”

“The cleverest?”

“I mean of the girl and her brother.”

“Oh, I think he, some day, will be prime minister of England.”

“Do you really? I’m so glad!” cried Lady Aurora, with a flush of colour
in her face. “I’m so glad you think that will be possible. You know it
ought to be, if things were right.”

Hyacinth had not professed this high faith for the purpose of playing
upon her ladyship’s feelings, but when he perceived her eager
responsiveness he felt almost as if he had been making sport of her.
Still, he said no more than he believed when he remarked, in a moment,
that he had the greatest expectations of Paul Muniment’s future: he was
sure that the world would hear of him, that England would feel him,
that the public, some day, would acclaim him. It was impossible to
associate with him without feeling that he was very strong, that he
must play an important part.

“Yes, people wouldn’t believe—they wouldn’t believe,” Lady Aurora
murmured softly, appreciatively. She was evidently very much pleased
with what Hyacinth was saying. It was moreover a pleasure to himself to
place on record his opinion of his friend; it seemed to make that
opinion more clear, to give it the force of an invocation, a prophecy.
This was especially the case when he asked why on earth nature had
endowed Paul Muniment with such extraordinary powers of mind, and
powers of body too—because he was as strong as a horse—if it had not
been intended that he should do something great for his fellow-men.
Hyacinth confided to her ladyship that he thought the people in his own
class generally very stupid—what he should call third-rate minds. He
wished it were not so, for heaven knew that he felt kindly to them and
only asked to cast his lot with theirs; but he was obliged to confess
that centuries of poverty, of ill-paid toil, of bad, insufficient food
and wretched homes, had not a favourable effect upon the higher
faculties. All the more reason that when there was a splendid
exception, like Paul Muniment, it should count for a tremendous
force—it had so much to make up for, to act for. And then Hyacinth
repeated that in his own low walk of life people had really not the
faculty of thought; their minds had been simplified—reduced to two or
three elements. He saw that this declaration made his interlocutress
very uncomfortable; she turned and twisted herself, vaguely, as if she
wished to protest, but she was far too considerate to interrupt him. He
had no desire to distress her, but there were times in which it was
impossible for him to withstand the perverse satisfaction he took in
insisting on his lowliness of station, in turning the knife about in
the wound inflicted by such explicit reference, and in letting it be
seen that if his place in the world was immeasurably small he at least
had no illusions about either himself or his fellows. Lady Aurora
replied, as quickly as possible, that she knew a great deal about the
poor—not the poor like Rose Muniment, but the terribly, hopelessly
poor, with whom she was more familiar than Hyacinth would perhaps
believe—and that she was often struck with their great talents, with
their quick wit, with their conversation being really much more
entertaining, to her at least, than what one usually heard in
drawing-rooms. She often found them immensely clever.

Hyacinth smiled at her, and said, “Ah, when you get to the lowest
depths of poverty, they may become very brilliant again. But I’m afraid
I haven’t gone so far down. In spite of my opportunities, I don’t know
many absolute paupers.”

“I know a great many.” Lady Aurora hesitated, as if she didn’t like to
boast, and then she added, “I dare say I know more than any one.” There
was something touching, beautiful, to Hyacinth, in this simple,
diffident admission; it confirmed his impression that Lady Aurora was
in some mysterious, incongruous, and even slightly ludicrous manner a
heroine, a creature of a noble ideal. She perhaps guessed that he was
indulging in reflections that might be favourable to her, for she said,
precipitately, the next minute, as if there were nothing she dreaded so
much as the danger of a compliment, “I think your aunt’s so very
attractive—and I’m sure Rose Muniment thinks so.” No sooner had she
spoken than she blushed again; it appeared to have occurred to her that
he might suppose she wished to contradict him by presenting this case
of his aunt as a proof that the baser sort, even in a prosaic upper
layer, were not without redeeming points. There was no reason why she
should not have had this intention; so without sparing her, Hyacinth
replied—

“You mean that she’s an exception to what I was saying?”

Lady Aurora stammered a little; then, at last, as if, since he wouldn’t
spare her, she wouldn’t spare him, either, “Yes, and you’re an
exception, too; you’ll not make me believe you’re wanting in
intelligence. The Muniments don’t think so,” she added.

“No more do I myself; but that doesn’t prove that exceptions are not
frequent. I have blood in my veins that is not the blood of the
people.”

“Oh, I see,” said Lady Aurora, sympathetically. And with a smile she
went on: “Then you’re all the more of an exception—in the upper class!”

Her smile was the kindest in the world, but it did not blind Hyacinth
to the fact that from his own point of view he had been extraordinarily
indiscreet. He believed a moment before that he would have been proof
against the strongest temptation to refer to the mysteries of his
lineage, inasmuch as, if made in a boastful spirit (and he had no
desire as yet to make it an exercise in humility), any such reference
would inevitably contain an element of the grotesque. He had never
opened his lips to any one about his birth (since the dreadful days
when the question was discussed, with Mr Vetch’s assistance, in Lomax
Place); never even to Paul Muniment, never to Millicent Henning nor to
Eustache Poupin. He had an impression that people had ideas about him,
and with some of Miss Henning’s he had been made acquainted: they were
of such a nature that he sometimes wondered whether the tie which
united him to her were not, on her own side, a secret determination to
satisfy her utmost curiosity before she had done with him. But he
flattered himself that he was impenetrable, and none the less he had
begun to swagger, idiotically, the first time a temptation (to call a
temptation) presented itself. He turned crimson as soon as he had
spoken, partly at the sudden image of what he had to swagger about, and
partly at the absurdity of a challenge having appeared to proceed from
the bashful gentlewoman before him. He hoped she didn’t particularly
regard what he had said (and indeed she gave no sign whatever of being
startled by his claim to a pedigree—she had too much quick delicacy for
that; she appeared to notice only the symptoms of confusion that
followed it), but as soon as possible he gave himself a lesson in
humility by remarking, “I gather that you spend most of your time among
the poor, and I am sure you carry blessings with you. But I frankly
confess that I don’t understand a lady giving herself up to people like
us when there is no obligation. Wretched company we must be, when there
is so much better to be had.”

“I like it very much—you don’t understand.”

“Precisely—that is what I say. Our little friend on the bed is
perpetually talking about your house, your family, your splendours,
your gardens and green-houses; they must be magnificent, of course—”

“Oh, I wish she wouldn’t; really, I wish she wouldn’t. It makes one
feel dreadfully!” Lady Aurora interposed, with vehemence.

“Ah, you had better give her her way; it’s such a pleasure to her.”

“Yes, more than to any of us!” sighed her ladyship, helplessly.

“Well, how can you leave all those beautiful things, to come and
breathe this beastly air, surround yourself with hideous images, and
associate with people whose smallest fault is that they are ignorant,
brutal and dirty? I don’t speak of the ladies here present,” Hyacinth
added, with the manner which most made Millicent Henning (who at once
admired and hated it) wonder where on earth he had got it.

“Oh, I wish I could make you understand!” cried Lady Aurora, looking at
him with troubled, appealing eyes, as if he were unexpectedly
discouraging.

“After all, I do understand! Charity exists in your nature as a kind of
passion.”

“Yes, yes, it’s a kind of passion!” her ladyship repeated, eagerly,
very thankful for the word. “I don’t know whether it’s charity—I don’t
mean that. But whatever it is, it’s a passion—it’s my life—it’s all I
care for.” She hesitated a moment, as if there might be something
indecent in the confession, or dangerous in the recipient; and then,
evidently, she was mastered by the comfort of being able to justify
herself for an eccentricity that had excited notice, as well as by the
luxury of discharging her soul of a long accumulation of timid, sacred
sentiment. “Already, when I was fifteen years old, I wanted to sell all
I had and give to the poor. And ever since, I have wanted to do
something; it has seemed as if my heart would break if I shouldn’t be
able!”

Hyacinth was struck with a great respect, which, however, did not
prevent him (the words sounded patronising, even to himself) from
saying in a moment, “I suppose you are very religious.”

Lady Aurora looked away, into the thickening dusk, at the smutty
housetops, the blurred emanation, above the streets, of lamp-light. “I
don’t know—one has one’s ideas—some of them may be strange. I think a
great many clergymen do good, but there are others I don’t like at all.
I dare say we had too many, always, at home; my father likes them so
much. I think I have known too many bishops; I have had the church too
much on my back. I dare say they wouldn’t think at home, you know, that
one was quite what one ought to be; but of course they consider me very
odd, in every way, as there’s no doubt I am. I should tell you that I
don’t tell them everything; for what’s the use, when people don’t
understand? We are twelve at home, and eight of us are girls; and if
you think it’s so very splendid, and _she_ thinks so, I should like you
both to try it for a little! My father isn’t rich, and there is only
one of us married, and we are not at all handsome, and—oh, there are
all kinds of things,” the young woman went on, looking round at him an
instant, shyly but excitedly. “I don’t like society; and neither would
you if you were to see the kind there is in London—at least in some
parts,” Lady Aurora added, considerately. “I dare say you wouldn’t
believe all the humbuggery and the tiresomeness that one has to go
through. But I’ve got out of it; I do as I like, though it has been
rather a struggle. I have my liberty, and that is the greatest blessing
in life, except the reputation of being queer, and even a little mad,
which is a greater advantage still. I’m a little mad, you know; you
needn’t be surprised if you hear it. That’s because I stop in town when
they go into the country; all the autumn, all the winter, when there’s
no one here (except three or four millions), and the rain drips, drips,
drips, from the trees in the big, dull park, where my people live. I
dare say I oughtn’t to say such things to you, but, as I tell you, I’m
a little mad, and I might as well keep up my character. When one is one
of eight daughters, and there’s very little money (for any of us, at
least), and there’s nothing to do but to go out with three or four
others in a mackintosh, one can easily go off one’s head. Of course
there’s the village, and it’s not at all a nice one, and there are the
people to look after, and heaven knows they’re in want of it; but one
must work with the vicarage, and at the vicarage there are four more
daughters, all old maids, and it’s dreary, and it’s dreadful, and one
has too much of it, and they don’t understand what one thinks or feels,
or a single word one says to them! Besides they _are_ stupid, I
admit—the country poor; they are very, very dense. I like Camberwell
better,” said Lady Aurora, smiling and taking breath, at the end of her
nervous, hurried, almost incoherent speech, of which she had delivered
herself pantingly, with strange intonations and grotesque movements of
her neck, as if she were afraid from one moment to the other that she
would repent, not of her confidence, but of her egotism.

It placed her, for Hyacinth, in an unexpected light, and made him feel
that her awkward, aristocratic spinsterhood was the cover of tumultuous
passions. No one could have less the appearance of being animated by a
vengeful irony; but he saw that this delicate, shy, generous, and
evidently most tender creature was not a person to spare, wherever she
could prick them, the institutions among which she had been brought up
and against which she had violently reacted. Hyacinth had always
supposed that a reactionary meant a backslider from the liberal faith,
but Rosy’s devotee gave a new value to the term; she appeared to have
been driven to her present excesses by the squire and the parson and
the conservative influences of that upper-class British home which our
young man had always supposed to be the highest fruit of civilisation.
It was clear that her ladyship was an original, and an original with
force; but it gave Hyacinth a real pang to hear her make light of
Inglefield (especially the park), and of the opportunities that must
have abounded in Belgrave Square. It had been his belief that in a
world of suffering and injustice these things were, if not the most
righteous, at least the most fascinating. If they didn’t give one the
finest sensations, where were such sensations to be had? He looked at
Lady Aurora with a face which was a tribute to her sudden vividness,
and said, “I can easily understand your wanting to do some good in the
world, because you’re a kind of saint.”

“A very curious kind!” laughed her ladyship.

“But I don’t understand your not liking what your position gives you.”

“I don’t know anything about my position. I want to live!”

“And do you call _this_ life?”

“I’ll tell you what my position is, if you want to know: it’s the
deadness of the grave!”

Hyacinth was startled by her tone, but he nevertheless laughed back at
her, “Ah, as I say, you’re a kind of saint!” She made no reply, for at
that moment the door opened, and Paul Muniment’s tall figure emerged
from the blackness of the staircase into the twilight, now very faint,
of the room. Lady Aurora’s eyes, as they rested upon him, seemed to
declare that such a vision as that, at least, was life. Another person,
as tall as himself, appeared behind him, and Hyacinth recognised with
astonishment their insinuating friend Captain Sholto. Muniment had
brought him up for Rosy’s entertainment, being ready, and more than
ready, always, to usher in any one in the world, from the prime
minister to the common hangman, who might give that young lady a
sensation. They must have met at the ‘Sun and Moon’, and if the
Captain, some accident smoothing the way, had made him half as many
advances as he had made some other people Hyacinth could see that it
wouldn’t take long for Paul to lay him under contribution. But what the
mischief was the Captain up to? It cannot be said that our young man
arrived, this evening, at an answer to that question. The occasion
proved highly festal, and the hostess rose to it without lifting her
head from the pillow. Her brother introduced Captain Sholto as a
gentleman who had a great desire to know extraordinary people, and she
made him take possession of the chair at her bedside, out of which Miss
Pynsent quickly edged herself, and asked him who he was, and where he
came from, and how Paul had made his acquaintance, and whether he had
many friends in Camberwell. Sholto had not the same grand air that
hovered about him at the theatre; he was shabbily dressed, very much
like Hyacinth himself; but his appearance gave our young man an
opportunity to wonder what made him so unmistakably a gentleman in
spite of his seedy coat and trousers—in spite too, of his rather
overdoing the manner of being appreciative even to rapture and thinking
everything and every one most charming and curious. He stood out, in
poor Rosy’s tawdry little room, among her hideous attempts at
decoration, and looked to Hyacinth a being from another sphere, playing
over the place and company a smile (one couldn’t call it false or
unpleasant, yet it was distinctly not natural), of which he had got the
habit in camps and courts. It became brilliant when it rested on
Hyacinth, and the Captain greeted him as he might have done a dear
young friend from whom he had been long and painfully separated. He was
easy, he was familiar, he was exquisitely benevolent and bland, and
altogether incomprehensible.

Rosy was a match for him, however. He evidently didn’t puzzle her in
the least; she thought his visit the most natural thing in the world.
She expressed all the gratitude that decency required, but appeared to
assume that people who climbed her stairs would always find themselves
repaid. She remarked that her brother must have met him for the first
time that day, for the way that he sealed a new acquaintance was
usually by bringing the person immediately to call upon her. And when
the Captain said that if she didn’t like them he supposed the poor
wretches were dropped on the spot, she admitted that this would be true
if it ever happened that she disapproved; as yet, however, she had not
been obliged to draw the line. This was perhaps partly because he had
not brought up any of his political friends—people that he knew only
for political reasons. Of these people, in general, she had a very
small opinion, and she would not conceal from Captain Sholto that she
hoped he was not one of them. Rosy spoke as if her brother represented
the Camberwell district in the House of Commons and she had discovered
that a parliamentary career lowered the moral tone. The Captain,
however, entered quite into her views, and told her that it was as
common friends of Mr Hyacinth Robinson that Mr Muniment and he had come
together; they were both so fond of him that this had immediately
constituted a kind of tie. On hearing himself commemorated in such a
brilliant way Mr Hyacinth Robinson averted himself; he saw that Captain
Sholto might be trusted to make as great an effort for Rosy’s
entertainment as he gathered that he had made for that of Millicent
Henning, that evening at the theatre. There were not chairs enough to
go round, and Paul fetched a three-legged stool from his own apartment,
after which he undertook to make tea for the company, with the aid of a
tin kettle and a spirit-lamp; these implements having been set out,
flanked by half a dozen cups, in honour, presumably, of the little
dressmaker, who was to come such a distance. The little dressmaker,
Hyacinth observed with pleasure, fell into earnest conversation with
Lady Aurora, who bent over her, flushed, smiling, stammering, and
apparently so nervous that Pinnie, in comparison, was majestic and
serene. They communicated presently to Hyacinth a plan they had
unanimously evolved, to the effect that Miss Pynsent should go home to
Belgrave Square with her ladyship, to settle certain preliminaries in
regard to the pink dressing-gown, toward which, if Miss Pynsent
assented, her ladyship hoped to be able to contribute sundry morsels of
stuff which had proved their quality in honourable service and might be
dyed to the proper tint. Pinnie, Hyacinth could see, was in a state of
religious exaltation; the visit to Belgrave Square and the idea of
co-operating in such a manner with the nobility were privileges she
could not take solemnly enough. The latter luxury, indeed, she began to
enjoy without delay; Lady Aurora suggesting that Mr Muniment might be
rather awkward about making tea, and that they should take the business
off his hands. Paul gave it up to them, with a pretence of compassion
for their conceit, remarking that at any rate it took two women to
supplant one man; and Hyacinth drew him to the window, to ask where he
had encountered Sholto and how he liked him.

They had met in Bloomsbury, as Hyacinth supposed, and Sholto had made
up to him very much as a country curate might make up to an archbishop.
He wanted to know what he thought of this and that: of the state of the
labour market at the East End, of the terrible case of the old woman
who had starved to death at Walham Green, of the practicability of more
systematic out-of-door agitation, and the prospects of their getting
one of their own men—one of the Bloomsbury lot—into Parliament. “He was
mighty civil,” Muniment said, “and I don’t find that he has picked my
pocket. He looked as if he would like me to suggest that _he_ should
stand as one of our own men, one of the Bloomsbury lot. He asks too
many questions, but he makes up for it by not paying any attention to
the answers. He told me he would give the world to see a working-man’s
‘interior’. I didn’t know what he meant at first: he wanted a
favourable specimen, one of the best; he had seen one or two that he
didn’t believe to be up to the average. I suppose he meant Schinkel,
the cabinet-maker, and he wanted to compare. I told him I didn’t know
what sort of a specimen my place would be, but that he was welcome to
look round, and that it contained at any rate one or two original
features. I expect he has found that’s the case—with Rosy and the noble
lady. I wanted to show him off to Rosy; he’s good for that, if he isn’t
good for anything else. I told him we expected a little company this
evening, so it might be a good time; and he assured me that to mingle
in such an occasion as that was the dream of his existence. He seemed
in a rare hurry, as if I were going to show him a hidden treasure, and
insisted on driving me over in a hansom. Perhaps his idea is to
introduce the use of cabs among the working-classes; certainly, I’ll
vote for him for Parliament, if that’s his line. On our way over he
talked to me about you; told me you were an intimate friend of his.”

“What did he say about me?” Hyacinth inquired, with promptness.

“Vain little beggar!”

“Did he call me that?” said Hyacinth, ingenuously.

“He said you were simply astonishing.”

“Simply astonishing?” Hyacinth repeated.

“For a person of your low extraction.”

“Well, I may be queer, but he is certainly queerer. Don’t you think so,
now you know him?”

Paul Muniment looked at his young friend a moment. “Do you want to know
what he is? He’s a tout.”

“A tout? What do you mean?”

“Well, a cat’s-paw, if you like better.”

Hyacinth stared. “For whom, pray?”

“Or a fisherman, if you like better still. I give you your choice of
comparisons. I made them up as we came along in the hansom. He throws
his nets and hauls in the little fishes—the pretty little shining,
wriggling fishes. They are all for her; she swallows ’em down.”

“For her? Do you mean the Princess?”

“Who else should I mean? Take care, my tadpole!”

“Why should I take care? The other day you told me not to.”

“Yes, I remember. But now I see more.”

“Did he speak of her? What did he say?” asked Hyacinth, eagerly.

“I can’t tell you now what he said, but I’ll tell you what I guessed.”

“And what’s that?”

They had been talking, of course, in a very low tone, and their voices
were covered by Rosy’s chatter in the corner, by the liberal laughter
with which Captain Sholto accompanied it, and by the much more
discreet, though earnest, intermingled accents of Lady Aurora and Miss
Pynsent. But Paul Muniment spoke more softly still—Hyacinth felt a kind
of suspense—as he replied in a moment, “Why, she’s a monster!”

“A monster?” repeated our young man, from whom, this evening, Paul
Muniment seemed destined to elicit ejaculations and echoes.

Muniment glanced toward the Captain, who was apparently more and more
fascinated by Rosy. “In him I think there’s no great harm. He’s only a
conscientious fisherman!”

It must be admitted that Captain Sholto justified to a certain extent
this definition by the manner in which he baited his hook for such
little facts as might help him to a more intimate knowledge of his host
and hostess. When the tea was made, Rose Muniment asked Miss Pynsent to
be so good as to hand it about. They must let her poor ladyship rest a
little, must they not?—and Hyacinth could see that in her innocent but
inveterate self-complacency she wished to reward and encourage the
dressmaker, draw her out and present her still more, by offering her
this graceful exercise. Sholto sprang up at this, and begged Pinnie to
let him relieve her, taking a cup from her hand; and poor Pinnie, who
perceived in a moment that he was some kind of masquerading gentleman,
who was bewildered by the strange mixture of elements that surrounded
her and unused to being treated like a duchess (for the Captain’s
manner was a triumph of respectful gallantry), collapsed, on the
instant, into a chair, appealing to Lady Aurora with a frightened smile
and conscious that, deeply versed as she might be in the theory of
decorum, she had no precedent that could meet such an occasion. “Now,
how many families would there be in such a house as this, and what
should you say about the sanitary arrangements? Would there be others
on this floor—what is it, the third, the fourth?—beside yourselves, you
know, and should you call it a fair specimen of a tenement of its
class?” It was with such inquiries as this that Captain Sholto beguiled
their tea-drinking, while Hyacinth made the reflection that, though he
evidently meant them very well, they were characterised by a want of
fine tact, by too patronising a curiosity. The Captain requested
information as to the position in life, the avocations and habits, of
the other lodgers, the rent they paid, their relations with each other,
both in and out of the family. “Now, would there be a good deal of
close packing, do you suppose, and any perceptible want of—a—sobriety?”

Paul Muniment, who had swallowed his cup of tea at a single gulp—there
was no offer of a second—gazed out of the window into the dark, which
had now come on, with his hands in his pockets, whistling, impolitely,
no doubt, but with brilliant animation. He had the manner of having
made over their visitor altogether to Rosy and of thinking that
whatever he said or did it was all so much grist to her indefatigable
little mill. Lady Aurora looked distressed and embarrassed, and it is a
proof of the degree to which our little hero had the instincts of a man
of the world that he guessed exactly how vulgar she thought this new
acquaintance. She was doubtless rather vexed, also—Hyacinth had learned
this evening that Lady Aurora could be vexed—at the alacrity of Rosy’s
responses; the little person in the bed gave the Captain every
satisfaction, considered his questions as a proper tribute to humble
respectability, and supplied him, as regards the population of Audley
Court, with statistics and anecdotes which she had picked up by
mysterious processes of her own. At last Lady Aurora, upon whom Paul
Muniment had not been at pains to bestow much conversation, took leave
of her, and signified to Hyacinth that for the rest of the evening she
would assume the care of Miss Pynsent. Pinnie looked very tense and
solemn, now that she was really about to be transported to Belgrave
Square, but Hyacinth was sure she would acquit herself only the more
honourably; and when he offered to call for her there, later, she
reminded him, under her breath, with a little sad smile, of the many
years during which, after nightfall, she had carried her work, pinned
up in a cloth, about London.

Paul Muniment, according to his habit, lighted Lady Aurora downstairs,
and Captain Sholto and Hyacinth were alone for some minutes with Rosy;
which gave the former, taking up his hat and stick, an opportunity to
say to his young friend, “Which way are you going? Not my way, by
chance?” Hyacinth saw that he hoped for his company, and he became
conscious that, strangely as Muniment had indulged him and too
promiscuously investigating as he had just shown himself, this
ingratiating personage was not more easy to resist than he had been the
other night at the theatre. The Captain bent over Rosy’s bed as if she
had been a fine lady on a satin sofa, promising to come back very soon
and very often, and the two men went downstairs. On their way they met
Paul Muniment coming up, and Hyacinth felt rather ashamed, he could
scarcely tell why, that his friend should see him marching off with the
‘tout’. After all, if Muniment had brought him to see his sister, might
not he at least walk with him? “I’m coming again, you know, very often.
I dare say you’ll find me a great bore!” the Captain announced, as he
bade good-night to his host. “Your sister is a most interesting
creature, one of the most interesting creatures I have ever seen, and
the whole thing, you know, exactly the sort of thing I wanted to get
at, only much more—really, much more—original and curious. It has been
a great success, a grand success!”

And the Captain felt his way down the dusky shaft, while Paul Muniment,
above, gave him the benefit of rather a wavering candlestick, and
answered his civil speech with an “Oh, well, you take us as you find
us, you know!” and an outburst of frank but not unfriendly laughter.

Half an hour later Hyacinth found himself in Captain Sholto’s chambers,
seated on a big divan covered with Persian rugs and cushions and
smoking the most delectable cigar that had ever touched his lips. As
they left Audley Court the Captain had taken his arm, and they had
walked along together in a desultory, colloquial manner, till on
Westminster Bridge (they had followed the embankment, beneath St
Thomas’s Hospital) Sholto said, “By the way, why shouldn’t you come
home with me and see my little place? I’ve got a few things that might
amuse you—some pictures, some odds and ends I’ve picked up, and a few
bindings; you might tell me what you think of them.” Hyacinth assented,
without hesitation; he had still in his ear the reverberation of the
Captain’s inquiries in Rose Muniment’s room, and he saw no reason why
he, on his side, should not embrace an occasion of ascertaining how, as
his companion would have said, a man of fashion would live now.

This particular specimen lived in a large, old-fashioned house in Queen
Anne Street, of which he occupied the upper floors, and whose high,
wainscoted rooms he had filled with the spoils of travel and the
ingenuities of modern taste. There was not a country in the world he
did not appear to have ransacked, and to Hyacinth his trophies
represented a wonderfully long purse. The whole establishment, from the
low-voiced, inexpressive valet who, after he had poured brandy into
tall tumblers, gave dignity to the popping of soda-water corks, to the
quaint little silver receptacle in which he was invited to deposit the
ashes of his cigar, was such a revelation for our appreciative hero
that he felt himself hushed and made sad, so poignant was the thought
that it took thousands of things which he, then, should never possess
nor know to make an accomplished man. He had often, in evening-walks,
wondered what was behind the walls of certain spacious, bright-windowed
houses in the West End, and now he got an idea. The first effect of the
idea was to overwhelm him.

“Well, now, tell me what you thought of our friend the Princess,” the
Captain said, thrusting out the loose yellow slippers which his servant
had helped to exchange for his shoes. He spoke as if he had been
waiting impatiently for the proper moment to ask that question, so much
might depend on the answer.

“She’s beautiful—beautiful,” Hyacinth answered, almost dreamily, with
his eyes wandering all over the room.

“She was so interested in all you said to her; she would like so much
to see you again. She means to write to you—I suppose she can address
to the ‘Sun and Moon’?—and I hope you’ll go to her house, if she
proposes a day.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know. It seems so strange.”

“What seems strange, my dear fellow?”

“Everything! My sitting here with you; my introduction to that lady;
the idea of her wanting, as you say, to see me again, and of her
writing to me; and this whole place of yours, with all these dim, rich
curiosities hanging on the walls and glinting in the light of that
rose-coloured lamp. You yourself, too—you are strangest of all.”

The Captain looked at him, in silence, so fixedly for a while, through
the fumes of their tobacco, after he had made this last charge, that
Hyacinth thought he was perhaps offended; but this impression was
presently dissipated by further manifestations of sociability and
hospitality, and Sholto took occasion, later, to let him know how
important it was, in the days they were living in, not to have too
small a measure of the usual, destined as they certainly were—“in the
whole matter of the relations of class with class, and all that sort of
thing, you know”—to witness some very startling developments. The
Captain spoke as if, for his part, he were a child of his age (so that
he only wanted to see all it could show him), down to the point of his
yellow slippers. Hyacinth felt that he himself had not been very
satisfactory about the Princess; but as his nerves began to tremble a
little more into tune with the situation he repeated to his host what
Millicent Henning had said about her at the theatre—asked if this young
lady had correctly understood him in believing that she had been turned
out of the house by her husband.

“Yes, he literally pushed her into the street—or into the garden; I
believe the scene took place in the country. But perhaps Miss Henning
didn’t mention, or perhaps I didn’t mention, that the Prince would at
the present hour give everything he owns in the world to get her back.
Fancy such a scene!” said the Captain, laughing in a manner that struck
Hyacinth as rather profane.

He stared, with dilated eyes, at this picture, which seemed to evoke a
comparison with the only incident of the sort that had come within his
experience—the forcible ejection of intoxicated females from public
houses. “That magnificent being—what had she done?”

“Oh, she had made him feel he was an ass!” the Captain answered,
promptly. He turned the conversation to Miss Henning; said he was so
glad Hyacinth gave him an opportunity to speak of her. He got on with
her famously; perhaps she had told him. They became immense friends—_en
tout bien tout honneur, s’entend_. Now, _there_ was another London
type, plebeian but brilliant; and how little justice one usually did
it, how magnificent it was! But she, of course, was a wonderful
specimen. “My dear fellow, I have seen many women, and the women of
many countries,” the Captain went on, “and I have seen them intimately,
and I know what I am talking about; and when I tell you that that
one—that one—” Then he suddenly paused, laughing in his democratic way.
“But perhaps I am going too far: you must always pull me up, you know,
when I do. At any rate, I congratulate you; I do, heartily. Have
another cigar. Now what sort of—a—salary would she receive at her big
shop, you know? I know where it is; I mean to there and buy some
pocket-handkerchiefs.”

Hyacinth knew neither how far Captain Sholto had been going, nor
exactly on what he congratulated him; and he pretended, at least, an
equal ignorance on the subject of Millicent’s salary. He didn’t want to
talk about her, moreover, nor about his own life; he wanted to talk
about the Captain’s, and to elicit information that would be in harmony
with his romantic chambers, which reminded our hero somehow of Bulwer’s
novels. His host gratified this desire most liberally, and told him
twenty stories of things that had happened to him in Albania, in
Madagascar, and even in Paris. Hyacinth induced him easily to talk
about Paris (from a different point of view from M. Poupin’s), and sat
there drinking in enchantments. The only thing that fell below the high
level of his entertainment was the bindings of the Captain’s books,
which he told him frankly, with the conscience of an artist, were not
very good. After he left Queen Anne Street he was quite too excited to
go straight home; he walked about with his mind full of images and
strange speculations, till the gray London streets began to grow clear
with the summer dawn.




XVI


The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August,
is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out
of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds
of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a
yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-pitched light itself, which
seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British
Sabbath. The Prince, however, had a talent for that kind of attitude;
it was one of the things by which he had exasperated his wife; he could
remain motionless, with the aid of some casual support for his high,
lean person, considering serenely and inexpressively any object that
might lie before him and presenting his aristocratic head at a
favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length. On first coming
into the room he had given some attention to its furniture and
decorations, perceiving at a glance that they were rich and varied;
some of the things he recognised as old friends, odds and ends the
Princess was fond of, which had accompanied her in her remarkable
wanderings, while others were unfamiliar, and suggested vividly that
she had not ceased to ‘collect’. The Prince made two reflections: one
was that she was living as expensively as ever; the other that, however
this might be, no one had such a feeling as she for the _mise-en-scène_
of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had still the most
charming salon in Europe.

It was his impression that she had taken the house in South Street but
for three months; yet, gracious heaven, what had she not put into it?
The Prince asked himself this question without violence, for that was
not to be his line to-day. He could be angry to a point at which he
himself was often frightened, but he honestly believed that this was
only when he had been baited beyond endurance and that as a usual thing
he was really as mild and accommodating as the extreme urbanity of his
manner appeared to announce. There was indeed nothing to suggest to the
world in general that he was an impracticable or vindictive nobleman:
his features were not regular, and his complexion had a bilious tone;
but his dark brown eye, which was at once salient and dull, expressed
benevolence and melancholy; his head drooped from his long neck in a
considerate, attentive style; and his close-cropped black hair,
combined with a short, fine, pointed beard, completed his resemblance
to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish
dominion at Naples. To-day, at any rate, he had come in conciliation,
almost in humility, and that is why he did not permit himself even to
murmur at the long delay to which he was subjected. He knew very well
that if his wife should consent to take him back it would be only after
a probation to which this little wait in her drawing-room was a trifle.
It was a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and even then it
was not the Princess who appeared, but only Madame Grandoni.

Their greeting was a very silent one. She came to him with both hands
outstretched, and took his own and held them awhile, looking up at him
in a kindly, motherly manner. She had elongated her florid, humorous
face to a degree that was almost comical, and the pair might have
passed, in their speechless solemnity, for acquaintances meeting in a
house in which a funeral was about to take place. It was indeed a house
on which death had descended, as he very soon learned from Madame
Grandoni’s expression; something had perished there for ever, and he
might proceed to bury it as soon as he liked. His wife’s ancient German
friend, however, was not a person to keep up a manner of that sort very
long, and when, after she had made him sit down on the sofa beside her,
she shook her head, slowly and definitely, several times, it was with a
face in which a more genial appreciation of the circumstances had
already begun to appear.

“Never—never—never?” said the Prince, in a deep, hoarse voice, which
was at variance with his aristocratic slimness. He had much of the
aspect which, in late-coming members of long-descended races, we
qualify to-day as effete; but his speech might have been the speech of
some deep-chested fighting ancestor.

“Surely you know your wife as well as I,” she replied, in Italian,
which she evidently spoke with facility, though with a strong guttural
accent. “I have been talking with her: that is what has made me keep
you. I have urged her to see you. I have told her that this could do no
harm and would pledge her to nothing. But you know your wife,” Madame
Grandoni repeated, with a smile which was now distinctly facetious.

Prince Casamassima looked down at his boots. “How can one ever know a
person like that? I hoped she would see me for five minutes.”

“For what purpose? Have you anything to propose?”

“For what purpose? To rest my eyes on her beautiful face.”

“Did you come to England for that?”

“For what else should I have come?” the Prince inquired, turning his
blighted gaze to the opposite side of South Street.

“In London, such a day as this, _già_,” said the old lady,
sympathetically. “I am very sorry for you; but if I had known you were
coming I would have written to you that you might spare yourself the
pain.”

The Prince gave a low, interminable sigh. “You ask me what I wish to
propose. What I wish to propose is that my wife does not kill me inch
by inch.”

“She would be much more likely to do that if you lived with her!”
Madame Grandoni cried.

“_Cara signora_, she doesn’t appear to have killed you,” the melancholy
nobleman rejoined.

“Oh, me? I am past killing. I am as hard as a stone. I went through my
miseries long ago; I suffered what you have not had to suffer; I wished
for death many times, and I survived it all. Our troubles don’t kill
us, Prince; it is we who must try to kill them. I have buried not a
few. Besides Christina is fond of me, God knows why!” Madame Grandoni
added.

“And you are so good to her,” said the Prince, laying his hand on her
fat, wrinkled fist.

“_Che vuole?_ I have known her so long. And she has some such great
qualities.”

“Ah, to whom do you say it?” And Prince Casamassima gazed at his boots
again, for some moments, in silence. Suddenly he inquired, “How does
she look to-day?”

“She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven
yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth!”

The Prince was evidently a man of a simple nature, and Madame
Grandoni’s rather violent metaphor took his fancy. His face lighted up
for a moment, and he replied with eagerness, “Ah, she is the only woman
I have ever seen whose beauty never for a moment falls below itself.
She has no bad days. She is so handsome when she is angry!”

“She is very handsome to-day, but she is not angry,” said the old lady.

“Not when my name was announced?”

“I was not with her then; but when she sent for me and asked me to see
you, it was quite without passion. And even when I argued with her, and
tried to persuade her (and she doesn’t like that, you know), she was
still perfectly quiet.”

“She hates me, she despises me too much, eh?”

“How can I tell, dear Prince, when she never mentions you?”

“Never, never?”

“That’s much better than if she railed at you and abused you.”

“You mean it should give me more hope for the future?” the young man
asked, quickly.

Madame Grandoni hesitated a moment. “I mean it’s better for me,” she
answered, with a laugh of which the friendly ring covered as much as
possible her equivocation.

“Ah, you like me enough to care,” he murmured, turning on her his sad,
grateful eyes.

“I am very sorry for you. _Ma che vuole?_”

The Prince had, apparently, nothing to suggest, and he only exhaled, in
reply, another gloomy groan. Then he inquired whether his wife pleased
herself in that country, and whether she intended to pass the summer in
London. Would she remain long in England, and—might he take the liberty
to ask?—what were her plans? Madame Grandoni explained that the
Princess had found the British metropolis much more to her taste than
one might have expected, and that as for plans, she had as many, or as
few, as she had always had. Had he ever known her to carry out any
arrangement, or to do anything, of any kind, she had selected or
determined upon? She always, at the last moment, did the other thing,
the one that had been out of the question; and it was for this that
Madame Grandoni herself privately made her preparations. Christina, now
that everything was over, would leave London from one day to the other;
but they should not know where they were going until they arrived. The
old lady concluded by asking the Prince if he himself liked England. He
thrust forward his thick lips. “How can I like anything? Besides, I
have been here before: I have friends,” he said.

His companion perceived that he had more to say to her, to extract from
her, but that he was hesitating nervously, because he feared to incur
some warning, some rebuff, with which his dignity—which, in spite of
his position of discomfiture, was really very great—might find it
difficult to square itself. He looked vaguely round the room, and
presently he remarked, “I wanted to see for myself how she is living.”

“Yes, that is very natural.”

“I have heard—I have heard—” and Prince Casamassima stopped.

“You have heard great rubbish, I have no doubt.” Madame Grandoni
watched him, as if she foresaw what was coming.

“She spends a terrible deal of money,” said the young man.

“Indeed she does.” The old lady knew that, careful as he was of his
very considerable property, which at one time had required much
nursing, his wife’s prodigality was not what lay heaviest on his mind.
She also knew that expensive and luxurious as Christina might be she
had never yet exceeded the income settled upon her by the Prince at the
time of their separation—an income determined wholly by himself and his
estimate of what was required to maintain the social consequence of his
name, for which he had a boundless reverence. “She thinks she is a
model of thrift—that she counts every shilling,” Madame Grandoni
continued. “If there is a virtue she prides herself upon, it’s her
economy. Indeed, it’s the only thing for which she takes any credit.”

“I wonder if she knows that I”—the Prince hesitated a moment, then he
went on—“that I spend really nothing. But I would rather live on dry
bread than that, in a country like this, in this English society, she
should not make a proper appearance.”

“Her appearance is all you could wish. How can it help being proper,
with me to set her off?”

“You are the best thing she has, dear lady. So long as you are with her
I feel a certain degree of security; and one of the things I came for
was to extract from you a promise that you won’t leave her.”

“Ah, let us not tangle ourselves up with promises!” Madame Grandoni
exclaimed. “You know the value of any engagement one may take with
regard to the Princess; it’s like promising you I will stay in the bath
when the hot water is turned on. When I begin to be scalded, I have to
jump out! I will stay while I can; but I shouldn’t stay if she were to
do certain things.” Madame Grandoni uttered these last words very
gravely, and for a minute she and her companion looked deep into each
other’s eyes.

“What things do you mean?”

“I can’t say what things. It is utterly impossible to predict, on any
occasion, what Christina will do. She is capable of giving us great
surprises. The things I mean are things I should recognise as soon as I
saw them, and they would make me leave the house on the instant.”

“So that if you have not left it yet—?” the Prince asked, in a low
tone, with extreme eagerness.

“It is because I have thought I may do some good by staying.”

The young man seemed only half satisfied with this answer; nevertheless
he said in a moment—“To me it makes all the difference. And if anything
of the kind you speak of should happen, that would be only the greater
reason for your staying—that you might interpose, that you might
arrest—” He stopped short; Madame Grandoni was laughing, with her
Teutonic homeliness, in his face.

“You must have been in Rome, more than once, when the Tiber had
overflowed, _è vero?_ What would you have thought then if you had heard
people telling the poor wretches in the Ghetto, on the Ripetta, up to
their knees in liquid mud, that they ought to interpose, to arrest?”

“_Capisco bene_,” said the Prince, dropping his eyes. He appeared to
have closed them, for some moments, as if a slow spasm of pain were
passing through him. “I can’t tell you what torments me most,” he
presently went on, “the thought that sometimes makes my heart rise into
my mouth. It’s a haunting fear.” And his pale face and disturbed
respiration might indeed have been those of a man before whom some
horrible spectre had risen.

“You needn’t tell me. I know what you mean, my poor friend.”

“Do you think, then, there _is_ a danger—that she will drag my name, do
what no one has ever dared to do? That I would never forgive,” said the
young man, almost under his breath; and the hoarseness of his whisper
lent a great effect to the announcement.

Madame Grandoni wondered for a moment whether she had not better tell
him (as it would prepare him for the worst) that his wife cared about
as much for his name as for any old label on her luggage; but after an
instant’s reflection she reserved this information for another hour.
Besides, as she said to herself, the Prince ought already to know
perfectly to what extent Christina attached the idea of an obligation
or an interdict to her ill-starred connection with an ignorant and
superstitious Italian race whom she despised for their provinciality,
their parsimony and their tiresomeness (she thought their talk the
climax of puerility), and whose fatuous conception of their importance
in the great modern world she had on various public occasions
sufficiently covered with her derision. The old lady finally contented
herself with remarking, “Dear Prince, your wife is a very proud woman.”

“Ah, how could my wife be anything else? But her pride is not my pride.
And she has such ideas, such opinions! Some of them are monstrous.”

Madame Grandoni smiled. “She doesn’t think it so necessary to have them
when you are not there.”

“Why then do you say that you enter into my fears—that you recognise
the stories I have heard?”

I know not whether the good lady lost patience with his persistence; at
all events, she broke out, with a certain sharpness, “Understand
this—understand this: Christina will never consider you—your name, your
illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn’t consider, much
more, herself!”

The Prince appeared to study, for a moment, this somewhat ambiguous yet
portentous phrase; then he slowly got up, with his hat in his hand, and
walked about the room, softly, solemnly, as he were suffering from his
long thin feet. He stopped before one of the windows, and took another
survey of South Street; then, turning, he suddenly inquired, in a voice
into which he had evidently endeavoured to infuse a colder curiosity,
“Is she admired in this place? Does she see many people?”

“She is thought very strange, of course. But she sees whom she likes.
And they mostly bore her to death!” Madame Grandoni added, with a
laugh.

“Why then do you tell me this country pleases her?”

Madame Grandoni left her place. She had promised Christina, who
detested the sense of being under the same roof with her husband, that
the Prince’s visit should be kept within narrow limits; and this
movement was intended to signify as kindly as possible that it had
better terminate. “It is the common people that please her,” she
replied, with her hands folded on her crumpled satin stomach and her
humorous eyes raised to his face. “It is the lower orders, the _basso
popolo_.”

“The _basso popolo?_” The Prince stared, at this fantastic
announcement.

“The _povera gente_,” pursued the old lady, laughing at his amazement.

“The London mob—the most horrible, the most brutal—?”

“Oh, she wishes to raise them.”

“After all, something like that is no more than I had heard,” said the
Prince gravely.

“_Che vuole?_ Don’t trouble yourself; it won’t be for long!”

Madame Grandoni saw that this comforting assurance was lost upon him;
his face was turned to the door of the room, which had been thrown
open, and all his attention was given to the person who crossed the
threshold. Madame Grandoni transferred her own to the same quarter, and
recognised the little artisan whom Christina had, in a manner so
extraordinary and so profoundly characteristic, drawn into her box that
night at the theatre, and whom she had since told her old friend she
had sent for to come and see her.

“Mr Robinson!” the butler, who had had a lesson, announced in a loud,
colourless tone.

“It won’t be for long,” Madame Grandoni repeated, for the Prince’s
benefit; but it was to Mr Robinson the words had the air of being
addressed.

He stood there while Madame Grandoni signalled to the servant to leave
the door open and wait, looking from the queer old lady, who was as
queer as before, to the tall foreign gentleman (he recognised his
foreignness at a glance), whose eyes seemed to challenge him, to devour
him; wondering whether he had made some mistake, and needing to remind
himself that he had the Princess’s note in his pocket, with the day and
hour as clear as her magnificent handwriting could make them.

“Good-morning, good-morning. I hope you are well,” said Madame
Grandoni, with quick friendliness, but turning her back upon him at the
same time, to ask of the Prince, in Italian, as she extended her hand,
“And do you not leave London soon—in a day or two?”

The Prince made no answer; he still scrutinised the little bookbinder
from head to foot, as if he were wondering who the deuce he could be.
His eyes seemed to Hyacinth to search for the small neat bundle he
ought to have had under his arm, and without which he was incomplete.
To the reader, however, it may be confided that, dressed more carefully
than he had ever been in his life before, stamped with that
extraordinary transformation which the British Sunday often operates in
the person of the wage-earning cockney, with his handsome head
uncovered and suppressed excitement in his brilliant little face, the
young man from Lomax Place might have passed for anything rather than a
carrier of parcels. “The Princess wrote to me, madam, to come and see
her,” he remarked, as a precaution, in case he should have incurred the
reproach of bad taste, or at least of precipitation.

“Oh yes, I dare say.” And Madame Grandoni guided the Prince to the
door, with an expression of the hope that he would have a comfortable
journey back to Italy.

A faint flush had come into his face; he appeared to have satisfied
himself on the subject of Mr Robinson. “I must see you once more—I
must—it’s impossible!”

“Ah, well, not in this house, you know.”

“Will you do me the honour to meet me, then?” And as the old lady
hesitated, he added, with sudden passion, “Dearest friend, I entreat
you on my knees!” After she had agreed that if he would write to her,
proposing a day and place, she would see him, he raised her ancient
knuckles to his lips and, without further notice of Hyacinth, turned
away. Madame Grandoni requested the servant to announce the other
visitor to the Princess, and then approached Mr Robinson, rubbing her
hands and smiling, with her head on one side. He smiled back at her,
vaguely; he didn’t know what she might be going to say. What she said
was, to his surprise—

“My poor young man, may I take the liberty of asking your age?”

“Certainly, madam; I am twenty-four.”

“And I hope you are industrious, and sober, and—what do you call it in
English?—steady.”

“I don’t think I am very wild,” said Hyacinth, smiling still. He
thought the old woman patronising, but he forgave her.

“I don’t know how one speaks, in this country, to young men like you.
Perhaps one is considered meddling, impertinent.”

“I like the way you speak,” Hyacinth interposed.

She stared, and then with a comical affectation of dignity, replied,
“You are very good. I am glad it amuses you. You are evidently
intelligent and clever,” she went on, “and if you are disappointed it
will be a pity.”

“How do you mean, if I am disappointed?” Hyacinth looked more grave.

“Well, I dare say you expect great things, when you come into a house
like this. You must tell me if I wound you. I am very old-fashioned,
and I am not of this country. I speak as one speaks to young men, like
you, in other places.”

“I am not so easily wounded!” Hyacinth exclaimed, with a flight of
imagination. “To expect anything, one must know something, one must
understand: isn’t it so? And I am here without knowing, without
understanding. I have come only because a lady who seems to me very
beautiful and very kind has done me the honour to send for me.”

Madame Grandoni examined him a moment, as if she were struck by his
good looks, by something delicate that was stamped upon him everywhere.
“I can see you are very clever, very intelligent; no, you are not like
the young men I mean. All the more reason—” And she paused, giving a
little sigh. “I want to warn you a little, and I don’t know how. If you
were a young Roman, it would be different.”

“A young Roman?”

“That’s where I live, properly, in Rome. If I hurt you, you can explain
it that way. No, you are not like them.”

“You don’t hurt me—please believe that; you interest me very much,”
said Hyacinth, to whom it did not occur that he himself might appear
patronising. “Of what do you want to warn me?”

“Well—only to advise you a little. Do not give up anything.”

“What can I give up?”

“Do not give up _yourself_. I say that to you in your interest. I think
you have some little trade—I forget what; but whatever it may be,
remember that to do it well is the best thing—it is better than paying
visits, better even than a Princess!”

“Ah yes, I see what you mean!” Hyacinth exclaimed, exaggerating a
little. “I am very fond of my trade, I assure you.”

“I am delighted to hear it. Hold fast to it, then, and be quiet; be
diligent, and honest, and good. I gathered the other night that you are
one of the young men who want everything changed—I believe there are a
great many in Italy, and also in my own dear old Deutschland—and even
think it’s useful to throw bombs into innocent crowds, and shoot
pistols at their rulers, or at any one. I won’t go into that. I might
seem to be speaking for myself, and the fact is that for myself I don’t
care; I am so old that I may hope to spend the few days that are left
me without receiving a bullet. But before you go any further please
think a little whether you are right.”

“It isn’t just that you should impute to me ideas which I may not
have,” said Hyacinth, turning very red, but taking more and more of a
fancy, all the same, to Madame Grandoni. “You talk at your ease about
our ways and means, but if we were only to make use of those that you
would like to see—” And while he blushed, smiling, the young man shook
his head two or three times, with great significance.

“I shouldn’t like to see any!” the old lady cried. “I like people to
bear their troubles as one has done one’s self. And as for injustice,
you see how kind I am to you when I say to you again, don’t, don’t give
anything up. I will tell them to send you some tea,” she added, as she
took her way out of the room, presenting to him her round, low, aged
back, and dragging over the carpet a scanty and lustreless train.




XVII


Hyacinth had been warned by Mr Vetch as to what brilliant women might
do with him (it was only a word on the old fiddler’s lips, but the word
had had a point), he had been warned by Paul Muniment, and now he was
admonished by a person supremely well placed for knowing—a fact that
could not fail to deepen the emotion which, any time these three days,
had made him draw his breath more quickly. That emotion, however, was
now not of a kind to make him fear remote consequences; as he looked
over the Princess Casamassima’s drawing-room and inhaled an air that
seemed to him inexpressibly delicate and sweet, he hoped that his
adventure would throw him upon his mettle only half as much as the old
lady had wished to intimate. He considered, one after the other, the
different chairs, couches and ottomans the room contained—he wished to
treat himself to the most sumptuous—and then, for reasons he knew best,
sank into a seat covered with rose-coloured brocade, of which the legs
and frame appeared to be of pure gold. Here he sat perfectly still,
with only his heart beating very sensibly and his eyes coursing again
and again from one object to another. The splendours and suggestions of
Captain Sholto’s apartment were thrown completely into the shade by the
scene before him, and as the Princess did not scruple to keep him
waiting for twenty minutes (during which the butler came in and set
out, on a small table, a glittering tea-service), Hyacinth had time to
count over the innumerable _bibelots_ (most of which he had never
dreamed of) involved in the personality of a woman of high fashion, and
to feel that their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces
of art, but refinements of choice, on the part of their owner,
complications of mind, and—almost—terrible depths of character.

When at last the door opened and the servant, reappearing, threw it far
back, as if to make a wide passage for a person of the importance of
his mistress, Hyacinth’s suspense became very acute; it was much the
same feeling with which, at the theatre, he had sometimes awaited the
entrance of a celebrated actress. In this case the actress was to
perform for him alone. There was still a moment before she came on, and
when she did so she was so simply dressed—besides his seeing her now on
her feet—that she looked like a different person. She approached him
rapidly, and a little stiffly and shyly, but in the manner in which she
shook hands with him there was an evident desire to be frank, and even
fraternal. She looked like a different person, but that person had a
beauty even more radiant; the fairness of her face shone forth at our
young man as if to dissipate any doubts that might have crept over him
as to the reality of the vision bequeathed to him by his former
interview. And in this brightness and richness of her presence he could
not have told you whether she struck him as more proud or more kind.

“I have kept you a long time, but it’s supposed not, usually, to be a
bad place, my salon; there are various things to look at, and perhaps
you have noticed them. Over on that side, for instance, there is rather
a curious collection of miniatures.” She spoke abruptly, quickly, as if
she were conscious that their communion might be awkward and she were
trying to strike, instantly (to conjure that element away), the sort of
note that would make them both most comfortable. Quickly, too, she sat
down before her tea-tray and poured him out a cup, which she handed him
without asking whether he would have it. He accepted it with a
trembling hand, though he had no desire for it; he was too nervous to
swallow the tea, but it would not have occurred to him that it was
possible to decline. When he had murmured that he had indeed looked at
all her things but that it would take hours to do justice to such
treasures, she asked if he were fond of works of art; adding, however,
immediately, that she was afraid he had not many opportunities of
seeing them, though of course there were the public collections, open
to all. Hyacinth said, with perfect veracity, that some of the happiest
moments of his life had been spent at the British Museum and the
National Gallery, and this reply appeared to interest her greatly, so
that she immediately begged him to tell her what he thought of certain
pictures and antiques. In this way it was that in an incredibly short
space of time, as it appeared to him, he found himself discussing the
Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin marbles with one of the most
remarkable woman in Europe. It is true that she herself talked most,
passing precipitately from one point to another, asking him questions
and not waiting for answers; describing and qualifying things,
expressing feelings, by the aid of phrases that he had never heard
before but which seemed to him illuminating and happy—as when, for
instance, she asked what art was, after all, but a synthesis made in
the interest of pleasure, or said that she didn’t like England at all,
but loved it. It did not occur to him to think these discriminations
pedantic. Suddenly she remarked, “Madame Grandoni told me you saw my
husband.”

“Ah, was the gentleman your husband?”

“Unfortunately! What do you think of him?”

“Oh, I can’t think—” Hyacinth murmured.

“I wish I couldn’t, either! I haven’t seen him for nearly three years.
He wanted to see me to-day, but I refused.”

“Ah!” said Hyacinth, staring and not knowing how he ought to receive so
unexpected a confidence. Then, as the suggestions of inexperience are
sometimes the happiest of all, he spoke simply what was in his mind and
said, gently, “It has made you very nervous.” Afterwards, when he had
left the house, he wondered how, at that stage, he could have ventured
on such a familiar remark.

The Princess took it with a quick, surprised laugh. “How do you know
that?” But before he had time to tell how, she added, “Your saying
that—that way—shows me how right I was to ask you to come to see me.
You know, I hesitated. It shows me you have perceptions; I guessed as
much the other night at the theatre. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have asked
you. I may be wrong, but I like people who understand what one says to
them, and also what one doesn’t say.”

“Don’t think I understand too much. You might easily exaggerate that,”
Hyacinth declared, conscientiously.

“You confirm, completely, my first impression,” the Princess returned,
smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. “We shall
discover the limits of your comprehension! I _am_ atrociously nervous.
But it will pass. How is your friend the dressmaker?” she inquired,
abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor
Pinnie—told her that she was tolerably well for her, but old and tired
and sad, and not very successful—she exclaimed, impatiently, “Ah, well,
she’s not the only one!” and came back, with irrelevance, to the former
question. “It’s not only my husband’s visit—absolutely unexpected!—that
has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you have been so kind as to
come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it, and
even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely
insufficient.”

“I don’t want any explanation,” said Hyacinth.

“It’s very nice of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word.
Explanations usually make things worse. All the same, I don’t want you
to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening) that I
wish only to treat you as a curious animal.”

“I don’t care how you treat me!” said Hyacinth, smiling.

There was a considerable silence, after which the Princess remarked,
“All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t
reciprocate my indifference.”

Hyacinth asked himself what reply he ought to make to such an
announcement as that, and it seemed to him that the least civility
demanded was that he should say—as he could with such conviction—“It
can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.”

“Why not, if I am odious? I can be—oh, there is no doubt of that!
However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I have been
exceedingly reasonable, and that most of the wrongs—the big ones, those
that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of
course that that’s the pretension of every woman who has made a mess of
her marriage. But ask Madame Grandoni.”

“She will tell me it’s none of my business.”

“Very true—she might!” the Princess admitted, laughing. “And I don’t
know, either, why I should talk to you about my domestic affairs;
except that I have been wondering what I could do to show confidence in
you, in return for your showing so much in me. As this matter of my
separation from my husband happens to have been turned uppermost by his
sudden descent upon me, I just mention it, though the subject is
tiresome enough. Moreover I ought to let you know that I have very
little respect for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so
much of in this country. They are doubtless convenient in some ways,
but when one has a reason—a reason of feeling—for overstepping them,
and one allows one’s self to be deterred by some dreary superstition
about one’s place, or some one else’s place, then I think it’s ignoble.
It always belongs to one’s place not to be a poor creature. I take it
that if you are a socialist you think about this as I do; but lest, by
chance, as the sense of those differences is the English religion, it
may have rubbed off even on you, though I am more and more impressed
with the fact that you are scarcely more British than I am; lest you
should, in spite of your theoretic democracy, be shocked at some of the
applications that I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it,
let me assure you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on
together at all, and had better part company before we go further.” She
paused, long enough for Hyacinth to declare, with a great deal of
emphasis, that he was not easily shocked; and then, restlessly,
eagerly, as if it relieved her to talk, and made their queer interview
less abnormal that she should talk most, she arrived at the point that
she wanted to know the _people_, and know them intimately—the toilers
and strugglers and sufferers—because she was convinced they were the
most interesting portion of society, and at the inquiry, “What could
possibly be in worse taste than for me to carry into such an
undertaking a pretension of greater delicacy and finer manners? If I
must do that,” she continued, “it’s simpler to leave them alone. But I
can’t leave them alone; they press upon me, they haunt me, they
fascinate me. There it is (after all, it’s very simple): I want to know
them, and I want you to help me!”

“I will help you with pleasure, to the best of my humble ability. But
you will be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it
seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have
found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze
from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing over the
aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the accent of
passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there had been
in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his present
interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that pushed her
struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious,
anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the
two women as much as the face and the manner, and that perhaps made
their curiosity the more significant.

“I haven’t the least doubt of it: there is nothing in life in which I
have not been awfully disappointed. But disappointment for
disappointment I shall like it better than some others. You’ll not
persuade me, either, that among the people I speak of, characters and
passions and motives are not more natural, more complete, more _naïf_.
The upper classes are so insipid! My husband traces his descent from
the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore on earth. That is the
kind of people I was condemned to live with after my marriage. Oh, if
you knew what I have been through, you would allow that intelligent
mechanics (of course I don’t want to know idiots) would be a pleasant
change. I must begin with some one—mustn’t I?—so I began, the other
night, with you!” As soon as she had uttered these words the Princess
added a correction, with the consciousness of her mistake in her face.
It made that face, to Hyacinth, more nobly, tenderly pure. “The only
objection to you, individually, is that you have nothing of the people
about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes wandered over him from
head to foot, and their friendly beauty made him ashamed. “I wish you
had come in the clothes you wear at your work!”

“You see you do regard me as a curious animal,” he answered.

It was perhaps to contradict this that, after a moment, she began to
tell him more about her domestic affairs. He ought to know who she was,
unless Captain Sholto had told him; and she related her
parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and
how she had led, in her younger years, a wandering, Bohemian life, in a
thousand different places (always in Europe; she had never been in
America and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to
cross the Atlantic), and largely, at one period, in Rome. She had been
married by her people, in a mercenary way, for the sake of a fortune
and a title, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy could
wish. Her parents were dead, luckily for them, and she had no one near
her of her own except Madame Grandoni, who belonged to her only in the
sense that she had known her as a girl; was an association of her—what
should she call them?—her innocent years. Not that she had ever been
very innocent; she had had a horrible education. However, she had known
a few good people—people she respected, then; but Madame Grandoni was
the only one who had stuck to her. She, too, was liable to leave her
any day; the Princess appeared to intimate that her destiny might
require her to take some step which would test severely the old lady’s
adhesive property. It would detain her too long to make him understand
the stages by which she had arrived at her present state of mind: her
disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the
selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility,
of the people who, all over Europe, had the upper hand. If he could
have seen her life, the _milieu_ in which, for several years, she had
been condemned to move, the evolution of her opinions (Hyacinth was
delighted to hear her use that term) would strike him as perfectly
logical. She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she considered
that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put on a
tolerable footing only by a revolution. At any rate, she had some
self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover;
the only way to arrive at that was to throw herself into some effort
which would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles
and efforts of others. Hyacinth listened to her with a wonderment
which, as she went on, was transformed into fascinated submission; she
seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By
the time he had been with her for half an hour she had made the
situation itself appear natural and usual, and a third person who
should have joined them at this moment would have observed nothing to
make him suppose that friendly social intercourse between little
bookbinders and Neapolitan princesses was not, in London, a matter of
daily occurrence.

Hyacinth had seen plenty of women who chattered about themselves and
their affairs—a vulgar garrulity of confidence was indeed a leading
characteristic of the sex as he had hitherto learned to know it—but he
was quick to perceive that the great lady who now took the trouble to
open herself to him was not of a gossiping habit; that she must be, on
the contrary, as a general thing, proudly, ironically, reserved, even
to the point of passing, with many people, for a model of the
unsatisfactory. It was very possible she was capricious; yet the fact
that her present sympathies and curiosities might be a caprice wore, in
Hyacinth’s eyes, no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and
interesting whim, and why might he not stand, for the hour at any rate,
in the silvery moonshine it threw upon his path? It must be added that
he was far from understanding everything she said, and some of her
allusions and implications were so difficult to seize that they mainly
served to reveal to him the limits of his own acquaintance with life.
Her words evoked all sorts of shadowy suggestions of things he was
condemned not to know, touching him most when he had not the key to
them. This was especially the case with her reference to her career in
Italy, on her husband’s estates, and her relations with his family; who
considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into
their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business), after
they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it. The position
made for her among these people, and what she had had to suffer from
their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might
be remained vague to her listener), had evidently planted in her soul a
lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force
of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and
democratic and heretical _à outrance_—lead her to swear by Darwin and
Spencer as well as by the revolutionary spirit. He surely need not have
been so sensible of the weak spots in his comprehension of the
Princess, when he could already surmise that personal passion had
counted for so much in the formation of her views. This induction,
however, which had no harshness, did not make her appear to him any the
less a creature compounded of the finest elements; brilliant, delicate,
complicated, but complicated with something divine. It was not until
after he had left her that he became conscious she had forced him to
talk, as well as talked herself. He drew a long breath as he reflected
that he had not made quite such an ass of himself as might very well
have happened; he had been saved by his enjoyment and admiration, which
had not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too, in his
improbable little way, was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of
anxious, delicious tension, as if the occasion had been a great
solemnity. He had said, indeed, much more than he had warrant for, when
she questioned him about his socialistic affiliations; he had spoken as
if the movement were vast and mature, whereas, in fact, so far, at
least, as he was as yet concerned with it, and could answer for it from
personal knowledge, it was circumscribed by the hideously papered walls
of the little club-room at the ‘Sun and Moon’. He reproached himself
with this laxity, but it had not been engendered by vanity. He was only
afraid of disappointing his hostess too much; of making her say, ‘Why
in the world, then, did you come to see me, if you have nothing more
remarkable to relate?’—an inquiry to which, of course, he would have
had an answer ready, if it had not been impossible to him to say that
he had never asked to come: his coming was her own affair. He wanted
too much to come a second time to have the courage to make that speech.
Nevertheless, when she exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, as she
always did, from something else they had been talking about, “I wonder
whether I shall ever see you again!”, he replied, with perfect
sincerity, that it was very difficult for him to believe anything so
delightful could be repeated. There were some kinds of happiness that
to many people never came at all, and to others could come only once.
He added, “It is very true I had just that feeling after I left you the
other night at the theatre. And yet here I am!”

“Yes, there you are,” said the Princess thoughtfully, as if this might
be a still graver and more embarrassing fact than she had yet supposed
it. “I take it there is nothing essentially impossible in my seeing you
again; but it may very well be that you will never again find it so
pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any
rate, you know, I am going away.”

“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town,” Hyacinth commented,
sagaciously.

“Do you, Mr Robinson?” asked the Princess.

“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless, it is possible that,
this year, I may get two or three days at the seaside. I should like to
take my old lady. I have done it before.”

“And except for that you shall be always at work?”

“Yes; but you must understand that I like my work. You must understand
that it’s a great blessing for a young fellow like me to have it.”

“And if you didn’t have it, what would you do? Should you starve?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should starve,” the young man replied, judicially.

The Princess looked a little chagrined, but after a moment she
remarked, “I wonder whether you would come to see me, in the country,
somewhere.”

“Oh, dear!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You are so kind,
I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t be _banal_, please. That’s what other people are. What’s the use
of my looking for something fresh in other walks of life, if you are
going to be _banal_ too? I ask you, would you come?”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “Yes, I think I would come. I don’t know,
at all, how I should do it—there would be several obstacles; but
wherever you should call for me, I would come.”

“You mean you can’t leave your work, like that; you might lose it, if
you did, and be in want of money and much embarrassed?”

“Yes, there would be little difficulties of that kind. You see that
immediately, in practice, great obstacles come up, when it’s a question
of a person like you making friends with a person like me.”

“That’s the way I like you to talk,” said the Princess, with a pitying
gentleness that seemed to her visitor quite sacred. “After all, I don’t
know where I shall be. I have got to pay stupid visits, myself, where
the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump. Every one
here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there is no doubt I am! I might be
ever so much more so if you would only help me a little. Why shouldn’t
I have my bookbinder, after all? In attendance, you know, it would be
awfully _chic_. We might have immense fun, don’t you think so? No doubt
it will come. At any rate, I shall return to London when I have got
through that _corvée;_ I shall be here next year. In the meantime,
don’t forget me,” she went on, rising to her feet. “Remember, on the
contrary, that I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad
places.” Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted up
her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at
Hyacinth—who, even as he stood up, was of slightly smaller stature—with
all her strange, radiant sweetness. Then, in a manner almost equally
incongruous, she added a reference to what she had said a moment
before: “I recognise perfectly the obstacles, in practice, as you call
them; but though I am not, by nature, persevering, and am really very
easily put off, I don’t consider that they will prove insurmountable.
They exist on my side as well, and if you will help me to overcome mine
I will do the same for you, with yours.”

These words, repeating themselves again and again in Hyacinth’s
consciousness, appeared to give him wings, to help him to float and
soar, as he turned that afternoon out of South Street. He had at home a
copy of Tennyson’s poems—a single, comprehensive volume, with a double
column on the page, in a tolerably neat condition, though he had
handled it much. He took it to pieces that same evening, and during the
following week, in his hours of leisure, at home in his little room,
with the tools he kept there for private use, and a morsel of delicate,
blue-tinted Russia leather, of which he obtained possession at the
place in Soho, he devoted himself to the task of binding the book as
perfectly as he knew how. He worked with passion, with religion, and
produced a masterpiece of firmness and finish, of which his own
appreciation was as high as that of M. Poupin, when, at the end of the
week, he exhibited the fruit of his toil, and much more freely
expressed than that of old Crookenden, who grunted approbation, but was
always too long-headed to create precedents. Hyacinth carried the
volume to South Street, as an offering to the Princess; hoping she
would not yet have left London, in which case he would ask the servant
to deliver it to her, along with a little note he had sat up all night
to compose. But the majestic butler, in charge of the house, opening
the door yet looking down at him as if from a second-storey window,
took the life out of his vision and erected himself as an impenetrable
medium. The Princess had been absent for some days; the butler was so
good as to inform the young man with the parcel that she was on a visit
to a ‘juke’, in a distant part of the country. He offered however to
receive, and even to forward, anything Hyacinth might wish to leave;
but our hero felt a sudden indisposition to launch his humble tribute
into the vast, the possibly cold, unknown of a ducal circle. He decided
to retain his little package for the present; he would give it to her
when he should see her again, and he turned away without parting with
it. Later, it seemed to create a sort of material link between the
Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared
to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his
own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most
remarkable woman in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of
acute happiness, almost always, with Hyacinth, in retrospect, became
rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done
after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned
into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight,
had left a palpable relic.




XVIII


The matter concerned him only indirectly, but it may concern the reader
more closely to know that before the visit to the duke took place
Madame Grandoni granted to Prince Casamassima the private interview she
had promised him on that sad Sunday afternoon. She crept out of South
Street after breakfast—a repast which under the Princess’s roof was
served at twelve o’clock, in the foreign fashion—crossed the sultry
solitude into which, at such a season, that precinct resolves itself,
and entered the Park, where the grass was already brown and a warm,
smoky haze prevailed, a sort of summer edition of what was most
characteristic in the London air. The Prince met her, by appointment,
at the gate, and they went and sat down together under the trees beside
the drive, amid a wilderness of empty chairs and with nothing to
distract their attention from an equestrian or two, left over from the
cavalcades of a fortnight before, and whose vain agitation in the
saddle the desolate scene seemed to throw into high relief. They
remained there for nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of
her leaning to friendly interpretations, could not have told herself
what comfort it was to the depressed, embarrassed young man at her
side. She had nothing to say to him which could better his case, as he
bent his mournful gaze on a prospect which was not, after all,
perceptibly improved by its not being Sunday, and could only feel that,
with her, he must seem to himself to be nearer his wife—to be touching
something she had touched. The old lady wished he would resign himself
more, but she was willing to minister to that thin illusion, little as
she approved of the manner in which he had conducted himself at the
time of the last sharp crisis in the remarkable history of his
relations with Christina. He had behaved like a spoiled child, with a
bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity
and wisdom, and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on
the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgment,
had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles! though one
of them was a powerful prelate), had been suspicious and jealous on
exactly the wrong occasions—occasions on which such ideas were a
gratuitous injury. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to
make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to a
ground where his wife was far too accomplished a woman not to obtain
the appearance of victory.

There was another reflection that Madame Grandoni made, as her
interview with her dejected friend prolonged itself. She could make it
the more freely as, besides being naturally quick and appreciative, she
had always, during her Roman career, in the dear old days (mingled with
bitterness as they had been for her), lived with artists,
archæologists, ingenious strangers, people who abounded in good talk,
threw out ideas and played with them. It came over her that, really,
even if things had not come to that particular crisis, Christina’s
active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and
impatiences, could not have tolerated for long the simple dullness of
the Prince’s company. The old lady had said to him, on meeting him, “Of
course, what you want to know immediately is whether she has sent you a
message. No, my poor friend, I must tell you the truth. I asked her for
one, but she told me that she had nothing whatever, of any kind, to say
to you. She knew I was coming out to see you. I haven’t done so _en
cachette_. She doesn’t like it, but she accepts the necessity for this
once, since you have made the mistake, as she considers it, of
approaching her again. We talked about you, last night, after your note
came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked, and Christina was good
enough to listen. At the end she said this (what I shall tell you) with
perfect calmness, and the appearance of being the most reasonable woman
in the world. She didn’t ask me to repeat it to you, but I do so
because it is the only substitute I can offer you for a message. ‘I try
to occupy my life, my mind, to create interests, in the odious position
in which I find myself; I endeavour to get out of myself, my small
personal disappointments and troubles, by the aid of such poor
faculties as I possess. There are things in the world more interesting,
after all, and I hope to succeed in giving my attention to them. It
appears to me not too much to ask that the Prince, on his side, should
make the same conscientious effort—and leave me alone!’ Those were your
wife’s remarkable words; they are all I have to give you.”

After she had given them Madame Grandoni felt a pang of regret; the
Prince turned upon her a face so white, bewildered and wounded. It had
seemed to her that they might form a wholesome admonition, but it was
now impressed upon her that, as coming from his wife, they were cruel,
and she herself felt almost cruel for having repeated them. What they
amounted to was an exquisite taunt of his mediocrity—a mediocrity which
was, after all, not a crime. How could the Prince occupy himself, what
interests could he create, and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he
possess? He was as ignorant as a fish, and as narrow as his hat-band.
His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the
insult, felt it more than saw it—felt that he could not plead
incapacity without putting the Princess largely in the right. He gazed
at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he
was going to burst into tears. But he said nothing—perhaps because he
was afraid of that—so that suffering silence, during which she gently
laid her hand upon his own, remained his only answer. He might
doubtless do so much he didn’t, that when Christina touched upon this
she was unanswerable. The old lady changed the subject: told him what a
curious country England was, in so many ways; offered information as to
their possible movements during the summer and autumn, which, within a
day or two, had become slightly clearer. But at last, abruptly, as if
he had not heard her, he inquired, appealingly, who the young man was
who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.

Madame Grandoni hesitated a moment. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”

“Her bookbinder? Do you mean her lover?”

“Prince, how can you dream she will ever live with you again?” the old
lady asked, in reply to this.

“Why, then, does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an
ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his books,
his bindings? I shouldn’t say this to her,” the Prince added, as if the
declaration justified him.

“I told you the other day that she is making studies of the people—the
lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” Madame Grandoni could
not help laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her
mirth elicited no echo from her interlocutor.

“I have thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less
I understand. Would it be your idea that she is quite crazy? I must
tell you I don’t care if she is!”

“We are all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the
Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at
present she is trying democracy and socialism.”

“_Santo Dio!_” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when
they see her bookbinder?”

“They haven’t seen him, and perhaps they won’t. But if they do, it
won’t matter, because here everything is forgiven. That a person should
be singular is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything
else.”

The Prince mused a while, and then he said, “How can she bear the dirt,
the bad smell?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. If you mean the young man you
saw at the house (I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the
first time he had been there, and that the Princess had only seen him
once)—if you mean the little bookbinder, he isn’t dirty, especially
what we should call. The people of that kind, here, are not like our
dear Romans. Every one has a sponge, as big as your head; you can see
them in the shops.”

“They are full of gin; their faces are purple,” said the Prince; after
which he immediately asked, “If she had only seen him once, how could
he have come into her drawing-room that way?”

The old lady looked at him with a certain severity. “Believe, at least,
what _I_ say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you
spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a
person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many
faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She
will speak the truth always.”

It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of
his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke.
But he did not admit his error, and she doubted whether he even
perceived it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who
has still a good deal to say for himself, “There are things it is
better to conceal.”

“It all depends on whether you are afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I
admit that she is very strange, and when the entertainment of watching
her, to see how she will carry out some of her inspirations, is not
stronger than anything else, I lose all patience with her. When she
doesn’t fascinate she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself,
since you are here, and as I may not see you again for a long time, or
perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!), I may as well give
you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make it
seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom, then, of much that
she does is the fact that she is ashamed of having married you.”

“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.

“You may say that there can be nothing more eccentric than that. But
you know—or, if not, it isn’t for want of her having told you—that the
Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold
herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a
horrible piece of frivolity that she can never, for the rest of her
days, be serious enough to make up for it.”

“Yes, I know that she pretends to have been forced. And does she think
she’s so serious now?”

“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” said the old woman,
smiling. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has
thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern’. That sums up the
greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”

“Yes, we are not, thank God! _Dio mio, Dio mio!_” groaned the Prince.
He seemed so exhausted by his reflections that he remained sitting in
his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of
her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no
ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with
Christina’s husband the current of conversation made her, as she
phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks
she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and
offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he
could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and
habits of his uncles, and he replied, for the moment, with the
minuteness which he had been taught that in such a case courtesy
demanded; but by the time that, at her request, they had returned to
the gate nearest to South Street (she wished him to come no farther) he
had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way.

“And who and what, then, is this English captain? About him there is a
great deal said.”

“This English captain?”

“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the
Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.

They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple
of predatory hansoms dashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought
that was coming, and at bottom it is he that has occupied you most!”
Madame Grandoni exclaimed, with a sigh. “But in reality he is the last
one you need trouble about; he doesn’t count.”

“Why doesn’t he count?”

“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t
even think he does.”

“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”

“Perhaps that is just the reason. When people give her a chance to get
tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate, you needn’t be
any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, a
_factotum_, but he works without wages.”

“Isn’t he, then, in love with her?”

“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”

“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince, lugubriously.

“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she
has strongly recommended him, in my hearing, to do—with other women.”

“Oh, the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events, he sees her.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t see him!” laughed Madame Grandoni, as she turned
away.




XIX


The pink dressing-gown which Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose
Muniment became, in Lomax Place, a conspicuous object, supplying poor
Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great
occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora,
after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She described this episode
vividly to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her
ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected. The
grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital as
something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by
shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons of
which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when they’re
out of town, what can it be when they are all there together and
everything is out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted
herself to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the
state of Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she had not been
afraid to appear to notice the disrepair of these objects, she would
have been so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she would
only come to me every week or two, I would keep up her rank for her,”
said Pinnie, with visions of a needle that positively flashed in the
disinterested service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship
got all dragged out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might
be in tatters, for all they could do to help her at the top of those
dreadful stairs, with that strange sick creature (she was too
unnatural) thinking only of her own finery and talking about her
complexion. If she wanted pink, she should have pink; but to Pinnie
there was something almost unholy in it, like decking out a corpse, or
the next thing to it. This was the other element that left Miss Pynsent
cold; it could not be other than difficult for her to enter into the
importance her ladyship appeared to attach to those pushing people. The
girl was unfortunate, certainly, stuck up there like a kitten on a
shelf, but in her ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more
in keeping, while they walked about under those tremendous gilded
ceilings. Lady Aurora, seeing how she was struck, showed her all over
the house, carrying the lamp herself and telling an old woman who was
there—a kind of housekeeper, with ribbons in her cap, who would have
pushed Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do
very well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive
stages of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was
terribly long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured
presence as had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently
because it was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was
dedicated to her humble friend.

One day, when Hyacinth came home from his work, Pinnie announced to him
as soon as he entered the room that her ladyship had been there to look
at it—to pass judgment before the last touches were conferred. The
dressmaker intimated that in such a case as that her judgment was
rather wild, and she had made an embarrassing suggestion about pockets.
Whatever could poor Miss Muniment want of pockets, and what had she to
put in them? But Lady Aurora had evidently found the garment far beyond
anything she expected, and she had been more affable than ever, and had
wanted to know about every one in the Place; not in a meddling, prying
way, either, like some of those upper-class visitors, but quite as if
the poor people were the high ones and she was afraid her curiosity
might be ‘presumptious’. It was in the same discreet spirit that she
had invited Amanda to relate her whole history, and had expressed an
interest in the career of her young friend.

“She said you had charming manners,” Miss Pynsent hastened to remark;
“but, before heaven, Hyacinth Robinson, I never mentioned a scrap that
it could give you pain that any one should talk about.” There was an
heroic explicitness in this, on Pinnie’s part, for she knew in advance
just how Hyacinth would look at her—fixedly, silently, hopelessly, as
if she were still capable of tattling horribly (with the idea that her
revelations would increase her importance), and putting forward this
hollow theory of her supreme discretion to cover it up. His eyes seemed
to say, ‘How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you are lying?
I am very helpless, for I can’t prove that without applying to the
person to whom your incorrigible folly has probably led you to brag, to
throw out mysterious and tantalising hints. You know, of course, that I
would never condescend to that.’ Pinnie suffered, acutely, from this
imputation; yet she exposed herself to it often, because she could
never deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting
Hyacinth know that he was appreciated, admired and, for those ‘charming
manners’ commended by Lady Aurora, even wondered at; and this kind of
interest always appeared to imply a suspicion of his secret—something
which, when he expressed to himself the sense of it, he called,
resenting it at once and yet finding a certain softness in it, ‘a
beastly _attendrissement_’. When Pinnie went on to say to him that Lady
Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet having come
to Belgrave Square for the famous books, he reflected that he must
really wait upon her without more delay, if he wished to keep up his
reputation for charming manners; and meanwhile he considered much the
extreme oddity of this new phase of his life (it had opened so
suddenly, from one day to the other); a phase in which his society
should have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the
obscurity of his condition only an attraction the more. They were
taking him up then, one after the other, and they were even taking up
poor Pinnie, as a means of getting at him; so that he wondered, with
humorous bitterness, whether it meant that his destiny was really
seeking him out—that the aristocracy, recognising a mysterious affinity
(with that fineness of _flair_ for which they were remarkable), were
coming to him to save him the trouble of coming to them.

It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening), and Lady
Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time
at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of ‘rising
from dinner’ having always been, in his imagination, for some reason or
other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He was ignorant of the
fact that Lady Aurora’s principal meal consisted of a scrap of fish and
a cup of tea, served on a little stand in the dismantled
breakfast-parlour. The door was opened for Hyacinth by the invidious
old lady whom Pinnie had described, and who listened to his inquiry,
conducted him through the house, and ushered him into her ladyship’s
presence, without the smallest relaxation of a pair of tightly-closed
lips. Hyacinth’s hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour, by
the light of a couple of candles, immersed apparently in a collection
of tolerably crumpled papers and account-books. She was ciphering,
consulting memoranda, taking notes; she had had her head in her hands,
and the silky entanglement of her tresses resisted the rapid effort she
made to smooth herself down as she saw the little bookbinder come in.
The impression of her fingers remained in little rosy streaks on her
pink skin. She exclaimed, instantly, “Oh, you have come about the
books—it’s so very kind of you;” and she hurried him off to another
room, to which, as she explained, she had had them brought down for him
to choose from. The effect of this precipitation was to make him
suppose at first that she might wish him to execute his errand as
quickly as possible and take himself off; but he presently perceived
that her nervousness, her shyness, were of an order that would always
give false ideas. She wanted him to stay, she wanted to talk with him,
and she had rushed with him at the books in order to gain time and
composure for exercising some subtler art. Hyacinth stayed half an
hour, and became more and more convinced that her ladyship was, as he
had ventured to pronounce her on the occasion of their last meeting, a
regular saint. He was privately a little disappointed in the books,
though he selected three or four, as many as he could carry, and
promised to come back for others: they denoted, on Lady Aurora’s part,
a limited acquaintance with French literature and even a certain
puerility of taste. There were several volumes of Lamartine and a set
of the spurious memoirs of the Marquise de Créqui; but for the rest the
little library consisted mainly of Marmontel and Madame de Genlis, the
_Récit d’une Sœur_ and the tales of M. J. T. de Saint-Germain. There
were certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and
scientific realists, of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long
desired to put his hand; but, evidently, none of them had ever stumbled
into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple
of Balzac’s novels, which, by ill-luck, happened to be just those that
Hyacinth had read more than once.

There was, nevertheless, something very agreeable to him in the moments
he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals,
monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he had
seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and Lady
Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a sense
of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of jealous
influences. She talked again about the poor people in the south of
London, and about the Muniments in particular; evidently, the only
fault she had to find with these latter was that they were not poor
enough—not sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which
she could step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished
she would talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was
that, like Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He
didn’t mind, with the poor, going into questions of poverty—it even
gave him at times a strange, savage satisfaction—but he saw that in
discussing them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less;
they could never treat them _à fond_. Their mistakes and illusions,
their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of the destitute
when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating. It
came over Hyacinth that if he found this want of perspective in Lady
Aurora’s deep conscientiousness, it would be a queer enough business
when he should come to go into the detail of such matters with the
Princess Casamassima.

His present hostess said not a word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed
that she had an instinctive desire to place him on the footing on which
people do not express approbation or surprise at the decency or
good-breeding of each other’s relatives. He saw that she would always
treat him as a gentleman, and that even if he should be basely
ungrateful she would never call his attention to the fact that she had
done so. He should not have occasion to say to her, as he had said to
the Princess, that she regarded him as a curious animal; and it gave
him immediately that sense, always so delightful to him, of learning
more about life, to perceive there were such different ways (which
implied still a good many more) of being a lady of rank. The manner in
which Lady Aurora appeared to wish to confer with him on the great
problems of pauperism might have implied that he was a benevolent
nobleman (of the type of Lord Shaftesbury), who had endowed many
charities and was noted, in philanthropic schemes, for his practical
sense. It was not less present to him that Pinnie might have tattled,
put forward his claims to high consanguinity, than it had been when the
dressmaker herself descanted on her ladyship’s condescensions; but he
remembered now that he too had only just escaped being asinine, when,
the other day, he flashed out an allusion to his accursed origin. At
all events, he was much touched by the delicacy with which the earl’s
daughter comported herself, simply assuming that he was ‘one of
themselves’; and he reflected that if she did know his history (he was
sure he might pass twenty years in her society without discovering
whether she did or not), this shade of courtesy, this natural tact,
coexisting even with extreme awkwardness, illustrated that ‘best
breeding’ which he had seen alluded to in novels portraying the
aristocracy. The only remark on Lady Aurora’s part that savoured in the
least of looking down at him from a height was when she said,
cheerfully, encouragingly, “I suppose that one of these days you will
be setting up in business for yourself;” and this was not so cruelly
patronising that he could not reply, with a smile equally free from any
sort of impertinence, “Oh dear, no, I shall never do that. I should
make a great mess of any attempt to carry on a business. I haven’t a
particle of that kind of aptitude.”

Lady Aurora looked a little surprised; then she said, “Oh, I see; you
don’t like—you don’t like—” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say
that he didn’t like the idea of going in, to that extent, for a trade;
but he stopped her in time from attributing to him a sentiment so
foolish, and declared that what he meant was simply that the only
faculty he possessed was the faculty of doing his little piece of work,
whatever it was, of liking to do it skillfully and prettily, and of
liking still better to get his money for it when it was done. His
conception of ‘business’, or of rising in the world, didn’t go beyond
that. “Oh yes, I can fancy!” her ladyship exclaimed; but she looked at
him a moment with eyes which showed that he puzzled her, that she
didn’t quite understand his tone. Before he went away she inquired of
him, abruptly (nothing had led up to it), what he thought of Captain
Sholto, whom she had seen that other evening in Audley Court. Didn’t
Hyacinth think he was very odd? Hyacinth confessed to this impression;
whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider
that—that—he is decidedly vulgar?”

“How can I know?”

“You can know perfectly—as well as any one!” Then she added, “I think
it’s a pity they should—a—form relations with any one of that kind.”

‘They’, of course, meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person
that may be vulgar?” Hyacinth asked, regarding this solicitude as
exquisite. “But think of the people they know—think of those they are
surrounded with—think of all Audley Court!”

“The poor, the unhappy, the labouring classes? Oh, I don’t call _them_
vulgar!” cried her ladyship, with radiant eyes. The young man, lying
awake a good deal that night, laughed to himself, on his pillow, not
unkindly, at her fear that he and his friends would be contaminated by
the familiar of a princess. He even wondered whether she would not find
the Princess herself rather vulgar.




XX


It must not be supposed that Hyacinth’s relations with Millicent
Henning had remained unaffected by the remarkable incident she had
witnessed at the theatre. It had made a great impression on the young
lady from Pimlico; he never saw her, for several weeks afterwards, that
she had not an immense deal to say about it; and though it suited her
to take the line of being shocked at the crudity of such proceedings,
and of denouncing the Princess for a bold-faced foreigner, of a kind to
which any one who knew anything of what could go on in London would
give a wide berth, it was easy to see that she was pleased at being
brought even into roundabout contact with a person so splendid and at
finding her own discriminating approval of Hyacinth confirmed in such
high quarters. She professed to derive her warrant for her low opinion
of the lady in the box from information given her by Captain Sholto as
he sat beside her—information of which at different moments she gave a
different version; her anecdotes having nothing in common, at least,
save that they were alike unflattering to the Princess. Hyacinth had
many doubts of the Captain’s pouring such confidences into Miss
Henning’s ear; under the circumstances it would be such a very
unnatural thing for him to do. He _was_ unnatural—that was true—and he
might have told Millicent, who was capable of having plied him with
questions, that his distinguished friend was separated from her
husband; but, for the rest, it was more probable that the girl had
given the rein to a certain inventive faculty which she had already
showed him she possessed, when it was a question of exercising her
primitive, half-childish, half-plebeian impulse of destruction, the
instinct of pulling down what was above her, the reckless energy that
would, precisely, make her so effective in revolutionary scenes.
Hyacinth (it has been mentioned) did not consider that Millicent was
false, and it struck him as a proof of positive candour that she should
make up absurd, abusive stories about a person concerning whom she knew
nothing at all, save that she disliked her, and could not hope for
esteem, or, indeed, for recognition of any kind, in return. When people
were really false you didn’t know where you stood with them, and on
such a point as this Miss Henning could never be accused of leaving you
in obscurity. She said little else about the Captain, and did not
pretend to repeat the remainder of his conversation; taking it with an
air of grand indifference when Hyacinth amused himself with repaying
her strictures on his new acquaintance by drawing a sufficiently
derisive portrait of hers.

He took the ground that Sholto’s admiration for the high-coloured
beauty in the second balcony had been at the bottom of the whole
episode: he had persuaded the Princess to pretend she was a socialist
and should like therefore to confer with Hyacinth, in order that he
might slip into the seat of this too easily deluded youth. At the same
time, it never occurred to our young man to conceal the fact that the
lady in the box had followed him up; he contented himself with saying
that this had been no part of the original plot, but a simple
result—not unnatural, after all—of his turning out so much more
fascinating than one might have supposed. He narrated, with sportive
variations, his visit in South Street, and felt that he would never
feel the need, with his childhood’s friend, of glossing over that sort
of experience. She might make him a scene of jealousy and welcome—there
were things that would have much more terror for him than that; her
jealousy, with its violence, its energy, even a certain inconsequent,
dare-devil humour that played through it, entertained him, illustrated
the frankness, the passion and pluck, that he admired her for. He
should never be on the footing of sparing Miss Henning’s
susceptibilities; how fond she might really be of him he could not take
upon himself to say, but her affection would never take the form of
that sort of delicacy, and their intercourse was plainly foredoomed to
be an exchange of thumps and concussions, of sarcastic shouts and
mutual _défis_. He liked her, at bottom, strangely, absurdly; but after
all it was only well enough to torment her—she could bear so much—not
well enough to spare her. Of there being any justification of her
jealousy of the Princess he never thought; it could not occur to him to
weigh against each other the sentiments he might excite in such opposed
bosoms or those that the spectacle of either emotion might have kindled
in his own. He had, no doubt, his share of fatuity, but he found
himself unable to associate, mentally, a great lady and a shop-girl in
a contest for a prize which should present analogies with his own
personality. How could they have anything in common—even so small a
thing as a desire to possess themselves of Hyacinth Robinson? A fact
that he did not impart to Millicent, and that he could have no wish to
impart to her, was the matter of his pilgrimage to Belgrave Square. He
might be in love with the Princess (how could he qualify, as yet, the
bewildered emotion she had produced in him?), and he certainly never
would conceive a passion for poor Lady Aurora; yet it would have given
him pain much greater than any he felt in the other case, to hear the
girl make free with the ministering angel of Audley Court. The
difference was, perhaps, somehow in that she appeared really not to
touch or arrive at the Princess at all, whereas Lady Aurora was within
her range and compass.

After paying him that visit at his rooms Hyacinth lost sight of Captain
Sholto, who had not again reappeared at the ‘Sun and Moon’, the little
tavern which presented so common and casual a face to the world and
yet, in its unsuspected rear, offered a security as yet unimpugned to
machinations going down to the very bottom of things. Nothing was more
natural than that the Captain should be engaged at this season in the
recreations of his class; and our young man took for granted that if he
were not hanging about the Princess, on that queer footing as to which
he himself had a secret hope that he should some day have more light,
he was probably ploughing through northern seas on a yacht or creeping
after stags in the Highlands; our hero’s acquaintance with the light
literature of his country being such as to assure him that in one or
other of these occupations people of leisure, during the autumn, were
necessarily immersed. If the Captain were giving his attention to
neither, he must have started for Albania, or at least for Paris. Happy
Captain, Hyacinth reflected, while his imagination followed him through
all kinds of vivid exotic episodes and his restless young feet
continued to tread, through the stale, flat weeks of September and
October, the familiar pavements of Soho, Islington and Pentonville, and
the shabby sinuous ways which unite these laborious districts. He had
told the Princess that he sometimes had a holiday at this period and
that there was a chance of his escorting his respectable companion to
the seaside; but as it turned out, at present, the spare cash for such
an excursion was wanting. Hyacinth had indeed, for the moment, an
exceptionally keen sense of the absence of this article, and was
forcibly reminded that it took a good deal of money to cultivate the
society of agreeable women. He not only had not a penny, but he was
much in debt, and the explanation of his pinched feeling was in a
vague, half-remorseful, half-resigned reference to the numerous
occasions when he had had to put his hand in his pocket under penalty
of disappointing a young lady whose needs were positive, and especially
to a certain high crisis (as it might prove to be) in his destiny, when
it came over him that one couldn’t call on a princess just as one was.
So, this year, he did not ask old Crookenden for the week which some of
the other men took (Eustache Poupin, who had never quitted London since
his arrival, launched himself, precisely that summer, supported by his
brave wife, into the British unknown, on the strength of a return
ticket to Worthing); simply because he shouldn’t know what to do with
it. The best way not to spend money, though it was no doubt not the
best in the world to make it, was still to take one’s daily course to
the old familiar, shabby shop, where, as the days shortened and
November thickened the air to a livid yellow, the uncovered flame of
the gas, burning often from the morning on, lighted up the ugliness
amid which the hand of practice endeavoured to disengage a little
beauty—the ugliness of a dingy, belittered interior, of battered,
dispapered walls, of work-tables stained and hacked, of windows opening
into a foul, drizzling street, of the bared arms, the sordid
waistcoat-backs, the smeared aprons, the personal odour, the patient,
obstinate, irritating shoulders and vulgar, narrow, inevitable faces,
of his fellow-labourers. Hyacinth’s relations with his comrades would
form a chapter by itself, but all that may be said of the matter here
is that the clever little operator from Lomax Place had a kind of
double identity, and that much as he lived in Mr Crookenden’s
establishment he lived out of it still more. In this busy, pasty,
sticky, leathery little world, where wages and beer were the main
objects of consideration, he played his part in a manner which caused
him to be regarded as a queer lot, but capable of queerness in the line
of good-nature too. He had not made good his place there without
discovering that the British workman, when animated by the spirit of
mirth, has rather a heavy hand, and he tasted of the practical joke in
every degree of violence. During his first year he dreamed, with secret
passion and suppressed tears, of a day of bliss when at last they would
let him alone—a day which arrived in time, for it is always an
advantage to be clever, if only one is clever enough. Hyacinth was
sufficiently so to have invented a _modus vivendi_ in respect to which
M. Poupin said to him, “_Enfin vous voilà ferme!_” (the Frenchman
himself, terribly _éprouvé_ at the beginning, had always bristled with
firmness and opposed to insular grossness a refined dignity), and under
the influence of which the scenery of Soho figured as a daily, dusky
phantasmagoria, relegated to the mechanical, passive part of experience
and giving no hostages to reality, or at least to ambition, save an
insufficient number of shillings on Saturday night and spasmodic
reminiscences of delicate work that might have been more delicate
still, as well as of certain applications of the tool which he
flattered himself were unsurpassed, unless by the supreme Eustache.

One evening in November, after discharging himself of a considerable
indebtedness to Pinnie, he had still a sovereign in his pocket—a
sovereign which seemed to spin there at the opposed solicitation of a
dozen exemplary uses. He had come out for a walk, with a vague
intention of pushing as far as Audley Court; and lurking within this
nebulous design, on which the damp breath of the streets, making
objects seem that night particularly dim and places particularly far,
had blown a certain chill, was a sense that it would be rather nice to
take something to Rose Muniment, who delighted in a sixpenny present
and to whom, for some time, he had not rendered any such homage. At
last, after he had wandered a while, hesitating between the pilgrimage
to Camberwell and the possibility of still associating his evening in
some way or other with that of Miss Henning, he reflected that if a
sovereign was to be pulled to pieces it was a simplification to get it
changed. He had been traversing the region of Mayfair, partly with the
preoccupation of a short cut and partly from an instinct of
self-defence; if one was in danger of spending one’s money
precipitately it was so much gained to plunge into a quarter in which,
at that hour especially, there were no shops for little bookbinders.
Hyacinth’s victory, however, was imperfect when it occurred to him to
turn into a public-house in order to convert his gold into convenient
silver. When it was a question of entering these establishments he
selected in preference the most decent; he never knew what unpleasant
people he might find on the other side of the swinging door. Those
which glitter, at intervals, amid the residential gloom of Mayfair
partake of the general gentility of the neighbourhood, so that Hyacinth
was not surprised (he had passed into the compartment marked ‘private
bar’) to see but a single drinker leaning against the counter on which,
with his request very civilly enunciated, he put down his sovereign. He
was surprised, on the other hand, when, glancing up again, he became
aware that this solitary drinker was Captain Godfrey Sholto.

“Why, my dear boy, what a remarkable coincidence!” the Captain
exclaimed. “For once in five years that I come into a place like this!”

“I don’t come in often myself. I thought you were in Madagascar,” said
Hyacinth.

“Ah, because I have not been at the ‘Sun and Moon’? Well, I have been
constantly out of town, you know. And then—don’t you see what I mean?—I
want to be tremendously careful. That’s the way to get on, isn’t it?
But I dare say you don’t believe in my discretion!” Sholto laughed.
“What shall I do to make you understand? I say, have a brandy and
soda,” he continued, as if this might assist Hyacinth’s comprehension.
He seemed a trifle flurried, and, if it were possible to imagine such a
thing of so independent and whimsical a personage, the least bit
abashed or uneasy at having been found in such a low place. It was not
any lower, after all, than the ‘Sun and Moon’. He was dressed on this
occasion according to his station, without the pot-hat and the shabby
jacket, and Hyacinth looked at him with a sense that a good tailor must
really add a charm to life. Our hero was struck more than ever before
with his being the type of man whom, as he strolled about, observing
people, he had so often regarded with wonder and envy—the sort of man
of whom one said to one’s self that he was the ‘finest white’, feeling
that he had the world in his pocket. Sholto requested the bar-maid to
please not dawdle in preparing the brandy and soda which Hyacinth had
thought to ease off the situation by accepting: this, indeed, was
perhaps what the finest white would naturally do. And when the young
man had taken the glass from the counter Sholto appeared to encourage
him not to linger as he drank it, and smiled down at him very kindly
and amusedly, as if the combination of a very small bookbinder and a
big tumbler were sufficiently droll. The Captain took time, however, to
ask Hyacinth how he had spent his autumn and what was the news in
Bloomsbury; he further inquired about those delightful people over the
river. “I can’t tell you what an impression they made upon me—that
evening, you know.” After this he remarked to Hyacinth, suddenly,
irrelevantly, “And so you are just going to stay on for the winter,
quietly?” Our young man stared: he wondered what other project any one
could attribute to him; he could not reflect, immediately, that this
was the sort of thing the finest whites said to each other when they
met, after their fashionable dispersals, and that his friend had only
been guilty of a momentary inadvertence. In point of fact the Captain
recovered himself: “Oh, of course you have got your work, and that sort
of thing;” and, as Hyacinth did not succeed in swallowing at a gulp the
contents of his big tumbler, he asked him presently whether he had
heard anything from the Princess. Hyacinth replied that he could have
no news except what the Captain might be good enough to give him; but
he added that he did go to see her just before she left town.

“Ah, you did go to see her? That’s quite right—quite right.”

“I went because she very kindly wrote to me to come.”

“Ah, she wrote to you to come?” The Captain fixed Hyacinth for a moment
with his curious colourless eyes. “Do you know you are a devilish
privileged mortal?”

“Certainly, I know that.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the
bar-maid, who had heard this odd couple talking about a princess, was
staring at him too, with her elbows on the counter.

“Do you know there are people who would give their heads that she
should write to them to come?”

“I have no doubt of it whatever!” Hyacinth exclaimed, taking refuge in
a laugh which did not sound as natural as he would have liked, and
wondering whether his interlocutor were not precisely one of these
people. In this case the bar-maid might well stare; for deeply
convinced as our young man might be that he was the son of Lord
Frederick Purvis, there was really no end to the oddity of his being
preferred—and by a princess—to Captain Sholto. If anything could have
reinforced, at that moment, his sense of this anomaly, it would have
been the indescribably gentlemanly way, implying all sorts of common
initiations, in which his companion went on—

“Ah, well, I see you know how to take it! And if you are in
correspondence with her why do you say that you can hear from her only
through me? My dear fellow, I am not in correspondence with her. You
might think I would naturally be, but I am not.” He subjoined, as
Hyacinth had laughed again, in a manner that might have passed for
ambiguous, “So much the worse for me—is that what you mean?” Hyacinth
replied that he himself had had the honour of hearing from the Princess
only once, and he mentioned that she had told him that her
letter-writing came only in fits, when it was sometimes very profuse:
there were months together that she didn’t touch a pen. “Oh, I can
imagine what she told you!” the Captain exclaimed. “Look out for the
next fit! She is visiting about. It’s a great thing to be in the same
house with her—an immense comedy.” He remarked that he had heard, now
he remembered, that she either had taken, or was thinking of taking, a
house in the country for a few months, and he added that if Hyacinth
didn’t propose to finish his brandy and soda they might as well turn
out. Hyacinth’s thirst had been very superficial, and as they turned
out the Captain observed, by way of explanation of his having been
found in a public-house (it was the only attempt of this kind he made),
that any friend of his would always know him by his love of curious
out-of-the-way nooks. “You must have noticed that,” he said—“my taste
for exploration. If I hadn’t explored I never should have known you,
should I? That was rather a nice little girl in there; did you twig her
figure? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth,
instinctively, had made a motion to go southward, but Sholto, passing a
hand into his arm, led him the other way. The house they had quitted
was near a corner, which they rounded, the Captain pushing forward as
if there were some reason for haste. His haste was checked, however, by
an immediate collision with a young woman who, coming in the opposite
direction, turned the angle as briskly as themselves. At this moment
the Captain gave Hyacinth a great jerk, but not before he had caught a
glimpse of the young woman’s face—it seemed to flash upon him out of
the dusk—and given quick voice to his surprise.

“Hallo, Millicent!” This was the simple cry that escaped from his lips,
while the Captain, still going on, inquired, “What’s the matter? Who’s
your pretty friend?” Hyacinth declined to go on, and repeated Miss
Henning’s baptismal name so loudly that the young woman, who had passed
them without looking back, was obliged to stop. Then Hyacinth saw that
he was not mistaken, though Millicent gave no audible response. She
stood looking at him, with her head very high, and he approached her,
disengaging himself from Sholto, who however hung back only an instant
before joining them. Hyacinth’s heart had suddenly begun to beat very
fast; there was a sharp shock in the girl’s turning up just in that
place at that moment. Yet when she began to laugh, abruptly, with
violence, and to ask him why he was looking at her as if she were a
kicking horse, he recognised that there was nothing so very
extraordinary, after all, in a casual meeting between persons who were
such frequenters of the London streets. Millicent had never concealed
the fact that she ‘trotted about’, on various errands, at night; and
once, when he had said to her that the less a respectable young woman
took the evening air alone the better for her respectability, she had
asked how respectable he thought she pretended to be, and had remarked
that if he would make her a present of a brougham, or even call for her
three or four times a week in a cab, she would doubtless preserve more
of her social purity. She could turn the tables quickly enough, and she
exclaimed, now, professing, on her own side, great astonishment—

“What are you prowling about here for? You’re after no good, I’ll be
bound!”

“Good evening, Miss Henning; what a jolly meeting!” said the Captain,
removing his hat with a humorous flourish.

“Oh, how d’ye do?” Millicent returned, as if she did not immediately
place him.

“Where were you going so fast? What are you doing?” asked Hyacinth, who
had looked from one to the other.

“Well, I never did see such a manner—from one that knocks about like
_you!_” cried Miss Henning. “I’m going to see a friend of mine—a
lady’s-maid in Curzon Street. Have you anything to say to that?”

“Don’t tell us—don’t tell us!” Sholto interposed, after she had spoken
(she had not hesitated an instant). “I, at least, disavow the
indiscretion. Where may not a charming woman be going when she trips
with a light foot through the gathering dusk?”

“I say, what are you talking about?” the girl inquired, with dignity,
of Hyacinth’s companion. She spoke as if with a resentful suspicion
that her foot had not really been perceived to be light.

“On what errand of mercy, of secret tenderness?” the Captain went on,
laughing.

“Secret yourself!” cried Millicent. “Do you two always hunt in
couples?”

“All right, we’ll turn round and go with you as far as your friend’s,”
Hyacinth said.

“All right,” Millicent replied.

“All right,” the Captain added; and the three took their way together
in the direction of Curzon Street. They walked for a few moments in
silence, though the Captain whistled, and then Millicent suddenly
turned to Hyacinth—

“You haven’t told me where _you_ were going, yet.”

“We met in that public-house,” the Captain said, “and we were each so
ashamed of being found in such a place by the other that we tumbled out
together, without much thinking what we should do with ourselves.”

“When he’s out with me he pretends he can’t abide them houses,” Miss
Henning declared. “I wish I had looked in that one, to see who was
there.”

“Well, she’s rather nice,” the Captain went on. “She told me her name
was Georgiana.”

“I went to get a piece of money changed,” Hyacinth said, with a sense
that there was a certain dishonesty in the air; glad that he, at least,
could afford to speak the truth.

“To get your grandmother’s nightcap changed! I recommend you to keep
your money together—you’ve none too much of it!” Millicent exclaimed.

“Is that the reason you are playing me false?” Hyacinth flashed out. He
had been thinking, with still intentness, as they walked; at once
nursing and wrestling with a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the
idea that he was being bamboozled; yet he was able to say to himself
that one must allow, in life, for the element of coincidence, and that
he might easily put himself immensely in the wrong by making a
groundless charge. It was only later that he pieced his impressions
together, and saw them—as it appeared—justify each other; at present,
as soon as he had uttered it, he was almost ashamed of his quick retort
to Millicent’s taunt. He ought at least to have waited to see what
Curzon Street would bring forth.

The girl broke out upon him immediately, repeating “False, false?” with
high derision, and wanting to know whether that was the way to knock a
lady about in public. She had stopped short on the edge of a crossing,
and she went on, with a voice so uplifted that he was glad they were in
a street that was rather empty at such an hour: “You’re a pretty one to
talk about falsity, when a woman has only to leer at you out of an
opera-box!”

“Don’t say anything about _her_,” the young man interposed, trembling.

“And pray why not about ‘her’, I should like to know? You don’t pretend
she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the
quiet neighbourhood.

“My dear fellow, you know you _have_ been to her,” Captain Sholto
remarked, smiling.

Hyacinth turned upon him, staring, at once challenged and baffled by
his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify
but it was not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly, I
have been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and
begged me, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the
devil are you, any way, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his
mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had
puzzled him and eluded him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot
everything that had entertained and gratified him.

“My dear fellow, whatever I am, I am not an ass,” this gentleman
replied, with imperturbable good-humour. “I don’t reproach you with
anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good
friends—my good friends,” and he laid a hand, in his practised way, on
Hyacinth’s shoulder, while, with the other pressed to his heart, he
bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in
it, “I am determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’
quarrels ought always to end.”

Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to
Millicent, “You are not really jealous of—of any one. You pretend that,
only to throw dust in my eyes.”

To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be
lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests.
He pronounced them a dear delightful, abominable young couple; he
declared it was most interesting to see how, in people of their sort,
the passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each
other’s arms; and he wound up by proposing that they should all
terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the
Pavilion music-hall, the nearest place of entertainment in that
neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her
mistress’s wig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an
accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is
justified when I relate that he placed this idea in so attractive a
light that his companions finally entered a hansom with him and rattled
toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the
seat, between the others. Two or three times his ears burned; he felt
that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind
him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If it was at his expense,
the whole evening constituted for them, indeed, an opportunity, and
this thought rendered his diversion but scantily absorbing, though at
the Pavilion the Captain engaged a private box and ordered ices to be
brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that
he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own.
It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of
himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he
withheld a question which rose to his lips repeatedly—a disposition to
inquire of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out
of the public-house, if he had not been waiting there, preconcertedly,
for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s
compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked
himself if a girl could change, that way, from one month to the other.
This was optimistic, but, all the same, he reflected, before leaving
the Pavilion, that he could see quite well what Lady Aurora meant by
thinking Captain Sholto vulgar.




XXI


Paul Muniment had fits of silence, while the others were talking; but
on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he
talked Hyacinth listened, almost holding his breath; and when he said
nothing Hyacinth watched him fixedly, listening to the others only
through the medium of his candid countenance. At the ‘Sun and Moon’
Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing
that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and
Hyacinth even thought, at moments, that he was bored or irritated by
the serious manner in which the little bookbinder could not conceal
from the world that he regarded him. He wondered whether this were a
system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a
manifestation of that superior brutality, latent in his composition,
which never had an intention of unkindness but was naturally intolerant
of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the ‘Sun and Moon’; there
were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place,
and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much insistent ignorance
and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions,
made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some
inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole
furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, “Them was my
words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to—what I
say I stick to;” and others who perpetually inquired of the company,
“And what the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings—with seventeen
shillings? What am I to do with them—will ye tell me that?” an
interrogation which, in truth, usually ended by eliciting a ribald
reply. There were still others who remarked, to satiety, that if it was
not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who
constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up
the Park rails again—just to pluck them straight up. A little
shoemaker, with red eyes and a grayish face, whose appearance Hyacinth
deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of
words: “Well, are we in earnest, or ain’t we in earnest?—that’s the
thing _I_ want to know.” He was terribly in earnest himself, but this
was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common
(though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of
uncertain attributes and stertorous breathing, who was understood to
know a good deal about dogs, had fat hands, and wore on his forefinger
a big silver ring, containing some one’s hair—Hyacinth believed it to
be that of a terrier, snappish in life. He had always the same refrain:
“Well, now, are we just starving, or ain’t we just starving? I should
like the ’vice of the company on that question.”

When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace, except
that he whistled a little, leaning back, with his hands in his pockets
and his eyes on the table. Hyacinth often supposed him to be on the
point of breaking out and letting the company know what he thought of
them—he had a perfectly clear vision of what he must think; but
Muniment never compromised his popularity to that degree: he judged
it—this he once told Hyacinth—too valuable an instrument, and
cultivated the faculty of patience, which had the advantage of showing
one more and more that one must do one’s thinking for one’s self. His
popularity, indeed, struck Hyacinth as rather an uncertain quantity,
and the only mistake he had seen a symptom of on his friend’s part was
a tendency to overestimate it. Muniment thought many of their
colleagues asinine, but it was Hyacinth’s belief that he himself knew
still better how asinine they were; and this inadequate conception
supported, in some degree, on Paul’s part, his theory of his
influence—an influence that would be stronger than any other on the day
he should choose to exert it. Hyacinth only wished that day would come;
it would not be till then, he was sure, that they would all know where
they were, and that the good they were striving for, blindly,
obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog, would pass
from the stage of crude discussion and mere sharp, tantalising
desirableness into that of irresistible reality. Muniment was listened
to unanimously, when he spoke, and was much talked about, usually with
a knowing, implicit allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally
admitted that he could see further than most. But it was suspected that
he wanted to see further than was necessary; as one of the most
inveterate frequenters of the club remarked one evening, if a man could
see as far as he could chuck a brick, that was far enough. There was an
idea that he had nothing particular to complain of, personally, or that
if he had he didn’t complain of it—an attitude which perhaps contained
the germs of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth could easily see that he
himself was exposed to the same imputation, but he couldn’t help it; it
would have been impossible to him to keep up his character for
sincerity by revealing, at the ‘Sun and Moon’, the condition of his
wardrobe, or announcing that he had not had a pennyworth of bacon for
six months. There were members of the club who were apparently always
in the enjoyment of involuntary leisure—narrating the vainest
peregrinations in search of a job, the cruelest rebuffs, the most vivid
anecdotes of the insolence of office. They made Hyacinth uncomfortably
conscious, at times, that if _he_ should be out of work it would be
wholly by his own fault; that he had in his hand a bread-winning tool
on which he might absolutely count. He was also aware, however, that
his position in this little band of malcontents (it was little only if
measured by the numbers that were gathered together on any one
occasion; he liked to think it was large in its latent possibilities,
its mysterious ramifications and affiliations) was peculiar and
distinguished; it would be favourable if he had the kind of energy and
assurance that would help him to make use of it. He had an intimate
conviction—the proof of it was in the air, in the sensible facility of
his footing at the ‘Sun and Moon’—that Eustache Poupin had taken upon
himself to disseminate the anecdote of his origin, of his mother’s
disaster; in consequence of which, as the victim of social infamy, of
heinous laws, it was conceded to him that he had a larger account to
settle even than most. He was _ab ovo_ a revolutionist, and that
balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that
was perceived in him as to the _h_ (he had had from his earliest years
a natural command of it), and the fact that he possessed the sort of
hand on which there is always a premium—an accident somehow to be
guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never
challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to
reproach him with any officious step that was meant in kindness; and
moreover his fellow-labourer at old Crookenden’s had said to him, as if
to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion, “Remember, my
child, that I am incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have
preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity
will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among
the disinherited there is a mystic language which dispenses with
proofs—a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination; they understand each
other with half a word.” It was with half a word, then, in Bloomsbury,
that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy
within him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat
implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being roundabout,
as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader
because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude:
these circumstances recommended intentness but they also suggested
modesty. When the gathering at the ‘Sun and Moon’ was at its best, and
its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its
calculations—that the people was only a sleeping lion, already
breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs—at these hours,
some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth waited for the voice that
should allot to him the particular part he was to play. His ambition
was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example—an example, even,
that might survive him—of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration.
He was conscious of no commission to give the promises, to assume the
responsibilities, of a redeemer, and he had no envy of the man on whom
this burden should rest. Muniment, indeed, might carry it, and it was
the first article of his faith that to help him to carry it the better
he himself was ready for any sacrifice. Then it was—on these nights of
intenser vibration—that Hyacinth waited for a sign.

They came oftener, this second winter, for the season was terribly
hard; and as in that lower world one walked with one’s ear nearer the
ground, the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and
swell and form the whole undertone of life. The filthy air came into
the place in the damp coats of silent men, and hung there till it was
brewed to a nauseous warmth, and ugly, serious faces squared themselves
through it, and strong-smelling pipes contributed their element in a
fierce, dogged manner which appeared to say that it now had to stand
for everything—for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and
the poor things at the pawnbroker’s and the smokeless chimney at home.
Hyacinth’s colleagues seemed to him wiser then, and more permeated with
intentions boding ill to the satisfied classes; and though the note of
popularity was still most effectively struck by the man who could
demand oftenest, unpractically, “What the plague am I to do with
seventeen shillings?” it was brought home to our hero on more than one
occasion that revolution was ripe at last. This was especially the case
on the evening I began by referring to, when Eustache Poupin squeezed
in and announced, as if it were a great piece of news, that in the east
of London, that night, there were forty thousand men out of work. He
looked round the circle with his dilated foreign eye, as he took his
place; he seemed to address the company individually as well as
collectively, and to make each man responsible for hearing him. He owed
his position at the ‘Sun and Moon’ to the brilliancy with which he
represented the political exile, the magnanimous immaculate citizen
wrenched out of bed at dead of night, torn from his hearthstone, his
loved ones and his profession, and hurried across the frontier with
only the coat on his back. Poupin had performed in this character now
for many years, but he had never lost the bloom of the outraged
proscript, and the passionate pictures he had often drawn of the
bitterness of exile were moving even to those who knew with what
success he had set up his household gods in Lisson Grove. He was
recognised as suffering everything for his opinions; and his hearers in
Bloomsbury—who, after all, even in their most concentrated hours, were
very good-natured—appeared never to have made the subtle reflection,
though they made many others, that there was a want of tact in his
calling upon them to sympathise with him for being one of themselves.
He imposed himself by the eloquence of his assumption that if one were
not in the beautiful France one was nowhere worth speaking of, and
ended by producing an impression that that country had an almost
supernatural charm. Muniment had once said to Hyacinth that he was sure
Poupin would be very sorry if he should be enabled to go home again (as
he might, from one week to the other, the Republic being so indulgent
and the amnesty to the Communards constantly extended), for over there
he couldn’t be a refugee; and however this might be he certainly
flourished a good deal in London on the basis of this very fact that he
was miserable there.

“Why do you tell us that, as if it was so very striking? Don’t we know
it, and haven’t we known it always? But you are right; we behave as if
we knew nothing at all,” said Mr Schinkel, the German cabinet-maker,
who had originally introduced Captain Sholto to the ‘Sun and Moon’. He
had a long, unhealthy, benevolent face and greasy hair, and constantly
wore a kind of untidy bandage round his neck, as if for a local
ailment. “You remind us—that is very well; but we shall forget it in
half an hour. We are not serious.”

“_Pardon, pardon;_ for myself, I do not admit that!” Poupin replied,
striking the table with his finger-tips several times, very fast. “If I
am not serious, I am nothing.”

“Oh no, you are something,” said the German, smoking his monumental
pipe with a contemplative air. “We are all something; but I am not sure
it is anything very useful.”

“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d rather be in here, in
_this_ kind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who understood
dogs.

“Certainly, it is very pleasant, especially if you have your beer; but
not so pleasant in the east, where fifty thousand people starve. It is
a very unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.

“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin inquired, looking defiantly at
the German, as if to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflection.
“It is so bad that the imagination recoils, refuses.”

“Oh, we don’t care for the imagination!” the fat man declared. “We want
a compact body, in marching order.”

“What do you call a compact body?” the little gray-faced shoemaker
demanded. “I dare say you don’t mean your kind of body.”

“Well, I know what I mean,” said the fat man, severely.

“That’s a grand thing. Perhaps one of these days you’ll tell us.”

“You’ll see it for yourself, perhaps, before that day comes,” the
gentleman with the silver ring rejoined. “Perhaps when you do, you’ll
remember.”

“Well, you know, Schinkel says we don’t,” said the shoemaker, nodding
at the cloud-compelling German.

“I don’t care what no man says!” the dog-fancier exclaimed, gazing
straight before him.

“They say it’s a bad year—the blockheads in the newspapers,” Mr
Schinkel went on, addressing himself to the company at large. “They say
that on purpose—to convey the impression that there are such things as
good years. I ask the company, has any gentleman present ever happened
to notice that article? The good year is yet to come: it might begin
to-night, if we like; it all depends on our being able to be serious
for a few hours. But that is too much to expect. Mr Muniment is very
serious; he looks as if he were waiting for the signal; but he doesn’t
speak—he never speaks, if I want particularly to hear him. He only
considers, very deeply, I am sure. But it is almost as bad to think
without speaking as to speak without thinking.”

Hyacinth always admired the cool, easy way in which Muniment comported
himself when the attention of the public was directed towards him.
These manifestations of curiosity, or of hostility, would have put him
out immensely, himself. When a lot of people, especially the kind of
people who were collected at the ‘Sun and Moon’, looked at him, or
listened to him, at once, he always blushed and stammered, feeling that
if he couldn’t have a million of spectators (which would have been
inspiring) he should prefer to have but two or three; there was
something very embarrassing in twenty.

Muniment smiled, for an instant, good-humouredly; then, after a
moment’s hesitation, looking across at the German, and the German only,
as if his remark were worth noticing, but it didn’t matter if the
others didn’t understand the reply, he said simply, “Hoffendahl’s in
London.”

“Hoffendahl? _Gott in Himmel!_” the cabinet-maker exclaimed, taking the
pipe out of his mouth. And the two men exchanged a longish glance. Then
Mr Schinkel remarked, “That surprises me, _sehr_. Are you very sure?”

Muniment continued, for a moment, to look at him. “If I keep quiet for
half an hour, with so many valuable suggestions flying all round me,
you think I say too little. Then if I open my head to give out three
words, you appear to think I say too much.”

“Ah, no; on the contrary, I want you to say three more. If you tell me
you have seen him I shall be perfectly satisfied.”

“Upon my word, I should hope so! Do you think he’s the kind of party a
fellow says he has seen?”

“Yes, when he hasn’t!” said Eustache Poupin, who had been listening.
Every one was listening now.

“It depends on the fellow he says it to. Not even here?” the German
asked.

“Oh, here!” Paul Muniment exclaimed, in a peculiar tone, and resumed
his muffled whistle again.

“Take care—take care; you will make me think you haven’t!” cried
Poupin, with his excited expression.

“That’s just what I want,” said Muniment.

“_Nun_, I understand,” the cabinet-maker remarked, restoring his pipe
to his lips after an interval almost as momentous as the stoppage of a
steamer in mid-ocean.

“_’Ere_, ’ere!” repeated the small shoemaker, indignantly. “I dare say
it is as good as the place he came from. He might look in and see what
he thinks of it.”

“That’s a place you might tell us a little about, now,” the fat man
suggested, as if he had been waiting for his chance.

Before the shoemaker had time to notice this challenge some one
inquired, with a hoarse petulance, who the blazes they were talking
about; and Mr Schinkel took upon himself to reply that they were
talking about a man who hadn’t done what he had done by simply
exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with his friends in a
respectable pot-house.

“What the devil has he done, then?” some one else demanded; and
Muniment replied, quietly, that he had spent twelve years in a Prussian
prison, and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest
to the police.

“Well, if you call that very useful, I must say I prefer a pot-house!”
cried the shoemaker, appealing to all the company and looking, as it
appeared to Hyacinth, particularly hideous.

“_Doch, doch_, it is useful,” the German remarked, philosophically,
among his yellow clouds.

“Do you mean to say you are not prepared for that, yourself?” Muniment
inquired of the shoemaker.

“Prepared for that? I thought we were going to smash that sort of shop
altogether; I thought that was the main part of the job.”

“They will smash best, those who have been inside,” the German
declared; “unless, perhaps, they are broken, enervated. But Hoffendahl
is not enervated.”

“Ah, no; no smashing, no smashing,” Muniment went on. “We want to keep
them standing, and even to build a few more; but the difference will be
that we shall put the correct sort in.”

“I take your idea—that Griffin is one of the correct sort,” the fat man
remarked, indicating the shoemaker.

“I thought we was going to ’ave their ’eads—all that bloomin’ lot!” Mr
Griffin declared, protesting; while Eustache Poupin began to enlighten
the company as to the great Hoffendahl, one of the purest martyrs of
their cause, a man who had been through everything—who had been scarred
and branded, tortured, almost flayed, and had never given them the
names they wanted to have. Was it possible they didn’t remember that
great combined attempt, early in the sixties, which took place in four
Continental cities at once and which, in spite of every effort to
smother it up—there had been editors and journalists transported even
for hinting at it—had done more for the social question than anything
before or since? “Through him being served in the manner you describe?”
some one asked, with plainness; to which Poupin replied that it was one
of those failures that are more glorious than any success. Muniment
said that the affair had been only a flash in the pan, but that the
great value of it was this—that whereas some forty persons (and of both
sexes) had been engaged in it, only one had been seized and had
suffered. It had been Hoffendahl himself who was collared. Certainly he
had suffered much, he had suffered for every one; but from that point
of view—that of the economy of material—the thing had been a rare
success.

“Do you know what I call the others? I call ’em bloody sneaks!” the fat
man cried; and Eustache Poupin, turning to Muniment, expressed the hope
that he didn’t really approve of such a solution—didn’t consider that
an economy of heroism was an advantage to any cause. He himself
esteemed Hoffendahl’s attempt because it had shaken, more than
anything—except, of course, the Commune—had shaken it since the French
Revolution, the rotten fabric of the actual social order, and because
that very fact of the impunity, the invisibility, of the persons
concerned in it had given the predatory classes, had given all Europe,
a shudder that had not yet subsided; but for his part, he must regret
that some of the associates of the devoted victim had not come forward
and insisted on sharing with him his tortures and his captivity.

“_C’aurait été d’un bel exemple!_” said the Frenchman, with an
impressive moderation of statement which made even those who could not
understand him see that he was saying something fine; while the
cabinet-maker remarked that in Hoffendahl’s place any of them would
have stood out just the same. He didn’t care if they set it down to
self-love (Mr Schinkel called it ‘loaf’), but he might say that he
himself would have done so if he had been trusted and had been bagged.

“I want to have it all drawn up clear first; then I’ll go in,” said the
fat man, who seemed to think it was expected of him to be reassuring.

“Well, who the dickens is to draw it up, eh? That’s what we happen to
be talking about,” returned his antagonist the shoemaker.

“A fine example, old man? Is that your idea of a fine example?”
Muniment, with his amused face, asked of Poupin. “A fine example of
asininity! Are there capable people, in such plenty, about the place?”

“Capable of greatness of soul, I grant you not.”

“Your greatness of soul is usually greatness of blundering. A man’s
foremost duty is not to get collared. If you want to show you’re
capable, that’s the way.”

At this Hyacinth suddenly felt himself moved to speak. “But some one
must be caught, always, must he not? Hasn’t some one always been?”

“Oh, I dare say you’ll be, if you like it!” Muniment replied, without
looking at him. “If they succeed in potting you, do as Hoffendahl did,
and do it as a matter of course; but if they don’t, make it your
supreme duty, make it your religion, to lie close and keep yourself for
another go. The world is full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to
see shovelled away by the thousand; but when it’s a question of honest
men and men of courage, I protest against the idea that two should be
sacrificed where one will serve.”

“_Trop d’arithmétique—trop d’arithmétique!_ That is fearfully English!”
Poupin cried.

“No doubt, no doubt; what else should it be? You shall never share my
fate, if I have a fate and I can prevent it!” said Muniment, laughing.

Eustache Poupin stared at him and his merriment, as if he thought the
English frivolous as well as calculating; then he rejoined, “If I
suffer, I trust it may be for suffering humanity, but I trust it may
also be for France.”

“Oh, I hope you ain’t going to suffer any more for France,” said Mr
Griffin. “Hasn’t it done that insatiable old country of yours some
good, by this time, all you’ve had to put up with?”

“Well, I want to know what Hoffendahl has come over for; it’s very kind
of him, I’m sure. What is he going to do for _us?_—that’s what _I_ want
to know,” remarked in a loud, argumentative tone a personage at the end
of the table most distant from Muniment’s place. His name was Delancey,
and he gave himself out as holding a position in a manufactory of
soda-water; but Hyacinth had a secret belief that he was really a
hairdresser—a belief connected with a high, lustrous curl, or crest,
which he wore on the summit of his large head, and the manner in which
he thrust over his ear, as if it were a barber’s comb, the pencil with
which he was careful to take notes of the discussions carried on at the
‘Sun and Moon’. His opinions were distinct and frequently expressed; he
had a watery (Muniment had once called it a soda-watery) eye, and a
personal aversion to a lord. He desired to change everything except
religion, of which he approved.

Muniment answered that he was unable to say, as yet, what the German
revolutionist had come to England for, but that he hoped to be able to
give some information on the matter the next time they should meet. It
was very certain Hoffendahl hadn’t come for nothing, and he would
undertake to declare that they would all feel, within a short time,
that he had given a lift to the cause they were interested in. He had
had a great experience, and they might very well find it useful to
consult. If there was a way for them, then and there, he was sure to
know the way. “I quite agree with the majority of you—as I take it to
be,” Muniment went on, with his fresh, cheerful, reasonable manner—“I
quite agree with you that the time has come to settle upon it and to
follow it. I quite agree with you that the actual state of things
is”—he paused a moment, and then went on in the same pleasant tone—“is
hellish.”

These remarks were received with a differing demonstration: some of the
company declaring that if the Dutchman cared to come round and smoke a
pipe they would be glad to see him—perhaps he’d show where the
thumb-screws had been put on; others being strongly of the opinion that
they didn’t want any more advice—they had already had advice enough to
turn a donkey’s stomach. What they wanted was to put forth their might
without any more palaver; to do something, or for some one; to go out
somewhere and smash something, on the spot—why not?—that very night.
While they sat there and talked, there were about half a million of
people in London that didn’t know where the h—— the morrow’s meal was
to come from; what they wanted to do, unless they were just a
collection of pettifogging old women, was to show them where to get it,
to take it to them with heaped-up hands. Hyacinth listened, with a
divided attention, to interlaced iterations, while the talk blew hot
and cold; there was a genuine emotion, to-night, in the rear of the
‘Sun and Moon’, and he felt the contagion of excited purpose. But he
was following a train of his own; he was wondering what Muniment had in
reserve (for he was sure he was only playing with the company), and his
imagination, quickened by the sense of impending relations with the
heroic Hoffendahl and the discussion as to the alternative duty of
escaping or of facing one’s fate, had launched itself into possible
perils—into the idea of how he might, in a given case, settle for
himself that question of paying for the lot. The loud, contradictory,
vain, unpractical babble went on about him, but he was definitely
conscious only that the project of breaking into the bakers’ shops was
well before the assembly and was receiving a vigorous treatment, and
that there was likewise a good deal of reference to the butchers and
grocers, and even to the fishmongers. He was in a state of inward
exaltation; he was seized by an intense desire to stand face to face
with the sublime Hoffendahl, to hear his voice, to touch his mutilated
hand. He was ready for anything: he knew that he himself was safe to
breakfast and dine, poorly but sufficiently, and that his colleagues
were perhaps even more crude and clumsy than usual; but a breath of
popular passion had passed over him, and he seemed to see, immensely
magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London—the
sick, eternal misery crying, in the darkness, in vain, confronted with
granaries and treasure-houses and places of delight, where shameless
satiety kept guard. In such a mood as this Hyacinth felt that there was
no need to consider, to reason: the facts themselves were as imperative
as the cry of the drowning; for while pedantry gained time didn’t
starvation gain it too? He knew that Muniment disapproved of delay,
that he held the day had come for a forcible rectification of horrible
inequalities. In the last conversation they had had together his
chemical friend had given him a more definite warrant than he had ever
done before for numbering him in the party of immediate action, though
indeed he remarked on this occasion, once more, that that particular
formula which the little bookbinder appeared to have taken such a fancy
to was mere gibberish. He hated that sort of pretentious label; it was
fit only for politicians and amateurs. None the less he had been as
plain as possible on the point that their game must be now to frighten
society, and frighten it effectually; to make it believe that the
swindled classes were at last fairly in league—had really grasped the
idea that, closely combined, they would be irresistible. They were not
in league, and they hadn’t in their totality grasped any idea at
all—Muniment was not slow to make that equally plain. All the same,
society was scareable, and every great scare was a gain for the people.
If Hyacinth had needed warrant to-night for a faith that transcended
logic, he would have found it in his recollection of this quiet
profession; but his friend’s words came back to him mainly to make him
wonder what that friend had in his head just now. He took no part in
the violence of the talk; he had called Schinkel to come round and sit
beside him, and the two appeared to confer together in comfortable
absorption, while the brown atmosphere grew denser, the passing to and
fro of fire-brands more lively, and the flush of faces more portentous.
What Hyacinth would have liked to know most of all was why Muniment had
not mentioned to him, first, that Hoffendahl was in London, and that he
had seen him; for he _had_ seen him, though he had dodged Schinkel’s
question—of that Hyacinth instantly felt sure. He would ask for more
information later; and meanwhile he wished, without resentment, but
with a certain helpless, patient longing, that Muniment would treat him
with a little more confidence. If there were a secret in regard to
Hoffendahl (and there evidently was: Muniment, quite rightly, though he
had dropped the announcement of his arrival, for a certain effect, had
no notion of sharing the rest of what he knew with that raw roomful),
if there was something to be silent and devoted about, Hyacinth
ardently hoped that to him a chance would be given to show how he could
practise this superiority. He felt hot and nervous; he got up suddenly,
and, through the dark, tortuous, greasy passage which communicated with
the outer world, he went forth into the street. The air was foul and
sleety, but it refreshed him, and he stood in front of the public-house
and smoked another pipe. Bedraggled figures passed in and out, and a
damp, tattered, wretched man, with a spongy, purple face, who had been
thrust suddenly across the threshold, stood and whimpered in the brutal
blaze of the row of lamps. The puddles glittered roundabout, and the
silent vista of the street, bordered with low black houses, stretched
away, in the wintry drizzle, to right and left, losing itself in the
huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty
night, ominously, monstrously, still, only howling, in its pain, in the
heated human cockpit behind him. Ah, what could he do? What opportunity
would rise? The blundering, divided counsels he had been listening to
only made the helplessness of every one concerned more abject. If he
had a definite wish while he stood there it was that that exalted,
deluded company should pour itself forth, with Muniment at its head,
and surge through the sleeping city, gathering the myriad miserable out
of their slums and burrows, and roll into the selfish squares, and lift
a tremendous hungry voice, and awaken the gorged indifferent to a
terror that would bring them down. Hyacinth lingered a quarter of an
hour, but this grand spectacle gave no sign of coming off, and he
finally returned to the noisy club-room, in a state of tormented wonder
as to what better idea than this very bad one (which seemed to our
young man to have at the least the merit that it _was_ an idea)
Muniment could be revolving in that too-comprehensive brain of his.

As he re-entered the place he saw that the meeting was breaking up in
disorder, or at all events in confusion, and that, certainly, no
organised attempt at the rescue of the proletariat would take place
that night. All the men were on their feet and were turning away, amid
a shuffling of benches and chairs, a hunching of shaggy shoulders, a
frugal lowering of superfluous gas, and a varied vivacity of disgust
and resignation. The moment after Hyacinth came in, Mr Delancey, the
supposititious hairdresser, jumped upon a chair at the far end of the
room, and shrieked out an accusation which made every one stop and
stare at him—

“Well, I want you all to know what strikes me, before we part company.
There isn’t a man in the blessed lot that isn’t afraid of his bloody
skin—afraid, afraid, afraid! I’ll go anywhere with any one, but there
isn’t another, by G—— by what I can make out! There isn’t a mother’s
son of you that’ll risk his precious bones!”

This little oration affected Hyacinth like a quick blow in the face; it
seemed to leap at him personally, as if a three-legged stool, or some
hideous hob-nailed boot, had been shied at him. The room surged round,
heaving up and down, while he was conscious of a loud explosion of
laughter and scorn; of cries of “Order, order!” of some clear word of
Muniment’s, “I say, Delancey, just step down;” of Eustache Poupin
shouting out, “_Vous insultez le peuple—vous insultez le peuple!_” of
other retorts, not remarkable for refinement. The next moment Hyacinth
found that he had sprung up on a chair, opposite to the barber, and
that at the sight of so rare a phenomenon the commotion had suddenly
checked itself. It was the first time he had asked the ear of the
company, and it was given on the spot. He was sure he looked very
white, and it was even possible they could see him tremble. He could
only hope that this didn’t make him ridiculous when he said, “I don’t
think it’s right of him to say that. There are others, besides him. At
all events, I want to speak for myself: it may do some good; I can’t
help it. I’m not afraid; I’m very sure I’m not. I’m ready to do
anything that will do any good; anything, anything—I don’t care a rap.
In such a cause I should like the idea of danger. I don’t consider my
bones precious in the least, compared with some other things. If one is
sure one isn’t afraid, and one is accused, why shouldn’t one say so?”

It appeared to Hyacinth that he was talking a long time, and when it
was over he scarcely knew what happened. He felt himself, in a moment,
down almost under the feet of the other men; stamped upon with
intentions of applause, of familiarity; laughed over and jeered over,
hustled and poked in the ribs. He felt himself also pressed to the
bosom of Eustache Poupin, who apparently was sobbing, while he heard
some say, “Did ye hear the little beggar, as bold as a lion?” A trial
of personal prowess between him and Mr Delancey was proposed, but
somehow it didn’t take place, and at the end of five minutes the
club-room emptied itself, not, evidently, to be reconstituted, outside,
in a revolutionary procession. Paul Muniment had taken hold of
Hyacinth, and said, “I’ll trouble you to stay, you little desperado.
I’ll be blowed if I ever expected to see _you_ on the stump!” Muniment
remained, and M. Poupin and Mr Schinkel lingered in their overcoats,
beneath a dim, surviving gasburner, in the unventilated medium in
which, at each renewed gathering, the Bloomsbury club seemed to
recognise itself.

“Upon my word, I believe you’re game,” said Muniment, looking down at
him with a serious face.

“Of course you think it’s swagger, ‘self-loaf’, as Schinkel says. But
it isn’t.” Then Hyacinth asked, “In God’s name, why don’t we do
something?”

“Ah, my child, to whom do you say it?” Eustache Poupin exclaimed,
folding his arms, despairingly.

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?” said Muniment.

“All the lot of us. There are plenty of them ready.”

“Ready for what? There is nothing to be done here.”

Hyacinth stared. “Then why the deuce do you come?”

“I dare say I shan’t come much more. This is a place you have always
overestimated.”

“I wonder if I have overestimated you,” Hyacinth murmured, gazing at
his friend.

“Don’t say that—he’s going to introduce us to Hoffendahl!” Schinkel
exclaimed, putting away his pipe in a receptacle almost as large as a
fiddle-case.

“Should you like to see the genuine article, Robinson?” Muniment asked,
with the same unusual absence of jocosity in his tone.

“The genuine article?” Hyacinth looked from one of his companions to
the other.

“You have never seen it yet—though you think you have.”

“And why haven’t you shown it to me before?”

“Because I had never seen you on the stump.” This time Muniment smiled.

“Bother the stump! I was trusting you.”

“Exactly so. That gave me time.”

“Don’t come unless your mind is made up, _mon petit_,” said Poupin.

“Are you going now—to see Hoffendahl?” Hyacinth cried.

“Don’t shout it all over the place. He wants a genteel little customer
like you,” Muniment went on.

“Is it true? Are we all going?” Hyacinth demanded eagerly.

“Yes, these two are in it; they are not very artful, but they are
safe,” said Muniment, looking at Poupin and Schinkel.

“Are _you_ the genuine article, Muniment?” asked Hyacinth, catching
this look.

Muniment dropped his eyes on him; then he said, “Yes, you’re the boy he
wants. It’s at the other end of London; we must have a growler.”

“Be calm, my child; _me voici!_” And Eustache Poupin led Hyacinth out.

They all walked away from the ‘Sun and Moon’, and it was not for some
five minutes that they encountered the four-wheeled cab which deepened
so the solemnity of their expedition. After they were seated in it,
Hyacinth learned that Hoffendahl was in London but for three days, was
liable to hurry away on the morrow, and was accustomed to receive
visits at all kinds of queer hours. It was getting to be midnight; the
drive seemed interminable, to Hyacinth’s impatience and curiosity. He
sat next to Muniment, who passed his arm round him, as if by way of
tacit expression of indebtedness. They all ended by sitting silent, as
the cab jogged along murky miles, and by the time it stopped Hyacinth
had wholly lost, in the drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts.




BOOK THIRD




XXII


Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as
he had scarcely closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window
made him dress as rapidly as a young man could do who desired more than
ever that his appearance should not give strange ideas about him: an
old garden, with parterres in curious figures, and little intervals of
lawn which appeared to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green.
At one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick, which looked
down on the other side into a canal, or moat, or quaint old pond; and
from the same standpoint there was also a view of a considerable part
of the main body of the house (Hyacinth’s room appeared to be in a wing
commanding the extensive, irregular back), which was richly gray
wherever it was not green with ivy and other dense creepers, and
everywhere infinitely like a picture, with a high-piled, ancient,
russet roof, broken by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all
manner of odd gables and windows on different lines and antique patches
and protrusions, and a particularly fascinating architectural
excrescence in which a wonderful clock-face was lodged—a clock-face
covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years
and the weather. Hyacinth had never in his life been in the country—the
real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere
ravelled fringe of London—and there entered through his open casement
the breath of a world enchantingly new and, after his recent feverish
hours, inexpressibly refreshing to him; a sense of sweet, sunny air and
mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and a kind of musical
silence, the greater part of which seemed to consist of the voices of
birds. There were tall, quiet trees near by, and afar off, and
everywhere; and the group of objects which greeted Hyacinth’s eyes
evidently formed only a corner of larger spaces and a more complicated
scene. There was a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting, with
the dew upon it, under his windows, and he must go down and take his
first steps in it.

The night before, at ten o’clock, when he arrived, he had only got the
impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate;
of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly; and of the glow
of several windows, suggesting in-door cheer, in a façade that lifted a
variety of vague pinnacles into the starlight. It was much of a relief
to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration of the
lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow; the delay
would give him time to recover his balance and look about him. This
latter opportunity was offered him first as he sat at supper in a vast
dining-room, with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South
Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should be
treated: there was too much vagueness in his conception of the way in
which, at a country-house, insidious distinctions might be made and
shades of importance illustrated; but it was plain that the best had
been ordered for him. He was, at all events, abundantly content with
his reception and more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate
(though his other senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he
ate, as it were, without eating), and the grave mechanical servant
filled his glass with a liquor that reminded him of some lines in
Keats—in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. He wondered whether he should hear
a nightingale at Medley (he knew nothing about the seasons of this
vocalist), and also whether the butler would attempt to talk to him,
had ideas about him, knew or suspected who he was and what; which,
after all, there was no reason for his doing, unless it might be the
poverty of the luggage that had been transported from Lomax Place. Mr
Withers, however (it was in this manner that Hyacinth heard him
addressed by the cabman who conveyed the visitor from the station),
gave no further symptom of sociability than to ask him at what time he
would be called in the morning; to which our young man replied that he
preferred not to be called at all—he would get up by himself. The
butler rejoined, “Very good, sir,” while Hyacinth thought it probable
that he puzzled him a good deal, and even considered the question of
giving him a glimpse of his identity, lest it should be revealed,
later, in a manner less graceful. The object of this anticipatory step,
in Hyacinth’s mind, was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed
with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing,
for the simple reason that before he spoke he found that he already
_was_ inured to being waited upon. His impulse to deprecate attentions
departed, and he became conscious that there were none he should care
to miss, or was not quite prepared for. He knew he probably thanked Mr
Withers too much, but he couldn’t help this—it was an irrepressible
tendency and an error he should doubtless always commit.

He lay in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to insure rest that
it was probably responsible in some degree for his restlessness, and in
a large, high room, where long dressing-glasses emitted ghostly glances
even after the light was extinguished. Suspended on the walls were many
prints, mezzotints and old engravings, which Hyacinth supposed,
possibly without reason, to be fine and rare. He got up several times
in the night, lighted his candle and walked about looking at them. He
looked at himself in one of the long glasses, and in a place where
everything was on such a scale it seemed to him more than ever that
Mademoiselle Vivier’s son was a tiny particle. As he came downstairs he
encountered housemaids, with dusters and brooms, or perceived them,
through open doors, on their knees before fireplaces; and it was his
belief that they regarded him more boldly than if he had been a guest
of the usual kind. Such a reflection as that, however, ceased to
trouble him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through
the park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in
narrowing circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled for an hour,
in a state of breathless ecstasy; brushing the dew from the deep fern
and bracken and the rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant
air, and stopping everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of
some exquisite impression. His whole walk was peopled with
recognitions; he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place
and such objects, such a morning and such a chance. It was the last of
April, and everything was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the
early air, were a blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he
revolved repeatedly; catching every point and tone, feasting on its
expression, and wondering whether the Princess would observe his
proceedings from the window, and whether, if she did, they would be
offensive to her. The house was not hers, but only hired for three
months, and it could flatter no princely pride that he should be struck
with it. There was something in the way the gray walls rose from the
green lawn that brought tears to his eyes; the spectacle of long
duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to
him; he had lived with people among whom old age meant, for the most
part, a grudged and degraded survival. In the majestic preservation of
Medley there was a kind of serenity of success, an accumulation of
dignity and honour.

A footman sought him out, in the garden, to tell him that breakfast was
ready. He had never thought of breakfast, and as he walked back to the
house, attended by the inscrutable flunkey, this offer appeared a free,
extravagant gift, unexpected and romantic. He found he was to breakfast
alone, and he asked no questions; but when he had finished the butler
came in and informed him that the Princess would see him after
luncheon, but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand that
the library was entirely at his service. ‘After luncheon’—that threw
the hour he had come for very far into the future, and it caused him
some confusion of mind that the Princess should think it worth while to
invite him to stay at her house from Saturday evening to Monday morning
if it had been her purpose that so much of his visit should elapse
without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor impatient; the
impressions that had already crowded upon him were in themselves a
sufficient reward, and what could one do better, precisely, in such a
house as that, than wait for a princess? The butler showed him the way
to the library, and left him planted in the middle of it, staring at
the treasures that he instantly perceived it contained. It was an old
brown room, of great extent—even the ceiling was brown, though there
were figures in it dimly gilt—where row upon row of finely-lettered
backs returned his discriminating professional gaze. A fire of logs
crackled in a great chimney, and there were alcoves with deep
window-seats, and arm-chairs such as he had never seen, luxurious,
leather-covered, with an adjustment for holding one’s volume; and a
vast writing-table, before one of the windows, furnished with a perfect
magazine of paper and pens, inkstands and blotters, seals, stamps,
candlesticks, reels of twine, paper-weights, book-knives. Hyacinth had
never imagined so many aids to correspondence, and before he turned
away he had written a note to Millicent, in a hand even more beautiful
than usual—his penmanship was very minute, but at the same time
wonderfully free and fair—largely for the pleasure of seeing ‘Medley
Hall’ stamped in crimson, heraldic-looking characters at the top of his
paper. In the course of an hour he had ravaged the collection, taken
down almost every book, wishing he could keep it a week, and put it
back quickly, as his eye caught the next, which appeared even more
desirable. He discovered many rare bindings, and gathered several ideas
from an inspection of them—ideas which he felt himself perfectly
capable of reproducing. Altogether, his vision of true happiness, at
that moment, was that, for a month or two, he should be locked into the
library at Medley. He forgot the outer world, and the morning waned—the
beautiful vernal Sunday—while he lingered there.

He was on the top of a ladder when he heard a voice remark, “I am
afraid they are very dusty; in this house, you know, it is the dust of
centuries;” and, looking down, he saw Madame Grandoni stationed in the
middle of the room. He instantly prepared to descend, to make her his
salutation, when she exclaimed, “Stay, stay, if you are not giddy; we
can talk from here! I only came in to show you we _are_ in the house,
and to tell you to keep up your patience. The Princess will probably
see you in a few hours.”

“I really hope so,” said Hyacinth, from his perch, rather dismayed at
the ‘probably’.

“_Natürlich_,” the old lady rejoined; “but people have come, sometimes,
and gone away without seeing her. It all depends upon her mood.”

“Do you mean even when she has sent for them?”

“Oh, who can tell whether she has sent for them or not?”

“But she sent for me, you know,” Hyacinth declared, staring down—struck
with the odd effect of Madame Grandoni’s wig in that bird’s-eye view.

“Oh yes, she sent for you, poor young man!” The old lady looked up at
him with a smile, and they remained a moment exchanging a silent
scrutiny. Then she added, “Captain Sholto has come, like that, more
than once; and he has gone away no better off.”

“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.

“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She took
her way back to it (she had left it open) and pushed it to; then
advanced into the room again, with her superannuated, shuffling step,
walking as if her shoes were too big for her. Hyacinth meanwhile
descended the ladder. “_Ecco!_ She’s a _capricciosa_,” said the old
lady.

“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked, gravely.
“You seem to be her friend, yet you say things that are not favourable
to her.”

“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should
ever say to you. I am rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I
ought to be particularly kind. But I am not false. It is not our German
nature. You will hear me some day. I _am_ the friend of the Princess;
it would be well enough if she never had a worse one! But I should like
to be yours, too—what will you have? Perhaps it is of no use. At any
rate, here you are.”

“Yes, here I am, decidedly!” Hyacinth laughed, uneasily.

“And how long shall you stay? Excuse me if I ask that; it is part of my
rudeness.”

“I shall stay till to-morrow morning. I must be at my work by noon.”

“That will do very well. Don’t you remember, the other time, how I told
you to remain faithful?”

“That was very good advice. But I think you exaggerate my danger.”

“So much the better,” said Madame Grandoni; “though now that I look at
you well I doubt it a little. I see you are one of those types that
ladies like. I can be sure of that, because I like you myself. At my
age—a hundred and twenty—can I not say that? If the Princess were to do
so, it would be different; remember that—that any flattery she may ever
offer you will be on her lips much less discreet. But perhaps she will
never have the chance; you may never come again. There are people who
have come only once. _Vedremo bene_. I must tell you that I am not in
the least against a young man taking a holiday, a little quiet
recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued, in her
disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take it every
five days; that is, no doubt, too often. In Germany, less often. In
this country, I cannot understand whether it is an increase of effort:
the English Sunday is so difficult! This one will, however, in any
case, have been beautiful for you. Be happy, make yourself comfortable;
but go home to-morrow!” And with this injunction Madame Grandoni took
her way again to the door, while Hyacinth went to open it for her. “I
can say that, because it is not my house. I am only here like you. And
sometimes I think I also shall go to-morrow!”

“I imagine you have not, like me, your living to get, every day. That
is reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.

She paused in the doorway, with her expressive, ugly, kindly little
eyes on his face. “I believe I am nearly as poor as you. And I have
not, like you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I am noble,” said the
old lady, shaking her wig.

“And I am not!” Hyacinth rejoined, smiling.

“It is better not to be lifted up high, like our friend. It does not
give happiness.”

“Not to one’s self, possibly; but to others!” From where they stood,
Hyacinth looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted
from above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflection of
this grandeur came into his appreciative eyes.

“Do you admire everything here very much—do you receive great
pleasure?” asked Madame Grandoni.

“Oh, so much—so much!”

She considered him a moment longer. “_Poverino!_” she murmured, as she
turned away.

A couple of hours later the Princess sent for Hyacinth, and he was
conducted upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung
with pictures, and ushered into a kind of bright drawing-room, which he
afterwards learned that his hostess regarded as her boudoir. The sound
of music had come to him outside the door, so that he was prepared to
find her seated at the piano, if not to see her continue to play after
he appeared. Her face was turned in the direction from which he
entered, and she smiled at him while the servant, as if he had just
arrived, formally pronounced his name, without lifting her hands from
the keys. The room, placed in an angle of the house and lighted from
two sides, was large and sunny, upholstered in fresh, gay chintz,
furnished with all sorts of sofas and low, familiar seats and
convenient little tables, most of them holding great bowls of early
flowers, littered over with books, newspapers, magazines, photographs
of celebrities, with their signatures, and full of the marks of
luxurious and rather indolent habitation. Hyacinth stood there, not
advancing very far, and the Princess, still playing and smiling, nodded
toward a seat near the piano. “Put yourself there and listen to me.”
Hyacinth obeyed, and she played a long time without glancing at him.
This left him the more free to rest his eyes on her own face and
person, while she looked about the room, vaguely, absently, but with an
expression of quiet happiness, as if she were lost in her music,
soothed and pacified by it. A window near her was half open, and the
soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused
themselves, and made the place cheerful and pure. The Princess struck
him as extraordinarily young and fair, and she seemed so slim and
simple, and friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her
occupation nor offered him her hand, that he sank back in his seat at
last, with the sense that all his uneasiness, his nervous tension, was
leaving him, and that he was safe in her kindness, in the free,
original way with which she evidently would always treat him. This
peculiar manner—half consideration, half fellowship—seemed to him
already to have the sweetness of familiarity. She played ever so
movingly, with different pieces succeeding each other; he had never
listened to music, nor to a talent, of that order. Two or three times
she turned her eyes upon him, and then they shone with the wonderful
expression which was the essence of her beauty; that profuse, mingled
light which seemed to belong to some everlasting summer, and yet to
suggest seasons that were past and gone, some experience that was only
an exquisite memory. She asked him if he cared for music, and then
added, laughing, that she ought to have made sure of this before; while
he answered—he had already told her so in South Street; she appeared to
have forgotten—that he was awfully fond of it.

The sense of the beauty of women had been given to our young man in a
high degree; it was a faculty that made him conscious, to adoration, of
every element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and
tone, that contributed to charm. Even, therefore, if he had appreciated
less the deep harmonies the Princess drew from the piano, there would
have been no lack of interest in his situation, in such an opportunity
to watch her admirable outline and movement, the noble form of her head
and face, the gathered-up glories of her hair, the living, flower-like
freshness which had no need to turn from the light. She was dressed in
fair colours, as simply as a young girl. Before she ceased playing she
asked Hyacinth what he would like to do in the afternoon: would he have
any objection to taking a drive with her? It was very possible he might
enjoy the country. She seemed not to attend to his answer, which was
covered by the sound of the piano; but if she had done so it would have
left her very little doubt as to the reality of his inclination. She
remained gazing at the cornice of the room, while her hands wandered to
and fro; then suddenly she stopped, got up and came toward her
companion. “It is probable that is the most I shall ever bore you; you
know the worst. Would you very kindly close the piano?” He complied
with her request, and she went to another part of the room and sank
into an arm-chair. When he approached her again she said, “Is it really
true that you have never seen a park, nor a garden, nor any of the
beauties of nature, and that sort of thing?” She was alluding to
something he had said in his letter, when he answered the note by which
she proposed to him to run down to Medley; and after he assured her
that it was perfectly true she exclaimed, “I’m so glad—I’m so glad! I
have never been able to show any one anything new, and I have always
thought I should like it so—especially to a sensitive nature. Then you
_will_ come and drive with me?” She asked this as if it would be a
great favour.

That was the beginning of the communion—so singular, considering their
respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy; and it
passed into some very remarkable phases. The Princess had the most
extraordinary way of taking things for granted, of ignoring
difficulties, of assuming that her preferences might be translated into
fact. After Hyacinth had remained with her ten minutes longer—a period
mainly occupied with her exclamations of delight at his having seen so
little of the sort of thing of which Medley consisted (Where should he
have seen it, gracious heaven? he asked himself); after she had rested,
thus briefly, from her exertions at the piano, she proposed that they
should go out-of-doors together. She was an immense walker—she wanted
her walk. She left him for a short time, giving him the last number of
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ to entertain himself withal, and calling
his attention, in particular, to a story of M. Octave Feuillet (she
should be so curious to know what he thought of it); and reappeared
with her hat and parasol, drawing on her long gloves, and presenting
herself to our young man, at that moment, as a sudden incarnation of
the heroine of M. Feuillet’s novel, in which he had instantly become
immersed. On their way downstairs it occurred to her that he had not
yet seen the house and that it would be amusing for her to show it to
him; so she turned aside and took him through it, up and down and
everywhere, even into the vast, old-fashioned kitchen, where there was
a small, red-faced man in a white jacket and apron and a white cap (he
removed the latter ornament to salute the little bookbinder), with whom
his companion spoke Italian, which Hyacinth understood sufficiently to
perceive that she addressed her cook in the second person singular, as
if he had been a feudal retainer. He remembered that was the way the
three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys. The Princess explained that
the gentleman in the white cap was a delightful creature (she couldn’t
endure English servants, though she was obliged to have two or three),
who would make her plenty of risottos and polentas—she had quite the
palate of a contadina. She showed Hyacinth everything: the queer
transmogrified corner that had once been a chapel; the secret stairway
which had served in the persecutions of the Catholics (the owners of
Medley were, like the Princess herself, of the old persuasion); the
musicians’ gallery, over the hall; the tapestried room, which people
came from a distance to see; and the haunted chamber (the two were
sometimes confounded, but they were quite distinct), where a dreadful
individual at certain times made his appearance—a dwarfish ghost, with
an enormous head, a dispossessed brother, of long ago (the eldest), who
had passed for an idiot, which he wasn’t, and had somehow been made
away with. The Princess offered her visitor the privilege of sleeping
in this apartment, declaring, however, that nothing would induce _her_
even to enter it alone, she being a benighted creature, consumed with
abject superstitions. “I don’t know whether I am religious, and
whether, if I were, my religion would be superstitious, but my
superstitions are certainly religious.” She made her young friend pass
through the drawing-room very cursorily, remarking that they should see
it again: it was rather stupid—drawing-rooms in English country-houses
were always stupid; indeed, if it would amuse him, they would sit there
after dinner. Madame Grandoni and she usually sat upstairs, but they
would do anything that he should find more comfortable.

At last they went out of the house together, and as they did so she
explained, as if she wished to justify herself against the imputation
of extravagance, that, though the place doubtless struck him as
absurdly large for a couple of quiet women, and the whole thing was not
in the least what she would have preferred, yet it was all far cheaper
than he probably imagined; she would never have looked at it if it
hadn’t been cheap. It must appear to him so preposterous for a woman to
associate herself with the great uprising of the poor and yet live in
palatial halls—a place with forty or fifty rooms. This was one of only
two allusions she made that day to her democratic sympathies; but it
fell very happily, for Hyacinth had been reflecting precisely upon the
anomaly she mentioned. It had been present to him all day; it added
much to the way life practised on his sense of the tragic-comical to
think of the Princess’s having retired to that magnificent residence in
order to concentrate her mind upon the London slums. He listened,
therefore, with great attention while she related that she had taken
the house for only three months, in any case, because she wanted to
rest, after a winter of visiting and living in public (as the English
spent their lives, with all their celebrated worship of the ‘home’),
and yet didn’t wish as yet to return to town—though she was obliged to
confess that she had still the place in South Street on her hands,
thanks to her deciding unexpectedly to go on with it rather than move
out her things. But one had to keep one’s things somewhere, and why
wasn’t that as good a receptacle as another? Medley was not what she
would have chosen if she had been left to herself; but she had not been
left to herself—she never was; she had been bullied into taking it by
the owners, whom she had met somewhere and who had made up to her
immensely, persuading her that she might really have it for nothing—for
no more than she would give for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old
parsonage embowered in clematis, which were really what she had been
looking for. Besides it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so
far from town, which it was always difficult to let, or to get a price
for; and then it was a wretched house for living in. Hyacinth, for whom
his three hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not
been struck with its geographical remoteness, and he asked the Princess
what she meant, in such a connection, by using the word ‘wretched’. To
this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, inconvenient in
every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That is the only reason
I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me more luxurious than I
am, or that I throw away money. Never, never!” Hyacinth had no standard
by which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for
her, and he perceived that though she judged him as a creature still
open to every initiation, whose _naïveté_ would entertain her, it was
also her fancy to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she
might have had the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance
of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and
everything lay before him but the reason she had for playing it.

One of the gardens at Medley took the young man’s heart beyond the
others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a
great training of apricots and plums, and straight walks, bordered with
old-fashioned homely flowers, inclosing immense squares where other
fruit-trees stood upright and mint and lavender floated in the air. In
the southern quarter it overhung a small, disused canal, and here a
high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad and
covered with fine turf; so that the top of it, looking down at the
canal, made a magnificent grassy terrace, than which, on a summer’s
day, there could be no more delightful place for strolling up and down
with a companion—all the more that, at either end, was a curious
pavilion, in the manner of a tea-house, which completed the scene in an
old-world sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or
shower. One of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and
superfluous flower-pots; the other was covered, inside, with a queer
Chinese paper, representing ever so many times over a group of people
with faces like blind kittens, having tea while they sat on the floor.
It also contained a big, clumsy inlaid cabinet, in which cups and
saucers showed themselves through doors of greenish glass, together
with a carved cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf, over
a sofa, not very comfortable though it had cushions of faded tapestry,
which looked like samplers, was a row of novels, out of date and out of
print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only
there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves, mixed with
some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness.

On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess until she
suddenly remembered that he had not had his luncheon. He protested that
this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared that
she had not asked him down to Medley to starve him and that he must go
back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way, through
the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk. She
explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock, in the
foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was so foreign
he might like that better, and in this case, on the morrow, they would
breakfast together. He could have coffee, and anything else he wanted,
brought to his room when he woke up. When Hyacinth had sufficiently
composed himself, in the presence of this latter image—he thought he
saw a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside—he mentioned
that really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in
London. There was a train at nine o’clock; he hoped she didn’t mind his
taking it. She looked at him a moment, gravely and kindly, as if she
were considering an abstract idea, and then she said, “Oh yes, I mind
it very much. Not to-morrow—some other day.” He made no rejoinder, and
the Princess spoke of something else; that is, his rejoinder was
private, and consisted of the reflection that he _would_ leave Medley
in the morning, whatever she might say. He simply couldn’t afford to
stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And then Madame Grandoni thought it
so important; for though the old lady was obscure she was decidedly
impressive. The Princess’s protest, however, was to be reckoned with;
he felt that it might take a form less cursory than the words she had
just uttered, which would make it embarrassing. She was less solemn,
less explicit, than Madame Grandoni had been, but there was something
in her slight seriousness and the delicate way in which she signified a
sort of command that seemed to tell him his liberty was going—the
liberty he had managed to keep (till the other day, when he gave
Hoffendahl a mortgage on it), and the possession of which had in some
degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This made him uneasy;
what would become of him if he should add another servitude to the one
he had undertaken, at the end of that long, anxious cab-drive in the
rain, in that dim back-bedroom of a house as to whose whereabouts he
was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel, all
visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and Poupin and
Schinkel—how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them at the
present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the
pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter, at least, if they could
have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!

As to this, Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess
touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and
conclusions she had gathered, since their former meeting. It was to
such matters as these that she directed the conversation; she appeared
to wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her
continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended
sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked
of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted, as
before, that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed he was
edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he didn’t
know what she was talking about. At all events, if _he_ had been with
the dukes (she didn’t call her associates dukes, but Hyacinth was sure
they were of that order), he would have got more satisfaction from
them. She appeared, on the whole, to judge the English world severely;
to think poorly of its wit, and even worse of its morals. “You know
people oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dull,” she said; and Hyacinth
turned this over, feeling that he certainly had not yet caught the
point of view of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of
bores. He had sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing that it was
fabulously profligate, but he was rather disappointed in the bad
account the Princess gave of it. She remarked that she herself was very
corrupt—she ought to have mentioned that before—but she had never been
accused of being stupid. Perhaps he would discover it, but most of the
people she had had to do with thought her only too lively. The second
allusion that she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and hers)
was when she said, “I determined to see it”—she was speaking still of
English society—“to learn for myself what it really is, before we blow
it up. I have been here now a year and a half, and, as I tell you, I
feel that I have seen. It is the old régime again, the rottenness and
extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which
the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a
reproduction of Roman society in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic,
depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and
scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are
the barbarians, you know.” The Princess was pretty general, after all,
in her animadversions, and regaled him with no anecdotes (he rather
missed them) that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed.
She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador. By
way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t be
true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she had
let him know that she liked him to speak in the manner of the people),
inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them—a noble lady—who was one
of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible
to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she
asked, “Whom do you mean—a noble lady?”

“I suppose there is no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.”

“I don’t know her. Is she nice?”

“I like her ever so much.”

“Is she pretty, clever?”

“She isn’t pretty, but she is very uncommon,” said Hyacinth.

“How did you make her acquaintance?” As he hesitated, she went on, “Did
you bind some books for her?”

“No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.”

“Where is that?”

“In Camberwell.”

“And who lives there?”

“A young woman I was calling on, who is bedridden.”

“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lydia Languish?—goes
to see her?”

“Yes, very often.”

The Princess was silent a moment, looking at him. “Will you take me
there?”

“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the
chemist’s assistant you will perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”

“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I am
sorry,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth inquired what she
might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, and
presently remarked, “Perhaps she goes to see him.”

“Goes to see whom?”

“The chemist’s assistant—the brother.” She said this very seriously.

“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth rejoined, laughing. “But she is a fine
sort of woman.”

The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again asked her for
what—for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied, “No; I
mean for my not being the first—what is it you call them?—noble lady
that you have encountered.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you
don’t make an impression on me.”

“I was not thinking of that. I was thinking that you might be less
fresh than I thought.”

“Of course I don’t know what you thought,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

“No; how should you?”




XXIII


He was in the library, after luncheon, when word was brought to him
that the carriage was at the door, for their drive; and when he went
into the hall he found Madame Grandoni, bonneted and cloaked, awaiting
the descent of the Princess. “You see I go with you. I am always
there,” she remarked, jovially. “The Princess has me with her to take
care of her, and this is how I do it. Besides, I never miss my drive.”

“You are different from me; this will be the first I have ever had in
my life.” He could establish that distinction without bitterness,
because he was too pleased with his prospect to believe the old lady’s
presence could spoil it. He had nothing to say to the Princess that she
might not hear. He didn’t dislike her for coming, even after she had
said to him, in answer to his own announcement, speaking rather more
sententiously than was her wont, “It doesn’t surprise me that you have
not spent your life in carriages. They have nothing to do with your
trade.”

“Fortunately not,” he answered. “I should have made a ridiculous
coachman.”

The Princess appeared, and they mounted into a great square barouche,
an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle, with a green body, a faded
hammer-cloth and a rumble where the footman sat (the Princess mentioned
that it had been let with the house), which rolled ponderously and
smoothly along the winding avenue and through the gilded gates (they
were surmounted with an immense escutcheon) of the park. The progress
of this oddly composed trio had a high respectability, and that is one
of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion to be tremendously
memorable. There might still be greater joys in store for him—he was by
this time quite at sea, and could recognise no shores—but he would
never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and
comprehensive, but very little was said while it lasted. “I shall show
you the whole country: it is exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the
heart.” Of so much as this his hostess had informed him at the start;
and she added, in French, with a light, allusive nod at the rich,
humanised landscape, “_Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre_.” For the
rest, she sat there opposite to him, in quiet fairness, under her
softly-swaying, lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she
noticed that his eyes rested; allowing them, when the carriage passed
anything particularly charming, to meet his own; smiling as if she
enjoyed the whole affair very nearly as much as he; and now and then
calling his attention to some prospect, some picturesque detail, by
three words of which the cadence was sociable. Madame Grandoni dozed
most of the time, with her chin resting on rather a mangy ermine
tippet, in which she had enveloped herself; expanding into
consciousness at moments, however, to greet the scenery with
comfortable polyglot ejaculations. If Hyacinth was exalted, during
these delightful hours, he at least measured his exaltation, and it
kept him almost solemnly still, as if with the fear that a wrong
movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain to fall
upon the play. This was especially the case when his senses oscillated
back from the objects that sprang up by the way, every one of which was
a rich image of something he had longed for, to the most beautiful
woman in England, who sat there, close to him, as completely for his
benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to make her portrait. More
than once he saw everything through a mist; his eyes were full of
tears.

That evening they sat in the drawing-room after dinner, as the Princess
had promised, or, as he was inclined to consider it, threatened him.
The force of the threat was in his prevision that the ladies would make
themselves fine, and that in contrast with the setting and company he
should feel dingier than ever; having already on his back the only
tolerably decent coat he possessed, and being unable to exchange it for
a garment of the pattern that civilised people (so much he knew, if he
couldn’t emulate them) put on about eight o’clock. The ladies, when
they came to dinner, looked festal indeed; but Hyacinth was able to
make the reflection that he was more pleased to be dressed as he was
dressed, meanly and unsuitably as it was, than he should have been to
present such a figure as Madame Grandoni, in whose toggery there was
something comical. He was coming more and more round to the sense that
if the Princess didn’t mind his poorness, in every way, he had no call
to mind it himself. His present circumstances were not of his
seeking—they had been forced upon him; they were not the fruit of a
disposition to push. How little the Princess minded—how much, indeed,
she enjoyed the consciousness that in having him about her in that
manner she was playing a trick upon society, the false and conventional
society she had measured and despised—was manifest from the way she had
introduced him to the people they found awaiting them in the hall on
the return from their drive: four ladies, a mother and three daughters,
who had come over to call, from Broome, a place some five miles off.
Broome was also a great house, as he gathered, and Lady Marchant, the
mother, was the wife of a county magnate. She explained that they had
come in on the persuasion of the butler, who had represented the return
of the Princess as imminent, and who then had administered tea without
waiting for this event. The evening had drawn in chill; there was a
fire in the hall, and they all sat near it, round the tea-table, under
the great roof which rose to the top of the house. Hyacinth conversed
mainly with one of the daughters, a very fine girl with a straight back
and long arms, whose neck was encircled so tightly with a fur boa that,
to look a little to one side, she was obliged to move her whole body.
She had a handsome, inanimate face, over which the firelight played
without making it more lively, a beautiful voice, and the occasional
command of a few short words. She asked Hyacinth with what pack he
hunted, and whether he went in much for tennis, and she ate three
muffins.

Our young man perceived that Lady Marchant and her daughters had
already been at Medley, and even guessed that their reception by the
Princess, who probably thought them of a tiresome type, had not been
enthusiastic; and his imagination projected itself, further still, into
the motives which, in spite of this tepidity, must have led them, in
consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country, to come a
second time. The talk, in the firelight, while Hyacinth laboured,
rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion, on his hostess’s
part, was passing into his own blood), with his muffin-eating
beauty—the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate
tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd, evident
_parti-pris_ of the Princess’s to make poor Lady Marchant explain
everything. With great urbanity of manner, she professed complete
inability to understand the sense in which her visitor meant her thin
remarks; and Hyacinth was scarcely able to follow her here, he wondered
so what interest she could have in trying to appear dense. It was only
afterwards he learned that the Marchant family produced a very
peculiar, and at moments almost maddening, effect upon her nerves. He
asked himself what would happen to that member of it with whom he was
engaged if it should be revealed to her that she was conversing (how
little soever) with a beggarly London artisan; and though he was rather
pleased at her not having discovered his station (for he didn’t
attribute her brevity to this idea), he entertained a little the
question of its being perhaps his duty not to keep it hidden from her,
not to flourish in a cowardly disguise. What did she take him for—or,
rather, what didn’t she take him for—when she asked him if he hunted?
Perhaps that was because it was rather dark; if there had been more
light in the great vague hall she would have seen he was not one of
themselves. Hyacinth felt that by this time he had associated a good
deal with swells, but they had always known what he was and had been
able to elect how to treat him. This was the first occasion on which a
young gentlewoman had not been warned, and, as a consequence, he
appeared to pass muster. He determined not to unmask himself, on the
simple ground that he should by the same stroke betray the Princess. It
was quite open to her to lean over and say to Miss Marchant, “You know
he’s a wretched little bookbinder, earning a few shillings a week in a
horrid street in Soho. There are all kinds of low things—and I suspect
even something very horrible—connected with his birth. It seems to me I
ought to mention it.” He almost wished she would mention it, for the
sake of the strange, violent sensation of the thing, a curiosity
quivering within him to know what Miss Marchant would do at such a
pinch, and what chorus of ejaculations—or, what appalled, irremediable
silence—would rise to the painted roof. The responsibility, however,
was not his; he had entered a phase of his destiny where
responsibilities were suspended. Madame Grandoni’s tea had waked her
up; she came, at every crisis, to the rescue of the conversation, and
talked to the visitors about Rome, where they had once spent a winter,
describing with much drollery the manner in which the English families
she had seen there for nearly half a century (and had met, of an
evening, in the Roman world) inspected the ruins and monuments and
squeezed into the great ceremonies of the church. Clearly, the four
ladies didn’t know what to make of the Princess; but, though they
perhaps wondered if she were a paid companion, they were on firm ground
in the fact that the queer, familiar, fat person had been acquainted
with the Millingtons, the Bunburys and the Tripps.

After dinner (during which the Princess allowed herself a considerable
license of pleasantry on the subject of her recent visitors, declaring
that Hyacinth must positively go with her to return their call, and
must see their interior, their manner at home), Madame Grandoni sat
down to the piano, at Christina’s request, and played to her companions
for an hour. The spaces were large in the big drawing-room, and our
friends had placed themselves at a distance from each other. The old
lady’s music trickled forth discreetly into the pleasant dimness of the
candlelight; she knew dozens of Italian local airs, which sounded like
the forgotten tunes of a people, and she followed them by a series of
tender, plaintive German _Lieder_, awaking, without violence, the
echoes of the high, pompous apartment. It was the music of an old
woman, and seemed to quaver a little, as her singing might have done.
The Princess, buried in a deep chair, listened, behind her fan.
Hyacinth at least supposed she listened; at any rate, she never moved.
At last Madame Grandoni left the piano and came toward the young man.
She had taken up, on the way, a French book, in a pink cover, which she
nursed in the hollow of her arm, and she stood looking at Hyacinth.

“My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see you
again for the present, as, to take your early train, you will have left
the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to gentlemen
without it. I have looked after the Princess pretty well, all day, to
keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you, for a little. Take
the same care, I beg you. I must put myself into my dressing-gown; at
my age, at this hour, it is the only thing. What will you have? I hate
to be tight,” pursued Madame Grandoni, who appeared even in her
ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort successfully enough.
“Do not sit up late,” she added; “and do not keep him, Christina.
Remember that for an active young man like Mr Robinson, going every day
to his work, there is nothing more exhausting than such an unoccupied
life as ours. For what do we do, after all? His eyes are very heavy.
_Basta!_”

During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that
part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but
after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned
shield and rested her eyes for a while on Hyacinth. At last she said,
“Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something
to you that I can’t shout across the room.” Hyacinth instantly got up,
but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other,
they met half-way, before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood a
little, opening and closing her fan; then she remarked, “You must be
surprised at my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”

“No, indeed, I am not surprised at anything.”

“When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all,
become friends,” said the Princess.

“I hoped we were, already. Certainly, after the kindness you have shown
me, there is no service of friendship that you might ask of me—”

“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you are going to say,
and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do
me if, all the while, you think of me as a hollow-headed,
hollow-hearted trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and
oppressing you with her attentions? Perhaps you can think of me as—what
shall I call it?—as a kind of coquette.”

Hyacinth demurred. “That would be very conceited.”

“Surely, you have the right to be as conceited as you please, after the
advances I have made you! Pray, who has a better one? But you persist
in remaining humble, and that is very provoking.”

“It is not I that am provoking; it is life, and society, and all the
difficulties that surround us.”

“I am precisely of that opinion—that they are exasperating; that when I
appeal to you, frankly, candidly, disinterestedly—simply because I like
you, for no other reason in the world—to help me to disregard and
surmount these obstructions, to treat them with the contempt they
deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little, and make yourself
small, and try to edge out of the situation by pleading general
devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease to be
insignificant from the moment I have anything to do with you. My dear
fellow,” the Princess went on, in her free, audacious, fraternising
way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, “there are
people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of
obscurity.”

“What do you wish me to do?” Hyacinth asked, as quietly as he could.

If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his
lips, and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain
unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment,
he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant:
“I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends, in
general—all I ever asked of the best I have had. But none of them ever
did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has just
left us. She understood me long ago.”

“That’s all I, on my side, ask of you,” said Hyacinth, smiling. “Give
me time, give me time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.

“Dear Mr Hyacinth, I have given you mouths!—months since our first
meeting. And at present, haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been
intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans; I
know what I am saying. Don’t try to look stupid; you will never
succeed. I wished to leave you free to amuse yourself.”

“Oh, I have amused myself,” said Hyacinth.

“You would have been very fastidious if you hadn’t! However, that is
precisely, in the first place, what I wished you to come here for. To
observe the impression made by such a place as this on such a nature as
yours, introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure you,
quite worth my while. I have already given you a hint of how
extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having
seen—what shall I call them?—beautiful, delightful old things. I have
been watching you; I am frank enough to tell you that. I want you to
see more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed, with a sudden flicker of
passion. “And I want to talk with you about this matter, as well as
others. That will be for to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?”

“I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you are
going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little
imagination!”

Hyacinth shook his head, smiling. “I can’t stay!” He had an idea his
mind was made up.

She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching—it
was so sad, yet, as a rebuke, so gentle—in the tone in which she
replied, “You oughtn’t to force me to beg. It isn’t nice.”

He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed to
fall from under him, to liquefy. He remained a moment, looking on the
ground; then he said, “Princess, you have no idea—how should you
have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust
yourself. I have no money—I have no clothes.”

“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”

“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages; and I live on my wages
from day to day.”

“Let me, then, give you wages. You will work for me.”

“What do you mean—work for you?”

“You will bind all my books. I have ever so many foreign ones, in
paper.”

“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”

“No, I don’t imagine that. I will give you the wages now, and you can
do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then, if you
want anything, you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very
good shops; I have used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things
at this juncture; the Princess had that quickening effect upon him.
Among others, he thought of these two: first, that it was indelicate
(though such an opinion was not very strongly held either in
Pentonville or in Soho) to accept money from a woman; and second, that
it was still more indelicate to make such a woman as that go down on
her knees to him. But it took more than a minute for one of these
convictions to prevail over the other, and before that he had heard the
Princess continue, in the tone of mild, disinterested argument: “If we
believe in the coming democracy, if it seems to us right and just, and
we hold that in sweeping over the world the great wave will wash away a
myriad iniquities and cruelties, why not make some attempt, with our
own poor means—for one must begin somewhere—to carry out the spirit of
it in our lives and our manners? I want to do that. I try to do it—in
my relations with you, for instance. But you hang back; you are not
democratic!”

The Princess accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine
stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity enough (though he still
hesitated an instant, wondering whether the words would not offend her)
to say, with a smile, “I have been strongly warned against you.”

The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that. Of
course my proceedings—though, after all, I have done little enough as
yet—must appear most unnatural. _Che vuole?_ as Madame Grandoni says.”

A certain knot of light blue ribbon, which formed part of the trimming
of her dress, hung down, at her side, in the folds of it. On these
glossy loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and
he now took one of them up and carried it to his lips. “I will do all
the work for you that you will give me. If you give it on purpose, by
way of munificence, that is your own affair. I myself will estimate the
price. What decides me is that I shall do it so well; at least it shall
be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will
have been that reason. I have brought you a book—so you can see. I did
it for you last year, and went to South Street to give it to you, but
you had already gone.”

“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so
exclusively the calmness of relief at finding that he could be
reasonable, as well as that of a friendly desire to see the proof of
his talent, that he was surprised when she said, in the next breath,
irrelevantly, “Who was it warned you against me?”

He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the
plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady, and
reflecting that, as the likelihood was small that his friend in
Camberwell would ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her
plan of going there), no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in
London—Paul Muniment.”

“Paul Muniment?”

“I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.”

“The person who said something good? I forget what it was.”

“It was sure to be something good if he said it; he is very wise.”

“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about
me?”

“Oh, nothing, of course, except the little that I could tell him. He
only spoke on general grounds.”

“I like his name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he resembles
it, I think I should like him.”

“You would like him much better than me.”

“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I am determined to
keep hold of you, simply for what you can show me.” She paused a
moment, with her beautiful, intelligent eyes smiling into his own, and
then she continued, “On general grounds, _bien entendu_, your friend
was quite right to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I
have undertaken to make as small as possible. It is to reduce them to
nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as
I have done. What in the world is it I am trying to do but, by every
device that my ingenuity suggests, fill up the inconvenient gulf that
yawns between my position and yours? You know what I think of
‘positions’; I told you in London. For Heaven’s sake, let me feel that
I have—a little—succeeded!” Hyacinth satisfied her sufficiently to
enable her, five minutes later, apparently to entertain no further
doubt on the question of his staying over. On the contrary, she burst
into a sudden ebullition of laughter, exchanging her bright, lucid
insistence for one of her singular sallies. “You must absolutely go
with me to call on the Marchants; it will be too delightful to see you
there!”

As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room it occurred to him to
ask himself whether that was mainly what she was keeping him for—so
that he might help her to play one of her tricks on the good people at
Broome. He paced there, in the still candlelight, for a longer time
than he measured; until the butler came and stood in the doorway,
looking at him silently and fixedly, as if to let him know that he
interfered with the custom of the house. He had told the Princess that
what determined him was the thought of the manner in which he might
exercise his craft in her service; but this was only half the influence
that pressed him into forgetfulness of what he had most said to himself
when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of unprecedented introspection, he
wrote the letter by which he accepted the invitation to Medley. He
would go there (so he said) because a man must be gallant, especially
if he be a little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would
insist at every step upon knowing what he was in for. The change that
had taken place in him now, from one moment to another, was that he had
simply ceased to care what he was in for. All warnings, reflections,
considerations of verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the
possible, of the value of his independence, had become as nothing to
him. The cup of an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted
palace, a week of such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crookenden as
he had never dreamed of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of
novelty, of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without
drinking. He might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in
his mouth the taste of nectar. He went upstairs, under the eye of the
butler, and on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found
himself face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just
issued from her own apartment, the door of which stood open, near her;
she might have been hovering there in expectation of his footstep. She
had donned her dressing-gown, which appeared to give her every facility
for respiration, but she had not yet parted with her wig. She still had
her pink French book under her arm; and her fat little hands, tightly
locked together in front of her, formed the clasp of her generous
girdle.

“Do tell me it is positive, Mr Robinson!” she said, stopping short.

“What is positive, Madame Grandoni?”

“That you take the train in the morning.”

“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary,
it has been settled that I shall stay over. I am very sorry if it
distresses you—but _che vuole?_” Hyacinth added, smiling.

Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in
return; she only looked at him a moment, and then, shrugging her
shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.




XXIV


“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He is Diedrich
Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly, the next
morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped
altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes upon
Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon,
with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately
not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed that he should
accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him that her venerable
friend had let her know, while the day was still very young, that she
thought it in the worst possible taste of the Princess not to have
allowed Mr Robinson to depart; to which Christina had replied that
concerning tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on
such matters before without any one being the worse. Hyacinth expressed
the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about _him_—of all thankless
subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never
disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than that
of arranging one’s relations with people; and Hyacinth guessed that she
meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On
her side, then, there was as little possibility as on his that they
should ever quarrel; their acquaintance would be a solid friendship or
it would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more
of this quality, and it may be imagined how safe Hyacinth felt by the
time he began to tell her that something had happened to him, in
London, three months before, one night (or rather in the small hours of
the morning), that had altered his life altogether—had, indeed, as he
might say, changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he
didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed
sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that
interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.

The Princess had led to this, almost as soon as they left the house;
making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying,
suddenly, “Now tell me what is going on among your friends. I don’t
mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers.
_Où en êtes-vous_, at the present time? Is there anything new, is
anything going to be done; I am afraid you are always simply dawdling
and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if, of late, he had by no means either
dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to
refute the imputation the Princess exclaimed, in another tone, “How
annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the
right to say to yourself, ‘After all, what do I know? May she not be in
the pay of the police?’”

“Oh, that doesn’t occur to me,” said Hyacinth, with a smile.

“It might, at all events; by which I mean it may, at any moment.
Indeed, I think it ought.”

“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head
about me.”

“I should make you think that, certainly! That would be my first care.
However, if you have no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said
the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the
scenes.

In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he felt
that he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she
might be an agent on the wrong side—he did not open himself
immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the
most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than
the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it
had consisted, he said, “I pledged myself, by everything that is
sacred.”

“To what did you pledge yourself?”

“I took a vow—a tremendous, terrible vow—in the presence of four
witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.

“And what was it about, your vow?”

“I gave my life away,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

She looked at him askance, as if to see how he would make such an
announcement as that; but she wore no smile—her face was politely
grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance, in silence,
and then she said, “Ah, well, then, I’m all the more glad you stayed!”

“That was one of the reasons.”

“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” the Princess
remarked.

“Why till after I had been here?”

“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have
seen reasons for keeping it.” And now, at last, she treated the matter
gaily, as Hyacinth had done. He replied that he had not the least doubt
that, on the whole, her influence was relaxing; but without heeding
this remark she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you are talking
about.”

“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and
he related what had happened in the back-room in Bloomsbury, in the
course of that evening of which I have given some account. The Princess
listened, intently, while they strolled under the budding trees with a
more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing
themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day, or naked in some gray
November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences, since
the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy slopes
and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things Hyacinth mentioned to
his companion that he didn’t go to the ‘Sun and Moon’ any more; he now
perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this
particular temple of their faith, and everything that pretended to get
hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff, from the
first, to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of
his, in whom he had confidence, appeared to set him the example; but
now it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again, by the
way) had always thought the men who went there a pack of duffers and
was only trying them because he tried everything. There was nobody you
could begin to call a first-rate man there, putting aside another
friend of his, a Frenchman named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent, but
he wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth had a standard, now that he had seen a
man who was the very incarnation of his programme. You felt that _he_
was a big chap the very moment you came into his presence.

“Into whose presence, Mr Robinson?” the Princess inquired.

“I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I am
speaking of the very remarkable individual with whom I entered into
that engagement.”

“To give away your life?”

“To do something which in a certain contingency he will require of me.
He will require my poor little carcass.”

“Those plans have a way of failing—unfortunately,” the Princess
murmured, adding the last word more quickly.

“Is that a consolation, or a lament?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shall
not fail, so far as it depends on me. They wanted an obliging young
man—the place was vacant—I stepped in.”

“I have no doubt you are right. We must pay for what we do.” The
Princess made that remark calmly and coldly; then she said, “I think I
know the person in whose power you have placed yourself.”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“You can’t believe I have already gone so far? Why not? I have given
you a certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back.”

“Well, if you know my friend, you have gone very far indeed.”

The Princess appeared to be on the point of pronouncing a name; but she
checked herself, and asked suddenly, smiling, “Don’t they also want, by
chance, an obliging young woman?”

“I happen to know he doesn’t think much of women, my first-rate man. He
doesn’t trust them.”

“Is that why you call him first-rate? You have very nearly betrayed him
to me.”

“Do you imagine there is only one of that opinion?” Hyacinth inquired.

“Only one who, having it, still remains a superior man. That’s a very
difficult opinion to reconcile with others that it is important to
have.”

“Schopenhauer did so, successfully,” said Hyacinth.

“How delightful that you should know Schopenhauer!” the Princess
exclaimed. “The gentleman I have in my eye is also German.” Hyacinth
let this pass, not challenging her, because he wished not to be
challenged in return, and the Princess went on: “Of course such an
engagement as you speak of must make a tremendous difference, in
everything.”

“It has made this difference, that I have now a far other sense from
any I had before of the reality, the solidity, of what is being
prepared. I was hanging about outside, on the steps of the temple,
among the loafers and the gossips, but now I have been in the innermost
sanctuary—I have seen the holy of holies.”

“And it’s very dazzling?”

“Ah, Princess!” sighed the young man.

“Then it _is_ real, it _is_ solid?” she pursued. “That’s exactly what I
have been trying to make up my mind about, for so long.”

“It is more strange than I can say. Nothing of it appears above the
surface; but there is an immense underworld, peopled with a thousand
forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it is
organised is what astonished me; I knew that, or thought I knew it, in
a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all,
society lives! People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and
dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and
suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the
misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil’, and
generations rot away and starve, in the midst of it, and day follows
day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds. All
that is one-half of it; the other half is that everything is doomed! In
silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the
revolution lives and works. It is a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on
the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery
is complete, there will be a great rehearsal. That rehearsal is what
they want me for. The invisible, impalpable wires are everywhere,
passing through everything, attaching themselves to objects in which
one would never think of looking for them. What could be more strange
and incredible, for instance, than that they should exist just here?”

“You make me believe it,” said the Princess, thoughtfully.

“It matters little whether one believes it or not!”

“You have had a vision,” the Princess continued.

“_Parbleu_, I have had a vision! So would you, if you had been there.”

“I wish I had!” she declared, in a tone charged with such ambiguous
implications that Hyacinth, catching them a moment after she had
spoken, rejoined, with a quick, incongruous laugh—

“No, you would have spoiled everything. He made me see, he made me
feel, he made me do, everything he wanted.”

“And why should he have wanted you, in particular?”

“Simply because I struck him as the right person. That’s his affair: I
can’t tell you. When he meets the right person he chalks him. I sat on
the bed. (There were only two chairs in the dirty little room, and by
way of a curtain his overcoat was hung up before the window.) He didn’t
sit, himself; he leaned against the wall, straight in front of me, with
his hands behind him. He told me certain things, and his manner was
extraordinarily quiet. So was mine, I think I may say; and indeed it
was only poor Poupin who made a row. It was for my sake, somehow: he
didn’t think we were all conscious enough; he wanted to call attention
to my sublimity. There was no sublimity about it—I simply couldn’t help
myself. He and the other German had the two chairs, and Muniment sat on
a queer old battered, hair-covered trunk, a most foreign-looking
article.” Hyacinth had taken no notice of the little ejaculation with
which his companion greeted, in this last sentence, the word ‘other’.

“And what did Mr Muniment say?” she presently inquired.

“Oh, he said it was all right. Of course he thought that, from the
moment he determined to bring me. He knew what the other fellow was
looking for.”

“I see.” Then the Princess remarked, “We have a curious way of being
fond of you.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”

“Your friends. Mr Muniment and I, for instance.”

“I like it as well as any other. But you don’t feel alike. I have an
idea you are sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“That I have put my head in a noose.”

“Ah, you’re severe—I thought I concealed it so well!” the Princess
exclaimed. He admitted that he had been severe, and begged her pardon,
for he was by no means sure that there was not a hint of tears in her
voice. She looked away from him for a minute, and it was after this
that, stopping short, she remarked, as I have related, “He is Diedrich
Hoffendahl.”

Hyacinth stared for a moment, with parted lips. “Well, you _are_ in it,
more than I supposed!”

“You know he doesn’t trust women,” his companion smiled.

“Why in the world should you have cared for any light _I_ can throw, if
you have ever been in relation with him?”

She hesitated a little. “Oh, you are very different. I like you
better,” she added.

“Ah, if it’s for that!” murmured Hyacinth.

The Princess coloured, as he had seen her colour before, and in this
accident, on her part, there was an unexpectedness, something touching.
“Don’t try to fix my inconsistencies on me,” she said, with an humility
which matched her blush. “Of course there are plenty of them, but it
will always be kinder of you to let them pass. Besides, in this case
they are not so serious as they seem. As a product of the ‘people’, and
of that strange, fermenting underworld (what you say of it is so
true!), you interest me more, and have more to say to me, even than
Hoffendahl—wonderful creature as he assuredly is.”

“Would you object to telling me how and where you came to know him?”

“Through a couple of friends of mine in Vienna, two of the affiliated,
both passionate revolutionists and clever men. They are Neapolitans,
originally _poveretti_, like yourself, who emigrated, years ago, to
seek their fortune. One of them is a teacher of singing, the wisest,
most accomplished person in his line I have ever known. The other, if
you please, is a confectioner! He makes the most delicious _pâtisserie
fine_. It would take long to tell you how I made _their_ acquaintance,
and how they put me into relation with the Maestro, as they called him,
of whom they spoke with bated breath. It is not from yesterday—though
you don’t seem able to believe it—that I have had a care for all this
business. I wrote to Hoffendahl, and had several letters from him; the
singing-master and the pastry-cook went bail for my sincerity. The next
year I had an interview with him at Wiesbaden; but I can’t tell you the
circumstances of our meeting, in that place, without implicating
another person, to whom, at present at least, I have no right to give
you a clue. Of course Hoffendahl made an immense impression on me; he
seemed to me the Master indeed, the very genius of a new social order,
and I fully understand the manner in which you were affected by him.
When he was in London, three months ago, I knew it, and I knew where to
write to him. I did so, and asked him if he wouldn’t see me somewhere.
I said I would meet him in any hole he should designate. He answered by
a charming letter, which I will show you—there is nothing in the least
compromising in it—but he declined my offer, pleading his short stay
and a press of engagements. He will write to me, but he won’t trust me.
However, he shall some day!”

Hyacinth was thrown quite off his balance by this representation of the
ground the Princess had already traversed, and the explanation was
still but half restorative when, on his asking her why she hadn’t
exhibited her titles before, she replied, “Well, I thought my being
quiet was the better way to draw you out.” There was but little
difficulty in drawing him out now, and before their walk was over he
had told her more definitely what Hoffendahl demanded. This was simply
that he should hold himself ready, for the next five years, to do, at a
given moment, an act which would in all probability cost him his life.
The act was as yet indefinite, but one might get an idea of it from the
penalty involved, which would certainly be capital. The only thing
settled was that it was to be done instantly and absolutely, without a
question, a hesitation or a scruple, in the manner that should be
prescribed, at the moment, from headquarters. Very likely it would be
to kill some one—some humbug in a high place; but whether the
individual should deserve it or should not deserve it was not
Hyacinth’s affair. If he recognised generally Hoffendahl’s wisdom—and
the other night it had seemed to shine like a northern aurora—it was
not in order that he might challenge it in the particular case. He had
taken a vow of blind obedience, as the Jesuit fathers did to the head
of their order. It was because they had carried out their vows (having,
in the first place, great administrators) that their organisation had
been mighty, and that sort of mightiness was what people who felt as
Hyacinth and the Princess felt should go in for. It was not certain
that he should be collared, any more than it was certain that he should
bring down his man; but it was much to be looked for, and it was what
he counted on and indeed preferred. He should probably take little
trouble to escape, and he should never enjoy the idea of hiding (after
the fact) or running away. If it were a question of putting a bullet
into some one, he himself should naturally deserve what would come to
him. If one did that sort of thing there was an indelicacy in not being
ready to pay for it; and he, at least, was perfectly willing. He
shouldn’t judge; he should simply execute. He didn’t pretend to say
what good his little job might do, or what _portée_ it might have; he
hadn’t the data for appreciating it, and simply took upon himself to
believe that at headquarters they knew what they were about. The thing
was to be a feature in a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure
the scope—something that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen
different countries. The effect was to be very much in this immense
coincidence. It was to be hoped it wouldn’t be spoiled. At any rate,
_he_ wouldn’t hang fire, whatever the other fellows might do. He didn’t
say it because Hoffendahl had done him the honour of giving him the
business to do, but he believed the Master knew how to pick out his
men. To be sure, Hoffendahl had known nothing about him in advance; he
had only been suggested by those who were looking out, from one day to
the other. The fact remained however that when Hyacinth stood before
him he recognised him as the sort of little chap that he had in his eye
(one who could pass through a small orifice). Humanity, in his scheme,
was classified and subdivided with a truly German thoroughness, and
altogether of course from the point of view of the revolution, as it
might forward or obstruct it. Hyacinth’s little job was a very small
part of what Hoffendahl had come to England for; he had in his hand
innumerable other threads. Hyacinth knew nothing of these, and didn’t
much want to know, except that it was marvellous, the way Hoffendahl
kept them apart. He had exactly the same mastery of them that a great
musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of the piano; he
treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so many notes in
his great symphonic revolt. The day would come when Hyacinth, far down
in the treble, would feel himself touched by the little finger of the
composer, would become audible (with a small, sharp crack) for a
second.

It was impossible that our young man should not feel, at the end of ten
minutes, that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most
genuine attention; she was listening to him as she had never listened
before. He enjoyed having that effect upon her, and his sense of the
tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by his hearing
himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present anything in the
line of enjoyment was so much gained. The reader may judge whether he
had passed through a phase of excitement after finding himself on his
new footing of utility in the world; but that had finally spent itself,
through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture—through an
exaltation which alternated with despair and which, equally with the
despair, he concealed more successfully than he supposed. He would have
detested the idea that his companion might have heard his voice tremble
while he told his story; but though to-day he had really grown used to
his danger and resigned, as it were, to his consecration, and though it
could not fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that he was
thrilling, he could still not guess how very remarkable, in such a
connection, the Princess thought his composure, his lucidity and
good-humour. It is true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it
to her self-respect to let it still appear that even she was prepared
for a personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she
endeavoured to have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted
for himself; nevertheless, there was something rather forced in the
smile (lovely as it was) with which she covered him, while she said,
after a little, “It’s very serious—it’s very serious indeed, isn’t it?”
He replied that the serious part was to come—there was no particular
grimness for him (comparatively) in strolling in that sweet park and
gossiping with her about the matter; and it occurred to her presently
to suggest to him that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign
at all, and he would wait all the while, _sur les dents_, in a false
suspense. He admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that
either way he would be sold, though differently; and that at any rate
he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour
as if it were to be one’s last.

“In holiness, you mean—in great _recueillement?_” the Princess asked.

“Oh dear, no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every minute that’s
added.”

“Ah, well, there will probably be a great many,” she rejoined.

“The more the better—if they are like this.”

“That won’t be the case with many of them, in Lomax Place.”

“I assure you that since that night Lomax Place has improved.” Hyacinth
stood there, smiling, with his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed
back a little.

The Princess appeared to consider this fact with an extreme
intellectual curiosity. “If, after all, then, you are not called, you
will have been positively happy.”

“I shall have had some fine moments. Perhaps Hoffendahl’s plot is
simply for that; Muniment may have put him up to it!”

“Who knows? However, with me you must go on as if nothing were
changed.”

“Changed from what?”

“From the time of our first meeting at the theatre.”

“I’ll go on in any way you like,” said Hyacinth; “only the real
difference will be there.”

“The real difference?”

“That I shall have ceased to care for what you care about.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Princess.

“Isn’t it enough, now, to give my life to the beastly cause,” the young
man broke out, “without giving my sympathy?”

“The beastly cause?” the Princess murmured, opening her deep eyes.

“Of course it is really just as holy as ever; only the people I find
myself pitying now are the rich, the happy.”

“I see. You are very curious. Perhaps you pity my husband,” the
Princess added in a moment.

“Do you call him one of the happy?” Hyacinth inquired, as they walked
on again.

In answer to this she only repeated, “You are very curious!”

I have related the whole of this conversation, because it supplies a
highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but it will not be
possible to trace all the stages through which the friendship of the
Princess Casamassima with the young man she had constituted her
bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the standard of fitness
she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties appeared the model
of justice and convenience; and during this period many other things
happened. One of them was that Hyacinth drove over to Broome with his
hostess, and called on Lady Marchant and her daughters; an episode from
which the Princess appeared to derive an exquisite gratification. When
they came away he asked her why she hadn’t told the ladies who he was.
Otherwise, where was the point? And she replied, “Simply because they
wouldn’t have believed me. That’s your fault!” This was the same note
she had struck when, the third day of his stay (the weather had changed
for the worse, and a rainy afternoon kept them in-doors), she remarked
to him, irrelevantly and abruptly, “It _is_ most extraordinary, your
knowing about Schopenhauer!” He answered that she really seemed quite
unable to accustom herself to his little talents; and this led to a
long talk, longer than the one I have already narrated, in which he
took her still further into his confidence. Never had the pleasure of
conversation (the greatest he knew) been so largely opened to him. The
Princess admitted, frankly, that he would, to her sense, take a great
deal of accounting for; she observed that he was, no doubt, pretty well
used to himself, but he must give other people time. “I have watched
you, constantly, since you have been here, in every detail of your
behaviour, and I am more and more _intriguée_. You haven’t a vulgar
intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you
do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the
hole you have described to me, and yet you might have stayed in
country-houses all your life. You are much better than if you had!
_Jugez donc_, from the way I talk to you! I have to make no allowances.
I have seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and taste, but I
didn’t know one ever found it in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it hadn’t been
cultivated at a vast expense; unless, indeed, in certain little
American women.”

“Do you mean I’m a gentleman?” asked Hyacinth, in a peculiar tone,
looking out into the wet garden.

She hesitated, and then she said, “It’s I who make the mistakes!” Five
minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost
more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of
her delicacy and sympathy and putting him before himself as vividly as
if the words were a little portrait: “Fancy the strange, the bitter
fate: to be constituted as you are constituted, to feel the capacity
that you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only
through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!”

“Every class has its pleasures,” Hyacinth rejoined, with perverse
sententiousness, in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn’t darken
their mutual intelligence, and before they separated that evening he
told her the things that had never yet passed his lips—the things to
which he had awaked when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the
prison. He told her, in a word, what he was.




XXV


Hyacinth took several long walks by himself, beyond the gates of the
park and through the neighbouring country—walks during which, committed
as he was to reflection on the general ‘rumness’ of his destiny, he had
still a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy
lanes; the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and
seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields;
the hedges thick with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew
no names; the picture-making quality of thatched cottages, the mystery
and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of rural complexions, the
quaintness of little girls bobbing curtsies by waysides (a sort of
homage he had never prefigured); the soft sense of the turf under feet
that had never ached but from paving-stones. One morning, as he had his
face turned homeward, after a long stroll, he heard behind him the
sound of a horse’s hoofs, and, looking back, perceived a gentleman, who
would presently pass him, advancing up the road which led to the
lodge-gates of Medley. He went his way, and, as the horse overtook him,
noticed that the rider slackened pace. Then he turned again, and
recognised in this personage his brilliant occasional friend Captain
Sholto. The Captain pulled up alongside of him, saluting him with a
smile and a movement of the whip-handle. Hyacinth stared with surprise,
not having heard from the Princess that she was expecting him. He
gathered, however, in a moment, that she was not; and meanwhile he
received an impression, on Sholto’s part, of riding-gear that was
‘knowing’—of gaiters and spurs and a curious waistcoat; perceiving that
this was a phase of the Captain’s varied nature which he had not yet
had an opportunity to observe. He struck him as very high in the air,
perched on his big, lean chestnut, and Hyacinth noticed that if the
horse was heated the rider was cool.

“Good-morning, my dear fellow. I thought I should find you here!” the
Captain exclaimed. “It’s a good job I’ve met you this way, without
having to go to the house.”

“Who gave you reason to think I was here?” Hyacinth asked; partly
occupied with the appositeness of this inquiry and partly thinking, as
his eyes wandered over his handsome friend, bestriding so handsome a
beast, what a jolly thing it would be to know how to ride. He had
already, during the few days he had been at Medley, had time to observe
that the knowledge of luxury and the extension of one’s sensations
beget a taste for still newer pleasures.

“Why, I knew the Princess was capable of asking you,” Sholto said; “and
I learned at the ‘Sun and Moon’ that you had not been there for a long
time. I knew furthermore that as a general thing you go there a good
deal, don’t you? So I put this and that together, and judged you were
out of town.”

This was very luminous and straightforward, and might have satisfied
Hyacinth, were it not for that irritating reference to the Princess’s
being ‘capable of asking him’. He knew as well as the Captain that it
had been tremendously eccentric in her to do so, but somehow a
transformation had lately taken place in him which made it disagreeable
for him to receive that view from another, and particularly from a
gentleman of whom, on a certain occasion, several months before, he had
had strong grounds for thinking unfavourably. He had not seen Sholto
since the evening when a queer combination of circumstances caused him,
more queerly still, to sit and listen to comic songs in the company of
Millicent Henning and this admirer. The Captain did not conceal his
admiration; Hyacinth had his own ideas about his taking that line in
order to look more innocent. That evening, when he accompanied
Millicent to her lodgings (they parted with Sholto on coming out of the
Pavilion), the situation was tense between the young lady and her
childhood’s friend. She let him have it, as she said; she gave him a
dressing which she evidently intended should be memorable, for having
suspected her, for having insulted her before a military gentleman. The
tone she took, and the magnificent audacity with which she took it,
reduced him to a kind of gratified helplessness; he watched her at last
with something of the excitement with which he would have watched a
clever but uncultivated actress, while she worked herself into a
passion which he believed to be fictitious. He gave more credence to
his jealousy and to the whole air of the case than to her vehement
repudiations, enlivened though these were by tremendous head-tossings
and skirt-shakings. But he felt baffled and outfaced, and took refuge
in sarcasms which after all proved as little as her high gibes; seeking
a final solution in one of those beastly little French shrugs, as
Millicent called them, with which she had already reproached him with
interlarding his conversation.

The air was never cleared, though the subject of their dispute was
afterwards dropped, Hyacinth promising himself to watch his playmate as
he had never done before. She let him know, as may well be supposed,
that she had her eye on _him_, and it must be confessed that as regards
the exercise of a right of supervision he had felt himself at a
disadvantage ever since the night at the theatre. It mattered little
that she had pushed him into the Princess’s box (for she herself had
not been jealous beforehand; she had wanted too much to know what such
a person could be ‘up to’, desiring, perhaps, to borrow a hint), and it
mattered little, also, that his relations with the great lady were all
for the sake of suffering humanity; the atmosphere, none the less, was
full of thunder for many weeks, and it scarcely signified from which
quarter the flash and the explosion proceeded. Hyacinth was a good deal
surprised to find that he should care whether Millicent deceived him or
not, and even tried to persuade himself that he didn’t; but there was a
grain of conviction in his heart that some kind of personal affinity
existed between them and that it would torment him more never to see
her at all than to see her go into tantrums in order to cover her
tracks. An inner sense told him that her mingled beauty and grossness,
her vulgar vitality, the spirit of contradiction yet at the same time
of attachment that was in her, had ended by making her indispensable to
him. She bored him as much as she irritated him; but if she was full of
execrable taste she was also full of life, and her rustlings and
chatterings, her wonderful stories, her bad grammar and good health,
her insatiable thirst, her shrewd perceptions and grotesque opinions,
her mistakes and her felicities, were now all part of the familiar
human sound of his little world. He could say to himself that she came
after him much more than he went after her, and this helped him, a
little, to believe, though the logic was but lame, that she was not
making a fool of him. If she were really taking up with a swell he
didn’t see why she wished to retain a bookbinder. Of late, it must be
added, he had ceased to devote much consideration to Millicent’s
ambiguities; for although he was lingering on at Medley for the sake of
suffering humanity he was quite aware that to say so (if she should ask
him for a reason) would have almost as absurd a sound as some of the
girl’s own speeches. As regards Sholto, he was in the awkward position
of having let him off, as it were, by accepting his hospitality, his
bounty; so that he couldn’t quarrel with him except on a fresh pretext.
This pretext the Captain had apparently been careful not to give, and
Millicent had told him, after the triple encounter in the street, that
he had driven him out of England, the poor gentleman whom he insulted
by his low insinuations even more (why ‘even more’ Hyacinth hardly
could think) than he outraged herself. When he asked her what she knew
about the Captain’s movements she made no scruple to announce to him
that the latter had come to her great shop to make a little purchase
(it was a pair of silk braces, if she remembered rightly, and she
admitted, perfectly, the transparency of the pretext), and had asked
her with much concern whether his gifted young friend (that’s what he
called him—Hyacinth could see he meant well) was still in a huff.
Millicent had answered that she was afraid he was—the more shame to
him; and then the Captain had said that it didn’t matter, for he
himself was on the point of leaving England for several weeks
(Hyacinth—he called him Hyacinth this time—couldn’t have ideas about a
man in a foreign country, could he?), and he hoped that by the time he
returned the little cloud would have blown over. Sholto had added that
she had better tell him frankly—recommending her at the same time to be
gentle with their morbid friend—about his visit to the shop. Their
candour, their humane precautions, were all very well; but after this,
two or three evenings, Hyacinth passed and repassed the Captain’s
chambers in Queen Anne Street, to see if, at the window, there were
signs of his being in London. Darkness, however, prevailed, and he was
forced to comfort himself a little when, at last making up his mind to
ring at the door and inquire, by way of a test, for the occupant, he
was informed, by the superior valet whose acquaintance he had already
made, and whose air of wearing a jacket left behind by his master
confirmed the statement, that the gentleman in question was at Monte
Carlo.

“Have you still got your back up a little?” the Captain demanded,
without rancour; and in a moment he had swung a long leg over the
saddle and dismounted, walking beside his young friend and leading his
horse by the bridle. Hyacinth pretended not to know what he meant, for
it came over him that after all, even if he had not condoned, at the
time, the Captain’s suspected treachery, he was in no position, sitting
at the feet of the Princess, to sound the note of jealousy in relation
to another woman. He reflected that the Princess had originally been,
in a manner, Sholto’s property, and if he did _en fin de compte_ wish
to quarrel with him about Millicent he would have to cease to appear to
poach on the Captain’s preserves. It now occurred to him, for the first
time, that the latter had intended a kind of exchange; though it must
be added that the Princess, who on a couple of occasions had alluded
slightingly to her military friend, had given him no sign of
recognising this gentleman’s claim. Sholto let him know, at present,
that he was staying at Bonchester, seven miles off; he had come down
from London and put up at the inn. That morning he had ridden over on a
hired horse (Hyacinth had supposed this steed was a very fine animal,
but Sholto spoke of it as an infernal screw); he had been taken by the
sudden fancy of seeing how his young friend was coming on.

“I’m coming on very well, thank you,” said Hyacinth, with some
shortness, not knowing exactly what business it was of the Captain’s.

“Of course you understand my interest in you, don’t you? I’m
responsible for you—I put you forward.”

“There are a great many things in the world that I don’t understand,
but I think the thing I understand least is your interest in me. Why
the devil—” And Hyacinth paused, breathless with the force of his
inquiry. Then he went on, “If I were you, I shouldn’t care a filbert
for the sort of person that I happen to be.”

“That proves how different my nature is from yours! But I don’t believe
it, my boy; you are too generous for that.” Sholto’s imperturbability
always appeared to grow with the irritation it produced, and it was
proof even against the just resentment excited by his want of tact.
That want of tact was sufficiently marked when he went on to say, “I
wanted to see you here, with my own eyes. I wanted to see how it
looked; it _is_ a rum sight! Of course you know what I mean, though you
are always trying to make a fellow explain. I don’t explain well, in
any sense, and that’s why I go in only for clever people, who can do
without it. It’s very grand, her having brought you down.”

“Grand, no doubt, but hardly surprising, considering that, as you say,
I was put forward by you.”

“Oh, that’s a great thing for me, but it doesn’t make any difference to
her!” Sholto exclaimed. “She may care for certain things for
themselves, but it will never signify a jot to her what I may have
thought about them. One good turn deserves another. I wish you would
put _me_ forward!”

“I don’t understand you, and I don’t think I want to,” said Hyacinth,
as his companion strolled beside him.

The latter put a hand on his arm, stopping him, and they stood face to
face a moment. “I say, my dear Robinson, you’re not spoiled already, at
the end of a week—how long is it? It isn’t possible you’re jealous!”

“Jealous of whom?” asked Hyacinth, whose failure to comprehend was
perfectly genuine.

Sholto looked at him a moment; then, with a laugh, “I don’t mean Miss
Henning.” Hyacinth turned away, and the Captain resumed his walk, now
taking the young man’s arm and passing his own through the bridle of
the horse. “The courage of it, the insolence, the _crânerie!_ There
isn’t another woman in Europe who could carry it off.”

Hyacinth was silent a little; after which he remarked, “This is
nothing, here. You should have seen me the other day over at Broome, at
Lady Marchant’s.”

“Gad, did she take you there? I’d have given ten pounds to see it.
There’s no one like her!” cried the Captain, gaily, enthusiastically.

“There’s no one like me, I think—for going.”

“Why, didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Too much—too much. Such excesses are dangerous.”

“Oh, I’ll back you,” said the Captain; then, checking their pace, he
inquired, “Is there any chance of our meeting her? I won’t go into the
park.”

“You won’t go to the house?” Hyacinth demanded, staring.

“Oh dear, no, not while you’re there.”

“Well, I shall ask the Princess about you, and have done with it, once
for all.”

“Lucky little beggar, with your fireside talks!” the Captain exclaimed.
“Where does she sit now, in the evening? She won’t tell you anything
except that I’m a nuisance; but even if she were willing to take the
trouble to throw some light upon me it wouldn’t be of much use, because
she doesn’t understand me herself.”

“You are the only thing in the world then of which that can be said,”
Hyacinth returned.

“I dare say I am, and I am rather proud of it. So far as the head is
concerned, the Princess is all there. I told you, when I presented you,
that she was the cleverest woman in Europe, and that is still my
opinion. But there are some mysteries you can’t see into unless you
happen to have a little heart. The Princess hasn’t, though doubtless
just now you think that’s her strong point. One of these days you’ll
see. I don’t care a straw, myself, whether she has or not. She has hurt
me already so much she can’t hurt me any more, and my interest in her
is quite independent of that. To watch her, to adore her, to see her
lead her life and act out her extraordinary nature, all the while she
treats me like a brute, is the only thing I care for to-day. It doesn’t
do me a scrap of good, but, all the same, it’s my principal occupation.
You may believe me or not—it doesn’t in the least matter; but I’m the
most disinterested human being alive. She’ll tell you I’m a tremendous
ass, and so one is. But that isn’t all.”

It was Hyacinth who stopped this time, arrested by something new and
natural in the tone of his companion, a simplicity of emotion which he
had not hitherto associated with him. He stood there a moment looking
up at him, and thinking again what improbable confidences it decidedly
appeared to be his lot to receive from gentlefolks. To what quality in
himself were they a tribute? The honour was one he could easily
dispense with; though as he scrutinised Sholto he found something in
his curious light eyes—an expression of cheerfulness not disconnected
from veracity—which put him into a less fantastic relation with this
jaunty, factitious personage. “Please go on,” he said, in a moment.

“Well, what I mentioned just now is my real and only motive, in
anything. The rest is mere gammon and rubbish, to cover it up—or to
give myself the change, as the French say.”

“What do you mean by the rest?” asked Hyacinth, thinking of Millicent
Henning.

“Oh, all the straw one chews, to cheat one’s appetite; all the rot one
dabbles in, because it may lead to something which it never does lead
to; all the beastly buncombe (you know) that you and I have heard
together in Bloomsbury and that I myself have poured out, damme, with
an eloquence worthy of a better cause. Don’t you remember what I have
said to you—all as my own opinion—about the impending change of the
relations of class with class? Impending fiddlesticks! I believe those
that are on top the heap are better than those that are under it, that
they mean to stay there, and that if they are not a pack of poltroons
they will.”

“You don’t care for the social question, then?” Hyacinth inquired, with
an aspect of which he was conscious of the blankness.

“I only took it up because she did. It hasn’t helped me,” Sholto
remarked, smiling. “My dear Robinson,” he went on, “there is only one
thing I care for in life: to have a look at that woman when I can, and
when I can’t, to approach her in the sort of way I’m doing now.”

“It’s a very curious sort of way.”

“Indeed it is; but if it is good enough for me it ought to be good
enough for you. What I want you to do is this—to induce her to ask me
over to dine.”

“To induce her—?” Hyacinth murmured.

“Tell her I’m staying at Bonchester and it would be an act of common
humanity.”

They proceeded till they reached the gates, and in a moment Hyacinth
said, “You took up the social question, then, because she did; but do
you happen to know why she took it up?”

“Ah, my dear fellow, you must find that out for yourself. I found you
the place, but I can’t do your work for you!”

“I see—I see. But perhaps you’ll tell me this: if you had free access
to the Princess a year ago, taking her to the theatre and that sort of
thing, why shouldn’t you have it now?”

This time Sholto’s white pupils looked strange again. “_You_ have it
now, my dear fellow, but I’m afraid it doesn’t follow that you’ll have
it a year hence. She was tired of me then, and of course she’s still
more tired of me now, for the simple reason that I’m more tiresome. She
has sent me to Coventry, and I want to come out for a few hours. See
how conscientious I am—I won’t pass the gates.”

“I’ll tell her I met you,” said Hyacinth. Then, irrelevantly, he added,
“Is that what you mean by her having no heart?”

“Her treating me as she treats me? Oh, dear, no; her treating you!”

This had a portentous sound, but it did not prevent Hyacinth from
turning round with his visitor (for it was the greatest part of the
oddity of the present meeting that the hope of a little conversation
with him, if accident were favourable, had been the motive not only of
Sholto’s riding over to Medley but of his coming down to stay, in the
neighbourhood, at a musty inn in a dull market-town), it did not
prevent him, I say, from bearing the Captain company for a mile on his
backward way. Our young man did not pursue this particular topic much
further, but he discovered still another reason or two for admiring the
light, free action with which his companion had unmasked himself, and
the nature of his interest in the revolutionary idea, after he had
asked him, abruptly, what he had had in his head when he travelled over
that evening, the summer before (he didn’t appear to have come back as
often as he promised), to Paul Muniment’s place in Camberwell. What was
he looking for, whom was he looking for, there?

“I was looking for anything that would turn up, that might take her
fancy. Don’t you understand that I’m always looking? There was a time
when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I
collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a belief in
ghosts), all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to
the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I
collected you.”

“Muniment read you exactly, then. And what did you find to your purpose
in Audley Court?”

“Well, I think the little woman with the popping eyes—she reminded me
of a bedridden grasshopper—will do. And I made a note of the other one,
the old virgin with the high nose, the aristocratic sister of mercy.
I’m keeping them in reserve for my next propitiatory offering.”

Hyacinth was silent a moment. “And Muniment himself—can’t you do
anything with him?”

“Oh, my dear fellow, after you he’s poor!”

“That’s the first stupid thing you have said. But it doesn’t matter,
for he dislikes the Princess—what he knows of her—too much ever to
consent to see her.”

“That’s his line, is it? Then he’ll do!” Sholto cried.




XXVI


“Of course he may come, and stay as long as he likes!” the Princess
exclaimed, when Hyacinth, that afternoon, told her of his encounter,
with the sweet, bright surprise her face always wore when people went
through the form (supererogatory she apparently meant to declare it) of
asking her leave. From the manner in which she granted Sholto’s
petition—with a geniality that made light of it, as if the question
were not worth talking of, one way or the other—it might have been
supposed that the account he had given Hyacinth of their relations was
an elaborate but none the less foolish hoax. She sent a messenger with
a note over to Bonchester, and the Captain arrived just in time to
dress for dinner. The Princess was always late, and Hyacinth’s toilet,
on these occasions, occupied him considerably (he was acutely conscious
of its deficiencies, and yet tried to persuade himself that they were
positively honourable and that the only garb of dignity, for him, was
the costume, as it were, of his profession); therefore, when the fourth
member of the little party descended to the drawing-room Madame
Grandoni was the only person he found there.

“_Santissima Vergine!_ I’m glad to see you! What good wind has sent
you?” she exclaimed, as soon as Sholto came into the room.

“Didn’t you know I was coming?” he asked. “Has the idea of my arrival
produced so little agitation?”

“I know nothing of the affairs of this house. I have given them up at
last, and it was time. I remain in my room.” There was nothing at
present in the old lady’s countenance of her usual spirit of cheer; it
expressed anxiety, and even a certain sternness, and the excellent
woman had perhaps at this moment more than she had ever had in her life
of the air of a duenna who took her duties seriously. She looked almost
august. “From the moment you come it’s a little better. But it is very
bad.”

“Very bad, dear madam?”

“Perhaps you will be able to tell me where Christina _veut en venir_. I
have always been faithful to her—I have always been loyal. But to-day I
have lost patience. It has no sense.”

“I am not sure I know what you are talking about,” Sholto said; “but if
I understand you I must tell you I think it’s magnificent.”

“Yes, I know your tone; you are worse than she, because you are
cynical. It passes all bounds. It is very serious. I have been thinking
what I should do.”

“Precisely; I know what you would do.”

“Oh, this time I shouldn’t come back!” the old lady declared. “The
scandal is too great; it is intolerable. My only fear is to make it
worse.”

“Dear Madame Grandoni, you can’t make it worse, and you can’t make it
better,” Sholto rejoined, seating himself on the sofa beside her. “In
point of fact, no idea of scandal can possibly attach itself to our
friend. She is above and outside of all such considerations, such
dangers. She carries everything off; she heeds so little, she cares so
little. Besides, she has one great strength—she does no wrong.”

“Pray, what do you call it when a lady sends for a bookbinder to come
and live with her?”

“Why not for a bookbinder as well as for a bishop? It all depends upon
who the lady is, and what she is.”

“She had better take care of one thing first,” cried Madame
Grandoni—“that she shall not have been separated from her husband!”

“The Princess can carry off even that. It’s unusual, it’s eccentric,
it’s fantastic, if you will, but it isn’t necessarily wicked. From her
own point of view our friend goes straight. Besides, she has her
opinions.”

“Her opinions are perversity itself.”

“What does it matter,” asked Sholto, “if they keep her quiet?”

“Quiet! Do you call this quiet?”

“Surely, if you’ll only be so yourself. Putting the case at the worst,
moreover, who is to know he’s her bookbinder? It’s the last thing you’d
take him for.”

“Yes, for that she chose him carefully,” the old lady murmured, still
with a discontented eyebrow.

“_She_ chose him? It was I who chose him, dear lady!” the Captain
exclaimed, with a laugh which showed how little he shared her
solicitude.

“Yes, I had forgotten; at the theatre,” said Madame Grandoni, gazing at
him as if her ideas were confused but a certain repulsion from her
interlocutor nevertheless disengaged itself. “It was a fine turn you
did him there, poor young man!”

“Certainly, he will have to be sacrificed. But why was I bound to
consider him so much? Haven’t I been sacrificed myself?”

“Oh, if he bears it like you!” cried the old lady, with a short laugh.

“How do you know how I bear it? One does what one can,” said the
Captain, settling his shirt-front. “At any rate, remember this: she
won’t tell people who he is, for his own sake; and he won’t tell them,
for hers. So, as he looks much more like a poet, or a pianist, or a
painter, there won’t be that sensation you fear.”

“Even so it’s bad enough,” said Madame Grandoni. “And he’s capable of
bringing it out, suddenly, himself.”

“Ah, if he doesn’t mind it, she won’t! But that’s his affair.”

“It’s too terrible, to spoil him for his station,” the old lady went
on. “How can he ever go back?”

“If you want him kept, then, indefinitely, you are inconsistent.
Besides, if he pays for it, he deserves to pay. He’s an abominable
little conspirator against society.”

Madame Grandoni was silent a moment; then she looked at the Captain
with a gravity which might have been impressive to him, had not his
accomplished jauntiness suggested an insensibility to that sort of
influence. “What, then, does Christina deserve?” she asked, with
solemnity.

“Whatever she may get; whatever, in the future, may make her suffer.
But it won’t be the loss of her reputation. She is too distinguished.”

“You English are strange. Is it because she’s a princess?” Madame
Grandoni reflected, audibly.

“Oh, dear, no, her princedom is nothing here. We can easily beat that.
But we can’t beat—” And Sholto paused a moment.

“What then?” his companion asked.

“Well, the perfection of her indifference to public opinion and the
unaffectedness of her originality; the sort of thing by which she has
bedeviled me.”

“Oh, _you!_” murmured Madame Grandoni.

“If you think so poorly of me why did you say just now that you were
glad to see me?” Sholto demanded, in a moment.

“Because you make another person in the house, and that is more
regular; the situation is by so much less—what did you call
it?—eccentric. _Nun_,” the old lady went on, in a moment, “so long as
you are here I won’t go off.”

“Depend upon it that I shall be here until I’m turned out.”

She rested her small, troubled eyes upon him, but they betrayed no
particular enthusiasm at this announcement, “I don’t understand how,
for yourself, on such an occasion, you should like it.”

“Dear Madame Grandoni, the heart of man, without being such a hopeless
labyrinth as the heart of woman, is still sufficiently complicated.
Don’t I know what will become of the little beggar?”

“You are very horrible,” said the ancient woman. Then she added, in a
different tone, “He is much too good for his fate.”

“And pray wasn’t I, for mine?” the Captain asked.

“By no manner of means!” Madame Grandoni answered, rising and moving
away from him.

The Princess had come into the room, accompanied by Hyacinth. As it was
now considerably past the dinner-hour the old lady judged that this
couple, on their side, had met in the hall and had prolonged their
conversation there. Hyacinth watched with extreme interest the way the
Princess greeted the Captain—observed that it was very simple, easy and
friendly. At dinner she made no stranger of him, including him in
everything, as if he had been a useful familiar, like Madame Grandoni,
only a little less venerable, yet not giving him any attention that
might cause their eyes to meet. She had told Hyacinth that she didn’t
like his eyes, nor indeed, very much, any part of him. Of course any
admiration, from almost any source, could not fail to be in some degree
agreeable to a woman, but of any little impression that one might ever
have produced the mark she had made on Godfrey Sholto was the one that
ministered least to her vanity. He had been useful, undoubtedly, at
times, but at others he had been an intolerable bore. He was so
uninteresting in himself, so shallow, so unoccupied and superfluous,
and really so frivolous, in spite of his pretension (of which she was
unspeakably weary) of being all wrapped up in a single idea. It had
never, by itself, been sufficient to interest her in any man, the fact
that he was in love with her; but indeed she could honestly say that
most of the people who had liked her had had, on their own side,
something—something in their character or circumstances—that one could
care a little about. Not so far as would do any harm, save perhaps in
one or two cases; but still, something.

Sholto was a curious and not particularly edifying English type (as the
Princess further described him); one of those strange beings produced
by old societies that have run to seed, corrupt, exhausted
civilisations. He was a cumberer of the earth, and purely selfish, in
spite of his devoted, disinterested airs. He was nothing whatever in
himself, and had no character or merit save by tradition, reflection,
imitation, superstition. He had a longish pedigree—he came of some
musty, mouldy ‘county family’, people with a local reputation and an
immense lack of general importance; he had taken the greatest care of
his little fortune. He had travelled all over the globe several times,
‘for the shooting’, in that brutal way of the English. That was a
pursuit which was compatible with the greatest stupidity. He had a
little taste, a little cleverness, a little reading, a little good
furniture, a little French and Italian (he exaggerated these latter
quantities), an immense deal of assurance, and complete leisure. That,
at bottom, was all he represented—idle, trifling, luxurious, yet at the
same time pretentious leisure, the sort of thing that led people to
invent false, humbugging duties, because they had no real ones.
Sholto’s great idea of himself (after his profession of being her
slave) was that he was a cosmopolite—exempt from every prejudice. About
the prejudices the Princess couldn’t say and didn’t care; but she had
seen him in foreign countries, she had seen him in Italy, and she was
bound to say he understood nothing about those people. It was several
years before, shortly after her marriage, that she had first
encountered him. He had not begun immediately to take the adoring line,
but it had come little by little. It was only after she had separated
from her husband that he had begun really to hang about her; since when
she had suffered much from him. She would do him one justice, however:
he had never, so far as she knew, had the impudence to represent
himself as anything but hopeless and helpless. It was on this that he
took his stand; he wished to pass for the great model of unrewarded
constancy. She couldn’t imagine what he was waiting for; perhaps it was
for the death of the Prince. But the Prince would never die, nor had
she the least desire that he should. She had no wish to be harsh, for
of course that sort of thing, from any one, was very flattering; but
really, whatever feeling poor Sholto might have, four-fifths of it were
purely theatrical. He was not in the least a natural human being, but
had a hundred affectations and attitudes, the result of never having
been obliged to put his hand to anything; having no serious tastes and
yet being born to a little ‘position’. The Princess remarked that she
was so glad Hyacinth had no position, and had been forced to do
something in life but amuse himself; that was the way she liked her
friends now. She had said to Sholto again and again, “There are plenty
of others who will be much more pleased; why not go to _them?_ It’s
such a waste of time:” and she was sure he had taken her advice, and
was by no means, as regards herself, the absorbed, annihilated creature
he endeavoured to appear. He had told her once that he tried to take an
interest in other women—though indeed he had added that it was of no
use. Of what use did he expect anything he could possibly do to be?
Hyacinth did not tell the Princess that he had reason to believe the
Captain’s effort in this direction had not been absolutely vain; but he
made that reflection, privately, with increased confidence. He
recognised a further truth even when his companion said, at the end,
that, with all she had touched upon, he was a queer combination.
Trifler as he was, there was something sinister in him too; and she
confessed she had had a vague feeling, at times, that some day he might
do her a hurt. Hyacinth, at this, stopped short, on the threshold of
the drawing-room, and asked in a low voice, “Are you afraid of him?”

The Princess looked at him a moment; then smiling, “_Dio mio_, how you
say that! Should you like to kill him for me?”

“I shall have to kill some one, you know. Why not him, while I’m about
it, if he troubles you?”

“Ah, my friend, if you should begin to kill every one who had troubled
me!” the Princess murmured, as they went into the room.




XXVII


Hyacinth knew there was something out of the way as soon as he saw Lady
Aurora’s face look forth at him, in answer to his tap, while she held
the door ajar. What was she doing in Pinnie’s bedroom?—a very poor
place, into which the dressmaker, with her reverence, would never have
admitted a person of that quality unless things were pretty bad. She
was solemn, too; she didn’t laugh, as usual; she had removed her large
hat, with its limp, old-fashioned veil, and she raised her finger to
her lips. Hyacinth’s first alarm had been immediately after he let
himself into the house, with his latch-key, as he always did, and found
the little room on the right of the passage, in which Pinnie had lived
ever since he remembered, fireless and untenanted. As soon as he had
paid the cabman, who put down his portmanteau for him in the hall (he
was not used to paying cabmen, and was conscious he gave him too much,
but was too impatient, in his sudden anxiety, to care), he hurried up
the vile staircase, which seemed viler, even through his preoccupation,
than ever, and gave the knock, accompanied by a call the least bit
tremulous, immediately answered by Lady Aurora. She drew back into the
room a moment, while he stared, in his dismay; then she emerged again,
closing the door behind her—all with the air of enjoining him to be
terribly quiet. He felt, suddenly, so sick at the idea of having
lingered at Medley while there was distress at the wretched little
house to which he owed so much, that he scarcely found strength for an
articulate question, and obeyed, mechanically, the mute, urgent gesture
by which Lady Aurora appealed to him to go downstairs with her. It was
only when they stood together in the deserted parlour (it was as if he
perceived for the first time what an inelegant odour prevailed there)
that he asked, “Is she dying—is she dead?” That was the least the
strained sadness looking out from the face of the noble visitor
appeared to announce.

“Dear Mr Robinson, I’m so sorry for you. I wanted to write, but I
promised her I wouldn’t. She is very ill—we are very anxious. It began
ten days ago, and I suppose I _must_ tell you how much she has gone
down.” Lady Aurora spoke with more than all her usual embarrassments
and precautions, eagerly, yet as if it cost her much pain: pausing a
little after everything she said, to see how he would take it; then
going on, with a little propitiatory rush. He learned presently what
was the matter, what doctor she had sent for, and that if he would wait
a little before going into the room it would be so much better; the
invalid having sunk, within half an hour, into a doze of a less
agitated kind than she had had for some time, from which it would be an
immense pity to run the risk of waking her. The doctor gave her the
right things, as it seemed to her ladyship, but he admitted that she
had very little power of resistance. He was of course not a very large
practitioner, Mr Buffery, from round the corner, but he seemed really
clever; and she herself had taken the liberty (as she confessed to this
she threw off one of her odd laughs, and her colour rose) of sending an
elderly, respectable person—a kind of nurse. She was out just then; she
had to go, for an hour, for the air—“only when I come, of course,” said
Lady Aurora. Dear Miss Pynsent had had a cold hanging about her, and
had not taken care of it. Hyacinth would know how plucky she was about
that sort of thing; she took so little interest in herself. “Of course
a cold is a cold, whoever has it; isn’t it?” said Lady Aurora. Ten days
before, she had taken an additional chill through falling asleep in her
chair, in the evening, down there, and letting the fire go out. “It
would have been nothing if she had been like you or me, you know,” her
ladyship went on; “but just as she was then, it made the difference.
The day was horribly damp, and it had struck into the lungs, and
inflammation had set in. Mr Buffery says she was impoverished, just
rather low and languid, you know.” The next morning she had bad pains
and a good deal of fever, yet she had got up. Poor Pinnie’s gracious
ministrant did not make clear to Hyacinth what time had elapsed before
she came to her relief, nor by what means she had been notified, and he
saw that she slurred this over from the admirable motive of wishing him
not to feel that the little dressmaker had suffered by his absence or
called for him in vain. This, apparently, had indeed not been the case,
if Pinnie had opposed, successfully, his being written to. Lady Aurora
only said, “I came in very soon, it was such a delightful chance. Since
then she has had everything; only it’s sad to see a person _need_ so
little. She did want you to stay; she has clung to that idea. I speak
the simple truth, Mr Robinson.”

“I don’t know what to say to you—you are so extraordinarily good, so
angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and made weak by a strange,
unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he
had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to
which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother
struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the
presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—the
contrast seemed to cut him like a knife, and to make the horrible
accident of his absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame
you, when you are so kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke
out.

Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of
course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to
consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that
your visit should _not_ be cut short. When you should come of yourself,
it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you have been, but
she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would
do you so much good.”

Hyacinth felt his eyes filling with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying!
How can she live when she’s like that?”

He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so
many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A
succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated
emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had
possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of
solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips
gently on his hand. So, for a minute, while his tears flowed and she
said nothing, he felt her timid, consoling touch. At the end of the
minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said ‘we’
just before, and he asked her whom she meant.

“Oh, Mr Vetch, don’t you know? I have made his acquaintance; it’s
impossible to be more kind.” Then, while, for an instant, Hyacinth was
silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden
to the fiddler while _he_ was masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora
added, “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once, at first, to
bring his violin; she thought it would soothe her.”

“I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble
him,” said Hyacinth.

Apparently there was a certain dryness in his tone, which was the cause
of her ladyship’s venturing to reply, after an hesitation, “Do let him
come, Mr Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder whether you know
that—that he has a great affection for you.”

“The more fool he; I have always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth
exclaimed, colouring.

The way Lady Aurora spoke proved to him, later, that she now definitely
did know his secret, or one of them, rather; for at the rate things had
been going for the last few months he was making a regular collection.
She knew the smaller—not, of course, the greater; she had, decidedly,
been illuminated by Pinnie’s divagations. At the moment he made that
reflection, however, he was almost startled to perceive how completely
he had ceased to resent such betrayals and how little it suddenly
seemed to signify that the innocent source of them was about to be
quenched. The sense of his larger secret swallowed up that particular
anxiety, making him ask himself what it mattered, for the time that was
left to him, that people should whisper to each other his little
mystery. The day came quickly when he believed, and yet didn’t care,
that it had been universally imparted.

After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first
moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale
parlour, immersed in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing
Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much, of late, in
the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker, in
taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious
discipline. What was most vivid to him, in the deserted scene of
Pinnie’s unsuccessful industry, was the changed vision with which he
had come back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the
same, and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in
the impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a
dismal _chiaroscuro_—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of
his own little life; but the eyes with which he looked at it had new
terms of comparison. He had known the place was hideous and sordid, but
its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he
couldn’t believe that for years together he had accepted and even, a
little, revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service that his
experience of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have
assimilated that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for
himself; but with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement
could one come to with the very humble, which was in its nature
uncompromising? Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark
drizzle, and the room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of
dampness from the muddy street, where the areas were a narrow slit. No
wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, and her small under-fed organism had
grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her limited, stinted
life, the patient, humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had
ended only in a show-room where there was nothing to show and a pensive
reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to
his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he heard a cautious tinkle at
the house-door, which was presently opened by the little besmirched
slavey retained for the service of the solitary lodger—a domestic
easily bewildered, who had a squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing
shoes that didn’t match, though they were of an equal antiquity and
resembled each other in the facility with which they dropped off.
Hyacinth had not heard Mr Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because
he spoke in a whisper; but the young man was not surprised when, taking
every precaution not to make the door creak, he came into the parlour.
The fiddler said nothing to him at first; the two men only looked at
each other for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to
know—whether _he_ knew the worst about Pinnie; but what was further in
his eyes (they had an expression considerably different from any he had
hitherto seen in them) defined itself to our hero only little by
little.

“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth, at
last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but
he thought the question fair. None the less, he expected a sarcastic
answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr
Vetch replied—

“I assure you, no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever did
more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you back,
and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I balanced
one thing against the other; it was very difficult.”

“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest
are dying, they are usually sent for.”

The fiddler gave a strange, argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and
Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to
Hyacinth, it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties
of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr Vetch’s old age
was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley
had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy,
this case was exceptional,” said the old man. “Your visit had a
character of importance.”

“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you
anything.”

“No, certainly, you have never told me much. But if, as is probable,
you have seen that kind lady who is now upstairs, you will have learned
that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed. She
threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back. You
know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As, at this, Hyacinth turned away
with a gesture of irritation, Mr Vetch went on, “No doubt she is
absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t, now, cast any disrespect
upon it. I assure you, if she had been here alone, suffering, sinking,
without a creature to tend her, and nothing before her but to die in a
corner, like a starved cat, she would still have faced that fate rather
than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel scenes.”

Hyacinth was silent for a moment. “Of course I know what you mean. But
she spun her delusion—she always did, all of them—out of nothing. I
can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of
scenes. I told her, when I went out of town, very little more than I
told you.”

“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been, at any rate, enough.
She has made up her mind that you have formed a connection by means of
which you will come, somehow or other, into your own. She has done
nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s
all one, the aristocracy, and nothing is simpler than that the
person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you have been to stay
should undertake your business with her friends.”

“Oh, well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of
that entertainment.”

“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added, “My
dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”

“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “I’ll tell her my
great relations have adopted me and that I have come back in the
character of Lord Robinson.”

“She will need nothing more to die happy,” Mr Vetch observed.

Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend a
confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition, Mr
Vetch explaining that he came over, like that, to see how she was, half
a dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended upon the
pair, while Hyacinth waited for some sign from Lady Aurora that he
might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked out of
the window, studying intently the physiognomy of Lomax Place; and
Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with his
hands in his pockets. At last Mr Vetch observed, without taking his
pipe out of his lips or looking round, “I think you might be a little
more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”

Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment, sincerely, what
his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of an
effort to conceal anything he could possibly tell (there were some
things, of course, he couldn’t); on the contrary, his life seemed to
him particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious
comment. It was at this moment he first observed a certain difference;
there was a tone in Mr Vetch’s voice that he had never perceived
before—an absence of that note which had made him say, in other days,
that the impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It
was as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate,
in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part, his
having grown older, or more important, or even simply more surpassingly
curious. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s old
neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his being
a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so
perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr Vetch in a mind familiar now
for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not
favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience on
Hyacinth’s part was speedily corrected by one of the sudden reactions
or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim. In
the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than it
said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had, for years, a
small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of it,
his visible expression, even, of ultimate parsimony and of having
ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more for
something else—these things became so many reasons for turning round,
going over to him, touching signs of an invincible fidelity, the
humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an art
after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the
species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting with fidgeted
from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the
same place for three months together.

“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to
know what I have been doing in the country? I should have first to
know, myself,” Hyacinth said.

“Have you enjoyed it very much?”

“Yes, certainly, very much—not knowing anything about Pinnie. I have
been in a beautiful house, with a beautiful woman.”

Mr Vetch had turned round; he looked very impartial, through the smoke
of his pipe.

“Is she really a princess?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really’. I suppose all titles are great
rot. But every one seems agreed to call her so.”

“You know I have always liked to enter into your life; and to-day the
wish is stronger than ever,” the old man observed, presently, fixing
his eyes very steadily on Hyacinth’s.

The latter returned his gaze for a moment; then he asked, “What makes
you say that just now?”

The fiddler appeared to deliberate, and at last he replied, “Because
you are in danger of losing the best friend you have ever had.”

“Be sure I feel it. But if I have got you—” Hyacinth added.

“Oh, me! I’m very old, and very tired of life.”

“I suppose that that’s what one arrives at. Well, if I can help you in
any way you must lean on me, you must make use of me.”

“That’s precisely what I was going to say to you,” said Mr Vetch.
“Should you like any money?”

“Of course I should! But why should you offer it to me?”

“Because in saving it up, little by little, I have had you in mind.”

“Dear Mr Vetch,” said Hyacinth, “you have me too much in mind. I’m not
worth it, please believe that; for all sorts of reasons. I should make
money enough for any uses I have for it, or have any right to have, if
I stayed quietly in London and attended to my work. As you know, I can
earn a decent living.”

“Yes, I can see that. But if you stayed quietly in London what would
become of your princess?”

“Oh, they can always manage, ladies in that position.”

“Hanged if I understand her position!” cried Mr Vetch, but without
laughing. “You have been for three weeks without work, and yet you look
uncommonly smart.”

“You see, my living has cost me nothing. When you stay with great
people you don’t pay your score,” Hyacinth explained, with great
gentleness. “Moreover, the lady whose hospitality I have been enjoying
has made me a very handsome offer of work.”

“What kind of work?”

“The only kind I know. She is going to send me a lot of books, to do up
for her.”

“And to pay you fancy prices?”

“Oh, no; I am to fix the prices myself.”

“Are not transactions of that kind rather disagreeable, with a lady
whose hospitality one has been enjoying?” Mr Vetch inquired.

“Exceedingly! That is exactly why I shall do the books and then take no
money.”

“Your princess is rather clever!” the fiddler exclaimed, in a moment,
smiling.

“Well, she can’t force me to take it if I won’t,” said Hyacinth.

“No; you must only let _me_ do that.”

“You have curious ideas about me,” the young man declared.

Mr Vetch turned about to the window again, remarking that he had
curious ideas about everything. Then he added, after an interval—

“And have you been making love to your great lady?”

He had expected a flash of impatience in reply to this inquiry, and was
rather surprised at the manner in which Hyacinth answered: “How shall I
explain? It is not a question of that sort.”

“Has she been making love to you, then?”

“If you should ever see her you would understand how absurd that
supposition is.”

“How shall I ever see her?” returned Mr Vetch. “In the absence of that
privilege I think there is something in my idea.”

“She looks quite over my head,” said Hyacinth, simply. “It’s by no
means impossible you may see her. She wants to know my friends, to know
the people who live in the Place. And she would take a particular
interest in you, on account of your opinions.”

“Ah, I have no opinions now, none any more!” the old man broke out,
sadly. “I only had them to frighten Pinnie.”

“She was easily frightened,” said Hyacinth.

“Yes, and easily reassured. Well, I like to know about your life,” his
neighbour sighed, irrelevantly. “But take care the great lady doesn’t
lead you too far.”

“How do you mean, too far?”

“Isn’t she an anarchist—a nihilist? Doesn’t she go in for a general
rectification, as Eustace calls it?”

Hyacinth was silent a moment. “You should see the place—you should see
what she wears, what she eats and drinks.”

“Ah, you mean that she is inconsistent with her theories? My dear boy,
she would be a droll woman if she were not. At any rate, I’m glad of
it.”

“Glad of it?” Hyacinth repeated.

“For you, I mean, when you stay with her; it’s more luxurious!” Mr
Vetch exclaimed, turning round and smiling. At this moment a little rap
on the floor above, given by Lady Aurora, announced that Hyacinth might
at last come up and see Pinnie. Mr Vetch listened and recognised it,
and it led him to say, with considerable force, “_There’s_ a woman
whose theories and conduct do square!”

Hyacinth, on the threshold, leaving the room, stopped long enough to
reply, “Well, when the day comes for my friend to give up—you’ll see.”

“Yes, I have no doubt there are things she will bring herself to
sacrifice,” the old man remarked; but Hyacinth was already out of
hearing.




XXVIII


Mr Vetch waited below till Lady Aurora should come down and give him
the news he was in suspense for. His mind was pretty well made up about
Pinnie. It had seemed to him, the night before, that death was written
in her face, and he judged it on the whole a very good moment for her
to lay down her earthly burden. He had reasons for believing that the
future could not be sweet to her. As regards Hyacinth, his mind was far
from being at ease; for though he was aware in a general way that he
had taken up with strange company, and though he had flattered himself
of old that he should be pleased to see the boy act out his life and
solve the problem of his queer inheritance, he was worried by the
absence of full knowledge. He put out his pipe, in anticipation of Lady
Aurora’s reappearance, and without this consoler he was more accessible
still to certain fears that had come to him in consequence of a recent
talk, or rather an attempt at a talk, with Eustache Poupin. It was
through the Frenchman that he had gathered the little he knew about the
occasion of Hyacinth’s unprecedented excursion. His ideas on the
subject had been very inferential; for Hyacinth had made a mystery of
his absence to Pinnie, merely letting her know that there was a lady in
the case and that the best luggage he could muster and the best way his
shirts could be done up would still not be good enough. Poupin had seen
Godfrey Sholto at the ‘Sun and Moon’, and it had come to him, through
Hyacinth, that there was a remarkable feminine influence in the
Captain’s life, mixed up in some way with his presence in Bloomsbury—an
influence, moreover, by which Hyacinth himself, for good or for evil,
was in peril of being touched. Sholto was the young man’s visible link
with a society for which Lisson Grove could have no importance in the
scheme of the universe but as a short cut (too disagreeable to be
frequently used) out of Bayswater; therefore if Hyacinth left town with
a new hat and a pair of kid gloves it must have been to move in the
direction of that superior circle and in some degree, at least, at the
solicitation of the before-mentioned feminine influence. So much as
this the Frenchman suggested, explicitly enough, as his manner was, to
the old fiddler; but his talk had a flavour of other references which
excited Mr Vetch’s curiosity much more than they satisfied it. They
were obscure; they evidently were painful to the speaker; they were
confused and embarrassed and totally wanting in the luminosity which
usually characterised the lightest allusions of M. Poupin. It was the
fiddler’s fancy that his friend had something on his mind which he was
not at liberty to impart, and that it related to Hyacinth and might,
for those who took an interest in the singular lad, constitute a
considerable anxiety. Mr Vetch, on his own part, nursed this anxiety
into a tolerably definite shape: he persuaded himself that the
Frenchman had been leading the boy too far in the line of social
criticism, had given him a push on some crooked path where a slip would
be a likely accident. When on a subsequent occasion, with Poupin, he
indulged in a hint of this suspicion, the bookbinder flushed a good
deal and declared that his conscience was pure. It was one of his
peculiarities that when his colour rose he looked angry, and Mr Vetch
held that his displeasure was a proof that in spite of his repudiations
he had been unwise; though before they parted Eustache gave this sign
of softness, that he shed tears of emotion, of which the reason was not
clear to the fiddler and which appeared in a general way to be
dedicated to Hyacinth. The interview had taken place in Lisson Grove,
where Madame Poupin, however, had not shown herself.

Altogether the old man was a prey to suppositions which led him to feel
how much he himself had outlived the democratic glow of his prime. He
had ended by accepting everything (though, indeed, he couldn’t swallow
the idea that a trick should be played upon Hyacinth), and even by
taking an interest in current politics, as to which, of old, he had
held the opinion (the same that the Poupins held to-day) that they had
been invented on purpose to throw dust in the eyes of disinterested
reformers and to circumvent the social solution. He had given up that
problem some time ago; there was no way to clear it up that didn’t seem
to make a bigger mess than the actual muddle of human affairs, which,
by the time one had reached sixty-five, had mostly ceased to
exasperate. Mr Vetch could still feel a certain sharpness on the
subject of the prayer-book and the bishops; and if at moments he was a
little ashamed of having accepted this world he could reflect that at
all events he continued to repudiate every other. The idea of great
changes, however, took its place among the dreams of his youth; for
what was any possible change in the relations of men and women but a
new combination of the same elements? If the elements could be made
different the thing would be worth thinking of; but it was not only
impossible to introduce any new ones—no means had yet been discovered
for getting rid of the old. The figures on the chessboard were still
the passions and jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man,
and their position with regard to each other, at any given moment,
could be of interest only to the grim, invisible fates who played the
game—who sat, through the ages, bow-backed over the table. This laxity
had come upon the old man with the increase of his measurement round
the waist, of the little heap of half-crowns and half-sovereigns that
had accumulated in a tin box with a very stiff padlock, which he kept
under his bed, and of the interwoven threads of sentiment and custom
that united him to the dressmaker and her foster-son. If he was no
longer pressing about the demands he felt he should have a right to
make of society, as he had been in the days when his conversation
scandalised Pinnie, so he was now not pressing for Hyacinth, either;
reflecting that though, indeed, the constituted powers might have to
‘count’ with him, it would be in better taste for him not to be
importunate about a settlement. What he had come to fear for him was
that he should be precipitated by crude agencies, with results in which
the deplorable might not exclude the ridiculous. It may even be said
that Mr Vetch had a secret project of settling a little on his behalf.

Lady Aurora peeped into the room, very noiselessly, nearly half an hour
after Hyacinth had left it, and let the fiddler know that she was
called to other duties but that the nurse had come back and the doctor
had promised to look in at five o’clock. She herself would return in
the evening, and meanwhile Hyacinth was with his aunt, who had
recognised him, without a protest; indeed seemed intensely happy that
he should be near her again, and lay there with closed eyes, very weak
and speechless, with his hand in hers. Her restlessness had passed and
her fever abated, but she had no pulse to speak of and Lady Aurora did
not disguise the fact that, in her opinion, she was rapidly sinking. Mr
Vetch had already accepted it, and after her ladyship had quitted him
he lighted another philosophic pipe upon it, lingering on, till the
doctor came, in the dressmaker’s dismal, forsaken bower, where, in past
years, he had indulged in so many sociable droppings-in and hot
tumblers. The echo of all her little simple surprises and pointless
contradictions, her gasping reception of contemplative paradox, seemed
still to float in the air; but the place felt as relinquished and
bereaved as if she were already beneath the sod. Pinnie had always been
a wonderful hand at ‘putting away’; the litter that testified to her
most elaborate efforts was often immense, but the reaction in favour of
an unspeckled carpet was greater still; and on the present occasion,
before taking to her bed, she had found strength to sweep and set in
order as daintily as if she had been sure that the room would never
again know her care. Even to the old fiddler, who had not Hyacinth’s
sensibility to the scenery of life, it had the cold propriety of a
place arranged for an interment. After the doctor had seen Pinnie, that
afternoon, there was no doubt left as to its soon being the stage of
dismal preliminaries.

Miss Pynsent, however, resisted her malady for nearly a fortnight more,
during which Hyacinth was constantly in her room. He never went back to
Mr Crookenden’s, with whose establishment, through violent causes, his
relations seemed indefinitely suspended; and in fact, for the rest of
the time that Pinnie demanded his care he absented himself but twice
from Lomax Place for more than a few minutes. On one of these occasions
he travelled over to Audley Court and spent an hour there; on the other
he met Millicent Henning, by appointment, and took a walk with her on
the Embankment. He tried to find a moment to go and thank Madame Poupin
for a sympathetic offering, many times repeated, of _tisane_, concocted
after a receipt thought supreme by the couple in Lisson Grove (though
little appreciated in the neighbourhood generally); but he was obliged
to acknowledge her kindness only by a respectful letter, which he
composed with some trouble, though much elation, in the French tongue,
peculiarly favourable, as he believed, to little courtesies of this
kind. Lady Aurora came again and again to the darkened house, where she
diffused her beneficent influence in nightly watches; in the most
modern sanative suggestions, in conversations with Hyacinth, directed
with more ingenuity than her fluttered embarrassments might have led
one to attribute to her, to the purpose of diverting his mind, and in
tea-makings (there was a great deal of this liquid consumed on the
premises during Pinnie’s illness), after a system more enlightened than
the usual fashion of Pentonville. She was the bearer of several
messages and of a good deal of medical advice from Rose Muniment, whose
interest in the dressmaker’s case irritated Hyacinth by its fine
courage, which even at second-hand was still obtrusive; she appeared
very nearly as resigned to the troubles of others as she was to her
own.

Hyacinth had been seized, the day after his return from Medley, with a
sharp desire to do something enterprising and superior on Pinnie’s
behalf. He felt the pressure of a sort of angry sense that she was
dying of her poor career, of her uneffaced remorse for the trick she
had played him in his boyhood (as if he hadn’t long ago, and indeed at
the time, forgiven it, judging it to have been the highest wisdom!), of
something basely helpless in the attitude of her little circle. He
wanted to do something which should prove to himself that he had got
the best opinion about the invalid that it was possible to have: so he
insisted that Mr Buffery should consult with a West End doctor, if the
West End doctor would consent to meet Mr Buffery. A physician capable
of this condescension was discovered through Lady Aurora’s agency (she
had not brought him of her own movement, because on the one hand she
hesitated to impose on the little household in Lomax Place the expense
of such a visit, and on the other, with all her narrow personal
economies for the sake of her charities, had not the means to meet it
herself); and in prevision of the great man’s fee Hyacinth applied to
Mr Vetch, as he had applied before, for a loan. The great man came, and
was wonderfully civil to Mr Buffery, whose conduct of the case he
pronounced judicious; he remained several minutes in the house, while
he gazed at Hyacinth over his spectacles (he seemed rather more
occupied with him than with the patient), and almost the whole of the
Place turned out to stare at his chariot. After all, he consented to
accept no fee. He put the question aside with a gesture full of
urbanity—a course disappointing and displeasing to Hyacinth, who felt
in a manner cheated of the full effect of the fine thing he had wished
to do for Pinnie; though when he said as much (or something like it) to
Mr Vetch, the caustic fiddler greeted the observation with a face of
amusement which, considering the situation, verged upon the unseemly.

Hyacinth, at any rate, had done the best he could, and the fashionable
doctor had left directions which foreshadowed relations with an
expensive chemist in Bond Street—a prospect by which our young man was
to some extent consoled. Poor Pinnie’s decline, however, was not
arrested, and one evening, more than a week after his return from
Medley, as he sat with her alone, it seemed to Hyacinth that her spirit
must already have passed away. The nurse had gone down to her supper,
and from the staircase a perceptible odour of fizzling bacon indicated
that a more cheerful state of things prevailed in the lower regions.
Hyacinth could not make out whether Miss Pynsent were asleep or awake;
he believed she had not lost consciousness, yet for more than an hour
she had given no sign of life. At last she put out her hand, as if she
knew he was near her and wished to feel for his, and murmured, “Why did
she come? I didn’t want to see her.” In a moment, as she went on, he
perceived to whom she was alluding: her mind had travelled back,
through all the years, to the dreadful day (she had described every
incident of it to him) when Mrs Bowerbank had invaded her quiet life
and startled her sensitive conscience with a message from the prison.
“She sat there so long—so long. She was very large, and I was
frightened. She moaned, and moaned, and cried—too dreadful. I couldn’t
help it—I couldn’t help it!” Her thought wandered from Mrs Bowerbank in
the discomposed show-room, enthroned on the yellow sofa, to the tragic
creature at Milbank, whose accents again, for the hour, lived in her
ears; and mixed with this mingled vision was still the haunting sense
that she herself might have acted differently. That had been cleared up
in the past, so far as Hyacinth’s intention was concerned; but what was
most alive in Pinnie at the present moment was the passion of
repentance, of still further expiation. It sickened Hyacinth that she
should believe these things were still necessary, and he leaned over
her and talked tenderly, with words of comfort and reassurance. He told
her not to think of that dismal, far-off time, which had ceased long
ago to have any consequences for either of them; to consider only the
future, when she should be quite strong again and he would look after
her and keep her all to himself and take care of her better, far
better, than he had ever done before. He had thought of many things
while he sat with Pinnie, watching the shadows made by the
night-lamp—high, imposing shadows of objects low and mean—and among
them he had followed, with an imagination that went further in that
direction than ever before, the probable consequences of his not having
been adopted in his babyhood by the dressmaker. The workhouse and the
gutter, ignorance and cold, filth and tatters, nights of huddling under
bridges and in doorways, vermin, starvation and blows, possibly even
the vigorous efflorescence of an inherited disposition to crime—these
things, which he saw with unprecedented vividness, suggested themselves
as his natural portion. Intimacies with a princess, visits to fine old
country-houses, intelligent consideration, even, of the best means of
inflicting a scare on the classes of privilege, would in that case not
have been within his compass; and that Pinnie should have rescued him
from such a destiny and put these luxuries within his reach was an
amelioration which really amounted to success, if he could only have
the magnanimity to regard it so.

Her eyes were open and fixed on him, but the sharp ray the little
dressmaker used to direct into Lomax Place as she plied her needle at
the window had completely left them. “Not there—what should I do
there?” she inquired, very softly. “Not with the great—the great—” and
her voice failed.

“The great what? What do you mean?”

“You know—you know,” she went on, making another effort. “Haven’t you
been with them? Haven’t they received you?”

“Ah, they won’t separate us, Pinnie; they won’t come between us as much
as that,” said Hyacinth, kneeling by her bed.

“_You_ must be separate—that makes me happier. I knew they would find
you at last.”

“Poor Pinnie, poor Pinnie,” murmured the young man.

“It was only for that—now I’m going,” she went on.

“If you’ll stay with me you needn’t fear,” said Hyacinth, smiling at
her.

“Oh, what would _they_ think?” asked the dressmaker.

“I like you best,” said Hyacinth.

“You have had me always. Now it’s their turn; they have waited.”

“Yes, indeed, they have waited!” Hyacinth exclaimed.

“But they will make it up; they will make up everything!” the invalid
panted. Then she added, “I couldn’t—couldn’t help it!”—which was the
last flicker of her strength. She gave no further sign of
consciousness, and four days later she ceased to breathe. Hyacinth was
with her, and Lady Aurora, but neither of them could recognise the
moment.

Hyacinth and Mr Vetch carried her bier, with the help of Eustache
Poupin and Paul Muniment. Lady Aurora was at the funeral, and Madame
Poupin as well, and twenty neighbours from Lomax Place; but the most
distinguished person (in appearance at least) in the group of mourners
was Millicent Henning, the grave yet brilliant beauty of whose
countenance, the high propriety of whose demeanour, and the fine taste
and general style of whose black ‘costume’ excited no little attention.
Mr Vetch had his idea; he had been nursing it ever since Hyacinth’s
return from Medley, and three days after Pinnie had been consigned to
the earth he broached it to his young friend. The funeral had been on a
Friday, and Hyacinth had mentioned to him that he should return to Mr
Crookenden’s on the Monday morning. This was Sunday night, and Hyacinth
had been out for a walk, neither with Millicent Henning nor with Paul
Muniment, but alone, after the manner of old days. When he came in he
found the fiddler waiting for him, and burning a tallow candle, in the
blighted show-room. He had three or four little papers in his hand,
which exhibited some jottings of his pencil, and Hyacinth guessed, what
was the truth but not all the truth, that he had come to speak to him
about business. Pinnie had left a little will, of which she had
appointed her old friend executor; this fact had already become known
to our hero, who thought such an arrangement highly natural. Mr Vetch
informed him of the purport of this simple and judicious document, and
mentioned that he had been looking into the dressmaker’s ‘affairs’.
They consisted, poor Pinnie’s affairs, of the furniture of the house in
Lomax Place, of the obligation to pay the remainder of a quarter’s
rent, and of a sum of money in the savings-bank. Hyacinth was surprised
to learn that Pinnie’s economies had produced fruit at this late day
(things had gone so ill with her in recent years, and there had been
often such a want of money in the house), until Mr Vetch explained to
him, with eager clearness, that he himself had watched over the little
hoard, accumulated during the period of her comparative prosperity,
with the stiff determination that it should be sacrificed only in case
of desperate necessity. Work had become scarce with Pinnie, but she
could still do it when it came, and the money was to be kept for the
very possible period when she should be helpless. Mercifully enough,
she had not lived to see that day, and the sum in the bank had survived
her, though diminished by more than half. She had left no debts but the
matter of the house and those incurred during her illness. Of course
the fiddler had known—he hastened to give his young friend this
assurance—that Pinnie, had she become infirm, would have been able to
count absolutely upon _him_ for the equivalent, in her old age, of the
protection she had given him in his youth. But what if an accident had
overtaken Hyacinth? What if he had incurred some nasty penalty for his
revolutionary dabblings, which, little dangerous as they might be to
society, were quite capable, in a country where authority, though
good-natured, liked occasionally to make an example, to put him on the
wrong side of a prison-wall? At any rate, for better or worse, by
pinching and scraping, she had saved a little, and of that little,
after everything was paid off, a fraction would still be left.
Everything was bequeathed to Hyacinth—everything but a couple of plated
candlesticks and the old ‘cheffonier’, which had been so handsome in
its day; these Pinnie begged Mr Vetch to accept in recognition of
services beyond all price. The furniture, everything he didn’t want for
his own use, Hyacinth could sell in a lump, and with the proceeds he
could wipe out old scores. The sum of money would remain to him; it
amounted, in its reduced condition, to about thirty-seven pounds. In
mentioning this figure Mr Vetch appeared to imply that Hyacinth would
be master of a very pretty little fortune. Even to the young man
himself, in spite of his recent initiations, it seemed far from
contemptible; it represented sudden possibilities of still not
returning to old Crookenden’s. It represented them, that is, till,
presently, he remembered the various advances made him by the fiddler,
and reflected that by the time these had been repaid there would hardly
be twenty pounds left. That, however, was a far larger sum than he had
ever had in his pocket at once. He thanked the old man for his
information, and remarked—and there was no hypocrisy in the speech—that
he was very sorry Pinnie had not given herself the benefit of the whole
of the little fund in her lifetime. To this her executor replied that
it had yielded her an interest far beyond any other investment; for he
was persuaded she believed she should never live to enjoy it, and this
faith was rich in pictures, visions of the effect such a windfall would
produce in Hyacinth’s career.

“What effect did she mean—do you mean?” Hyacinth inquired. As soon as
he had spoken he felt that he knew what the old man would say (it would
be a reference to Pinnie’s belief in his reunion with his ‘relations’,
and the facilities that thirty-seven pounds would afford him for
cutting a figure among them); and for a moment Mr Vetch looked at him
as if exactly that response were on his lips. At the end of the moment,
however, he replied, quite differently—

“She hoped you would go abroad and see the world.” The fiddler watched
his young friend; then he added, “She had a particular wish that you
should go to Paris.”

Hyacinth had turned pale at this suggestion, and for a moment he said
nothing. “Ah, Paris!” he murmured, at last.

“She would have liked you even to take a little run down to Italy.”

“Doubtless that would be pleasant. But there is a limit to what one can
do with twenty pounds.”

“How do you mean, with twenty pounds?” the old man asked, lifting his
eyebrows, while the wrinkles in his forehead made deep shadows in the
candlelight.

“That’s about what will remain, after I have settled my account with
you.”

“How do you mean, your account with me? I shall not take any of your
money.”

Hyacinth’s eyes wandered over his interlocutor’s suggestive rustiness.
“I don’t want to be ungracious, but suppose _you_ should lose your
powers.”

“My dear boy, I shall have one of the resources that was open to
Pinnie. I shall look to you to be the support of my old age.”

“You may do so with perfect safety, except for that danger you just
mentioned, of my being imprisoned or hanged.”

“It’s precisely because I think it will be less if you go abroad that I
urge you to take this chance. You will see the world, and you will like
it better. You will think society, even as it is, has some good
points,” said Mr Vetch.

“I have never liked it better than the last few months.”

“Ah well, wait till you see Paris!”

“Oh, Paris—Paris,” Hyacinth repeated, vaguely, staring into the turbid
flame of the candle as if he made out the most brilliant scenes there;
an attitude, accent and expression which the fiddler interpreted both
as the vibration of a latent hereditary chord and a symptom of the
acute sense of opportunity.




BOOK FOURTH




XXIX


The boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, with the
variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of shops and cafés seen
through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant
porches of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the
far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure
and prosperity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening
in June. Hyacinth had been walking about all day—he had walked from
rising till bed-time every day of the week that had elapsed since his
arrival—and now an extraordinary fatigue, which, however, was not
without its delight (there was a kind of richness, a sweet satiety, in
it), a tremendous lassitude had fallen upon him, and he settled himself
in a chair beside a little table in front of Tortoni’s, not so much to
rest from it as to enjoy it. He had seen so much, felt so much, learned
so much, thrilled and throbbed and laughed and sighed so much, during
the past several days, that he was conscious at last of the danger of
becoming incoherent to himself, of the need of balancing his accounts.

To-night he came to a full stop; he simply sat at the door of the most
dandified café in Paris and felt his pulse and took stock of his
impressions. He had been intending to visit the Variétés theatre, which
blazed through intermediate lights and through the thin foliage of
trees not favoured by the asphalt, on the other side of the great
avenue. But the impression of Chaumont—he relinquished that, for the
present; it added to the luxury of his situation to reflect that he
should still have plenty of time to see the _succès du jour_. The same
effect proceeded from his determination to order a _marquise_, when the
waiter, whose superior shirt-front and whisker emerged from the long
white cylinder of an apron, came to take his commands. He knew the
decoction was expensive—he had learnt as much at the moment he happened
to overhear, for the first time, a mention of it; which had been the
night before, in his place in a stall, during an _entr’acte_, at the
_Comédie Française_. A gentleman beside him, a young man in
evening-dress, conversing with an acquaintance in the row behind,
recommended the latter to refresh himself with the article in question
after the play: there was nothing like it, the speaker remarked, of a
hot evening, in the open air, when one was thirsty. The waiter brought
Hyacinth a tall glass of champagne, in which a pine-apple ice was in
solution, and our hero felt that he had hoped for a sensation no less
delicate when he looked for an empty table on Tortoni’s terrace. Very
few tables were empty, and it was his belief that the others were
occupied by high celebrities; at any rate they were just the types he
had had a prevision of and had wanted most to meet, when the
extraordinary opportunity to come abroad with his pocket full of money
(it was more extraordinary, even, than his original meeting with the
Princess) became real to him in Lomax Place. He knew about Tortoni’s
from his study of the French novel, and as he sat there he had a vague
sense of fraternising with Balzac and Alfred de Musset; there were
echoes and reminiscences of their works in the air, confounding
themselves with the indefinable exhalations, the strange composite
odour, half agreeable, half impure, of the boulevard. ‘Splendid Paris,
charming Paris’—that refrain, the fragment of an invocation, a
beginning without an end, hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth’s ears;
the only articulate words that got themselves uttered in the hymn of
praise which his imagination had been offering to the French capital
from the first hour of his stay. He recognised, he greeted, with a
thousand palpitations, the seat of his maternal ancestors—was proud to
be associated with so much of the superb, so many proofs of a
civilisation that had no visible rough spots. He had his perplexities,
and he had even now and then a revulsion for which he had made no
allowance, as when it came over him that the most brilliant city in the
world was also the most blood-stained; but the great sense that he
understood and sympathised was preponderant, and his comprehension gave
him wings—appeared to transport him to still wider fields of knowledge,
still higher sensations.

In other days, in London, he had thought again and again of his
mother’s father, the revolutionary watch-maker who had known the
ecstasy of the barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his
reveries had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to
nothing about him. He figured him in his mind, had a conviction that he
was very short, like himself, and had curly hair, an immense talent for
his work and an extraordinary natural eloquence, together with many of
the most attractive qualities of the French character. But he was
reckless, and a little cracked, and probably immoral; he had
difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions; his life had been an
incurable fever and its tragic termination was a matter of course. None
the less it would have been a charm to hear him talk, to feel the
influence of a gaiety which even political madness could never quench;
for his grandson had a theory that he spoke the French tongue of an
earlier time, delightful and sociable in accent and phrase, exempt from
the commonness of modern slang. This vague yet vivid personage became
Hyacinth’s constant companion, from the day of his arrival; he roamed
about with Florentine’s boy, hand in hand, sat opposite to him at
dinner, at the small table in the restaurant, finished the bottle with
him, made the bill a little longer, and treated him to innumerable
revelations and counsels. He knew the lad’s secret without being told,
and looked at him across the diminutive tablecloth, where the great
tube of bread, pushed aside a little, left room for his elbows (it
puzzled Hyacinth that the people of Paris should ever have had the
fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so big), gazed at him with
eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with lips which seemed to
murmur that when one was to die to-morrow one was wise to eat and drink
to-day. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or
disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man
considered that Hyacinthe Vivier was of his own time of life and could
enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. Wondering, repeatedly,
where the barricade on which his grandfather fell had been erected, he
at last satisfied himself (but I am unable to trace the process of the
induction) that it had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré, very near
to the church of Saint-Roch. The pair had now roamed together through
all the museums and gardens, through the principal churches (the
republican martyr was very good-natured about this), through the
passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues, across all the
bridges, and above all, again and again, along the river, where the
quays were an endless entertainment to Hyacinth, who lingered by the
half-hour beside the boxes of old books on the parapets, stuffing his
pockets with five-penny volumes, while the bright industries of the
Seine flashed and glittered beneath him, and on the other bank the
glorious Louvre stretched either way for a league. Our young man took
almost the same sort of satisfaction in the Louvre as if he had erected
it; he haunted the museum during all the first days, and couldn’t look
enough at certain pictures, nor sufficiently admire the high polish of
the great floors in which the golden, frescoed ceilings repeated
themselves. All Paris struck him as tremendously artistic and
decorative; he felt as if hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy,
Philistine world, in which the taste was the taste of Little Pedlington
and the idea of beautiful arrangement had never had an influence. In
his ancestral city it had been active from the first, and that was why
his quick sensibility responded; and he murmured again his constant
refrain, when the fairness of the great monuments arrested him, in the
pearly, silvery light, or he saw them take gray-blue, delicate tones at
the end of stately vistas. It seemed to him that Paris expressed
herself, and did it in the grand style, while London remained vague and
blurred, inarticulate, blunt and dim.

Eustache Poupin had given him letters to three or four democratic
friends, ardent votaries of the social question, who had by a miracle
either escaped the cruelty of exile or suffered the outrage of pardon,
and, in spite of republican _mouchards_, no less infamous than the
imperial, and the periodical swoops of despotism which had only changed
its buttons and postage-stamps, kept alive the sacred spark which would
some day become a consuming flame. Hyacinth, however, had not had the
thought of delivering these introductions; he had accepted them because
Poupin had had such a solemn glee in writing them, and also because he
had not the courage to let the couple in Lisson Grove know that since
that terrible night at Hoffendahl’s a change had come over the spirit
of his dream. He had not grown more concentrated, he had grown more
relaxed, and it was inconsistent with relaxation that he should rummage
out Poupin’s friends—one of whom lived in the Batignolles and the
others in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—and pretend that he cared for what
they cared for in the same way as they cared for it. What was supreme
in his mind to-day was not the idea of how the society that surrounded
him should be destroyed; it was, much more, the sense of the wonderful,
precious things it had produced, of the brilliant, impressive fabric it
had raised. That destruction was waiting for it there was forcible
evidence, known to himself and others, to show; but since this truth
had risen before him, in its magnitude he had become conscious of a
transfer, partial if not complete, of his sympathies; the same
revulsion of which he had given a sign to the Princess in saying that
now he pitied the rich, those who were regarded as happy. While the
evening passed, therefore, as he kept his place at Tortoni’s, the
emotion that was last to visit him was a compunction for not having put
himself in relation with poor Poupin’s friends, for having neglected to
make the acquaintance of earnest people.

Who in the world, if one should come to that, was as earnest as he
himself, or had given such signal even though secret proofs of it? He
could lay that unction to his soul in spite of his having amused
himself cynically, spent all his time in theatres, galleries, walks of
pleasure. The feeling had not failed him with which he accepted Mr
Vetch’s furtherance—the sense that since he was destined to perish in
his flower he was right to make a dash at the beautiful, horrible
world. That reflection had been natural enough, but what was strange
was the fiddler’s own impulse, his desire to do something pleasant for
him, to beguile him and ship him off. What had been most odd in that
was the way Mr Vetch appeared to overlook the fact that his young
friend had already had, that year, such an episode of dissipation as
was surely rare in the experience of London artisans. This was one of
the many things Hyacinth thought of; he thought of the others in turn
and out of turn; it was almost the first time he had sat still long
enough (except at the theatre) to collect himself. A hundred confused
reverberations of the recent past crowded upon him, and he saw that he
had lived more intensely in the previous six months than in all the
rest of his existence. The succession of events finally straightened
itself, and he tasted some of the rarest, strangest moments over again.
His last week at Medley, in especial, had already become a kind of
fable, the echo of a song; he could read it over like a story, gaze at
it as he would have gazed at some exquisite picture. His visit there
had been perfect to the end, and even the three days that Captain
Sholto’s sojourn lasted had not broken the spell, for the three more
that had elapsed before his own departure (the Princess herself had
given him the signal) were the most important of all. It was then the
Princess had made it clear to him that she was in earnest, was prepared
for the last sacrifice. She was now his standard of comparison, his
authority, his measure, his perpetual reference; and in taking
possession of his mind to this extent she had completely renewed it.
She was altogether a new term, and now that he was in a foreign country
he observed how much her conversation, itself so foreign, had prepared
him to understand it. In Paris he saw, of course, a great many women,
and he noticed almost all of them, especially the actresses;
confronting, mentally, their movement, their speech, their manner of
dressing, with that of his extraordinary friend. He judged that she was
beyond them in every respect, though there were one or two actresses
who had the air of trying to copy her.

The recollection of the last days he had spent with her affected him
now like the touch of a tear-washed cheek. She had shed tears for him,
and it was his suspicion that her secret idea was to frustrate the
redemption of his vow to Hoffendahl, to the immeasurable body that
Hoffendahl represented. She pretended to have accepted it, and what she
said was simply that when he should have played his part she would
engage to save him—to fling a cloud about him, as the goddess-mother of
the Trojan hero used, in Virgil’s poem, to _escamoter_ Æneas. What she
meant was, in his view, to prevent him from playing his part at all.
She was earnest for herself, not for him. The main result of his
concentrated intimacy with her had been to make him feel that he was
good enough for anything. When he had asked her, the last day, if he
might write to her, she had said, Yes, but not for two or three weeks.
He had written after Pinnie’s death, and again just before coming
abroad, and in doing so had taken account of something else she had
said in regard to their correspondence—that she didn’t wish vague
phrases, protestations or compliments; she wanted the realities of his
life, the smallest, most personal details. Therefore he had treated her
to the whole business of the break-up in Lomax Place, including the
sale of the rickety furniture. He had told her what that transaction
brought—a beggarly sum, but sufficient to help a little to pay debts;
and he had informed her furthermore that one of the ways Mr Vetch had
taken to hurry him off to Paris was to offer him a present of thirty
pounds out of his curious little hoard, to add to the sum already
inherited from Pinnie—which, in a manner that none of Hyacinth’s
friends, of course, could possibly regard as frugal, or even as
respectable, was now consecrated to a mere excursion. He even mentioned
that he had ended by accepting the thirty pounds, adding that he feared
there was something demoralising in his peculiar situation (she would
know what he meant by that): it disposed one to take what one could
get, made one at least very tolerant of whims that happened to be
munificent.

What he did not mention to the Princess was the manner in which he had
been received by Paul Muniment and by Millicent Henning on his return
from Medley. Millicent’s reception had been the queerest; it had been
quite unexpectedly mild. She made him no scene of violence, and
appeared to have given up the line of throwing a blur of recrimination
over her own nefarious doings. She treated him as if she liked him for
having got in with the swells; she had an appreciation of success which
would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that he was really
successful. She tried to make him describe the style of life that was
led in a house where people were invited to stay like that without
having to pay, and she surprised him almost as much as she gratified
him by not indulging in any of her former digs at the Princess. She was
lavish of ejaculations when he answered certain of her
questions—ejaculations that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh, I say!” and “Oh,
my stars!”—and he was more than ever struck with her detestable habit
of saying, “Aye, that’s where it is,” when he had made some remark to
which she wished to give an intelligent and sympathetic assent. But she
didn’t jeer at the Princess’s private character; she stayed her satire,
in a case where there was such an opening for it. Hyacinth reflected
that this was lucky for her: he couldn’t have stood it (nervous and
anxious as he was about Pinnie) if she had had the bad taste, at such a
time as that, to be profane and insulting. In that case he would have
broken with her completely—he would have been too disgusted. She
displeased him enough, as it was, by her vulgar tricks of speech. There
were two or three little recurrent irregularities that aggravated him
to a degree quite out of proportion to their importance, as when she
said ‘full up’ for full, ‘sold out’ for sold, or remarked to him that
she supposed he was now going to chuck up his work at old Crookenden’s.
These phrases had fallen upon his ear many a time before, but now they
seemed almost unpardonable enough to quarrel about. Not that he had any
wish to quarrel, for if the question had been pushed he would have
admitted that to-day his intimacy with the Princess had caused any
rights he might have had upon Millicent to lapse. Millicent did not
push it, however; she only, it was evident, wished to convey to him
that it was better for both parties they should respect each other’s
liberty. A genial understanding on this subject was what Miss Henning
desired, and Hyacinth forbade himself to inquire what use she proposed
to make of her freedom. During the month that elapsed between Pinnie’s
death and his visit to Paris he had seen her several times, for the
respect for each other’s freedom had somehow not implied cessation of
intercourse, and it was only natural she should have been soft to him
in his bereaved condition. Hyacinth’s sentiment about Pinnie was deep,
and Millicent was clever enough to guess it; the consequence of which
was that on these occasions she was very soft indeed. She talked to him
almost as if she had been his mother and he a convalescent child;
called him her dear, and a young rascal, and her old boy; moralised a
good deal, abstained from beer (till she learned he had inherited a
fortune), and when he remarked once (moralising a little, too) that
after the death of a person we have loved we are haunted by the memory
of our failures of kindness, of generosity, rejoined, with a dignity
that made the words almost a contribution to philosophy, “Yes, that’s
where it is!”

Something in her behaviour at this period had even made Hyacinth wonder
whether there were not some mystical sign in his appearance, some
subtle betrayal in the very expression of his face, of the predicament
in which he had been placed by Diedrich Hoffendahl; he began to suspect
afresh the operation of that ‘beastly _attendrissement_’ he had
detected of old in people who had the benefit of Miss Pynsent’s
innuendoes. The compassion Millicent felt for him had never been one of
the reasons why he liked her; it had fortunately been corrected,
moreover, by his power to make her furious. This evening, on the
boulevard, as he watched the interminable successions, one of the ideas
that came to him was that it was odd he should like her even yet; for
heaven knew he liked the Princess better, and he had hitherto supposed
that when a sentiment of this kind had the energy of a possession it
made a clean sweep of all minor predilections. But it was clear to him
that Millicent still existed for him; that he couldn’t feel he had
quite done with her, or she with him; and that in spite of his having
now so many other things to admire there was still a comfort in the
recollection of her robust beauty and her primitive passions. Hyacinth
thought of her as some clever young barbarian who in ancient days
should have made a pilgrimage to Rome might have thought of a Dacian or
Iberian mistress awaiting his return on the rough provincial shore. If
Millicent considered his visit at a ‘hall’ a proof of the sort of
success that was to attend him (how he reconciled this with the
supposition that she perceived, as a ghostly irradiation, intermingled
with his curly hair, the aureola of martyrdom, he would have had some
difficulty in explaining), if Miss Henning considered, on his return
from Medley, that he had taken his place on the winning side, it was
only consistent of her to borrow a grandeur from his further travels;
and, indeed, by the time he was ready to start she spoke of the plan as
if she had invented it herself and even contributed materially to the
funds required. It had been her theory, from the first, that she only
liked people of spirit; and Hyacinth certainly had never had so much
spirit as when he launched himself into Continental adventures. He
could say to himself, quite without bitterness, that of course she
would profit by his absence to put her relations with Sholto on a
comfortable footing; yet, somehow, at this moment, as her face came
back to him amid the crowd of faces about him, it had not that
gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It was the brilliancy of Paris,
perhaps, that made him see things rosy; at any rate, he remembered with
kindness something that she had said to him the last time he saw her
and that had touched him exceedingly at the moment. He had happened to
observe to her, in a friendly way, that now Miss Pynsent had gone she
was, with the exception of Mr Vetch, the person in his whole circle who
had known him longest. To this Millicent had replied that Mr Vetch
wouldn’t live for ever, and then she should have the satisfaction of
being his very oldest friend. “Oh, well, I shan’t live for ever,
either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to inquire whether by chance he
had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I might get
killed in a row;” and when she broke out into scorn of his silly notion
of turning everything up (as if any one wanted to know what a
costermonger would like, or any of that low sort at the East End!) he
amused himself with asking her if she were satisfied with the condition
of society and thought nothing ought to be done for people who, at the
end of a lifetime of starvation-wages, had only the reward of the
hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave.

“I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything, if ever you was to slip up,”
Millicent answered, simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness.
Then she added, “There’s one thing I can tell _you_, Mr Robinson: that
if ever any one was to do you a turn—” And she paused again, tossing
back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by a tiara, while
Hyacinth inquired what would occur in that contingency. “Well, there’d
be _one_ left behind who would take it up!” she announced; and in the
tone of the declaration there was something brave and genuine. It
struck Hyacinth as a strange fate—though not stranger, after all, than
his native circumstances—that one’s memory should come to be
represented by a shop-girl overladen with bracelets of imitation
silver; but he was reminded that Millicent was a fine specimen of a
woman of a type opposed to the whining, and that in her free
temperament many disparities were reconciled.




XXX


On the other hand the brilliancy of Paris had not much power to
transfigure the impression made upon him by such intercourse with Paul
Muniment as he had enjoyed during the weeks that followed Pinnie’s
death—an impression considerably more severe than any idea of
renunciation or oblivion that could connect itself with Millicent. Why
it should have had the taste of sadness was not altogether clear, for
Muniment’s voice was as distinct as any in the chorus of approbation
excited by the news that Hyacinth was about to cultivate the most
characteristic of the pleasures of gentility—a sympathetic unanimity,
of which the effect was to place his journey to Paris in a light almost
ridiculous. What had got into them all, and did they think he was good
for nothing but to amuse himself? Mr Vetch had been the most zealous,
but the others clapped him on the back in almost exactly the same
manner as he had seen his mates in Soho bring their palms down on one
of their number when it was disclosed to them that his ‘missus’ had
made him yet once again a father. That had been Poupin’s tone, and his
wife’s as well; and even poor Schinkel, with his everlasting bandage,
whom he had met in Lisson Grove, appeared to think it necessary to
remark that a little run across the Rhine, while he was about it, would
open his eyes to a great many wonders. The Poupins shed tears of joy,
and the letters which have already been mentioned, and which lay day
after day on the mantel-shelf of the little room our hero occupied in a
_hôtel garni_, tremendously tall and somewhat lopsided, in the Rue
Jacob (that recommendation proceeded also from Lisson Grove, the
_garni_ being kept by a second cousin of Madame Eustache), these
valuable documents had been prepared by the obliging exile many days
before his young friend was ready to start. It was almost refreshing to
Hyacinth when old Crookenden, the sole outspoken dissentient, told him
he was a blockhead to waste his money on the bloody French. This worthy
employer of labour was evidently disgusted at such an innovation; if he
wanted a little recreation why couldn’t he take it as it had been taken
in Soho from the beginning of time, in the shape of a trip to Hampton
Court or two or three days of alcoholic torpor? Old Crookenden was
right. Hyacinth conceded freely that he was a blockhead, and was only a
little uncomfortable that he couldn’t explain why he didn’t pretend not
to be and had a kind of right to that compensatory luxury.

Paul guessed why, of course, and smiled approval with a candour which
gave Hyacinth a strange, inexpressible heartache. He already knew that
his friend’s view of him was that he was ornamental and adapted to the
lighter kinds of socialistic utility—constituted to show that the
revolution was not necessarily brutal and illiterate; but in the light
of the cheerful stoicism with which Muniment regarded the sacrifice our
hero was committed to, the latter had found it necessary to remodel a
good deal his original conception of the young chemist’s nature. The
result of this process was not that he admired it less but that he felt
almost awe-stricken in the presence of it. There had been an element of
that sort in his appreciation of Muniment from the first, but it had
been infinitely deepened by the spectacle of his sublime consistency.
Hyacinth felt that he himself could never have risen to that point. He
was competent to make the promise to Hoffendahl, and he was equally
competent to keep it; but he could not have had the same fortitude for
another, could not have detached himself from personal prejudice so
effectually as to put forward, in that way, for the terrible ‘job’, a
little chap he liked. That Muniment liked him it never occurred to
Hyacinth to doubt, and certainly he had all the manner of it to-day: he
had never been more good-humoured, more placidly talkative; he was like
an elder brother who knew that the ‘youngster’ was clever, and was
rather proud of it even when there was no one there to see. That air of
suspending their partnership for the moment, which had usually marked
him at the ‘Sun and Moon’, was never visible in other places; in Audley
Court he only chaffed Hyacinth occasionally for taking him too
seriously. To-day his young friend hardly knew just how to take him;
the episode of which Hoffendahl was the central figure had, as far as
one could see, made so little change in his life. As a conspirator he
was so extraordinarily candid, and bitterness and denunciation so
rarely sat on his lips. It was as if he had been ashamed to complain;
and indeed, for himself, as the months went on, he had nothing
particular to complain of. He had had a rise, at the chemical works,
and a plan of getting a larger room for Rosy was under serious
consideration. On behalf of others he never sounded the pathetic
note—he thought that sort of thing unbusiness-like; and the most that
he did in the way of expatiation on the wrongs of humanity was
occasionally to mention certain statistics, certain ‘returns’, in
regard to the remuneration of industries, applications for employment
and the discharge of hands. In such matters as these he was deeply
versed, and he moved in a dry statistical and scientific air in which
it cost Hyacinth an effort of respiration to accompany him. Simple and
kindly as he was, and thoughtful of the woes of beasts, attentive and
merciful to small insects, and addicted even to kissing dirty babies in
Audley Court, he sometimes emitted a short satiric gleam which showed
that his esteem for the poor was small and that if he had no illusions
about the people who had got everything into their hands he had as few
about those who had egregiously failed to do so. He was tremendously
reasonable, which was largely why Hyacinth admired him, having a desire
to be so himself but finding it terribly difficult.

Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy,
exact knowledge, the way he kept himself clean (except for the chemical
stains on his hands) in circumstances of foul contact, constituted a
group of qualities that had always appeared to Hyacinth singularly
enviable. Most enviable of all was the force that enabled him to sink
personal sentiment where a great public good was to be attempted and
yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest. It seemed to
Hyacinth that if _he_ had introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for
his purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such a recommendation,
and everything had been settled, he would have preferred never to look
at the young fellow again. That was his weakness, and Muniment carried
it off far otherwise. It must be added that he had never made an
allusion to their visit to Hoffendahl; so that Hyacinth also, out of
pride, held his tongue on the subject. If his friend didn’t wish to
express any sympathy for him he was not going to beg for it (especially
as he didn’t want it) by restless references. It had originally been a
surprise to him that Muniment should be willing to countenance a
possible assassination; but after all none of his ideas were narrow
(Hyacinth had a sense that they ripened all the while), and if a
pistol-shot would do any good he was not the man to raise pedantic
objections. It is true that, as regards his quiet acceptance of the
predicament in which Hyacinth might be placed by it, our young man had
given him the benefit of a certain amount of doubt; it had occurred to
him that perhaps Muniment had his own reasons for believing that the
summons from Hoffendahl would never really arrive, so that he might
only be treating himself to the entertainment of judging of a little
bookbinder’s nerve. But in this case, why did he take an interest in
the little bookbinder’s going to Paris? That was a thing he would not
have cared for if he had held that in fact there was nothing to fear.
He despised the sight of idleness, and in spite of the indulgence he
had more than once been good enough to express on the subject of
Hyacinth’s epicurean tendencies what he would have been most likely to
say at present was, ‘Go to Paris? Go to the dickens! Haven’t you been
out at grass long enough for one while, didn’t you lark enough in the
country there with the noble lady, and hadn’t you better take up your
tools again before you forget how to handle them?’ Rosy had said
something of that sort, in her free, familiar way (whatever her
intention, she had been, in effect, only a little less sarcastic than
old Crookenden): that Mr Robinson was going in for a life of leisure, a
life of luxury, like herself; she must congratulate him on having the
means and the time. Oh, the time—that was the great thing! She could
speak with knowledge, having always enjoyed these advantages herself.
And she intimated—or was she mistaken?—that his good fortune emulated
hers also in the matter of his having a high-born and beneficent friend
(such a blessing, now he had lost dear Miss Pynsent), who covered him
with little attentions. Rose Muniment, in short, had been more
exasperating than ever.

The boulevard became even more brilliant as the evening went on, and
Hyacinth wondered whether he had a right to occupy the same table for
so many hours. The theatre on the other side discharged its multitude;
the crowd thickened on the wide asphalt, on the terrace of the café;
gentlemen, accompanied by ladies of whom he knew already how to
characterise the type—_des femmes très-chic_—passed into the portals of
Tortoni. The nightly emanation of Paris seemed to rise more richly, to
float and hang in the air, to mingle with the universal light and the
many-voiced sound, to resolve itself into a thousand solicitations and
opportunities, addressed however mainly to those in whose pockets the
chink of a little loose gold might respond. Hyacinth’s retrospections
had not made him drowsy, but quite the reverse; he grew restless and
excited, and a kind of pleasant terror of the place and hour entered
into his blood. But it was nearly midnight, and he got up to walk home,
taking the line of the boulevard toward the Madeleine. He passed down
the Rue Royale, where comparative stillness reigned; and when he
reached the Place de la Concorde, to cross the bridge which faces the
Corps Législatif, he found himself almost isolated. He had left the
human swarm and the obstructed pavements behind, and the wide spaces of
the splendid square lay quiet under the summer stars. The plash of the
great fountains was audible, and he could almost hear the wind-stirred
murmur of the little wood of the Tuileries on one side, and of the
vague expanse of the Champs Elysées on the other. The place itself—the
Place Louis Quinze, the Place de la Révolution—had given him a sensible
emotion, from the day of his arrival; he had recognised so quickly its
tremendously historic character. He had seen, in a rapid vision, the
guillotine in the middle, on the site of the inscrutable obelisk, and
the tumbrils, with waiting victims, were stationed round the circle now
made majestic by the monuments of the cities of France. The great
legend of the French Revolution, sanguinary and heroic, was more real
to him here than anywhere else; and, strangely, what was most present
was not its turpitude and horror, but its magnificent energy, the
spirit of life that had been in it, not the spirit of death. That
shadow was effaced by the modern fairness of fountain and statue, the
stately perspective and composition; and as he lingered, before
crossing the Seine, a sudden sense overtook him, making his heart sink
with a kind of desolation—a sense of everything that might hold one to
the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great
cities, the charm of travel and discovery, the generosity of
admiration. The tears rose to his eyes, as they had done more than once
in the past six months, and a question, low but poignant, broke from
his lips, ending in nothing: “How could he—how _could_ he—?” It may be
explained that ‘he’ was a reference to Paul Muniment; for Hyacinth had
dreamed of the religion of friendship.

Three weeks after this he found himself in Venice, whence he addressed
to the Princess Casamassima a letter of which I reproduce the principal
passages.

‘This is probably the last time I shall write to you before I return to
London. Of course you have been in this place, and you will easily
understand why here, especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear
Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable impressions, what a
revelation of the exquisite! I have a room in a little _campo_ opposite
to a small old church, which has cracked marble slabs let into the
front; and in the cracks grow little wild delicate flowers, of which I
don’t know the name. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered
leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress, and with
buttons in it, like a sofa; and it flops to and fro, laboriously, as
women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little
wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the
middle of the campo is a fountain, which looks still older than the
church; it has a primitive, barbaric air, and I have an idea it was put
there by the first settlers—those who came to Venice from the mainland,
from Aquileia. Observe how much historical information I have already
absorbed; it won’t surprise you, however, for you never wondered at
anything after you discovered I knew something of Schopenhauer. I
assure you, I don’t think of that musty misogynist in the least to-day,
for I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of, as they
glide, with a small clatter and with their old copper water-jars, to
the fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the
effect is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look under-fed) is
framed in the old faded shawl. They also have very fascinating hair,
which never has done curling, and they slip along together, in couples
or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s eye (so that
its geniality doesn’t matter), dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns,
whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in
Italy makes. The weather is splendid and I roast—but I like it;
apparently, I was made to be spitted and “done”, and I discover that I
have been cold all my life, even when I thought I was warm. I have seen
none of the beautiful patricians who sat for the great painters—the
gorgeous beings whose golden hair was intertwined with pearls; but I am
studying Italian in order to talk with the shuffling, clicking maidens
who work in the bead-factories—I am determined to make one or two of
them look at me. When they have filled their old water-pots at the
fountain it is jolly to see them perch them on their heads and patter
away over the polished Venetian stones. It’s a charm to be in a country
where the women don’t wear the hideous British bonnet. Even in my own
class (excuse the expression—I remember it used to offend you), I have
never known a young female, in London, to put her nose out of the door
without it; and if you had frequented such young females as much as I
have you would have learned of what degradation that dreary necessity
is the source. The floor of my room is composed of little brick tiles,
and to freshen the air, in this temperature, one sprinkles it, as you
no doubt know, with water. Before long, if I keep on sprinkling, I
shall be able to swim about; the green shutters are closed, and the
place makes a very good tank. Through the chinks the hot light of the
campo comes in. I smoke cigarettes, and in the pauses of this
composition recline on a faded magenta divan in the corner. Convenient
to my hand, in that attitude, are the works of Leopardi and a
second-hand dictionary. I am very happy—happier than I have ever been
in my life save at Medley—and I don’t care for anything but the present
hour. It won’t last long, for I am spending all my money. When I have
finished this I shall go forth and wander about in the splendid
Venetian afternoon; and I shall spend the evening in that enchanted
square of St Mark’s, which resembles an immense open-air drawing-room,
listening to music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between those two
strange old columns, in the piazzetta, which seem to make a portal for
it. I can scarcely believe that it’s of myself that I am telling these
fine things; I say to myself a dozen times a day that Hyacinth Robinson
is not in it—I pinch my leg to see if I’m not dreaming. But a short
time hence, when I have resumed the exercise of my profession, in sweet
Soho, I shall have proof enough that it has been my very self: I shall
know that by the terrible grind I shall feel my work to be.

‘That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply demoralised. It won’t be for
you, however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my
demoralisation began from the moment I first approached you. Dear
Princess, I may have done you good, but you haven’t done me much. I
trust you will understand what I mean by that speech, and not think it
flippant or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand and enter
into the misery of the people (though I protest I don’t know much about
it), but you have led my imagination into quite another train. However,
I don’t mean to pretend that it’s all your fault if I have lost sight
of the sacred cause almost altogether in my recent adventures. It is
not that it has not been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest
result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing as we go, that
want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the immense
majority of the human race. I have found them everywhere, but I haven’t
minded them. Excuse the cynical confession. What has struck me is the
great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of them—the
splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which, doubtless, the
miserable many have also in their degree contributed. The face of
Europe appears to be covered with them, and they have had much the
greater part of my attention. They seem to me inestimably precious and
beautiful, and I have become conscious, more than ever before, of how
little I understand what, in the great rectification, you and Poupin
propose to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things which I shall
be sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I
tell you _le fond de ma pensée_, as you used to say?—I feel myself
capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a traitor, for you know
the obligation that I recognise. The monuments and treasures of art,
the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste,
the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will,
upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies
and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the
world is less impracticable and life more tolerable—our friend
Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too cheap and to wish to substitute
for them something in which I can’t somehow believe as I do in things
with which the aspirations and the tears of generations have been
mixed. You know how extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl (to speak only
of him); but if there is one thing that is more clear about him than
another it is that he wouldn’t have the least feeling for this
incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of
the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece.
I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I have a
great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom
of the idea of a redistribution. You will say that I talk of it at my
ease, while, in a delicious capital, I smoke cigarettes on a magenta
divan; and I give you leave to scoff at me if it turns out that, when I
come back to London without a penny in my pocket, I don’t hold the same
language. I don’t know what it comes from, but during the last three
months there has crept over me a deep mistrust of that same grudging
attitude—the intolerance of positions and fortunes that are higher and
brighter than one’s own; a fear, moreover, that I may, in the past,
have been actuated by such motives, and a devout hope that if I am to
pass away while I am yet young it may not be with that odious stain
upon my soul.’




XXXI


Hyacinth spent three days, after his return to London, in a process
which he supposed to be the quest of a lodging; but in reality he was
pulling himself together for the business of his livelihood—an effort
he found by no means easy or agreeable. As he had told the Princess, he
was demoralised, and the perspective of Mr Crookenden’s dirty staircase
had never seemed so steep. He lingered on the brink, before he plunged
again into Soho; he wished not to go back to the shop till he should be
settled, and he delayed to get settled in order not to go back to the
shop. He saw no one during this interval, not even Mr Vetch; he waited
to call upon the fiddler till he should have the appearance of not
coming as a beggar or a borrower—have recovered his employment and be
able to give an address, as he had heard Captain Sholto say. He went to
South Street—not meaning to go in at once but wishing to look at the
house—and there he had the surprise of perceiving a bill of sale in the
window of the Princess’s late residence. He had not expected to find
her in town (he had heard from her the last time three weeks before,
and then she said nothing about her prospects), but he was puzzled by
this indication that she had moved away altogether. There was something
in this, however, which he felt that at bottom he had looked for; it
appeared a proof of the justice of a certain suspicious, uneasy
sentiment from which one could never be quite free, in one’s
intercourse with the Princess—a vague apprehension that one might
suddenly stretch out one’s hand and miss her altogether from one’s
side. Hyacinth decided to ring at the door and ask for news of her; but
there was no response to his summons: the stillness of an August
afternoon (the year had come round again from his first visit) hung
over the place, the blinds were down and the caretaker appeared to be
absent. Under these circumstances Hyacinth was much at a loss; unless,
indeed, he should address a letter to his wonderful friend at Medley.
It would doubtless be forwarded, though her short lease of the
country-house had terminated, as he knew, several weeks before. Captain
Sholto was of course a possible medium of communication; but nothing
would have induced Hyacinth to ask such a service of him.

He turned away from South Street with a curious sinking of the heart;
his state of ignorance struck inward, as it were—had the force of a
vague, disquieting portent. He went to old Crookenden’s only when he
had arrived at his last penny. This, however, was very promptly the
case. He had disembarked at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in
his pocket, and he had lived on that sum for three days. The old
fiddler in Lomax Place was having a chop before he went to the theatre,
and he invited Hyacinth to share his repast, sending out at the same
time for another pot of beer. He took the youth with him to the play,
where, as at that season there were very few spectators, he had no
difficulty in finding him a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of
him, and looked at him strangely, over his spectacles (Mr Vetch wore
the homely double glass in these latter years), when he learned that
Hyacinth had taken a lodging not in their old familiar quarter but in
the unexplored purlieus of Westminster. What had determined our young
man was the fact that from this part of the town the journey was
comparatively a short one to Camberwell; he had suffered so much,
before Pinnie’s death, from being separated by such a distance from his
best friends. There was a pang in his heart connected with the image of
Paul Muniment, but none the less the prospect of an evening hour in
Audley Court, from time to time, appeared one of his most definite
sources of satisfaction in the future. He could have gone straight to
Camberwell to live, but that would carry him too far from the scene of
his profession; and in Westminster he was much nearer to old
Crookenden’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He said to Mr Vetch that
if it would give him pleasure he would abandon his lodging and take
another in Pentonville. But the old man replied, after a moment, that
he should be sorry to put that constraint upon him; if he were to make
such an exaction Hyacinth would think he wanted to watch him.

“How do you mean, to watch me?”

Mr Vetch had begun to tune his fiddle, and he scraped it a little
before answering. “I mean it as I have always meant it. Surely you know
that in Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched you as a child on
the edge of a pond watches the little boat he has constructed and set
afloat.”

“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after all, very little of me,”
Hyacinth said.

“I made what I could of that little; it was better than nothing.”

Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s arm; he had never felt
so kindly to him, not even when he accepted the thirty pounds, before
going abroad, as at this moment. “Certainly I will come and see you.”

“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr Vetch remarked,
without heeding these words, and continuing to scrape. He had always,
even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English
good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements), that there
was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner of
expressing gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory
tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity.

Hyacinth took but little interest in the play, which was an inanimate
revival; he had been at the _Théâtre Français_ and the tradition of
that house was still sufficiently present to him to make any other
style of interpretation appear of the clumsiest. He sat in one of the
front stalls, close to the orchestra; and while the piece went
forward—or backward, ever backward, as it seemed to him—his thoughts
wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty boards, revolving
round a question which had come up immensely during the last few hours.
The Princess was a _capricciosa_—that, at least, was Madame Grandoni’s
account of her; and was that blank, expressionless house in South
Street a sign that an end had come to the particular caprice in which
he had happened to be involved? He had returned to London with an ache
of eagerness to be with her again on the same terms as at Medley, a
throbbing sense that unless she had been abominably dishonest he might
count upon her. This state of mind was by no means complete security,
but it was so sweet that it mattered little whether it were sound.
Circumstances had favoured in an extraordinary degree his visit to her,
and it was by no means clear that they would again be so accommodating
or that what had been possible for a few days should be possible with
continuity, in the midst of the ceremonies and complications of London.
Hyacinth felt poorer than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had
had money and spent it, whereas in previous times he had never had it
to spend. He never for an instant regretted his squandered fortune, for
he said to himself that he had made a good bargain and become master of
a precious equivalent. The equivalent was a rich experience—an
experience which would become richer still as he should talk it over,
in a low chair, close to hers, with the all-comprehending,
all-suggesting lady of his life. His poverty would be no obstacle to
their intercourse so long as he should have a pair of legs to carry him
to her door; for she liked him better shabby than when he was furbished
up, and she had given him too many pledges, they had taken together too
many appointments, worked out too many programmes, to be disconcerted
(on either side) by obstacles that were merely a part of the general
conventionality. He was to go with her into the slums, to introduce her
to the worst that London contained (he should have, precisely, to make
acquaintance with it first), to show her the reality of the horrors of
which she dreamed that the world might be purged. He had ceased,
himself, to care for the slums, and had reasons for not wishing to
spend his remnant in the contemplation of foul things; but he would go
through with his part of the engagement. He might be perfunctory, but
any dreariness would have a gilding that should involve an association
with her. What if she should have changed, have ceased to care? What
if, from a kind of royal insolence which he suspected to lurk somewhere
in the side-scenes of her nature, though he had really not once seen it
peep out, she should toss back her perfect head with a movement
signifying that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no
more? Hyacinth’s imagination represented her this evening in places
where a barrier of dazzling light shut her out from access, or even
from any appeal. He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms, where
‘the dukes’ had possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded,
covered with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found a
reassurance in reflecting that after all she would be unlikely to throw
him personally over so long as she should remain mixed up with what was
being planned in the dark, and that it would not be easy for her to
liberate herself from that entanglement. She had of course told him
more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already committed
herself, and he remembered, with a strange perverse elation, that she
had gone very far indeed.

In the intervals of the foolish play Mr Vetch, who lingered in his
place in the orchestra while his mates descended into the little hole
under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend
occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time up about the
dingy house, at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished galleries he had been
staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters, and
said, “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me
immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she
could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.”

“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured, while Mr Vetch went on—

“I was in Paris in 1840; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue Mogador.
I judge everything is changed, from your letters. Does the Rue Mogador
still exist? Yes, everything is changed. I dare say it’s all much
finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events, I am
right in supposing—am I not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made
you really happy.”

“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth
replied.

The fiddler turned his old white face upon him; it had the unhealthy
smoothness which denotes a sedentary occupation, thirty years spent in
a close crowd, amid the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint. “I
thought you were sad about Pinnie,” he remarked.

“When I jumped, with that avidity, at your proposal that I should take
a tour? Poor old Pinnie!” Hyacinth added.

“Well, I hope you think a little better of the world. We mustn’t make
up our mind too early in life.”

“Oh, I have made up mine: it’s an awfully jolly place.”

“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old pair of shoes—I like
so much less the idea of putting on the new ones.”

“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked. “What have I known but
kindness? People have done such a lot for me.”

“Oh, well, of course, they have liked you. But that’s all right,”
murmured Mr Vetch, beginning to scrape again. What remained in
Hyacinth’s mind from this conversation was the fact that the old man,
whom he regarded distinctly as cultivated, had thought his letters
clever. He only wished that he had made them cleverer still; he had no
doubt of his ability to have done so.

It may be imagined whether the first hours he spent at old
Crookenden’s, after he took up work again, were altogether to his
taste, and what was the nature of the reception given him by his former
comrades, whom he found exactly in the same attitudes and the same
clothes (he knew and hated every article they wore), and with the same
primitive pleasantries on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were
mingled; the place and the people appeared to him loathsome, but there
was something delightful in handling his tools. He gave a little
private groan of relief when he discovered that he still liked his work
and that the pleasant swarm of his ideas (in the matter of sides and
backs) returned to him. They came in still brighter, more suggestive
form, and he had the satisfaction of feeling that his taste had
improved, that it had been purified by experience, and that the covers
of a book might be made to express an astonishing number of high
conceptions. Strange enough it was, and a proof surely, of our little
hero’s being a genuine artist, that the impressions he had accumulated
during the last few months appeared to mingle and confound themselves
with the very sources of his craft and to be susceptible of technical
representation. He had quite determined, by this time, to carry on his
life as if nothing were hanging over him, and he had no intention of
remaining a little bookbinder to the end of his days; for that medium,
after all, would translate only some of his conceptions. Yet his trade
was a resource, an undiminished resource, for the present, and he had a
particular as well as a general motive in attempting new flights—the
prevision of the exquisite work which he was to do during the coming
year for the Princess and which it was very definite to him he owed
her. When that debt should have been paid and his other arrears made up
he proposed to himself to write something. He was far from having
decided as yet what it should be; the only point settled was that it
should be very remarkable and should not, at least on the face of it,
have anything to do with a fresh deal of the social pack. That was to
be his transition—into literature; to bind the book, charming as the
process might be, was after all much less fundamental than to write it.
It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once that it would be a fine
thing to produce a brilliant death-song.

It is not surprising that among such reveries as this he should have
been conscious of a narrow range in the tone of his old workfellows.
They had only one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds and had
gone to spend them in France with a regular high one. He was aware, in
advance, of the diffusion of this legend, and did his best to allow for
it, taking the simplest course, which was not to contradict it but to
catch the ball as it came and toss it still further, enlarging and
embroidering humorously until Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the
rest, who struck him as not having washed since he left them, seemed
really to begin to understand how it was he could have spent such a
rare sum in so short a time. The impressiveness of this achievement
helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could see that, though
the treatment it received was superficially irreverent, the sense that
he was very sharp and that the springs of his sharpness were somehow
secret gained a good deal of strength from it. Hyacinth was not
incapable of being rather pleased that it _should_ be supposed, even by
Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand pounds
in less than five months, especially as to his own conscience the fact
had altogether yet to be proved. He got off, on the whole, easily
enough to feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men at
Crookenden’s, at any rate, showed no symptoms of the social jealousy
lying at the bottom of the desire for a fresh deal. This was doubtless
an accident, and not inherent in the fact that they were highly skilled
workmen (old Crookenden had no others), and therefore sure of constant
employment; for it was impossible to be more skilled, in one’s own
line, than Paul Muniment was, and yet he (though not out of jealousy,
of course) went in for the great restitution. What struck him most,
after he had got used again to the sense of his apron and bent his back
a while over his battered table, was the simple, synthetic patience of
the others, who had bent _their_ backs and felt the rub of that dirty
drapery all the while he was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling
through boulevards and museums, and admiring the purity of the Venetian
girl-face. With Poupin, to be sure, his relations were special; but the
explanations that he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such as
could make him very unhappy, once he had determined to resist as much
as possible the friction of his remaining days. There was moreover more
sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his young
friend and pupil had failed to cultivate, in Paris, the rich
opportunities he had offered him. “You are cooling off, my child; there
is something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself that
anything has been done, or that humanity suffers a particle less?
_Enfin_, it’s between you and your conscience.”

“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth asked, smiling;
Eustache Poupin’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so,
having grown of late strangely hollow and _rococo_.

“You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is
absolute, except, of course, in those classes in which, from the very
nature of the infamies on which they are founded, no conscience can
exist. Speak to me, however, of my Paris; _she_ is always divine,”
Poupin went on; but he showed signs of irritation when Hyacinth began
to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of
December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible dilemma:
he was gratified as a Parisian and a patriot but he was disconcerted as
a lover of liberty; it cost him a pang to admit that anything in the
sacred city was defective, yet he saw still less his way to concede
that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the second
Empire, or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the
régime before which the sacred Commune had gone down in blood and fire.
“Ah, yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will
be finer still when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn
back to his work with a slight feeling of sickness. Everywhere,
everywhere, he saw the ulcer of envy—the passion of a party which hung
together for the purpose of despoiling another to its advantage. In old
Eustache, one of the ‘pure’, this was particularly sad.




XXXII


The landing at the top of the stairs in Audley Court was always dark;
but it seemed darker than ever to Hyacinth while he fumbled for the
door-latch, after he had heard Rose Muniment’s penetrating voice bid
him come in. During that instant his ear caught the sound—if it could
trust itself—of another voice, which prepared him, a little, for the
spectacle that offered itself as soon as the door (his attempt to reach
the handle, in his sudden agitation, proving fruitless) was opened to
him by Paul. His friend stood there, tall and hospitable, saying
something loud and jovial, which he didn’t distinguish. His eyes had
crossed the threshold in a flash, but his step faltered a moment, only
to obey, however, the vigour of Muniment’s outstretched hand.
Hyacinth’s glance had gone straight, and though with four persons in it
Rosy’s little apartment looked crowded, he saw no one but the object of
his quick preconception—no one but the Princess Casamassima, seated
beside the low sofa (the grand feature introduced during his absence
from London) on which, arrayed in the famous pink dressing-gown, Miss
Muniment now received her visitors. He wondered afterwards why he
should have been so startled; for he had said, often enough, both to
himself and to the Princess, that so far as she was concerned he was
proof against astonishment; it was so evident that, in her behaviour,
the unexpected was the only thing to be looked for. In fact, now that
he perceived she had made her way to Camberwell without his assistance,
the feeling that took possession of him was a kind of embarrassment; he
blushed a little as he entered the circle, the fourth member of which
was inevitably Lady Aurora Langrish. Was it that his intimacy with the
Princess gave him a certain sense of responsibility for her conduct in
respect to people who knew her as yet but a little, and that there was
something that required explanation in the confidence with which she
had practised a descent upon them? It is true that it came over our
young man that by this time, perhaps, they knew her a good deal; and
moreover a woman’s conduct spoke for itself when she could sit looking,
in that fashion, like a radiant angel dressed in a simple bonnet and
mantle and immensely interested in an appealing corner of the earth. It
took Hyacinth but an instant to perceive that her character was in a
different phase from any that had yet been exhibited to him. There had
been a brilliant mildness about her the night he made her acquaintance,
and she had never ceased, at any moment since, to strike him as an
exquisitely human, sentient, pitying organisation; unless it might be,
indeed, in relation to her husband, against whom—for reasons, after
all, doubtless, very sufficient—her heart appeared absolutely steeled.
But now her face looked at him through a sort of glorious charity. She
had put off her splendour, but her beauty was unquenchably bright; she
had made herself humble for her pious excursion; she had, beside Rosy
(who, in the pink dressing-gown, looked much the more luxurious of the
two), almost the attitude of a hospital nurse; and it was easy to see,
from the meagre line of her garments, that she was tremendously in
earnest. If Hyacinth was flurried her own countenance expressed no
confusion; for her, evidently, this queer little chamber of poverty and
pain was a place in which it was perfectly natural that _he_ should
turn up. The sweet, still greeting her eyes offered him might almost
have conveyed to him that she had been waiting for him, that she knew
he would come and that there had been a tacit appointment for that very
moment. They said other things beside, in their beautiful friendliness:
they said, ‘Don’t notice me too much, or make any kind of scene. I have
an immense deal to say to you, but remember that I have the rest of our
life before me to say it in. Consider only what will be easiest and
kindest to these people, these delightful people, whom I find
enchanting (why didn’t you ever tell me more—I mean really more—about
them?). It won’t be particularly complimentary to them if you have the
air of seeing a miracle in my presence here. I am very glad of your
return. The quavering, fidgety “ladyship” is as fascinating as the
others.’

Hyacinth’s reception at the hands of his old friends was cordial enough
quite to obliterate the element of irony that had lurked, three months
before, in their godspeed; their welcome was not boisterous, but it
seemed to express the idea that the occasion was already so rare and
agreeable that his arrival was all that was needed to make it perfect.
By the time he had been three minutes in the room he was able to
measure the impression produced by the Princess, who, it was clear, had
thrown a spell of adoration over the little company. This was in the
air, in the face of each, in their excited, smiling eyes and heightened
colour; even Rosy’s wan grimace, which was at all times screwed up to
ecstasy, emitted a supererogatory ray. Lady Aurora looked more than
ever dishevelled with interest and wonder; the long strands of her
silky hair floated like gossamer, as, in her extraordinary, religious
attention (her hands were raised and clasped to her bosom, as if she
were praying), her respiration rose and fell. She had never seen any
one like the Princess; but Hyacinth’s apprehension, of some months
before, had been groundless—she evidently didn’t think her vulgar. She
thought her divine, and a revelation of beauty and benignity; and the
illuminated, amplified room could contain no dissentient opinion. It
was her beauty, primarily, that ‘fetched’ them, Hyacinth could easily
see, and it was not hidden from him that the sensation was as active in
Paul Muniment as in his companions. It was not in Paul’s nature to be
jerkily demonstrative, and he had not lost his head on the present
occasion; but he had already appreciated the difference between one’s
preconception of a meretricious, factitious fine lady and the actual
influence of such a personage. She was gentler, fairer, wiser, than a
chemist’s assistant could have guessed in advance. In short, she held
the trio in her hand (she had reduced Lady Aurora to exactly the same
simplicity as the others), and she performed, admirably, artistically,
for their benefit. Almost before Hyacinth had had time to wonder how
she had found the Muniments out (he had no recollection of giving her
specific directions), she mentioned that Captain Sholto had been so
good as to introduce her; doing so as if she owed him that explanation
and were a woman who would be scrupulous in such a case. It was rather
a blow to him to hear that she had been accepting the Captain’s
mediation, and this was not softened by her saying that she was too
impatient to wait for his own return; he was apparently so happy on the
Continent that one couldn’t be sure it would ever take place. The
Princess might at least have been sure that to see her again very soon
was still more necessary to his happiness than anything the Continent
could offer.

It came out in the conversation he had with her, to which the others
listened with respectful curiosity, that Captain Sholto had brought her
a week before, but then she had seen only Miss Muniment. “I took the
liberty of coming again, by myself, to-day, because I wanted to see the
whole family,” the Princess remarked, looking from Paul to Lady Aurora,
with a friendly gaiety in her face which purified the observation (as
regarded her ladyship) of impertinence. The Princess added, frankly,
that she had now been careful to arrive at an hour when she thought Mr
Muniment might be at home. “When I come to see gentlemen, I like at
least to find them,” she continued, and she was so great a lady that
there was no small diffidence in her attitude; it was a simple matter
for her to call on a chemist’s assistant, if she had a reason. Hyacinth
could see that the reason had already been brought forward—her immense
interest in problems that Mr Muniment had completely mastered, and in
particular their common acquaintance with the extraordinary man whose
mission it was to solve them. Hyacinth learned later that she had
pronounced the name of Hoffendahl. A part of the lustre in Rosy’s eye
came no doubt from the explanation she had inevitably been moved to
make in respect to any sympathy with wicked theories that might be
imputed to _her;_ and of course the effect of this intensely individual
little protest (such was always its effect), emanating from the sofa
and the pink dressing-gown, was to render the Muniment interior still
more quaint and original. In that spot Paul always gave the go-by,
humorously, to any attempt to draw out his views, and you would have
thought, to hear him, that he allowed himself the reputation of having
them only in order to get a ‘rise’ out of his sister and let their
visitors see with what wit and spirit she could repudiate them. This,
however, would only be a reason the more for the Princess’s following
up her scent. She would doubtless not expect to get at the bottom of
his ideas in Audley Court; the opportunity would occur, rather, in case
of his having the civility (on which surely she might count) to come
and talk them over with her in her own house.

Hyacinth mentioned to her the disappointment he had had in South
Street, and she replied, “Oh, I have given up that house, and taken
quite a different one.” But she didn’t say where it was, and in spite
of her having given him so much the right to expect she would
communicate to him a matter so nearly touching them both as a change of
address, he felt a great shyness about asking.

Their companions watched them as if they considered that something
rather brilliant, now, would be likely to come off between them; but
Hyacinth was too full of regard to the Princess’s tacit notification to
him that they must not appear too thick, which was after all more
flattering than the most pressing inquiries or the most liberal
announcements about herself could have been. She never asked him when
he had come back; and indeed it was not long before Rose Muniment took
that business upon herself. Hyacinth, however, ventured to assure
himself whether Madame Grandoni were still with the Princess, and even
to remark (when she had replied, “Oh yes, still, still. The great
refusal, as Dante calls it, has not yet come off”), “You ought to bring
her to see Miss Rosy. She is a person Miss Rosy would particularly
appreciate.”

“I am sure I should be most happy to receive any friend of the Princess
Casamassima,” said this young lady, from the sofa; and when the
Princess answered that she certainly would not fail to produce Madame
Grandoni some day, Hyacinth (though he doubted whether the presentation
would really take place) guessed how much she wished her old friend
might have heard the strange bedizened little invalid make that speech.

There were only three other seats, for the introduction of the sofa (a
question so profoundly studied in advance) had rendered necessary the
elimination of certain articles; so that Muniment, on his feet, hovered
round the little circle, with his hands in his pockets, laughing freely
and sociably but not looking at the Princess; though, as Hyacinth was
sure, he was none the less agitated by her presence.

“You ought to tell us about foreign parts and the grand things you have
seen; except that, doubtless, our distinguished visitor knows all about
them,” Muniment said to Hyacinth. Then he added, “Surely, at any rate,
you have seen nothing more worthy of your respect than Camberwell.”

“Is this the worst part?” the Princess asked, looking up with her
noble, interested face.

“The worst, madam? What grand ideas you must have! We admire Camberwell
immensely.”

“It’s my brother’s ideas that are grand!” cried Rose Muniment,
betraying him conscientiously. “He does want everything changed, no
less than you, Princess; though he is more cunning than you, and won’t
give one a handle where one can take him up. He thinks all this part
most objectionable—as if dirty people won’t always make everything
dirty where they live! I dare say he thinks there ought to be no dirty
people, and it may be so; only if every one was clean, where would be
the merit? You would get no credit for keeping yourself tidy. At any
rate, if it’s a question of soap and water, every one can begin by
himself. My brother thinks the whole place ought to be as handsome as
Brompton.”

“Ah, yes, that’s where the artists and literary people live, isn’t it?”
asked the Princess, attentively.

“I have never seen it, but it’s very well laid out,” Rosy rejoined,
with her competent air.

“Oh, I like Camberwell better than that,” said Muniment, hilariously.

The Princess turned to Lady Aurora, and with the air of appealing to
her for her opinion gave her a glance which travelled in a flash from
the topmost bow of her large, misfitting hat to the crumpled points of
her substantial shoes. “I must get _you_ to tell me the truth,” she
murmured. “I want so much to know London—the real London. It seems so
difficult!”

Lady Aurora looked a little frightened, but at the same time gratified,
and after a moment she responded, “I believe a great many artists live
in St John’s Wood.”

“I don’t care about the artists!” the Princess exclaimed, shaking her
head, slowly, with the sad smile which sometimes made her beauty so
inexpressibly touching.

“Not when they have painted you such beautiful pictures?” Rosy
demanded. “We know about your pictures—we have admired them so much. Mr
Hyacinth has described to us your precious possessions.”

The Princess transferred her smile to Rosy, and rested it on that young
lady’s shrunken countenance with the same ineffable head-shake. “You do
me too much honour. I have no possessions.”

“Gracious, was it all a make-believe?” Rosy cried, flashing at Hyacinth
an eye that was never so eloquent as when it demanded an explanation.

“I have nothing in the world—nothing but the clothes on my back!” the
Princess repeated, very gravely, without looking at the young man.

The words struck him as an admonition, so that, though he was much
puzzled, he made no attempt, for the moment, to reconcile the
contradiction. He only replied, “I meant the things in the house. Of
course I didn’t know whom they belonged to.”

“There are no things in my house now,” the Princess went on; and there
was a touch of pure, high resignation in the words.

“Laws, I shouldn’t like that!” Rose Muniment declared, glancing, with
complacency, over her own decorated walls. “Everything here belongs to
me.”

“I shall bring Madame Grandoni to see you,” said the Princess,
irrelevantly but kindly.

“Do you think it’s not right to have a lot of things about?” Lady
Aurora, with sudden courage, queried of her distinguished companion,
pointing her chin at her but looking into the upper angle of the room.

“I suppose one must always settle that for one’s self. I don’t like to
be surrounded with objects I don’t care for; and I can care only for
one thing—that is, for one class of things—at a time. Dear lady,” the
Princess went on, “I fear I must confess to you that my heart is not in
_bibelots_. When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put
in their mouths, I can dispense with tapestry and old china.” And her
fair face, bent charmingly, conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to
argue that if she was narrow at least she was candid.

Hyacinth wondered, rather vulgarly, what strange turn she had taken,
and whether this singular picture of her denuded personality were not
one of her famous caprices, a whimsical joke, a nervous perversity.
Meanwhile, he heard Lady Aurora urge, anxiously, “But don’t you think
we ought to make the world more beautiful?”

“Doesn’t the Princess make it so by the mere fact of her existence?”
Hyacinth demanded; his perplexity escaping, in a harmless manner,
through this graceful hyperbole. He had observed that, though the lady
in question could dispense with old china and tapestry, she could not
dispense with a pair of immaculate gloves, which fitted her like a
charm.

“My people have a mass of things, you know, but I have really nothing
myself,” said Lady Aurora, as if she owed this assurance to such a
representative of suffering humanity.

“The world will be beautiful enough when it becomes good enough,” the
Princess resumed. “Is there anything so ugly as unjust distinctions, as
the privileges of the few contrasted with the degradation of the many?
When we want to beautify, we must begin at the right end.”

“Surely there are none of us but what have our privileges!” Rose
Muniment exclaimed, with eagerness. “What do you say to mine, lying
here between two members of the aristocracy, and with Mr Hyacinth
thrown in?”

“You are certainly lucky—with Lady Aurora Langrish. I wish she would
come and see _me_,” the Princess murmured, getting up.

“Do go, my lady, and tell me if it’s so poor!” Rosy went on, gaily.

“I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of
art,” Hyacinth broke out. “The more the better, whether people are
hungry or not. In the way of ameliorating influences, are not those the
most definite?”

“A piece of bread and butter is more to the purpose, if your stomach’s
empty,” the Princess declared.

“Robinson has been corrupted by foreign influences,” Paul Muniment
suggested. “He doesn’t care for bread and butter now; he likes French
cookery.”

“Yes, but I don’t get it. And have you sent away the little man, the
Italian, with the white cap and apron?” Hyacinth asked of the Princess.

She hesitated a moment, and then she replied, laughing, and not in the
least offended at his question, though it was an attempt to put her in
the wrong from which Hyacinth had not been able to refrain, in his
astonishment at these ascetic pretensions, “I have sent him away many
times!”

Lady Aurora had also got up: she stood there gazing at her beautiful
fellow-visitor with a timidity which made her wonder only more
apparent. “Your servants must be awfully fond of you,” she said.

“Oh, my servants!” murmured the Princess, as if it were only by a
stretch of the meaning of the word that she could be said to enjoy the
ministrations of menials. Her manner seemed to imply that she had a
charwoman for an hour a day. Hyacinth caught the tone, and determined
that since she was going, as it appeared, he would break off his own
visit and accompany her. He had flattered himself, at the end of three
weeks of Medley, that he knew her in every phase, but here was a field
of freshness. She turned to Paul Muniment and put out her hand to him,
and while he took it in his own his face was visited by the most
beautiful eyes that had ever rested there. “Will you come and see me,
one of these days?” she asked, with a voice as sweet and clear as her
glance.

Hyacinth waited for Paul’s answer with an emotion that could only be
accounted for by his affectionate sympathy, the manner in which he had
spoken of him to the Princess and which he wished him to justify, the
interest he had in his appearing, completely, the fine fellow he
believed him. Muniment neither stammered nor blushed; he held himself
straight, and looked back at his interlocutress with an eye almost as
crystalline as her own. Then, by way of answer, he inquired, “Well,
madam, pray what good will it do me?” And the tone of the words was so
humorous and kindly, and so instinct with a plain manly sense, that
though they were not gallant Hyacinth was not ashamed for him. At the
same moment he observed that Lady Aurora was watching their friend as
if she had at least an equal stake in what he might say.

“Ah, none; only me, perhaps, a little.” With this rejoinder, and with a
wonderful sweet, indulgent dignity, in which there was none of the
stiffness of pride or resentment, the Princess quitted him and
approached Lady Aurora. She asked her if _she_ wouldn’t do her the
kindness to come. She should like so much to know her, and she had an
idea there was a great deal they might talk about. Lady Aurora said she
should be delighted, and the Princess took one of her cards out of her
pocket and gave it to the noble spinster. After she had done so she
stood a moment holding her hand, and remarked, “It has really been such
a happiness to me to meet you. Please don’t think it’s very clumsy if I
say I _do_ like you so!” Lady Aurora was evidently exceedingly moved
and impressed; but Rosy, when the Princess took farewell of her, and
the irrepressible invalid had assured her of the pleasure with which
she should receive her again, admonished her that in spite of this she
could never conscientiously enter into such theories.

“If every one was equal,” she asked, “where would be the gratification
I feel in getting a visit from a grandee? That’s what I have often said
to her ladyship, and I consider that I’ve kept her in her place a
little. No, no; no equality while _I_’m about the place!”

The company appeared to comprehend that there was a natural fitness in
Hyacinth’s seeing the great lady on her way, and accordingly no effort
was made to detain him. He guided her, with the help of an attendant
illumination from Muniment, down the dusky staircase, and at the door
of the house there was a renewed brief leave-taking with the young
chemist, who, however, showed no signs of relenting or recanting in
respect to the Princess’s invitation. The warm evening had by this time
grown thick, and the population of Audley Court appeared to be passing
it, for the most part, in the open air. As Hyacinth assisted his
companion to thread her way through groups of sprawling, chattering
children, gossiping women with bare heads and babies at the breast, and
heavily-planted men smoking very bad pipes, it seemed to him that their
project of exploring the slums was already in the way of execution. He
said nothing till they had gained the outer street, and then, pausing a
moment, he inquired how she would be conveyed. Had she a carriage
somewhere, or should he try and get a cab?

“A carriage, my dear fellow? For what do you take me? I won’t trouble
you about a cab: I walk everywhere now.”

“But if I had not been here?”

“I should have gone alone,” said the Princess, smiling at him through
the turbid twilight of Camberwell.

“And where, please, gracious heaven? I may at least have the honour of
accompanying you.”

“Certainly, if you can walk so far.”

“So far as what, dear Princess?”

“As Madeira Crescent, Paddington.”

“Madeira Crescent, Paddington?” Hyacinth stared.

“That’s what I call it when I’m with people with whom I wish to be
fine, like you. I have taken a small house there.”

“Then it’s really true that you have given up your beautiful things?”

“I have sold them all, to give to the poor.”

“Ah, Princess!” the young man almost moaned; for the memory of some of
her treasures was vivid within him.

She became very grave, even stern, and with an accent of reproach that
seemed to show she had been wounded where she was most sensitive, she
demanded, “When I said I was willing to make the last sacrifice, did
you then believe I was lying?”

“Haven’t you kept _anything?_” Hyacinth went on, without heeding this
challenge.

She looked at him a moment. “I have kept _you!_” Then she took his arm,
and they moved forward. He saw what she had done; she was living in a
little ugly, bare, middle-class house and wearing simple gowns; and the
energy and good faith of her behaviour, with the abruptness of the
transformation, took away his breath. “I thought I should please you so
much,” she added, after they had gone a few steps. And before he had
time to reply, as they came to a part of the street where there were
small shops, those of butchers, greengrocers and pork-pie men, with
open fronts, flaring lamps and humble purchasers, she broke out,
joyously, “Ah, this is the way I like to see London!”




XXXIII


The house in Madeira Crescent was a low, stucco-fronted edifice, in a
shabby, shallow semicircle, and Hyacinth could see, as they approached
it, that the window-place in the parlour (which was on a level with the
street-door) was ornamented by a glass case containing stuffed birds
and surmounted by an alabaster Cupid. He was sufficiently versed in his
London to know that the descent in the scale of the gentility was
almost immeasurable for a person who should have moved into that
quarter from the neighbourhood of Park Lane. The street was not
squalid, and it was strictly residential; but it was mean and meagre
and fourth-rate, and had in the highest degree that paltry, parochial
air, that absence of style and elevation, which is the stamp of whole
districts of London and which Hyacinth had already more than once
mentally compared with the high-piled, important look of the Parisian
perspective. It possessed in combination every quality which should
have made it detestable to the Princess; it was almost as bad as Lomax
Place. As they stopped before the narrow, ill-painted door, on which
the number of the house was marked with a piece of common porcelain,
cut in a fanciful shape, it appeared to Hyacinth that he had felt, in
their long walk, the touch of the passion which led his companion to
divest herself of her superfluities, but that it would take the
romantic out of one’s heroism to settle one’s self in such a _mesquin_,
Philistine row. However, if the Princess had wished to mortify the
flesh she had chosen an effective means of doing so, and of mortifying
the spirit as well. The long light of the gray summer evening was still
in the air, and Madeira Crescent wore a soiled, dusty expression. A
hand-organ droned in front of a neighbouring house, and the cart of the
local washerwoman, to which a donkey was harnessed, was drawn up
opposite. The local children, as well, were dancing on the pavement, to
the music of the organ, and the scene was surveyed, from one of the
windows, by a gentleman in a dirty dressing-gown, smoking a pipe, who
made Hyacinth think of Mr Micawber. The young man gave the Princess a
deep look, before they went into the house, and she smiled, as if she
understood everything that was passing in his mind.

The long, circuitous walk with her, from the far-away south of London,
had been strange and delightful; it reminded Hyacinth, more queerly
than he could have expressed, of some of the rambles he had taken on
summer evenings with Millicent Henning. It was impossible to resemble
this young lady less than the Princess resembled her, but in her
enjoyment of her unwonted situation (she had never before, on a
summer’s evening—to the best of Hyacinth’s belief, at least—lost
herself in the unfashionable districts on the arm of a seedy artisan)
the distinguished personage exhibited certain coincidences with the
shop-girl. She stopped, as Millicent had done, to look into the windows
of vulgar establishments, and amused herself with picking out
abominable objects that she should like to possess; selecting them from
a new point of view, that of a reduced fortune and the domestic
arrangements of the ‘lower middle class’, deriving extreme diversion
from the idea that she now belonged to that aggrieved body. She was in
a state of light, fresh, sociable exhilaration which Hyacinth had
hitherto, in the same degree, not seen in her, and before they reached
Madeira Crescent it had become clear to him that her present phase was
little more than a brilliant _tour de force_, which he could not
imagine her keeping up long, for the simple reason that after the
novelty and strangeness of the affair had passed away she would not be
able to endure the contact of so much that was common and ugly. For the
moment her discoveries in this line diverted her, as all discoveries
did, and she pretended to be sounding, in a scientific spirit—that of
the social philosopher, the student and critic of manners—the depths of
British Philistia. Hyacinth was struck, more than ever, with the fund
of life that was in her, the energy of feeling, the high, free,
reckless spirit. These things expressed themselves, as the couple
proceeded, in a hundred sallies and droll proposals, kindling the young
man’s pulses and making him conscious of the joy with which, in any
extravagance, he would bear her company to the death. She appeared to
him, at this moment, to be playing with life so audaciously and
defiantly that the end of it all would inevitably be some violent
catastrophe.

She desired exceedingly that Hyacinth should take her to a music-hall
or a coffee-tavern; she even professed a curiosity to see the inside of
a public-house. As she still had self-possession enough to remember
that if she stayed out beyond a certain hour Madame Grandoni would
begin to worry about her, they were obliged to content themselves with
the minor ‘lark’, as the Princess was careful to designate their peep
into an establishment, glittering with polished pewter and brass, which
bore the name of the ‘Happy Land’. Hyacinth had feared that she would
be nervous after the narrow, befingered door had swung behind her, or
that, at all events, she would be disgusted at what she might see and
hear in such a place and would immediately wish to retreat. By good
luck, however, there were only two or three convivial spirits in
occupancy, and the presence of the softer sex was apparently not so
rare as to excite surprise. The softer sex, furthermore, was embodied
in a big, hard, red woman, the publican’s wife, who looked as if she
were in the habit of dealing with all sorts and mainly interested in
seeing whether even the finest put down their money before they were
served. The Princess pretended to ‘have something’, and to admire the
ornamentation of the bar; and when Hyacinth asked her in a low tone
what disposal they should make, when the great changes came, of such an
embarrassing type as that, replied, off-hand, “Oh, drown her in a
barrel of beer!” She professed, when they came out, to have been
immensely interested in the ‘Happy Land’, and was not content until
Hyacinth had fixed an evening on which they might visit a music-hall
together. She talked with him, largely, by fits and starts, about his
adventures abroad and his impressions of France and Italy; breaking
off, suddenly, with some irrelevant but almost extravagantly
appreciative allusion to Rose Muniment and Lady Aurora; then returning
with a question as to what he had seen and done, the answer to which,
however, in many cases, she was not at pains to wait for. Yet it
implied that she had paid considerable attention to what he told her
that she should be able to say, towards the end, with that fraternising
frankness which was always touching because it appeared to place her at
one’s mercy, to show that she counted on one’s having an equal loyalty,
“Well, my dear friend, you have not wasted your time; you know
everything, you have missed nothing; there are lots of things you can
tell me, and we shall have some famous talks in the winter evenings.”
This last reference was apparently to the coming season, and there was
something in the tone of quiet friendship with which it was uttered,
and which seemed to involve so many delightful things, something that,
for Hyacinth, bound them still closer together. To live out of the
world with her that way, lost among the London millions, in a queer
little cockneyfied retreat, was a refinement of intimacy, and better
even than the splendid chance he had enjoyed at Medley.

They found Madame Grandoni sitting alone in the twilight, very patient
and peaceful, and having, after all, it was clear, accepted the
situation too completely to fidget at such a trifle as her companion’s
not coming home at a ladylike hour. She had placed herself in the back
part of the tawdry little drawing-room, which looked into a small,
smutty garden, and from the front window, which was open, the sound of
the hurdy-gurdy and the voices of the children, who were romping to its
music, came in to her through the summer dusk. The influence of London
was there, in a kind of mitigated, far-away hum, and for some reason or
other, at that moment, the place, to Hyacinth, took on the semblance of
the home of an exile—a spot and an hour to be remembered with a throb
of fondness in some danger or sorrow of after years. The old lady never
moved from her chair as she saw the Princess come in with the little
bookbinder, and her eyes rested on Hyacinth as familiarly as if she had
seen him go out with her in the afternoon. The Princess stood before
Madame Grandoni a moment, smiling. “I have done a great thing. What do
you think I have done?” she asked, as she drew off her gloves.

“God knows! I have ceased to think!” said the old woman, staring up,
with her fat, empty hands on the arms of her chair.

“I have come on foot from the far south of London—how many miles? four
or five—and I’m not a particle tired.”

“_Che forza, che forza!_” murmured Madame Grandoni. “She will knock you
up, completely,” she added, turning to Hyacinth with a kind of
customary compassion.

“Poor darling, _she_ misses the carriage,” Christina remarked, passing
out of the room.

Madame Grandoni followed her with her eyes, and Hyacinth thought he
perceived a considerable lassitude, a plaintive bewilderment and
_hébétement_, in the old woman’s face. “Don’t you like to use cabs—I
mean hansoms?” he asked, wishing to say something comforting to her.

“It is not true that I miss anything; my life is only too full,” she
replied. “I lived worse than this—in my bad days.” In a moment she went
on: “It’s because you are here—she doesn’t like Assunta to come.”

“Assunta—because I am here?” Hyacinth did not immediately catch her
meaning.

“You must have seen her Italian maid at Medley. She has kept her, and
she’s ashamed of it. When we are alone Assunta comes for her bonnet.
But she likes you to think she waits on herself.”

“That’s a weakness—when she’s so strong! And what does Assunta think of
it?” Hyacinth asked, looking at the stuffed birds in the window, the
alabaster Cupid, the wax flowers on the chimney-piece, the florid
antimacassars on the chairs, the sentimental engravings on the walls—in
frames of _papier-mâché_ and ‘composition’, some of them enveloped in
pink tissue-paper—and the prismatic glass pendants which seemed
attached to everything.

“She says, ‘What on earth will it matter to-morrow?’”

“Does she mean that to-morrow the Princess will have her luxury back
again? Hasn’t she sold all her beautiful things?”

Madame Grandoni was silent a moment. “She has kept a few. They are put
away.”

“_A la bonne heure!_” cried Hyacinth, laughing. He sat down with the
ironical old woman; he spent nearly half an hour in desultory
conversation with her, before candles were brought in, and while
Christina was in Assunta’s hands. He noticed how resolutely the
Princess had withheld herself from any attempt to sweeten the dose she
had taken it into her head to swallow, to mitigate the ugliness of her
vulgar little house. She had respected its horrible idiosyncrasies, and
left, rigidly, in their places the gimcracks which found favour in
Madeira Crescent. She had flung no draperies over the pretentious
furniture and disposed no rugs upon the staring carpet; and it was
plainly her theory that the right way to acquaint one’s self with the
sensations of the wretched was to suffer the anguish of exasperated
taste. Presently a female servant came in—not the sceptical Assunta,
but a stunted young woman of the maid-of-all-work type, the same who
had opened the door to the pair a short time before—and informed
Hyacinth that the Princess wished him to understand that he was
expected to remain to tea. He learned from Madame Grandoni that the
custom of an early dinner, followed in the evening by the frugal repast
of the lower orders, was another of Christina’s mortifications; and
when, shortly afterwards, he saw the table laid in the back parlour,
which was also the dining-room, and observed the nature of the crockery
with which it was decorated, he perceived that whether or no her
earnestness were durable, it was at any rate, for the time, intense.
Madame Grandoni narrated to him, definitely, as the Princess had done
only in scraps, the history of the two ladies since his departure from
Medley, their relinquishment of that fine house and the sudden
arrangements Christina had made to change her mode of life, after they
had been only ten days in South Street. At the climax of the London
season, in a society which only desired to treat her as one of its
brightest ornaments, she had retired to Madeira Crescent, concealing
her address (with only partial success, of course) from every one, and
inviting a celebrated curiosity-monger to come and look at her
_bibelots_ and tell her what he would give her for the lot. In this
manner she had parted with them at a fearful sacrifice. She had wished
to avoid the nine days’ wonder of a public sale; for, to do her
justice, though she liked to be original she didn’t like to be
notorious, an occasion of vulgar chatter. What had precipitated her
determination was a remonstrance received from her husband, just after
she left Medley, on the subject of her excessive expenditure; he had
written to her that it was past a joke (as she had appeared to consider
it), and that she must really pull up. Nothing could gall her more than
an interference on that head (she maintained that she knew the exact
figure of the Prince’s income, and that her allowance was an
insignificant part of it), and she had pulled up with a vengeance, as
Hyacinth perceived. The young man divined on this occasion one of the
Princess’s sharpest anxieties (he had never thought of it before), the
danger of Casamassima’s really putting the screw on—attempting to make
her come back and live with him by withholding supplies altogether. In
this case she would find herself in a very tight place, though she had
a theory that if she should go to law about the matter the courts would
allow her a separate maintenance. This course, however, it would
scarcely be in her character to adopt; she would be more likely to
waive her right and support herself by lessons in music and the foreign
tongues, supplemented by the remnant of property that had come to her
from her mother. That she was capable of returning to the Prince some
day, through not daring to face the loss of luxury, was an idea that
could not occur to Hyacinth, in the midst of her assurances, uttered at
various times, that she positively yearned for a sacrifice; and such an
apprehension was less present to him than ever as he listened to Madame
Grandoni’s account of the manner in which her rupture with the
fashionable world had been effected. It must be added that the old lady
remarked, with a sigh, that she didn’t know how it would all end, as
some of Christina’s economies were very costly; and when Hyacinth
pressed her a little she went on to say that it was not at present the
question of complications arising from the Prince that troubled her
most, but the fear that Christina was seriously compromised by her
reckless, senseless correspondences—letters arriving from foreign
countries, from God knew whom (Christina never told her, nor did she
desire it), all about uprisings and liberations (of so much one could
be sure) and other matters that were no concern of honest folk.
Hyacinth scarcely knew what Madame Grandoni meant by this allusion,
which seemed to show that, during the last few months, the Princess had
considerably extended her revolutionary connection: he only thought of
Hoffendahl, whose name, however, he was careful not to pronounce, and
wondered whether his hostess had been writing to the Master to
intercede for _him_, to beg that he might be let off. His cheeks burned
at the thought, but he contented himself with remarking to Madame
Grandoni that their extraordinary friend enjoyed the sense of danger.
The old lady wished to know how she would enjoy the hangman’s rope
(with which, _du train dont elle allait_, she might easily make
acquaintance); and when he expressed the hope that she didn’t regard
him as a counsellor of imprudence, replied, “You, my poor child? Oh, I
saw into you at Medley. You are a simple _codino!_”

The Princess came in to tea in a very dull gown, with a bunch of keys
at her girdle; and nothing could have suggested the thrifty housewife
better than the manner in which she superintended the laying of the
cloth and the placing on it of a little austere refreshment—a pile of
bread and butter, flanked by a pot of marmalade and a morsel of bacon.
She filled the teapot out of a little tin canister locked up in a
cupboard, of which the key worked with difficulty, and made the tea
with her own superb hands; taking pains, however, to explain to
Hyacinth that she was far from imposing that régime on Madame Grandoni,
who understood that the grocer had a standing order to supply her, for
her private consumption, with any delicacy she might desire. For
herself, she had never been so well as since she had followed a homely
diet. On Sundays they had muffins, and sometimes, for a change, a
smoked haddock, or even a fried sole. Hyacinth was lost in adoration of
the Princess’s housewifely ways and of the exquisite figure that she
made as a little _bourgeoise;_ judging that if her attempt to combine
plain living with high thinking were all a comedy, at least it was the
most finished entertainment she had yet offered him. She talked to
Madame Grandoni about Lady Aurora; described her with much drollery,
even to the details of her dress; declared that she was a delightful
creature and one of the most interesting persons she had seen for an
age; expressed to Hyacinth the conviction that she should like her
exceedingly, if Lady Aurora would only believe a little in _her_. “But
I shall like her, whether she does or not,” said the Princess. “I
always know when that’s going to happen; it isn’t so common. She will
begin very well with me, and be ‘fascinated’—isn’t that the way people
begin with me?—but she won’t understand me at all, or make out in the
least what kind of a queer fish I am, though I shall try to show her.
When she thinks she does, at last, she will give me up in disgust, and
will never know that she has understood me quite wrong. That has been
the way with most of the people I have liked; they have run away from
me _à toutes jambes_. Oh, I have inspired aversions!” laughed the
Princess, handing Hyacinth his cup of tea. He recognised it by the
aroma as a mixture not inferior to that of which he had partaken at
Medley. “I have never succeeded in knowing any one who would do me
good; for by the time I began to improve, under their influence, they
could put up with me no longer.”

“You told me you were going to visit the poor. I don’t understand what
your Gräfin was doing there,” said Madame Grandoni.

“She had come out of charity—in the same way as I. She evidently goes
about immensely over there; I shall entreat her to take me with her.”

“I thought you had promised to let me be your guide, in those
explorations,” Hyacinth remarked.

The Princess looked at him a moment. “Dear Mr Robinson, Lady Aurora
knows more than you.”

“There have been times, surely, when you have complimented me on my
knowledge.”

“Oh, I mean more about the lower classes!” the Princess exclaimed; and,
oddly enough, there was a sense in which Hyacinth was unable to deny
the allegation. He presently returned to something she had said a
moment before, declaring that it had not been the way with Madame
Grandoni and him to take to their heels, and to this she replied, “Oh,
you’ll run away yet; don’t be afraid!”

“I think that if I had been capable of quitting you I should have done
it by this time; I have neglected such opportunities,” the old lady
sighed. Hyacinth now perceived that her eye had quite lost its ancient
twinkle; she was troubled about many things.

“It is true that if you didn’t leave me when I was rich, it wouldn’t
look well for you to leave me at present,” the Princess suggested; and
before Madame Grandoni could reply to this speech she said to Hyacinth,
“I liked the man, your friend Muniment, so much for saying he wouldn’t
come to see me. ‘What good would it do him,’ poor fellow? What good
would it do him, indeed? You were not so difficult: you held off a
little and pleaded obstacles, but one could see you would come down,”
she continued, covering her guest with her mystifying smile. “Besides,
I was smarter then, more splendid; I had on gewgaws and suggested
worldly lures. I must have been more attractive. But I liked him for
refusing,” she repeated; and of the many words she uttered that evening
it was these that made most impression on Hyacinth. He remained for an
hour after tea, for on rising from the table she had gone to the piano
(she had not deprived herself of this resource, and had a humble
instrument, of the so-called ‘cottage’ kind) and begun to play in a
manner that reminded him of her playing the day of his arrival at
Medley. The night had grown close, and as the piano was in the front
room he opened, at her request, the window that looked into Madeira
Crescent. Beneath it assembled the youth of both sexes, the dingy
loiterers who had clustered an hour before around the hurdy-gurdy. But
on this occasion they did not caper about; they remained still, leaning
against the area-rails and listening to the wondrous music. When
Hyacinth told the Princess of the spell she had thrown upon them she
declared that it made her singularly happy; she added that she was
really glad, almost proud, of her day; she felt as if she had begun to
do something for the people. Just before he took leave she encountered
some occasion for saying to him that she was certain the man in Audley
Court wouldn’t come; and Hyacinth forbore contradict her, because he
believed that in fact he wouldn’t.




XXXIV


How right she had been to say that Lady Aurora would probably be
fascinated at first was proved the first time Hyacinth went to Belgrave
Square, a visit he was led to pay very promptly, by a deep sense of the
obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of
Pinnie’s death. The circumstances in which he found her were quite the
same as those of his visit the year before; she was spending the
unfashionable season in her father’s empty house, amid a desert of
brown holland and the dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen
so much of her during Pinnie’s illness that he felt (or had felt then)
that he knew her almost intimately—that they had become real friends,
almost comrades, and might meet henceforth without reserves or
ceremonies; yet she was as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the
other occasion: not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and
apparently unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer.
Hyacinth, however, always liked extremely to be with her, for she was
the person in the world who quietly, delicately, and as a matter of
course treated him most like a gentleman. She had never said the
handsome, flattering things to him that had fallen from the lips of the
Princess, and never explained to him her view of him; but her timid,
cursory, receptive manner, which took all sorts of equalities for
granted, was a homage to the idea of his refinement. It was in this
manner that she now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign
travels; he found himself discussing the political indications of Paris
and the Ruskinian theories of Venice, in Belgrave Square, quite like
one of the cosmopolites bred in that region. It took him, however, but
a few minutes to perceive that Lady Aurora’s heart was not in these
considerations; the deferential smile she bent upon him, while she sat
with her head thrust forward and her long hands clasped in her lap, was
slightly mechanical, her attitude perfunctory. When he gave her his
views of some of the _arrière-pensées_ of _M. Gambetta_ (for he had
views not altogether, as he thought, deficient in originality), she did
not interrupt, for she never interrupted; but she took advantage of his
first pause to say, quickly, irrelevantly, “Will the Princess
Casamassima come again to Audley Court?”

“I have no doubt she will come again, if they would like her to.”

“I do hope she will. She is very wonderful,” Lady Aurora continued.

“Oh, yes, she is very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure,” said
Hyacinth.

“Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to
see the Princess again. Don’t you think she is different from anybody
that one has ever seen?” But her ladyship added, before waiting for an
answer to this, “I liked her quite extraordinarily.”

“She liked you just as much. I know it would give her great pleasure if
you should go to see her.”

“Fancy!” exclaimed Lady Aurora; but she instantly obtained the
Princess’s address from Hyacinth, and made a note of it in a small,
shabby book. She mentioned that the card the Princess had given her in
Camberwell proved to contain no address, and Hyacinth recognised that
vagary—the Princess was so off-hand. Then she said, hesitating a
little, “Does she really care for the poor?”

“If she doesn’t,” the young man replied, “I can’t imagine what interest
she has in pretending to.”

“If she does, she’s very remarkable—she deserves great honour.”

“You really care; why is she more remarkable than you?” Hyacinth
demanded.

“Oh, it’s very different—she’s so wonderfully attractive!” Lady Aurora
replied, making, recklessly, the only allusion to the oddity of her own
appearance in which Hyacinth was destined to hear her indulge. She
became conscious of it the moment she had spoken, and said, quickly, to
turn it off, “I should like to talk with her, but I’m rather afraid.
She’s tremendously clever.”

“Ah, what she is you’ll find out when you know her!” Hyacinth sighed,
expressively.

His hostess looked at him a little, and then, vaguely, exclaimed, “How
very interesting!” The next moment she continued, “She might do so many
other things; she might charm the world.”

“She does that, whatever she does,” said Hyacinth, smiling. “It’s all
by the way; it needn’t interfere.”

“That’s what I mean, that most other people would be content—beautiful
as she is. There’s great merit, when you give up something.”

“She has known a great many bad people, and she wants to know some
good,” Hyacinth rejoined. “Therefore be sure to go to her soon.”

“She looks as if she had known nothing bad since she was born,” said
Lady Aurora, rapturously. “I can’t imagine her going into all the
dreadful places that she would have to.”

“You have gone into them, and it hasn’t hurt you,” Hyacinth suggested.

“How do you know that? My family think it has.”

“You make me glad that I haven’t a family,” said the young man.

“And the Princess—has she no one?”

“Ah, yes, she has a husband. But she doesn’t live with him.”

“Is he one of the bad persons?” asked Lady Aurora, as earnestly as a
child listening to a tale.

“Well, I don’t like to abuse him, because he is down.”

“If I were a man, I should be in love with her,” said Lady Aurora. Then
she pursued, “I wonder whether we might work together.”

“That’s exactly what she hopes.”

“I won’t show her the worst places,” said her ladyship, smiling.

To which Hyacinth replied, “I suspect you will do what every one else
has done, namely, exactly what she wants!” Before he took leave he said
to her, “Do you know whether Paul Muniment liked the Princess?”

Lady Aurora meditated a moment, apparently with some intensity. “I
think he considered her extraordinarily beautiful—the most beautiful
person he had ever seen.”

“Does he still believe her to be a humbug?”

“Still?” asked Lady Aurora, as if she didn’t understand.

“I mean that that was the impression apparently made upon him last
winter by my description of her.”

“Oh, I’m sure he thinks her tremendously plucky!” That was all the
satisfaction Hyacinth got just then as to Muniment’s estimate of the
Princess.

A few days afterward he returned to Madeira Crescent, in the evening,
the only time he was free, the Princess having given him a general
invitation to take tea with her. He felt that he ought to be discreet
in acting upon it, though he was not without reasons that would have
warranted him in going early and often. He had a peculiar dread of her
growing tired of him—boring herself in his society; yet at the same
time he had rather a sharp vision of her boring herself without him, in
the dull summer evenings, when even Paddington was out of town. He
wondered what she did, what visitors dropped in, what pastimes she
cultivated, what saved her from the sudden vagary of throwing up the
whole of her present game. He remembered that there was a complete side
of her life with which he was almost unacquainted (Lady Marchant and
her daughters, at Medley, and three or four other persons who had
called while he was there, being, in his experience, the only
illustrations of it), and knew not to what extent she had, in spite of
her transformation, preserved relations with her old friends; but he
could easily imagine a day when she should discover that what she found
in Madeira Crescent was less striking than what she missed. Going
thither a second time Hyacinth perceived that he had done her great
injustice; she was full of resources, she had never been so happy, she
found time to read, to write, to commune with her piano, and above all
to think—a delightful detachment from the invasive, vulgar, gossiping,
distracting world she had known hitherto. The only interruption to her
felicity was that she received quantities of notes from her former
acquaintance, challenging her to give some account of herself, to say
what had become of her, to come and stay with them in the country; but
with these importunate missives she took a very short way—she simply
burned them, without answering. She told Hyacinth immediately that Lady
Aurora had called on her, two days before, at an hour when she was not
in, and she had straightway addressed her, in return, an invitation to
come to tea, any evening, at eight o’clock. That was the way the people
in Madeira Crescent entertained each other (the Princess knew
everything about them now, and was eager to impart her knowledge); and
the evening, she was sure, would be much more convenient to Lady
Aurora, whose days were filled with good works, peregrinations of
charity. Her ladyship arrived ten minutes after Hyacinth; she told the
Princess that her invitation had been expressed in a manner so
irresistible that she was unwilling to wait more than a day to respond.
She was introduced to Madame Grandoni, and tea was immediately served;
Hyacinth being gratefully conscious the while of the super-subtle way
in which Lady Aurora forbore to appear bewildered at meeting him in
such society. She knew he frequented it, and she had been witness of
his encounter with the Princess in Audley Court; but it might have
startled her to have ocular evidence of the footing on which he stood.
Everything the Princess did or said, at this time, had for effect,
whatever its purpose, to make her seem more rare and fine; and she had
seldom given him greater pleasure than by the exquisite art she put
forward to win Lady Aurora’s confidence, to place herself under the
pure and elevating influence of the noble spinster. She made herself
small and simple; she spoke of her own little aspirations and efforts;
she appealed and persuaded; she laid her white hand on Lady Aurora’s,
gazing at her with an interest which was evidently deeply sincere, but
which, all the same, derived half its effect from the contrast between
the quality of her beauty, the whole air of her person, and the hard,
dreary problems of misery and crime. It was touching, and Lady Aurora
was touched; that was very evident as they sat together on the sofa,
after tea, and the Princess protested that she only wanted to know what
her new friend was doing—what she had done for years—in order that she
might go and do likewise. She asked personal questions with a
directness that was sometimes embarrassing to the subject—Hyacinth had
seen that habit in her from the first—and Lady Aurora, though she was
charmed and excited, was not quite comfortable at being so publicly
probed and sounded. The public was formed of Madame Grandoni and
Hyacinth; but the old lady (whose intercourse with the visitor had
consisted almost wholly of watching her with a quiet, speculative
anxiety) presently shuffled away, and was heard, through the thin
partitions that prevailed in Madeira Crescent, to ascend to her own
apartment. It seemed to Hyacinth that he ought also, in delicacy, to
retire, and this was his intention, from one moment to the other; to
him, certainly (and the second time she met him), Lady Aurora had made
as much of her confession as he had a right to look for. After that one
little flash of egotism he had never again heard her allude to her own
feelings or circumstances.

“Do you stay in town, like this, at such a season, on purpose to attend
to your work?” the Princess asked; and there was something archly
rueful in the tone in which she made this inquiry, as if it cost her
just a pang to find that in taking such a line she herself had not been
so original as she hoped. “Mr Robinson has told me about your big house
in Belgrave Square—you must let me come and see you there. Nothing
would make me so happy as that you should allow me to help you a
little—how little soever. Do you like to be helped, or do you like to
go alone? Are you very independent, or do you need to look up, to
cling, to lean upon some one? Excuse me if I ask impertinent questions;
we speak that way—rather, you know—in Rome, where I have spent a large
part of my life. That idea of your being there alone in your great dull
house, with all your charities and devotions, makes a kind of picture
in my mind; it’s quaint and touching, like something in some English
novel. Englishwomen are so accomplished, are they not? I am really a
foreigner, you know, and though I have lived here a while it takes one
some time to find those things out _au juste_. Therefore, is your work
for the people only one of your occupations, or is it everything, does
it absorb your whole life? That’s what I should like it to be for me!
Do your family like you to throw yourself into all this, or have you
had to brave a certain amount of ridicule? I dare say you have; that’s
where you English are strong, in braving ridicule. They have to do it
so often, haven’t they? I don’t know whether I could do it. I never
tried; but with you I would brave anything. Are your family clever and
sympathetic? No? the kind of thing that one’s family generally is? Ah,
well, dear lady, we must make a little family together. Are you
encouraged or disgusted? Do you go on doggedly, or have you any faith,
any great idea, that lifts you up? Are you religious, now, _par
exemple?_ Do you do your work in connection with any ecclesiasticism,
any missions, or priests or sisters? I’m a Catholic, you know—but so
little! I shouldn’t mind in the least joining hands with any one who is
really doing anything. I express myself awkwardly, but perhaps you know
what I mean. Possibly you don’t know that I am one of those who believe
that a great social cataclysm is destined to take place, and that it
can’t make things worse than they are already. I believe, in a word, in
the people doing something for themselves (the others will never do
anything for them), and I am quite willing to help them. If that shocks
you I shall be immensely disappointed, because there is something in
the impression you make on me that seems to say that you haven’t the
usual prejudices, and that if certain things were to happen you
wouldn’t be afraid. You are shy, are you not?—but you are not timorous.
I suppose that if you thought the inequalities and oppressions and
miseries which now exist were a necessary part of life, and were going
on for ever, you wouldn’t be interested in those people over the river
(the bedridden girl and her brother, I mean); because Mr Robinson tells
me that they are advanced socialists—or at least the brother is.
Perhaps you’ll say that you don’t care for him; the sister, to your
mind, being the remarkable one. She is, indeed, a perfect little _femme
du monde_—she talks so much better than most of the people in society.
I hope you don’t mind my saying that, because I have an idea that you
are not in society. You can imagine whether I am! Haven’t you judged
it, like me, condemned it, and given it up? Are you not sick of the
egotism, the snobbery, the meanness, the frivolity, the immorality, the
hypocrisy? Isn’t there a great resemblance in our situation? I don’t
mean in our nature, for you are far better than I shall ever be. Aren’t
you quite divinely good? When I see a woman of your sort (not that I
often do!) I try to be a little less bad. You have helped hundreds,
thousands, of people; you must help me!”

These remarks, which I have strung together, did not, of course, fall
from the Princess’s lips in an uninterrupted stream; they were arrested
and interspersed by frequent inarticulate responses and embarrassed
protests. Lady Aurora shrank from them even while they gratified her,
blinking and fidgeting in the brilliant, direct light of her hostess’s
attentions. I need not repeat her answers, the more so as they none of
them arrived at completion, but passed away into nervous laughter and
averted looks, the latter directed at the ceiling, the floor, the
windows, and appearing to constitute a kind of entreaty to some occult
or supernatural power that the conversation should become more
impersonal. In reply to the Princess’s allusion to the convictions
prevailing in the Muniment family, she said that the brother and sister
thought differently about public questions, but were of the same mind
with regard to persons of the upper class taking an interest in the
working people, attempting to enter into their life: they held it was a
great mistake. At this information the Princess looked much
disappointed; she wished to know if the Muniments thought it was
impossible to do them any good. “Oh, I mean a mistake from _our_ point
of view,” said Lady Aurora. “They wouldn’t do it in our place; they
think we had much better occupy ourselves with our own pleasures.” And
as the Princess stared, not comprehending, she went on: “Rosy thinks we
have a right to our own pleasures under all circumstances, no matter
how badly off the poor may be; and her brother takes the ground that we
will not have them long, and that in view of what may happen we are
great fools not to make the most of them.”

“I see, I see. That is very strong,” the Princess murmured, in a tone
of high appreciation.

“I dare say. But all the same, whatever is going to come, one _must_ do
something.”

“You do think, then, that something is going to come?” said the
Princess.

“Oh, immense changes, I dare say. But I don’t belong to anything, you
know.”

The Princess hesitated a moment. “No more do I. But many people do. Mr
Robinson, for instance.” And she gave Hyacinth a familiar smile.

“Oh, if the changes depend on me!” the young man exclaimed, blushing.

“They won’t set the Thames on fire—I quite agree to that!”

Lady Aurora had the manner of not considering that she had a warrant
for going into the question of Hyacinth’s affiliations; so she stared
abstractly at the piano and in a moment remarked to the Princess, “I am
sure you play awfully well; I should like so much to hear you.”

Hyacinth felt that their hostess thought this _banal_. She had not
asked Lady Aurora to spend the evening with her simply that they should
fall back on the resources of the vulgar. Nevertheless, she replied
with perfect good-nature that she should be delighted to play; only
there was a thing she should like much better, namely, that Lady Aurora
should narrate her life.

“Oh, don’t talk about mine; yours, yours!” her ladyship cried,
colouring with eagerness and, for the first time since her arrival,
indulging in the free gesture of laying her hand upon that of the
Princess.

“With so many narratives in the air, I certainly had better take myself
off,” said Hyacinth, and the Princess offered no opposition to his
departure. She and Lady Aurora were evidently on the point of striking
up a tremendous intimacy, and as he turned this idea over, walking
away, it made him sad, for strange, vague reasons, which he could not
have expressed.




XXXV


The Sunday following this occasion Hyacinth spent almost entirely with
the Muniments, with whom, since his return to his work, he had been
able to have no long, fraternising talk, of the kind that had marked
their earlier relations. The present, however, was a happy day; it
refreshed exceedingly the sentiments with which he now regarded the
inscrutable Paul. The warm, bright September weather gilded even the
dinginess of Audley Court, and while, in the morning, Rosy’s brother
and their visitor sat beside her sofa, the trio amused themselves with
discussing a dozen different plans for giving a festive turn to the
day. There had been moments, in the last six months, when Hyacinth had
the sense that he should never again be able to enter into such ideas
as that, and these moments had been connected with the strange
perversion taking place in his mental image of the man whose hardness
(of course he was obliged to be hard) he had never expected to see
turned upon a passionate admirer. But now, for the hour at least, the
darkness had cleared away, and Paul’s company was in itself a
comfortable, inspiring influence. He had never been kinder, jollier,
safer, as it were; it had never appeared more desirable to hold fast to
him and trust him. Less than ever would an observer have guessed there
was a reason why the two young men might have winced as they looked at
each other. Rosy naturally took part in the question debated between
her companions—the question whether they should limit their excursion
to a walk in Hyde Park; should embark at Lambeth pier on the penny
steamer, which would convey them to Greenwich; or should start
presently for Waterloo station and go thence by train to Hampton Court.
Miss Muniment had visited none of these places, but she contributed
largely to the discussion, for which she seemed perfectly qualified;
talked about the crowd on the steamer, and the inconvenience arising
from drunken persons on the return, quite as if she had suffered from
these drawbacks; said that the view from the hill at Greenwich was
terribly smoky, and at that season the fashionable world—half the
attraction, of course—was wholly absent from Hyde Park; and expressed
strong views in favour of Wolsey’s old palace, with whose history she
appeared intimately acquainted. She threw herself into her brother’s
holiday with eagerness and glee, and Hyacinth marvelled again at the
stoicism of the hard, bright creature, polished, as it were, by pain,
whose imagination appeared never to concern itself with her own
privations, so that she could lie in her close little room the whole
golden afternoon, without bursting into sobs as she saw the western
sunbeams slant upon the shabby, ugly, familiar paper of her wall and
thought of the far-off fields and gardens which she should never see.
She talked immensely of the Princess, for whose beauty, grace and
benevolence she could find no sufficient praise; declaring that of all
the fair faces that had ever hung over her couch (and Rosy spoke as
from immense opportunities for comparison) she had far the noblest and
most refreshing. She seemed to make a kind of light in the room and to
leave it behind her after she had gone. Rosy could call up her image as
she could hum a tune she had heard, and she expressed in her quaint,
particular way how, as she lay there in the quiet hours, she repeated
over to herself the beautiful air. The Princess might be anything, she
might be royal or imperial, and Rosy was well aware how little _she_
should complain of the dullness of her life when such apparitions as
that could pop in any day. She made a difference in the place—it gave
it a kind of finish for her to have come there; if it was good enough
for a princess, it was good enough for _her_, and she hoped she
shouldn’t hear again of Paul’s wishing her to move out of a room with
which she should have henceforth such delightful associations. The
Princess had found her way to Audley Court, and perhaps she wouldn’t
find it to another lodging—they couldn’t expect her to follow them
about London at their pleasure; and at any rate she had evidently been
very much struck with the little room, so that if they were quiet and
patient who could say but the fancy would take her to send them a bit
of carpet, or a picture, or even a mirror with a gilt frame, to make it
a bit more tasteful? Rosy’s transitions from pure enthusiasm to the
imaginative calculation of benefit were performed with a serenity
peculiar to herself. Her chatter had so much spirit and point that it
always commanded attention, but to-day Hyacinth was less tolerant of it
than usual, because so long as it lasted Muniment held his tongue, and
what he had been anxious about was much more Paul’s impression of the
Princess. Rosy made no remark to him on the monopoly he had so long
enjoyed of this wonderful lady; she had always had the manner of a kind
of indulgent incredulity about Hyacinth’s social adventures, and he saw
the day might easily come when she would begin to talk of the Princess
as if she herself had been the first to discover her. She had much to
say, however, about the nature of the acquaintance Lady Aurora had
formed with her, and she was mainly occupied with the glory she had
drawn upon herself by bringing two such exalted persons together. She
fancied them alluding, in the great world, to the occasion on which ‘we
first met, at Miss Muniment’s, you know’; and she related how Lady
Aurora, who had been in Audley Court the day before, had declared that
she owed her a debt she could never repay. The two ladies had liked
each other more, almost, than they liked any one; and wasn’t it a rare
picture to think of them moving hand in hand, like twin roses, through
the bright upper air? Muniment inquired, in rather a coarse,
unsympathetic way, what the mischief she ever wanted of _her;_ which
led Hyacinth to demand in return, “What do you mean? What does who want
of whom?”

“What does the beauty want of _our_ poor lady? She has a totally
different stamp. I don’t know much about women, but I can see that.”

“How do you mean—a different stamp? They both have the stamp of their
rank!” cried Rosy.

“Who can ever tell what women want, at any time?” Hyacinth said, with
the off-handedness of a man of the world.

“Well, my boy, if you don’t know any more than I, you disappoint me!
Perhaps if we wait long enough she will tell us some day herself.”

“Tell you what she wants of Lady Aurora?”

“I don’t mind about Lady Aurora so much; but what in the name of long
journeys does she want with _us?_”

“Don’t you think you’re worth a long journey?” Rosy asked, gaily. “If
you were not my brother, which is handy for seeing you, and I were not
confined to my sofa, I would go from one end of England to the other to
make your acquaintance! He’s in love with the Princess,” she went on,
to Hyacinth, “and he asks those senseless questions to cover it up.
What does any one want of anything?”

It was decided, at last, that the two young men should go down to
Greenwich, and after they had partaken of bread and cheese with Rosy
they embarked on a penny steamer. The boat was densely crowded, and
they leaned, rather squeezed together, in the fore part of it, against
the rail of the deck, and watched the big black fringe of the yellow
stream. The river was always fascinating to Hyacinth. The mystified
entertainment which, as a child, he had found in all the aspects of
London came back to him from the murky scenery of its banks and the
sordid agitation of its bosom: the great arches and pillars of the
bridges, where the water rushed, and the funnels tipped, and sounds
made an echo, and there seemed an overhanging of interminable
processions; the miles of ugly wharves and warehouses; the lean
protrusions of chimney, mast, and crane; the painted signs of grimy
industries, staring from shore to shore; the strange, flat, obstructive
barges, straining and bumping on some business as to which everything
was vague but that it was remarkably dirty; the clumsy coasters and
colliers, which thickened as one went down; the small, loafing boats,
whose occupants, somehow, looking up from their oars at the steamer, as
they rocked in the oily undulations of its wake, appeared profane and
sarcastic; in short, all the grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing
activity of the turbid flood. In the good-natured crowd, amid the fumes
of vile tobacco, beneath the shower of sooty particles, and to the
accompaniment of a bagpipe of a dingy Highlander, who sketched
occasionally a smothered reel, Hyacinth forbore to speak to his
companion of what he had most at heart; but later, as they lay on the
brown, crushed grass, on one of the slopes of Greenwich Park, and saw
the river stretch away and shine beyond the pompous colonnades of the
hospital, he asked him whether there was any truth in what Rosy had
said about his being sweet on their friend the Princess. He said ‘their
friend’ on purpose, speaking as if, now that she had been twice to
Audley Court, Muniment might be regarded as knowing her almost as well
as he himself did. He wished to conjure away the idea that he was
jealous of Paul, and if he desired information on the point I have
mentioned this was because it still made him almost as uncomfortable as
it had done at first that his comrade should take the scoffing view. He
didn’t easily see such a fellow as Muniment wheel about from one day to
the other, but he had been present at the most exquisite exhibition he
had ever observed the Princess make of that divine power of
conciliation which was not perhaps in social intercourse the art she
chiefly exercised but was certainly the most wonderful of her secrets,
and it would be remarkable indeed that a sane young man should not have
been affected by it. It was familiar to Hyacinth that Muniment was not
easily touched by women, but this might perfectly have been the case
without detriment to the Princess’s ability to work a miracle. The
companions had wandered through the great halls and courts of the
hospital; had gazed up at the glories of the famous painted chamber and
admired the long and lurid series of the naval victories of
England—Muniment remarking to his friend that he supposed he had seen
the match to all that in foreign parts, offensive little travelled
beggar that he was. They had not ordered a fish-dinner either at the
‘Trafalgar’ or the ‘Ship’ (having a frugal vision of tea and shrimps
with Rosy, on their return), but they had laboured up and down the
steep undulations of the shabby, charming park; made advances to the
tame deer and seen them amble foolishly away; watched the young of both
sexes, hilarious and red in the face, roll in promiscuous entanglement
over the slopes; gazed at the little brick observatory, perched on one
of the knolls, which sets the time of English history and in which
Hyacinth could see that his companion took a kind of technical
interest; wandered out of one of the upper gates and admired the
trimness of the little villas at Blackheath, where Muniment declared
that it was his idea of supreme social success to be able to live. He
pointed out two or three small, semi-detached houses, faced with
stucco, and with ‘Mortimer Lodge’ or ‘The Sycamores’ inscribed upon the
gate-posts, and Hyacinth guessed that these were the sort of place
where he would like to end his days—in high, pure air, with a genteel
window for Rosy’s couch and a cheerful view of suburban excursions. It
was when they came back into the park that, being rather hot and a
little satiated, they stretched themselves under a tree and Hyacinth
yielded to his curiosity.

“Sweet on her—sweet on her, my boy!” said Muniment. “I might as well be
sweet on the dome of St Paul’s, which I just make out off there.”

“The dome of St Paul’s doesn’t come to see you, and doesn’t ask you to
return the visit.”

“Oh, I don’t return visits—I’ve got a lot of jobs of my own to do. If I
don’t put myself out for the Princess, isn’t that a sufficient answer
to your question?”

“I’m by no means sure,” said Hyacinth. “If you went to see her, simply
and civilly, because she asked you, I shouldn’t regard it as a proof
that you had taken a fancy to her. Your hanging off is more suspicious;
it may mean that you don’t trust yourself—that you are in danger of
falling in love if you go in for a more intimate acquaintance.”

“It’s a rum job, your wanting me to make up to her. I shouldn’t think
it would suit your book,” Muniment rejoined, staring at the sky, with
his hands clasped under his head.

“Do you suppose I’m afraid of you?” his companion asked. “Besides,”
Hyacinth added in a moment, “why the devil should I care, now?”

Muniment, for a little, made no rejoinder; he turned over on his side,
and with his arm resting on the ground leaned his head on his hand.
Hyacinth felt his eyes on his face, but he also felt himself colouring,
and didn’t meet them. He had taken a private vow never to indulge, to
Muniment, in certain inauspicious references, and the words he had just
spoken had slipped out of his mouth too easily. “What do you mean by
that?” Paul demanded, at last; and when Hyacinth looked at him he saw
nothing but his companion’s strong, fresh, irresponsible face.
Muniment, before speaking, had had time to guess what he meant by it.

Suddenly, an impulse that he had never known before, or rather that he
had always resisted, took possession of him. There was a mystery which
it concerned his happiness to clear up, and he became unconscious of
his scruples, of his pride, of the strength that he had believed to be
in him—the strength for going through his work and passing away without
a look behind. He sat forward on the grass, with his arms round his
knees, and bent upon Muniment a face lighted up by his difficulties.
For a minute the two men’s eyes met with extreme clearness, and then
Hyacinth exclaimed, “What an extraordinary fellow you are!”

“You’ve hit it there!” said Muniment, smiling.

“I don’t want to make a scene, or work on your feelings, but how will
you like it when I’m strung up on the gallows?”

“You mean for Hoffendahl’s job? That’s what you were alluding to just
now?” Muniment lay there, in the same attitude, chewing a long blade of
dry grass, which he held to his lips with his free hand.

“I didn’t mean to speak of it; but after all, why shouldn’t it come up?
Naturally, I have thought of it a good deal.”

“What good does that do?” Muniment returned. “I hoped you didn’t, and I
noticed you never spoke of it. You don’t like it; you would rather
throw it up,” he added.

There was not in his voice the faintest note of irony or contempt, no
sign whatever that he passed judgment on such a tendency. He spoke in a
quiet, human, memorising manner, as if it had originally quite entered
into his thought to allow for weak regrets. Nevertheless the complete
reasonableness of his tone itself cast a chill on his companion’s
spirit; it was like the touch of a hand at once very firm and very
soft, but strangely cold.

“I don’t want in the least to throw the business up, but did you
suppose I liked it?” Hyacinth asked, with rather a forced laugh.

“My dear fellow, how could I tell? You like a lot of things I don’t.
You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable
sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”

“If you object, for yourself, to change, and are so fond of still
waters, why have you associated yourself with a revolutionary
movement?” Hyacinth demanded, with a little air of making rather a good
point.

“Just for that reason!” Muniment answered, with a smile. “Isn’t our
revolutionary movement as quiet as the grave? Who knows, who suspects,
anything like the full extent of it?”

“I see—you take only the quiet parts!”

In speaking these words Hyacinth had had no derisive intention, but a
moment later he flushed with the sense that they had a sufficiently
petty sound. Muniment, however, appeared to see no offence in them, and
it was in the gentlest, most suggestive way, as if he had been thinking
over what might comfort his comrade, that he replied, “There’s one
thing you ought to remember—that it’s quite on the cards it may never
come off.”

“I don’t desire that reminder,” Hyacinth said; “and, moreover, you must
let me say that, somehow, I don’t easily fancy _you_ mixed up with
things that don’t come off. Anything you have to do with will come off,
I think.”

Muniment reflected a moment, as if his little companion were charmingly
ingenious. “Surely, I have nothing to do with this idea of
Hoffendahl’s.”

“With the execution, perhaps not; but how about the conception? You
seemed to me to have a great deal to do with it the night you took me
to see him.”

Muniment changed his position, raising himself, and in a moment he was
seated, Turk-fashion, beside his mate. He put his arm over his shoulder
and held him, studying his face; and then, in the kindest manner in the
world, he remarked, “There are three or four definite chances in your
favour.”

“I don’t want comfort, you know,” said Hyacinth, with his eyes on the
distant atmospheric mixture that represented London.

“What the devil _do_ you want?” Muniment asked, still holding him, and
with perfect good-humour.

“Well, to get inside of _you_ a little; to know how a chap feels when
he’s going to part with his best friend.”

“To part with him?” Muniment repeated.

“I mean, putting it at the worst.”

“I should think you would know by yourself, if you’re going to part
with me!”

At this Hyacinth prostrated himself, tumbled over on the grass, on his
face, which he buried in his arms. He remained in this attitude, saying
nothing, for a long time; and while he lay there he thought, with a
sudden, quick flood of association, of many strange things. Most of
all, he had the sense of the brilliant, charming day; the warm
stillness, touched with cries of amusement; the sweetness of loafing
there, in an interval of work, with a friend who was a tremendously
fine fellow, even if he didn’t understand the inexpressible. Muniment
also kept silent, and Hyacinth perceived that he was unaffectedly
puzzled. He wanted now to relieve him, so that he pulled himself
together again and turned round, saying the first thing he could think
of, in relation to the general subject of their conversation, that
would carry them away from the personal question: “I have asked you
before, and you have told me, but somehow I have never quite grasped it
(so I just touch on the matter again), exactly what good you think it
will do.”

“This idea of Hoffendahl’s? You must remember that as yet we know only
very vaguely what it is. It is difficult, therefore, to measure closely
the importance it may have, and I don’t think I have ever, in talking
with you, pretended to fix that importance. I don’t suppose it will
matter immensely whether your own engagement is carried out or not; but
if it is it will have been a detail in a scheme of which the general
effect will be decidedly useful. I believe, and you pretend to believe,
though I am not sure you do, in the advent of the democracy. It will
help the democracy to get possession that the classes that keep them
down shall be admonished from time to time that they have a very
definite and very determined intention of doing so. An immense deal
will depend upon that. Hoffendahl is a capital admonisher.”

Hyacinth listened to this explanation with an expression of interest
that was not feigned; and after a moment he rejoined, “When you say you
believe in the democracy, I take for granted you mean you positively
wish for their coming into power, as I have always supposed. Now what I
really have never understood is this—why you should desire to put
forward a lot of people whom you regard, almost without exception, as
donkeys.”

“Ah, my dear lad,” laughed Muniment, “when one undertakes to meddle in
human affairs one must deal with human material. The upper classes have
the longest ears.”

“I have heard you say that you were working for an equality in human
conditions, to abolish the immemorial inequality. What you want, then,
for all mankind is a similar _nuance_ of asininity.”

“That’s very clever; did you pick it up in France? The low tone of our
fellow-mortals is a result of bad conditions; it is the conditions I
want to alter. When those that have no start to speak of have a good
one, it is but fair to infer that they will go further. I want to try
them, you know.”

“But why equality?” Hyacinth asked. “Somehow, that word doesn’t say so
much to me as it used to. Inequality—inequality! I don’t know whether
it’s by dint of repeating it over to myself, but _that_ doesn’t shock
me as it used.”

“They didn’t put you up to that in France, I’m sure!” Muniment
exclaimed. “Your point of view has changed; you have risen in the
world.”

“Risen? Good God, what have I risen to?”

“True enough; you were always a bloated little swell!” And Muniment
gave his young friend a sociable slap on the back. There was a
momentary bitterness in its being imputed to such a one as Hyacinth,
even in joke, that he had taken sides with the fortunate ones of the
earth, and he had it on his tongue’s end to ask his friend if he had
never guessed what his proud titles were—the bastard of a murderess,
spawned in a gutter, out of which he had been picked by a sewing-girl.
But his life-long reserve on this point was a habit not easily broken,
and before such an inquiry could flash through it Muniment had gone on:
“If you’ve ceased to believe we can do anything, it will be rather
awkward, you know.”

“I don’t know what I believe, God help me!” Hyacinth remarked, in a
tone of an effect so lugubrious that Paul gave one of his longest, most
boyish-sounding laughs. And he added, “I don’t want you to think I have
ceased to care for the people. What am I but one of the poorest and
meanest of them?”

“You, my boy? You’re a duke in disguise, and so I thought the first
time I ever saw you. That night I took you to Hoffendahl you had a
little way with you that made me forget it; I mean that your disguise
happened to be better than usual. As regards caring for the people,
there’s surely no obligation at all,” Muniment continued. “I wouldn’t
if I could help it—I promise you that. It all depends on what you see.
The way _I_’ve used my eyes in this abominable metropolis has led to my
seeing that present arrangements won’t do. They won’t do,” he repeated,
placidly.

“Yes, I see that, too,” said Hyacinth, with the same dolefulness that
had marked his tone a moment before—a dolefulness begotten of the
rather helpless sense that, whatever he saw, he saw (and this was
always the case) so many other things beside. He saw the immeasurable
misery of the people, and yet he saw all that had been, as it were,
rescued and redeemed from it: the treasures, the felicities, the
splendours, the successes, of the world. All this took the form,
sometimes, to his imagination, of a vast, vague, dazzling presence, an
irradiation of light from objects undefined, mixed with the atmosphere
of Paris and of Venice. He presently added that a hundred things
Muniment had told him about the foul horrors of the worst districts of
London, pictures of incredible shame and suffering that he had put
before him, came back to him now, with the memory of the passion they
had kindled at the time.

“Oh, I don’t want you to go by what I have told you; I want you to go
by what you have seen yourself. I remember there were things you told
me that weren’t bad in their way.” And at this Paul Muniment sprang to
his feet, as if their conversation had drawn to an end, or they must at
all events be thinking of their homeward way. Hyacinth got up, too,
while his companion stood there. Muniment was looking off toward
London, with a face that expressed all the healthy singleness of his
vision. Suddenly Paul remarked, as if it occurred to him to complete,
or at any rate confirm, the declaration he had made a short time
before, “Yes, I don’t believe in the millennium, but I do believe in
the democracy.”

The young man, as he spoke these words, struck his comrade as such a
fine embodiment of the spirit of the people; he stood there, in his
powerful, sturdy newness, with such an air of having learnt what he had
learnt and of good-nature that had purposes in it, that our hero felt
the simple inrush of his old, frequent pride at having a person of that
promise, a nature of that capacity, for a friend. He passed his hand
into Muniment’s arm and said, with an imperceptible tremor in his
voice, “It’s no use your saying I’m not to go by what you tell me. I
would go by what you tell me, anywhere. There’s no awkwardness to speak
of. I don’t know that I believe exactly what you believe, but I believe
in you, and doesn’t that come to the same thing?”

Muniment evidently appreciated the cordiality and candour of this
little tribute, and the way he showed it was by a movement of his arm,
to check his companion, before they started to leave the spot, and by
looking down at him with a certain anxiety of friendliness. “I should
never have taken you to Hoffendahl if I hadn’t thought you would jump
at the job. It was that flaring little oration of yours, at the club,
when you floored Delancey for saying you were afraid, that put me up to
it.”

“I did jump at it—upon my word I did; and it was just what I was
looking for. That’s all correct!” said Hyacinth, cheerfully, as they
went forward. There was a strain of heroism in these words—of heroism
of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in their
interlocked arms. Hyacinth did not make the reflection that he was
infernally literal; he dismissed the sentimental problem that had
bothered him; he condoned, excused, admired—he merged himself, resting
happy for the time in the consciousness that Paul was a grand fellow,
that friendship was a purer feeling than love, and that there was an
immense deal of affection between them. He did not even observe at that
moment that it was preponderantly on his own side.




XXXVI


A certain Sunday in November, more than three months after she had gone
to live in Madeira Crescent, was so important an occasion for the
Princess Casamassima that I must give as complete an account of it as
the limits of my space will allow. Early in the afternoon a loud peal
from her door-knocker came to her ear; it had a sound of resolution,
almost of defiance, which made her look up from her book and listen.
She was sitting by the fire, alone, with a volume of a heavy work on
Labour and Capital in her hand. It was not yet four o’clock, but she
had had candles for an hour; a dense brown fog made the daylight
impure, without suggesting an answer to the question whether the scheme
of nature had been to veil or to deepen the sabbatical dreariness. She
was not tired of Madeira Crescent—such an idea she would indignantly
have repudiated; but the prospect of a visitor was rather pleasant to
her—the possibility even of his being an ambassador, or a cabinet
minister, or another of the eminent personages with whom she had
associated before embracing the ascetic life. They had not knocked at
her present door hitherto in any great numbers, for more reasons than
one; they were out of town, and she had taken pains to diffuse the
belief that she had left England. If the impression prevailed, it was
exactly the impression she had desired; she forgot this fact whenever
she felt a certain surprise, even, it may be, a certain irritation, in
perceiving that people were not taking the way to Madeira Crescent. She
was making the discovery, in which she had had many predecessors, that
in London it is only too possible to hide one’s self. It was very much
in that fashion that Godfrey Sholto was in the habit of announcing
himself, when he reappeared after the intervals she explicitly imposed
upon him; there was a kind of artlessness, for so world-worn a
personage, in the point he made of showing that he knocked with
confidence, that he had as good a right as any other. This afternoon
she was ready to accept a visit from him: she was perfectly detached
from the shallow, frivolous world in which he lived, but there was
still a freshness in her renunciation which coveted reminders and
enjoyed comparisons; he would prove to her how right she had been to do
exactly what she was doing. It did not occur to her that Hyacinth
Robinson might be at her door, for it was understood between them that,
except by special appointment, he was to come to see her only in the
evening. She heard in the hail, when the servant arrived, a voice that
she failed to recognise; but in a moment the door of the room was
thrown open and the name of Mr Muniment was pronounced. It may be said
at once that she felt great pleasure in hearing it, for she had both
wished to see more of Hyacinth’s extraordinary friend and had given him
up, so little likely had it begun to appear that he would put himself
out for her. She had been glad he wouldn’t come, as she had told
Hyacinth three months before; but now that he had come she was still
more glad.

Presently he was sitting opposite to her, on the other side of the
fire, with his big foot crossed over his big knee, his large, gloved
hands fumbling with each other, drawing and smoothing the gloves (of
very red, new-looking dog-skin) in places, as if they hurt him. So far
as the size of his extremities, and even his attitude and movement,
went, he might have belonged to her former circle. With the details of
his dress remaining vague in the lamp-light, which threw into relief
mainly his powerful, important head, he might have been one of the most
considerable men she had ever known. The first thing she said to him
was that she wondered extremely what had brought him at last to come to
see her: the idea, when she proposed it, evidently had so little
attraction for him. She had only seen him once since then—the day she
met him coming into Audley Court as she was leaving it, after a visit
to his sister—and, as he probably remembered, she had not on that
occasion repeated her invitation.

“It wouldn’t have done any good, at the time, if you had,” Muniment
rejoined, with his natural laugh.

“Oh, I felt that; my silence wasn’t accidental!” the Princess
exclaimed, joining in his merriment.

“I have only come now—since you have asked me the reason—because my
sister hammered at me, week after week, dinning it into me that I ought
to. Oh, I’ve been under the lash! If she had left me alone, I wouldn’t
have come.”

The Princess blushed on hearing these words, but not with shame or with
pain; rather with the happy excitement of being spoken to in a manner
so fresh and original. She had never before had a visitor who practised
so racy a frankness, or who, indeed, had so curious a story to tell.
She had never before so completely failed, and her failure greatly
interested her, especially as it seemed now to be turning a little to
success. She had succeeded promptly with every one, and the sign of it
was that every one had rendered her a monotony of homage. Even poor
little Hyacinth had tried, in the beginning, to say sweet things to
her. This very different type of man appeared to have his thoughts
fixed on anything but sweetness; she felt the liveliest hope that he
would move further and further away from it. “I remember what you asked
me—what good it would do you. I couldn’t tell you then; and though I
now have had a long time to turn it over, I haven’t thought of it yet.”

“Oh, but I hope it will do me some,” said Paul. “A fellow wants a
reward, when he has made a great effort.”

“It does me some,” the Princess remarked, gaily.

“Naturally, the awkward things I say amuse you. But I don’t say them
for that, but just to give you an idea.”

“You give me a great many ideas. Besides, I know you already a good
deal.”

“From little Robinson, I suppose,” said Muniment.

The Princess hesitated. “More particularly from Lady Aurora.”

“Oh, she doesn’t know much about me!” the young man exclaimed.

“It’s a pity you say that, because she likes you.”

“Yes, she likes me,” Muniment replied, serenely.

Again the Princess hesitated. “And I hope you like her.”

“Ay, she’s a dear old girl!”

The Princess reflected that her visitor was not a gentleman, like
Hyacinth; but this made no difference in her present attitude. The
expectation that he would be a gentleman had had nothing to do with her
interest in him; that, in fact, had rested largely on the supposition
that he had a rich plebeian strain. “I don’t know that there is any one
in the world I envy so much,” she remarked; an observation which her
visitor received in silence. “Better than any one I have ever met she
has solved the problem—which, if we are wise, we all try to solve,
don’t we?—of getting out of herself. She has got out of herself more
perfectly than any one I have ever known. She has merged herself in the
passion of doing something for others. That’s why I envy her,” said the
Princess, with an explanatory smile, as if perhaps he didn’t understand
her.

“It’s an amusement, like any other,” said Paul Muniment.

“Ah, not like any other! It carries light into dark places; it makes a
great many wretched people considerably less wretched.”

“How many, eh?” asked the young man, not exactly as if he wished to
dispute, but as if it were always in him to enjoy an argument.

The Princess wondered why he should desire to argue at Lady Aurora’s
expense. “Well, one who is very near to you, to begin with.”

“Oh, she’s kind, most kind; it’s altogether wonderful. But Rosy makes
_her_ considerably less wretched,” Paul Muniment rejoined.

“Very likely, of course; and so she does me.”

“May I inquire what you are wretched about?” Muniment went on.

“About nothing at all. That’s the worst of it. But I am much happier
now than I have ever been.”

“Is that also about nothing?”

“No, about a sort of change that has taken place in my life. I have
been able to do some little things.”

“For the poor, I suppose you mean. Do you refer to the presents you
have made to Rosy?” the young man inquired.

“The presents?” The Princess appeared not to remember. “Oh, those are
trifles. It isn’t anything one has been able to give; it’s some talks
one has had, some convictions one has arrived at.”

“Convictions are a source of very innocent pleasure,” said the young
man, smiling at his interlocutress with his bold, pleasant eyes, which
seemed to project their glance further than any she had seen.

“Having them is nothing. It’s the acting on them,” the Princess
replied.

“Yes; that doubtless, too, is good.” He continued to look at her
peacefully, as if he liked to consider that this might be what she had
asked him to come for. He said nothing more, and she went on—

“It’s far better, of course, when one is a man.”

“I don’t know. Women do pretty well what they like. My sister and you
have managed, between you, to bring me to this.”

“It’s more your sister, I suspect, than I. But why, after all, should
you have disliked so much to come?”

“Well, since you ask me,” said Paul Muniment, “I will tell you frankly,
though I don’t mean it uncivilly, that I don’t know what to make of
you.”

“Most people don’t,” returned the Princess. “But they usually take the
risk.”

“Ah, well, I’m the most prudent of men.”

“I was sure of it; that is one of the reasons why I wanted to know you.
I know what some of your ideas are—Hyacinth Robinson has told me; and
the source of my interest in them is partly the fact that you consider
very carefully what you attempt.”

“That I do—I do,” said Muniment, simply.

The tone in which he said this would have been almost ignoble, as
regards a kind of northern canniness which it expressed, had it not
been corrected by the character of his face, his youth and strength,
and his military eye. The Princess recognised both the shrewdness and
the latent audacity as she rejoined, “To do anything with you would be
very safe. It would be sure to succeed.”

“That’s what poor Hyacinth thinks,” said Paul Muniment.

The Princess wondered a little that he could allude in that light tone
to the faith their young friend had placed in him, considering the
consequences such a trustfulness might yet have; but this curious
mixture of qualities could only make her visitor, as a tribune of the
people, more interesting to her. She abstained for the moment from
touching on the subject of Hyacinth’s peculiar position, and only said,
“Hasn’t he told you about me? Hasn’t he explained me a little?”

“Oh, his explanations are grand!” Muniment exclaimed, hilariously.
“He’s fine sport when he talks about you.”

“Don’t betray him,” said the Princess, gently.

“There’s nothing to betray. You would be the first to admire it if you
were there. Besides, I don’t betray,” the young man added.

“I love him very much,” said the Princess; and it would have been
impossible for the most impudent cynic to smile at the manner in which
she made the declaration.

Paul accepted it respectfully. “He’s a sweet little lad, and, putting
her ladyship aside, quite the light of our home.”

There was a short pause after this exchange of amenities, which the
Princess terminated by inquiring, “Wouldn’t some one else do his work
quite as well?”

“His work? Why, I’m told he’s a master-hand.”

“Oh, I don’t mean his bookbinding.” Then the Princess added, “I don’t
know whether you know it, but I am in correspondence with Hoffendahl. I
am acquainted with many of our most important men.”

“Yes, I know it. Hyacinth has told me. Do you mention it as a
guarantee, so that I may know you are genuine?”

“Not exactly; that would be weak, wouldn’t it?” the Princess asked. “My
genuineness must be in myself—a matter for you to appreciate as you
know me better; not in my references and vouchers.”

“I shall never know you better. What business is it of mine?”

“I want to help you,” said the Princess, and as she made this earnest
appeal her face became transfigured; it wore an expression of the most
passionate yet the purest longing. “I want to do something for the
cause you represent; for the millions that are rotting under our
feet—the millions whose whole life is passed on the brink of
starvation, so that the smallest accident pushes them over. Try me,
test me; ask me to put my hand to something, to prove that I am as
deeply in earnest as those who have already given proof. I know what I
am talking about—what one must meet and face and count with, the nature
and the immensity of your organisation. I am not playing. No, I am not
playing.”

Paul Muniment watched her with his steady smile until this sudden
outbreak had spent itself. “I was afraid you would be like this—that
you would turn on the fountains and let off the fireworks.”

“Permit me to believe you thought nothing about it. There is no reason
my fireworks should disturb you.”

“I have always had a fear of women.”

“I see—that’s a part of your prudence,” said the Princess,
reflectively. “But you are the sort of man who ought to know how to use
them.”

Muniment said nothing, immediately, in answer to this; the way he
appeared to consider the Princess suggested that he was not following
closely what she said, so much as losing himself in certain matters
which were beside that question—her beauty, for instance, her grace,
her fragrance, the spectacle of a manner and quality so new to him.
After a little, however, he remarked, irrelevantly, “I’m afraid I’m
very rude.”

“Of course you are, but it doesn’t signify. What I mainly object to is
that you don’t answer my questions. Would not some one else do Hyacinth
Robinson’s work quite as well? Is it necessary to take a nature so
delicate, so intellectual? Oughtn’t we to keep him for something
finer?”

“Finer than what?”

“Than what Hoffendahl will call upon him to do.”

“And pray what is that?” the young man demanded. “You know nothing
about it; no more do I,” he added in a moment. “It will require
whatever it will. Besides, if some one else might have done it, no one
else volunteered. It happened that Robinson did.”

“Yes, and you nipped him up!” the Princess exclaimed.

At this expression Muniment burst out laughing. “I have no doubt you
can easily keep him, if you want him.”

“I should like to do it in his place—that’s what I should like,” said
the Princess.

“As I say, you don’t even know what it is.”

“It may be nothing,” she went on, with her grave eyes fixed on her
visitor. “I dare say you think that what I wanted to see you for was to
beg you to let him off. But it wasn’t. Of course it’s his own affair,
and you can do nothing. But oughtn’t it to make some difference, when
his opinions have changed?”

“His opinions? He never had any opinions,” Muniment replied. “He is not
like you and me.”

“Well, then, his feelings, his attachments. He hasn’t the passion for
democracy he had when I first knew him. He’s much more tepid.”

“Ah, well, he’s quite right.”

The Princess stared. “Do you mean that _you_ are giving up—?”

“A fine stiff conservative is a thing I perfectly understand,” said
Paul Muniment. “If I were on the top, I’d stick there.”

“I see, you are not narrow,” the Princess murmured, appreciatively.

“I beg your pardon, I am. I don’t call that wide. One must be narrow to
penetrate.”

“Whatever you are, you’ll succeed,” said the Princess. “Hyacinth won’t,
but you will.”

“It depends upon what you call success!” the young man exclaimed. And
in a moment, before she replied, he added, looking about the room,
“You’ve got a very lovely dwelling.”

“Lovely? My dear sir, it’s hideous. That’s what I like it for,” the
Princess added.

“Well, I like it; but perhaps I don’t know the reason. I thought you
had given up everything—pitched your goods out of the window, for a
grand scramble.”

“Well, so I have. You should have seen me before.”

“I should have liked that,” said Muniment, smiling. “I like to see
solid wealth.”

“Ah, you’re as bad as Hyacinth. I am the only consistent one!” the
Princess sighed.

“You have a great deal left, for a person who has given everything
away.”

“These are not mine—these abominations—or I would give them, too!”
Paul’s hostess rejoined, artlessly.

Muniment got up from his chair, still looking about the room. “I would
give my nose for such a place as this. At any rate, you are not yet
reduced to poverty.”

“I have a little left—to help you.”

“I dare say you’ve a great deal,” said Paul, with his north-country
accent.

“I could get money—I could get money,” the Princess continued, gravely.
She had also risen, and was standing before him.

These two remarkable persons faced each other, their eyes met again,
and they exchanged a long, deep glance of mutual scrutiny. Each seemed
to drop a plummet into the other’s mind. Then a strange and, to the
Princess, unexpected expression passed over the countenance of the
young man; his lips compressed themselves, as if he were making a
strong effort, his colour rose, and in a moment he stood there blushing
like a boy. He dropped his eyes and stared at the carpet, while he
observed, “I don’t trust women—I don’t trust women!”

“I am sorry, but, after all, I can understand it,” said the Princess;
“therefore I won’t insist on the question of your allowing me to work
with you. But this appeal I will make to you: help me a little
yourself—help me!”

“How do you mean, help you?” Muniment demanded, raising his eyes, which
had a new, conscious look.

“Advise me; you will know how. I am in trouble—I have gone very far.”

“I have no doubt of that!” said Paul, laughing.

“I mean with some of those people abroad. I’m not frightened, but I’m
perplexed; I want to know what to do.”

“No, you are not frightened,” Muniment rejoined, after a moment.

“I am, however, in a sad entanglement. I think you can straighten it
out. I will give you the facts, but not now, for we shall be
interrupted; I hear my old lady on the stairs. For this, you must come
to see me again.”

At this point the door opened, and Madame Grandoni appeared,
cautiously, creepingly, as if she didn’t know what might be going on in
the parlour. “Yes, I will come again,” said Paul Muniment, in a low but
distinct tone; and he walked away, passing Madame Grandoni on the
threshold, without having exchanged the hand-shake of farewell with his
hostess. In the hall he paused an instant, feeling she was behind him;
and he learned that she had not come to exact from him this omitted
observance, but to say once more, dropping her voice, so that her
companion, through the open door, might not hear—

“I _could_ get money—I could!”

Muniment passed his hand through his hair, and, as if he had not heard
her, remarked, “I have not given you, after all, half Rosy’s messages.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter!” the Princess answered, turning back into the
parlour.

Madame Grandoni was in the middle of the room, wrapped in an old shawl,
looking vaguely around her, and the two ladies heard the house-door
close. “And pray, who may that be? Isn’t it a new face?” the elder one
inquired.

“He’s the brother of the little person I took you to see over the
river—the chattering cripple with the wonderful manners.”

“Ah, she had a brother! That, then, was why you went?”

It was striking, the good-humour with which the Princess received this
rather coarse thrust, which could have been drawn from Madame Grandoni
only by the petulance and weariness of increasing age, and the
antipathy she now felt to Madeira Crescent and everything it produced.
Christina bent a calm, charitable smile upon her ancient companion, and
replied—

“There could have been no question of our seeing him. He was, of
course, at his work.”

“Ah, how do I know, my dear? And is he a successor?”

“A successor?”

“To the little bookbinder.”

“My darling,” said the Princess, “you will see how absurd that question
is when I tell you he’s his greatest friend!”




XXXVII


Half an hour after Paul Muniment’s departure the Princess heard another
rat-tat-tat at her door; but this was a briefer, discreeter peal, and
was accompanied by a faint tintinnabulation. The person who had
produced it was presently ushered in, without, however, causing Madame
Grandoni to look round, or rather to look up, from an arm-chair as low
as a sitz-bath, and of very much the shape of such a receptacle, in
which, near the fire, she had been immersed. She left this care to the
Princess, who rose on hearing the name of the visitor pronounced,
inadequately, by her maid. ‘Mr Fetch’ Assunta called it; but the
Princess recognised without difficulty the little fat, ‘reduced’
fiddler of whom Hyacinth had talked to her, who, as Pinnie’s most
intimate friend, had been so mixed up with his existence, and whom she
herself had always had a curiosity to see. Hyacinth had not told her he
was coming, and the unexpectedness of the apparition added to its
interest. Much as she liked seeing queer types and exploring
out-of-the-way social corners, she never engaged in a fresh encounter,
nor formed a new relation of this kind, without a fit of nervousness, a
fear that she might be awkward and fail to hit the right tone. She
perceived in a moment, however, that Mr Vetch would take her as she was
and require no special adjustments; he was a gentleman and a man of
experience, and she would only have to leave the tone to him. He stood
there with his large, polished hat in his two hands, a hat of the
fashion of ten years before, with a rusty sheen and an undulating
brim—stood there without a salutation or a speech, but with a little
fixed, acute, tentative smile, which seemed half to inquire and half to
explain. What he explained was that he was clever enough to be trusted,
and that if he had come to see her that way, abruptly, without an
invitation, he had a reason which she would be sure to think good
enough when she should hear it. There was even a certain jauntiness in
this confidence—an insinuation that he knew how to present himself to a
lady; and though it quickly appeared that he really did, that was the
only thing about him that was inferior—it suggested a long experience
of actresses at rehearsal, with whom he had formed habits of advice and
compliment.

“I know who you are—I know who you are,” said the Princess, though she
could easily see that he knew she did.

“I wonder whether you also know why I have come to see you,” Mr Vetch
replied, presenting the top of his hat to her as if it were a
looking-glass.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. I am very glad; you might even have come
before.” Then the Princess added, with her characteristic honesty,
“Don’t you know of the great interest I have taken in your nephew?”

“In my nephew? Yes, my young friend Robinson. It is in regard to him
that I have ventured to intrude upon you.”

The Princess had been on the point of pushing a chair toward him, but
she stopped in the act, staring, with a smile. “Ah, I hope you haven’t
come to ask me to give him up!”

“On the contrary—on the contrary!” the old man rejoined, lifting his
hand expressively, and with his head on one side, as if he were holding
his violin.

“How do you mean, on the contrary?” the Princess demanded, after he had
seated himself and she had sunk into her former place. As if that might
sound contradictious, she went on: “Surely he hasn’t any fear that I
shall cease to be a good friend to him?”

“I don’t know what he fears; I don’t know what he hopes,” said Mr
Vetch, looking at her now with a face in which she could see there was
something more tonic than old-fashioned politeness. “It will be
difficult to tell you, but at least I must try. Properly speaking, I
suppose, it’s no business of mine, as I am not a blood-relation to the
boy; but I have known him since he was an urchin, and I can’t help
saying that I thank you for your great kindness to him.”

“All the same, I don’t think you like it,” the Princess remarked. “To
me it oughtn’t to be difficult to say anything.”

“He has told me very little about you; he doesn’t know I have taken
this step,” the fiddler said, turning his eyes about the room, and
letting them rest on Madame Grandoni.

“Why do you call it a ‘step’?” the Princess asked. “That’s what people
say when they have to do something disagreeable.”

“I call very seldom on ladies. It’s long time since I have been in the
house of a person like the Princess Casamassima. I remember the last
time,” said the old man. “It was to get some money from a lady at whose
party I had been playing—for a dance.”

“You must bring your fiddle, sometime, and play to us. Of course I
don’t mean for money,” the Princess rejoined.

“I will do it with pleasure, or anything else that will gratify you.
But my ability is very small. I only know vulgar music—things that are
played at theatres.”

“I don’t believe that; there must be things you play for yourself, in
your room, alone.”

For a moment the old man made no reply; then he said, “Now that I see
you, that I hear you, it helps me to understand.”

“I don’t think you do see me!” cried the Princess, kindly, laughing;
while the fiddler went on to ask whether there were any danger of
Hyacinth’s coming in while he was there. The Princess replied that he
only came, unless by prearrangement, in the evening, and Mr Vetch made
a request that she would not let their young friend know that he
himself had been with her. “It doesn’t matter; he will guess it, he
will know it by instinct, as soon as he comes in. He is terribly
subtle,” said the Princess; and she added that she had never been able
to hide anything from him. Perhaps it served her right, for attempting
to make a mystery of things that were not worth it.

“How well you know him!” Mr Vetch murmured, with his eyes wandering
again to Madame Grandoni, who paid no attention to him as she sat
staring at the fire. He delayed, visibly, to say what he had come for,
and his hesitation could only be connected with the presence of the old
lady. He said to himself that the Princess might have divined this from
his manner; he had an idea that he could trust himself to convey such
an intimation with clearness and yet with delicacy. But the most she
appeared to apprehend was that he desired to be presented to her
companion.

“You must know the most delightful of women. She also takes a
particular interest in Mr Robinson: of a different kind from mine—much
more sentimental!” And then she explained to the old lady, who seemed
absorbed in other ideas, that Mr Vetch was a distinguished musician, a
person whom she, who had known so many in her day, and was so fond of
that kind of thing, would like to talk with. The Princess spoke of
‘that kind of thing’ quite as if she herself had given it up, though
Madame Grandoni heard her by the hour together improvising on the piano
revolutionary battle-songs and pæans.

“I think you are laughing at me,” Mr Vetch said to the Princess, while
Madame Grandoni twisted herself slowly round in her chair and
considered him. She looked at him leisurely, up and down, and then she
observed, with a sigh—

“Strange people—strange people!”

“It is indeed a strange world, madam,” the fiddler replied; and he then
inquired of the Princess whether he might have a little conversation
with her in private.

She looked about her, embarrassed and smiling. “My dear sir, I have
only this one room to receive in. We live in a very small way.”

“Yes, your excellency _is_ laughing at me. Your ideas are very large,
too. However, I would gladly come at any other time that might suit
you.”

“You impute to me higher spirits than I possess. Why should I be so
gay?” the Princess asked. “I should be delighted to see you again. I am
extremely curious as to what you may have to say to me. I would even
meet you anywhere—in Kensington Gardens or the British Museum.”

The fiddler looked at her a moment before replying; then, with his
white old face flushing a little, he exclaimed, “Poor dear little
Hyacinth!”

Madame Grandoni made an effort to rise from her chair, but she had sunk
so low that at first it was not successful. Mr Vetch gave her his hand,
to help her, and she slowly erected herself, keeping hold of him for a
moment after she stood there. “What did she tell me? That you are a
great musician? Isn’t that enough for any man? You ought to be content,
my dear gentleman. It has sufficed for people whom I don’t believe you
surpass.”

“I don’t surpass any one,” said poor Mr Vetch. “I don’t know what you
take me for.”

“You are not a conspirator, then? You are not an assassin? It surprises
me, but so much the better. In this house one can never know. It is not
a good house, and if you are a respectable person it is a pity you
should come here. Yes, she is very gay, and I am very sad. I don’t know
how it will end. After me, I hope. The world is not good, certainly;
but God alone can make it better.” And as the fiddler expressed the
hope that he was not the cause of her leaving the room, she went on,
“_Doch, doch_, you are the cause; but why not you as well as another? I
am always leaving it for some one or for some thing, and I would sooner
do so for an honest man, if you _are_ one—but, as I say, who can
tell?—than for a destroyer. I wander about. I have no rest. I have,
however, a very nice room, the best in the house. Me, at least, she
does not treat ill. It looks to-day like the end of all things. If you
would turn your climate the other side up, the rest would do well
enough. Good-night to you, whoever you are.”

The old lady shuffled away, in spite of Mr Vetch’s renewed apologies,
and the Princess stood before the fire, watching her companions, while
he opened the door. “She goes away, she comes back; it doesn’t matter.
She thinks it’s a bad house, but she knows it would be worse without
her. I remember now,” the Princess added. “Mr Robinson told me that you
had been a great democrat in old days, but that now you had ceased to
care for the people.”

“The people—the people? That is a vague term. Whom do you mean?”

The Princess hesitated. “Those you used to care for, to plead for;
those who are underneath every one, every thing, and have the whole
social mass crushing them.”

“I see you think I’m a renegade. The way certain classes arrogate to
themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some
human beings the people, and the people only, and others not? I am of
the people myself, I have worked all my days like a knife-grinder, and
I have really never changed.”

“You must not let me make you angry,” said the Princess, laughing and
sitting down again. “I am sometimes very provoking, but you must stop
me off. You wouldn’t think it, perhaps, but no one takes a snub better
than I.”

Mr Vetch dropped his eyes a minute; he appeared to wish to show that he
regarded such a speech as that as one of the Princess’s characteristic
humours, and knew that he should be wanting in respect to her if he
took it seriously or made a personal application of it. “What I want is
this,” he began, after a moment: “that you will—that you will—” But he
stopped before he had got further. She was watching him, listening to
him, and she waited while he paused. It was a long pause, and she said
nothing. “Princess,” the old man broke out at last, “I would give my
own life many times for that boy’s!”

“I always told him you must have been fond of him!” she cried, with
bright exultation.

“Fond of him? Pray, who can doubt it? I made him, I invented him!”

“He knows it, moreover,” said the Princess, smiling. “It is an
exquisite organisation.” And as the old man gazed at her, not knowing,
apparently, what to make of her tone, she continued: “It is a very
interesting opportunity for me to learn certain things. Speak to me of
his early years. How was he as a child? When I like people I want to
know everything about them.”

“I shouldn’t have supposed there was much left for you to learn about
our young friend. You have taken possession of his life,” the fiddler
added, gravely.

“Yes, but as I understand you, you don’t complain of it? Sometimes one
does so much more than one has intended. One must use one’s influence
for good,” said the Princess, with the noble, gentle air of
accessibility to reason that sometimes lighted up her face. And then
she went on, irrelevantly: “I know the terrible story of his mother. He
told it me himself, when he was staying with me; and in the course of
my life I think I have never been more affected.”

“That was my fault, that he ever learned it. I suppose he also told you
that.”

“Yes, but I think he understood your idea. If you had the question to
determine again, would you judge differently?”

“I thought it would do him good,” said the old man, simply and rather
wearily.

“Well, I dare say it has,” the Princess rejoined, with the manner of
wishing to encourage him.

“I don’t know what was in my head. I wanted him to quarrel with
society. Now I want him to be reconciled to it,” Mr Vetch remarked,
earnestly. He appeared to wish the Princess to understand that he made
a great point of this.

“Ah, but he is!” she immediately returned. “We often talk about that;
he is not like me, who see all kinds of abominations. He’s a tremendous
aristocrat. What more would you have?”

“Those are not the opinions that he expresses to me,” said Mr Vetch,
shaking his head sadly. “I am greatly distressed, and I don’t
understand. I have not come here with the presumptuous wish to
cross-examine you, but I should like very much to know if I _am_ wrong
in believing that he has gone about with you in the bad quarters—in St
Giles’s and Whitechapel.”

“We have certainly inquired and explored together,” the Princess
admitted, “and in the depths of this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful
city we have seen sights of unspeakable misery and horror. But we have
been not only in the slums; we have been to a music-hall and a
penny-reading.”

The fiddler received this information at first in silence, so that his
hostess went on to mention some of the phases of life they had
observed; describing with great vividness, but at the same time with a
kind of argumentative moderation, several scenes which did little
honour to ‘our boasted civilisation’. “What wonder is it, then, that he
should tell me that things cannot go on any longer as they are?” he
asked, when she had finished. “He said only the other day that he
should regard himself as one of the most contemptible of human beings
if he should do nothing to alter them, to better them.”

“What wonder, indeed? But if he said that, he was in one of his bad
days. He changes constantly, and his impressions change. The misery of
the people is by no means always weighing on his heart. You tell me
what he has told you; well, he has told me that the people may perish
over and over, rather than the conquests of civilisation shall be
sacrificed to them. He declares, at such moments, that they will be
sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the ignorant masses get the upper
hand.”

“He needn’t be afraid! That will never happen.”

“I don’t know. We can at least try!”

“Try what you like, madam, but, for God’s sake, get the boy out of his
mess!”

The Princess had suddenly grown excited, in speaking of the cause she
believed in, and she gave, for the moment, no heed to this appeal,
which broke from Mr Vetch’s lips with a sudden passion of anxiety. Her
beautiful head raised itself higher, and the deep expression that was
always in her eyes became an extraordinary radiance. “Do you know what
I say to Mr Robinson when he makes such remarks as that to me? I ask
him what he means by civilisation. Let civilisation come a little,
first, and then we will talk about it. For the present, face to face
with those horrors, I scorn it, I deny it!” And the Princess laughed
ineffable things, like some splendid syren of the Revolution.

“The world is very sad and very hideous, and I am happy to say that I
soon shall have done with it. But before I go I want to save Hyacinth.
If he’s a little aristocrat, as you say, there is so much the less
fitness in his being ground in your mill. If he doesn’t even believe in
what he pretends to do, that’s a pretty situation! What is he in for,
madam? What devilish folly has he undertaken?”

“He is a strange mixture of contradictory impulses,” said the Princess,
musingly. Then, as if calling herself back to the old man’s question,
she continued: “How can I enter into his affairs with you? How can I
tell you his secrets? In the first place, I don’t know them, and if I
did—fancy me!”

The fiddler gave a long, low sigh, almost a moan, of discouragement and
perplexity. He had told the Princess that now he saw her he understood
how Hyacinth should have become her slave, but he would not have been
able to tell her that he understood her own motives and mysteries, that
he embraced the immense anomaly of her behaviour. It came over him that
she was incongruous and perverse, a more complicated form of the
feminine character than any he had hitherto dealt with, and he felt
helpless and baffled, foredoomed to failure. He had come prepared to
flatter her without scruple, thinking that would be the clever, the
efficacious, method of dealing with her; but he now had a sense that
this primitive device had, though it was strange, no application to
such a nature, while his embarrassment was increased rather than
diminished by the fact that the lady at least made the effort to be
accommodating. He had put down his hat on the floor beside him, and his
two hands were clasped on the knob of an umbrella which had long since
renounced pretensions to compactness; he collapsed a little, and his
chin rested on his folded hands. “Why do you take such a line? Why do
you believe such things?” he asked; and he was conscious that his tone
was weak and his inquiry beside the question.

“My dear sir, how do you know what I believe? However, I have my
reasons, which it would take too long to tell you, and which, after
all, would not particularly interest you. One must see life as one can;
it comes, no doubt, to each of us in different ways. You think me
affected, of course, and my behaviour a fearful _pose;_ but I am only
trying to be natural. Are you not yourself a little inconsequent?” the
Princess went on, with the bright mildness which had the effect of
making Mr Vetch feel that he should not extract any pledge of
assistance from her. “You don’t want our young friend to pry into the
wretchedness of London, because it excites his sense of justice. It is
a strange thing to wish, for a person of whom one is fond and whom one
esteems, that his sense of justice shall not be excited.”

“I don’t care a fig for his sense of justice—I don’t care a fig for the
wretchedness of London; and if I were young, and beautiful, and clever,
and brilliant, and of a noble position, like you, I should care still
less. In that case I should have very little to say to a poor
mechanic—a youngster who earns his living with a glue-pot and scraps of
old leather.”

“Don’t misrepresent him; don’t make him out what you know he’s not!”
the Princess retorted, with her baffling smile. “You know he’s one of
the most civilised people possible.”

The fiddler sat breathing unhappily. “I only want to keep him—to get
him free.” Then he added, “I don’t understand you very well. If you
like him because he’s one of the lower orders, how can you like him
because he’s a swell?”

The Princess turned her eyes on the fire a moment, as if this little
problem might be worth considering, and presently she answered, “Dear
Mr Vetch, I am very sure you don’t mean to be impertinent, but some
things you say have that effect. Nothing is more annoying than when
one’s sincerity is doubted. I am not bound to explain myself to you. I
ask of my friends to trust me, and of the others to leave me alone.
Moreover, anything not very nice you may have said to me, out of
awkwardness, is nothing to the insults I am perfectly prepared to see
showered upon me before long. I shall do things which will produce a
fine crop of them—oh, I shall do things, my dear sir! But I am
determined not to mind them. Come, therefore, pull yourself together.
We both take such an interest in young Robinson that I can’t see why in
the world we should quarrel about him.”

“My dear lady,” the old man pleaded, “I have indeed not the least
intention of failing in respect or courtesy, and you must excuse me if
I don’t look after my manners. How can I when I am so worried, so
haunted? God knows I don’t want to quarrel. As I tell you, I only want
to get Hyacinth free.”

“Free from what?” the Princess asked.

“From some abominable brotherhood or international league that he
belongs to, the thought of which keeps me awake at night. He’s just the
sort of youngster to be made a cat’s-paw.”

“Your fears seem very vague.”

“I hoped you would give me chapter and verse.”

“On what do your suspicions rest? What grounds have you?” the Princess
inquired.

“Well, a great many; none of them very definite, but all contributing
something—his appearance, his manner, the way he strikes me. Dear
madam, one feels those things, one guesses. Do you know that poor,
infatuated phrase-monger, Eustache Poupin, who works at the same place
as Hyacinth? He’s a very old friend of mine, and he’s an honest man,
considering everything. But he is always conspiring, and corresponding,
and pulling strings that make a tinkle which he takes for the
death-knell of society. He has nothing in life to complain of, and he
drives a roaring trade. But he wants folks to be equal, heaven help
him; and when he has made them so I suppose he’s going to start a
society for making the stars in the sky all of the same size. He isn’t
serious, though he thinks that he’s the only human being who never
trifles; and his machinations, which I believe are for the most part
very innocent, are a matter of habit and tradition with him, like his
theory that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America, was a
Frenchman, and his hot foot-bath on Saturday nights. He has _not_
confessed to me that Hyacinth has taken some secret engagement to do
something for the cause which may have nasty consequences, but the way
he turns off the idea makes me almost as uncomfortable as if he had. He
and his wife are very sweet on Hyacinth, but they can’t make up their
minds to interfere; perhaps for them, indeed, as for me, there is no
way in which interference can be effective. Only _I_ didn’t put him up
to those devil’s tricks—or, rather, I did originally! The finer the
work, I suppose, the higher the privilege of doing it; yet the Poupins
heave socialistic sighs over the boy, and their peace of mind evidently
isn’t all that it ought to be, if they have given him a noble
opportunity. I have appealed to them, in good round terms, and they
have assured me that every hair of his head is as precious to them as
if he were their own child. That doesn’t comfort me much, however, for
the simple reason that I believe the old woman (whose grandmother, in
Paris, in the Revolution, must certainly have carried bloody heads on a
pike) would be quite capable of chopping up her own child, if it would
do any harm to proprietors. Besides, they say, what influence have they
on Hyacinth any more? He is a deplorable little backslider; he worships
false gods. In short, they will give me no information, and I dare say
they themselves are tied up by some unholy vow. They may be afraid of a
vengeance if they tell tales. It’s all sad rubbish, but rubbish may be
a strong motive.”

The Princess listened attentively, following her visitor with patience.
“Don’t speak to me of the French; I have never liked them.”

“That’s awkward, if you’re a socialist. You are likely to meet them.”

“Why do you call me a socialist? I hate labels and tickets,” she
declared. Then she added, “What is it you suppose on Mr Robinson’s
part?—for you must suppose something.”

“Well, that he may have drawn some accursed lot, to do some idiotic
thing—something in which even he himself doesn’t believe.”

“I haven’t an idea of what sort of thing you mean. But, if he doesn’t
believe in it he can easily let it alone.”

“Do you think he’s a customer who will back out of an engagement?” the
fiddler asked.

The Princess hesitated a moment. “One can never judge of people, in
that way, until they are tested.” The next thing, she inquired,
“Haven’t you even taken the trouble to question him?”

“What would be the use? He would tell me nothing. It would be like a
man giving notice when he is going to fight a duel.”

The Princess sat for some moments in thought; she looked up at Mr Vetch
with a pitying, indulgent smile. “I am sure you are worrying about a
mere shadow; but that never prevents, does it? I still don’t see
exactly how I can help you.”

“Do you want him to commit some atrocity, some infamy?” the old man
murmured.

“My dear sir, I don’t want him to do anything in all the wide world. I
have not had the smallest connection with any arrangement of any kind,
that he may have entered into. Do me the honour to trust me,” the
Princess went on, with a certain dryness of tone. “I don’t know what I
have done to deprive myself of your confidence. Trust the young man a
little, too. He is a gentleman, and he will behave like a gentleman.”

The fiddler rose from his chair, smoothing his hat, silently, with the
cuff of his coat. He stood there, whimsical and piteous, as if the
sense that he had still something to urge mingled with that of his
having received his dismissal, and both of them were tinged with the
oddity of another idea. “That’s exactly what I am afraid of!” he
exclaimed. Then he added, continuing to look at her, “But he _must_ be
very fond of life.”

The Princess took no notice of the insinuation contained in these
words, and indeed it was of a sufficiently impalpable character. “Leave
him to me—leave him to me. I am sorry for your anxiety, but it was very
good of you to come to see me. That has been interesting, because you
have been one of our friend’s influences.”

“Unfortunately, yes! If it had not been for me, he would not have known
Poupin, and if he hadn’t known Poupin he wouldn’t have known his
chemical friend—what’s his name? Muniment.”

“And has that done him harm, do you think?” the Princess asked. She had
got up.

“Surely: that fellow has been the main source of his infection.”

“I lose patience with you,” said the Princess, turning away.

And indeed her visitor’s persistence was irritating. He went on,
lingering, with his head thrust forward and his short arms out at his
sides, terminating in his hat and umbrella, which he held grotesquely,
as if they were intended for emphasis or illustration: “I have supposed
for a long time that it was either Muniment or you that had got him
into his scrape. It was you I suspected most—much the most; but if it
isn’t you, it must be he.”

“You had better go to him, then!”

“Of course I will go to him. I scarcely know him—I have seen him but
once—but I will speak my mind.”

The Princess rang for her maid to usher the fiddler out, but at the
moment he laid his hand on the door of the room she checked him with a
quick gesture. “Now that I think of it, don’t go to Mr Muniment. It
will be better to leave him quiet. Leave him to me,” she added,
smiling.

“Why not, why not?” he pleaded. And as she could not tell him on the
instant why not, he asked, “Doesn’t he know?”

“No, he doesn’t know; he has nothing to do with it.” She suddenly found
herself desiring to protect Paul Muniment from the imputation that was
in Mr Vetch’s mind—the imputation of an ugly responsibility; and though
she was not a person who took the trouble to tell fibs, this
repudiation, on his behalf, issued from her lips before she could check
it. It was a result of the same desire, though it was also an
inconsequence, that she added, “Don’t do that—you’ll spoil everything!”
She went to him, suddenly eager, and herself opened the door for him.
“Leave him to me—leave him to me,” she continued, persuasively, while
the fiddler, gazing at her, dazzled and submissive, allowed himself to
be wafted away. A thought that excited her had come to her with a
bound, and after she had heard the house-door close behind Mr Vetch she
walked up and down the room half an hour, restlessly, under the
possession of it.




BOOK FIFTH




XXXVIII


Hyacinth found, this winter, considerable occupation for his odd hours,
his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in hand the
books which he had promised himself, at Medley, to inclose in covers
worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life (these
brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight), and of
the confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she
should receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in
thinking that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand
as specimens of rare work, while connoisseurs bent their heads over
them, smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention
stirred itself, and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he
sat up late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this
time his skill was of a very high order. Old Crookenden recognised it
by raising the rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among
the traditions of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to
the end wore the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches,
Hyacinth learned accidentally that several books that he had given him
to do had been carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the
villa, where they were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden
circle who came to tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself, indeed, was
included in this company on a great occasion—invited to a musical party
where he made the acquaintance of half a dozen Miss Crookendens, an
acquaintance which consisted in his standing in a corner, behind
several broad-backed old ladies, and watching the rotation, at the
piano and the harp, of three or four of his master’s thick-fingered
daughters. “You know it’s a tremendously musical house,” said one of
the old ladies to another (she called it ‘’ouse’); but the principal
impression made upon him by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was
that it was wonderfully different from the Princess’s playing.

He knew that he was the only young man from the shop who had been
invited, not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a
wig which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides
being accompanied by a little frightened, furtive wife, who closed her
eyes, as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs
Crookenden spoke to her. The Poupins were not there—which, however, was
not a surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that (even if they had been asked,
which they were not) they had objections of principle to putting their
feet _chez les bourgeois_. They were not asked because, in spite of the
place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business,
it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife (though
she was certainly no one’s else); and the evidence of this irregularity
was conceived to reside, vaguely, in the fact that she had never been
seen save in a camisole. There had doubtless been an apprehension that
if she had come to the villa she would not have come with the proper
number of hooks and eyes, though Hyacinth, on two or three occasions,
notably the night he took the pair to Mr Vetch’s theatre, had been
witness of the proportions to which she could reduce her figure when
she wished to give the impression of a lawful tie.

It was not clear to him how the distinction conferred upon him became
known in Soho, where, however, it excited no sharpness of
jealousy—Grugan, Roker, and Hotchkin being hardly more likely to envy a
person condemned to spend a genteel evening than they were to envy a
monkey performing antics on a barrel-organ: both forms of effort
indicated an urbanity painfully acquired. But Roker took his young
comrade’s breath half away with his elbow and remarked that he supposed
he saw the old man had spotted him for one of the darlings at home;
inquiring, furthermore, what would become in that case of the little
thing he took to France, the one to whom he had stood champagne and
lobster. This was the first allusion Hyacinth had heard made to the
idea that he might some day marry his master’s daughter, like the
virtuous apprentice of tradition; but the suggestion, somehow, was not
inspiring, even when he had thought of an incident or two which gave
colour to it. None of the Miss Crookendens spoke to him—they all had
large faces and short legs and a comical resemblance to that elderly
male with wide nostrils, their father, and, unlike the Miss Marchants,
at Medley, they knew who he was—but their mother, who had on her head
the plumage of a cockatoo, mingled with a structure of glass beads,
looked at him with an almost awful fixedness and asked him three
distinct times if he would have a glass of negus.

He had much difficulty in getting his books from the Princess; for when
he reminded her of the promise she had given him at Medley to make over
to him as many volumes as he should require, she answered that
everything was changed since then, that she was completely
_dépouillée_, that she had now no pretension to have a library, and
that, in fine, he had much better leave the matter alone. He was
welcome to any books that were in the house, but, as he could see for
himself, these were cheap editions, on which it would be foolish to
expend such work as his. He asked Madame Grandoni to help him—to tell
him, at least, whether there were not some good volumes among the
things the Princess had sent to be warehoused; it being known to him,
through casual admissions of her own, that she had allowed her maid to
save certain articles from the wreck and pack them away at the
Pantechnicon. This had all been Assunta’s work, the woman had begged so
hard for a few reservations—a loaf of bread for their old days; but the
Princess herself had washed her hands of the business. “_Chè, chè_,
there are boxes, I am sure, in that place, with a little of
everything,” said the old lady, in answer to his inquiry; and Hyacinth
conferred with Assunta, who took a sympathetic, talkative, Italian
interest in his undertaking and promised to fish out for him whatever
worthy volumes should remain. She came to his lodging, one evening, in
a cab, with an armful of pretty books, and when he asked her where they
had come from waved her forefinger in front of her nose, in a manner
both mysterious and expressive. He brought each volume to the Princess,
as it was finished; but her manner of receiving it was to shake her
head over it with a kind, sad smile. “It’s beautiful, I am sure, but I
have lost my sense for such things. Besides, you must always remember
what you once told me, that a woman, even the most cultivated, is
incapable of feeling the difference between a bad binding and a good. I
remember your once saying that fine ladies had brought shoemaker’s
bindings to your shop, and wished them imitated. Certainly those are
not the differences I most feel. My dear fellow, such things have
ceased to speak to me; they are doubtless charming, but they leave me
cold. What will you have? One can’t serve God and mammon.” Her thoughts
were fixed on far other matters than the delight of dainty covers, and
she evidently considered that in caring so much for them Hyacinth
resembled the mad emperor who fiddled in the flames of Rome. European
society, to her mind, was in flames, and no frivolous occupation could
give the measure of the emotion with which she watched them. It
produced occasionally demonstrations of hilarity, of joy and hope, but
these always took some form connected with the life of the people. It
was the people she had gone to see, when she accompanied Hyacinth to a
music-hall in the Edgware Road; and all her excursions and pastimes,
this winter, were prompted by her interest in the classes on whose
behalf the revolution was to be wrought.

To ask himself whether she were in earnest was now an old story to him,
and, indeed, the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased
to have any practical relevancy. It was just as she was, superficial or
profound, that she held him, and she was, at any rate, sufficiently
animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences, actual and
possible. Some of these might be serious, even if she herself were not,
and there were times when Hyacinth was much visited by the apprehension
of them. On the Sundays that she had gone with him into the darkest
places, the most fetid holes, in London, she had always taken money
with her, in considerable quantities, and always left it behind. She
said, very naturally, that one couldn’t go and stare at people, for an
impression, without paying them, and she gave alms right and left,
indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgment, as simply as the abbess
of some beggar-haunted convent, or a lady-bountiful of the
superstitious, unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted
to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes
thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity
should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles
of economical science; partly because she was not a woman to be
directed and regulated—she could take other people’s ideas, but she
could never take their way. Besides, what did it matter? To himself,
what did it matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or
into wrong ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The
Princess was an embodied passion—she was not a system; and her
behaviour, after all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to
relieving others. And then misery was sown so thick in her path that
wherever her money was dropped it fell into some trembling palm. He
wondered that she should still have so much cash to dispose of, until
she explained to him that she came by it through putting her personal
expenditure on a rigid footing. What she gave away was her savings, the
margin she had succeeded in creating; and now that she had tasted of
the satisfaction of making little hoards for such a purpose she
regarded her other years, with their idleness and waste, their merely
personal motives, as a long, stupid sleep of the conscience. To do
something for others was not only so much more human, but so much more
amusing!

She made strange acquaintances, under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened
to extraordinary stories, and formed theories about them, and about the
persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more
extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex,
attempted to establish social relations with them, and was the cause of
infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent,
who was always smoking at the window, and who reminded Hyacinth of Mr
Micawber. She received visits that were a scandal to the Crescent, and
Hyacinth neglected his affairs, whatever they were, to see what
tatterdemalion would next turn up at her door. This intercourse, it is
true, took a more fruitful form as her intimacy with Lady Aurora
deepened; her ladyship practised discriminations which she brought the
Princess to recognise, and before the winter was over Hyacinth’s
services in the slums were found unnecessary. He gave way with relief,
with delight, to Lady Aurora, for he had not in the least understood
his behaviour for the previous four months, nor taken himself seriously
as a _cicerone_. He had plunged into a sea of barbarism without having
any civilising energy to put forth. He was conscious that the people
were miserable—more conscious, it often seemed to him, than they
themselves were; so frequently was he struck with their brutal
insensibility, a grossness impervious to the taste of better things or
to any desire for them. He knew it so well that the repetition of
contact could add no vividness to the conviction; it rather smothered
and befogged his impression, peopled it with contradictions and
difficulties, a violence of reaction, a sense of the inevitable and
insurmountable. In these hours the poverty and ignorance of the
multitude seemed so vast and preponderant, and so much the law of life,
that those who had managed to escape from the black gulf were only the
happy few, people of resource as well as children of luck; they
inspired in some degree the interest and sympathy that one should feel
for survivors and victors, those who have come safely out of a
shipwreck or a battle. What was most in Hyacinth’s mind was the idea,
of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was a
syllable, that the flood of democracy was rising over the world; that
it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; that, whatever
it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom a
magnificent energy; and that it might be trusted to look after its own.
When democracy should have its way everywhere, it would be its fault
(whose else?) if want and suffering and crime should continue to be
ingredients of the human lot. With his mixed, divided nature, his
conflicting sympathies, his eternal habit of swinging from one view to
another, Hyacinth regarded this prospect, in different moods, with
different kinds of emotion. In spite of the example Eustache Poupin
gave him of the reconcilement of disparities, he was afraid the
democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings or for the finest sort of
conversation. The Princess gave up these things in proportion as she
advanced in the direction she had so audaciously chosen; and if the
Princess could give them up it would take very transcendent natures to
stick to them. At the same time there was joy, exultation, in the
thought of surrendering one’s self to the wave of revolt, of floating
in the tremendous tide, of feeling one’s self lifted and tossed,
carried higher on the sun-touched crests of billows than one could ever
be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own. That vision could deepen to a
kind of ecstasy; make it indifferent whether one’s ultimate fate, in
such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to be submerged in
bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on resisting cliffs. Hyacinth
felt that, whether his personal sympathy should rest finally with the
victors or the vanquished, the victorious force was colossal and would
require no testimony from the irresolute.

The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations,
and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach
importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either
cause, but they were important for himself, if only because they would
rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual
laceration of the rebound. There was no peace for him between the two
currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate,
plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, supercivilised sire.
They continued to toss him from one side to the other; they arrayed him
in intolerable defiances and revenges against himself. He had a high
ambition: he wanted neither more nor less than to get hold of the truth
and wear it in his heart. He believed, with the candour of youth, that
it is brilliant and clear-cut, like a royal diamond; but in whatever
direction he turned in the effort to find it, he seemed to know that
behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face. The
thought of his mother had filled him, originally, with the vague,
clumsy fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but
since the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things
in the world as it was constituted grew intensely dear to him, he had
tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human countenance
for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and
recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation.
To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea had a kind of
shame in it, as an act of treachery would have had; for he could almost
hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct of a
gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of fanatics
and cads. He had got over thinking that it would not have become his
father to talk of what was proper to gentlemen, and making the mental
reflection that from him, at least, the biggest cad in London could not
have deserved less consideration. He had worked himself round to
allowances, to interpretations, to such hypotheses as the evidence in
the _Times_, read in the British Museum on that never-to-be-forgotten
afternoon, did not exclude; though they had been frequent enough, and
too frequent, his hours of hot resentment against the man who had
attached to him the stigma he was to carry for ever, he threw himself,
in other conditions, and with a certain success, into the effort to
find condonations, excuses, for him. It was comparatively easy for him
to accept himself as the son of a terribly light Frenchwoman; there
seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his having for his other
parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness. He was too poor to
afford it. Sometimes, in his imagination, he sacrificed one to the
other, throwing over Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when
the theory failed that his father would have done great things for him
if he had lived, or the assumption broke down that he had been
Florentine Vivier’s only lover, he cursed and disowned them alike;
sometimes he arrived at conceptions which presented them side by side,
looking at him with eyes infinitely sad but quite unashamed—eyes which
seemed to tell him that they had been hideously unfortunate but had not
been base. Of course his worst moments now, as they had always been the
worst, were those in which his grounds for thinking that Lord Frederick
had really been his father perversely fell away from him. It must be
added that they always passed, for the mixture that he felt himself so
tormentingly, so insolubly, to be could be accounted for in no other
manner.

I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial
degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the
Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were a
constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in any
view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and
December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster
and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamp-light and
tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his
heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London
had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered
away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which was
most his own lay round him under her pall, like an immeasurable
breathing monster, he felt, with a vague excitement, as he had felt
before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest
expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened,
but it was filled, again, by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and
strange blurred reflections and emanations into a sky without stars. He
suspended, as it were, his small sensibility in the midst of it, and it
quivered there with joy and hope and ambition, as well as with the
effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with
deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and
the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations
with the mistress of it were more organised than they had been in his
first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she
cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity,
it was better, at least, for Hyacinth. It made her more near and him
more free; and if there had been a danger of her nature seeming really
to take the tone of the vulgar things about her, he would only have had
to remember her as she was at Medley to restore the perspective. In
truth, her beauty always appeared to have the setting that best became
it; her fairness made the element in which she lived and, among the
meanest accessories, constituted a kind of splendour. Nature had
multiplied the difficulties in the way of her successfully representing
herself as having properties in common with the horrible populace of
London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his night-walks to
Paddington, or homeward; the populace of London were scattered upon his
path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised
to high participations. There were nights when every one he met
appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by
figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular,
were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled,
obscene. ‘What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but
annihilation?’ he asked himself, as he went his way; and he wondered
what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet
overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a
ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul
Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such
abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the
shame; for the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause
as well as the effect.

It did not occur to Hyacinth that the Princess had withdrawn her
confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still
further the condition of the poor, she placed herself in the hands of
Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had
too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her
knowledge, and her capacity to answer any question it could come into
the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness
of his own desultory and superficial attitude toward the great
question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira
Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve, and toward
which his steps could direct themselves, with an unalloyed sense of
security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the
time, in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that
doubtless did not literally characterise the scene. His relations with
the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the
world of fable; they were as natural as anything else (everything in
life was queer enough); he had by this time assimilated them, as it
were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. ‘Of
each’—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now
involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe
was, simply, very fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome
he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat
together like very old friends, whom long pauses, during which they
simply looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, could not make
uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part
of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a
great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times
almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken
for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy,
humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamp-light, and
interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences, all turning to
the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her
present existence that she was picnicking; but all the accidents of the
business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her
steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the
way she played with the cat, or looked after the fire, or folded Madame
Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all, in the inveteracy with which
she spent her evenings at home, never dining out nor going to parties,
ignorant of the dissipations of the town. There was something in the
isolation of the room, when the kettle was on the hob and he had given
his wet umbrella to the maid and the Princess made him sit in a certain
place near the fire, the better to dry his shoes—there was something
that evoked the idea of the _vie de province_, as he had read about it
in French works. The French term came to him because it represented
more the especial note of the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the
facility, of talk. She expressed herself often in the French tongue
itself; she could borrow that convenience, for certain shades of
meaning, though she had told Hyacinth that she didn’t like the people
to whom it was native. Certainly, the quality of her conversation was
not provincial; it was singularly free and unrestricted; there was
nothing one mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say
herself. She had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional
danger-posts. Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see
it—with which, in any direction, intellectually, she could fling open
her windows. There was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of
liberty and humility—in seeing a creature capable, socially, of
immeasurable flights sit dove-like, with folded wings.

The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent (her
days, like his own, were filled with work, and she came in the
evening), and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived
at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous
interest to each other, and each rejoiced that the other was not a bit
different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would give
her up—all nice people did, very soon; but to Hyacinth the end of her
ladyship’s almost breathless enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was
bewildered, but she was fascinated; and she thought the Princess not
only the most distinguished, the most startling, the most edifying and
the most original person in the world, but the most amusing and the
most delightful to have tea with. As for the Princess, her sentiment
about Lady Aurora was the same that Hyacinth’s had been: she thought
her a saint, the first she had ever seen, and the purest specimen
conceivable; as good in her way as St Francis of Assisi, as tender and
naïve and transparent, of a spirit of charity as sublime. She held that
when one met a human flower as fresh as that in the dusty ways of the
world one should pluck it and wear it; and she was always inhaling Lady
Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her and holding her hand. The
spinster was frightened at her generosity, at the way her imagination
embroidered; she wanted to convince her (as the Princess did on her own
side) that such exaggerations destroyed their unfortunate subject. The
Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way she put them on and wore
them, in the economies she practised in order to have money for charity
and the ingenuity with which these slender resources were made to go
far, in the very manner in which she spoke, a kind of startled
simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these particulars; to
learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her bonnets at the
same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves, to ask, in the
same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has got a
ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a French
milliner, and that if there was anything in the world she loathed it
was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected by
the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as she
was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her
friend.

One evening, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual,
Hyacinth met Lady Aurora on the doorstep, leaving the house. She had a
different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and
even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad
news. She said, “Oh, how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague
laugh; but she went her way, without stopping to talk.

Hyacinth, on going in, mentioned to the Princess that he had
encountered her, and this lady replied, “It’s a pity you didn’t come a
little sooner. You would have assisted at a scene.”

“At a scene?” Hyacinth repeated, not understanding what violence could
have taken place between mutual adorers.

“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well
meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I am going too far.”

“I imagine you tell her things that you don’t tell me,” said Hyacinth.

“Oh, you, my dear fellow!” the Princess murmured. She spoke
absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady
Aurora, and as if the futility of telling things to Hyacinth had become
a commonplace.

There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace
with her ‘views’ being quite extinct. The tone they now, for the most
part, took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging
commiseration for insanity on the one hand and benightedness on the
other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went to
fantastic lengths in the way of reaction; and it was their habit and
their entertainment to hurl all manner of denunciation at each other’s
head. They had given up serious discussion altogether, and when they
were not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities
I have mentioned, they talked of matters as to which it could not occur
to them to differ. There were evenings when the Princess did nothing
but relate her life and all that she had seen of humanity, from her
earliest years, in a variety of countries. If the evil side of it
appeared mainly to have been presented to her view, this did not
diminish the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her
power, the greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light pictorial,
dramatic evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him
hang on her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign
courts (he delighted to know how sovereigns lived and conversed), there
was often, for hours together, nothing to indicate that she would have
liked to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of
one. Nevertheless, his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to
what she was really doing in the dark and in what queer consequences
she might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to
know by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He
did so but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the
validity of his warrant; but on one occasion, when she challenged him,
he replied, smiling and hesitating, “Well, I must say, it seems to me
that, from what I have told you, it ought to strike you that I have a
title.”

“You mean your famous engagement, your vow? Oh, that will never come to
anything.”

“Why won’t it come to anything?”

“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a
novel.”

“_Vous me rendez la vie!_” said Hyacinth, theatrically.

“You won’t have to do it,” the Princess went on.

“I think you mean I won’t do it. I have offered, at least; isn’t that a
title?”

“Well, then, you won’t do it,” said the Princess; and they looked at
each other a couple of minutes in silence.

“You will, I think, at the pace you are going,” the young man resumed.

“What do you know about the pace? You are not worthy to know!”

He did know, however; that is, he knew that she was in communication
with foreign socialists and had, or believed she had, irons on the
fire—that she held in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in
great movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch
her askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and
had only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now become
constant, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame
Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the
police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising
papers; of being dragged, herself, as an accomplice in direful plots,
into a court of justice—possibly into a prison. “If she would only
burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she
groaned to Hyacinth, in her helpless gloom. Hyacinth could only guess
what it might be that she kept; asking himself whether she were
seriously entangled, were being exploited by revolutionary Bohemians,
predatory adventurers who counted on her getting frightened at a given
moment and offering hush-money to be allowed to slip out (out of a
complicity which they, of course, would never have taken seriously); or
were merely coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap
sensations, discussing preliminaries which, for her, could have no
second stage. It would have been easy for Hyacinth to smile at the
Princess’s impression that she was ‘in it’, and to conclude that even
the cleverest women do not know when they are superficial, had not the
vibration remained which had been imparted to his nerves two years
before, of which he had spoken to his hostess at Medley—the sense,
vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forces secretly arrayed
against the present social order were pervasive and universal, in the
air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand of an
acquaintance that one might touch, or the eye of a stranger that might
rest a moment upon one’s own. They were above, below, within, without,
in every contact and combination of life; and it was no disproof of
them to say it was too odd that they should lurk in a particular
improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely their
strength, and they would doubtless exhibit much stranger incidents than
this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when she
flattered herself that she was.

“You do go too far,” Hyacinth said to her, the evening Lady Aurora had
passed him at the door.

To which she answered, “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How
else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman!
She’s an angel, but she isn’t in the least in it,” she added, in a
moment. She would give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when
he pressed her she inquired whether he had brought the copy of Browning
that he had promised the last time. If he had, he was to sit down and
read it to her. In such a case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to
insist; he was glad enough not to talk about the everlasting nightmare.
He took _Men and Women_ from his pocket, and read aloud for half an
hour; but on his making some remark on one of the poems, at the end of
this time he perceived the Princess had been paying no attention. When
he charged her with this levity she only replied, looking at him
musingly, “How _can_ one, after all, go too far? That’s a word of
cowards.”

“Do you mean her ladyship is a coward?”

“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions.
The way the English can go half-way to a thing, and then stick in the
middle!” the Princess exclaimed, impatiently.

“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me
that Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”

“We are all afraid of some things, and brave about others,” the
Princess went on.

“The thing Lady Aurora is most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,”
Hyacinth remarked.

His companion looked at him, but she did not take this up. “There is
one particular in which she would be very brave. She would marry her
friend—your friend—Mr Muniment.”

“Marry him, do you think?”

“What else, pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks
on.”

“And what would Belgrave Square, and Inglefield, and all the rest of
it, say?”

“What do they say already, and how much does it make her swerve? She
would do it in a moment; and it would be fine to see it, it would be
magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle, at
the idea of any great freedom of action.

“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the
middle,” Hyacinth rejoined.

“Ah, it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion.
When it’s a question of that, the English, to do them justice, don’t
stick!”

This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth, and
he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung friend
should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her name, and
the few habits of gentility that survived in her life, of making
herself a scandal, a fable, and a nine days’ wonder, for Muniment’s
sake; the young chemist’s assistant being, to his mind, as we know,
exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures and
renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what ideas Muniment
might have on the subject of a union with a young woman who should have
come out of her class for him. He would marry some day, evidently,
because he would do all the natural, human, productive things; but for
the present he had business on hand which would be likely to pass
first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give evidence of this—he didn’t
think people could really come out of their class; he held that the
stamp of one’s origin is ineffaceable and that the best thing one can
do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could easily imagine how it
would put him out to be mixed up, closely, with a person who, like Lady
Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She can’t marry him unless he
asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he reflected.

“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess, thoughtfully.




XXXIX


On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at four
o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his visit to
Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy’s room at about five, carefully
dressed and brushed, and ruddy with the freshness of an abundant
washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa, with a conscious smile,
knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after a
moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the
strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over
his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him, “My dear Mr
Muniment, you are going to see the Princess.”

“Well, have you anything to say against it?” Mr Muniment asked.

“Not a word; you know I like princesses. But you have.”

“Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,” the young man rejoined.
“There’s something to be said against everything, if you’ll give
yourself trouble enough.”

“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against you.”

“The man’s a sneak who is only and always praised,” Muniment remarked.
“If you didn’t hope to be finely abused, where would be the
encouragement?”

“Ay, but not with reason,” said Rosy, who always brightened to an
argument.

“The better the reason, the greater the incentive to expose one’s self.
However, you won’t hear it, if people do heave bricks at me.”

“I won’t hear it? Pray, don’t I hear everything? I should like any one
to keep anything from _me!_” And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her
recumbent head.

“There’s a good deal I keep from you, my dear,” said Paul, rather
dryly.

“You mean there are things I don’t want, I don’t take any trouble, to
know. Indeed and indeed there are: things that I wouldn’t know for the
world—that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you was to
go down on your knees. But if I did—if I did, I promise you that just
as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are
others,” the young woman went on—“there are others that you will just
be so good as to tell me. When the Princess asked you to come and see
her you refused, and you wanted to know what good it would do. I hoped
you would go, then; I should have liked you to go, because I wanted to
know how she lived, and whether she had things handsome, or only in the
poor way she said. But I didn’t push you, because I couldn’t have told
you what good it _would_ do you: that was only the good it would have
done me. At present I have heard everything from Lady Aurora, and I
know that it’s all quite decent and tidy (though not really like a
princess a bit), and that she knows how to turn everything about and
put it best end foremost, just as I do, like, though _I_ oughtn’t to
say it, no doubt. Well, you have been, and more than once, and I have
had nothing to do with it; of which I am very glad now, for reasons
that you perfectly know—you’re too honest a man to pretend you don’t.
Therefore, when I see you going again, I just inquire of you, as you
inquired of her, what good _does_ it do you?”

“I like it—I like it, my dear,” said Paul, with his fresh,
unembarrassed smile.

“I dare say you do. So should I, in your place. But it’s the first time
I have heard you express the idea that we ought to do everything we
like.”

“Why not, when it doesn’t hurt any one else?”

“Oh, Mr Muniment, Mr Muniment!” Rosy exclaimed, with exaggerated
solemnity, holding up a straight, attenuated forefinger at him. Then
she added, “No, she doesn’t do you good, that beautiful, brilliant
woman.”

“Give her time, my dear—give her time,” said Paul, looking at his
watch.

“Of course you are impatient, but you _must_ hear me. I have no doubt
she’ll wait for you; you won’t lose your turn. Please, what would you
do if any one was to break down altogether?”

“My bonny lassie,” the young man rejoined, “if _you_ only keep going, I
don’t care who fails.”

“Oh, I shall keep going, if it’s only to look after my friends and get
justice for them,” said Miss Muniment—“the delicate, sensitive
creatures who require support and protection. Have you really forgotten
that we have such a one as that?”

The young man walked to the window, with his hands in his pockets, and
looked out at the fading light. “Why does she go herself, then, if she
doesn’t like her?”

Rose Muniment hesitated a moment. “Well, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she
broke out. “I think a woman on her back is cleverer than a man on his
two legs. And you such a wonderful one, too!”

“You are all too clever for me, my dear. If she goes—and twenty times a
week, too—why shouldn’t I go, once in ever so long? Especially as I
like her, and Lady Aurora doesn’t.”

“Lady Aurora doesn’t? Do you think she’d be guilty of hypocrisy? Lady
Aurora delights in her; she won’t let me say that she herself is fit to
dust the Princess’s shoes. I needn’t tell _you_ how she goes down
before them she likes. And I don’t believe you care a button; you have
got something in your head, some wicked game or other, that you think
she can hatch for you.”

At this Paul Muniment turned round and looked at his sister a moment,
smiling still and whistling just audibly. “Why shouldn’t I care? Ain’t
I soft, ain’t I susceptible?”

“I never thought I should hear you ask that, after what I have seen
these four years. For four years she has come, and it’s all for you, as
well it might be, and you never showing any more sense of what she’d be
willing to do for you than if you had been that woollen cat on the
hearth-rug!”

“What would you like me to do? Would you like me to hang round her neck
and hold her hand, the same as you do?” Muniment asked.

“Yes, it would do me good, I can tell you. It’s better than what I
see—the poor lady getting spotted and dim, like a mirror that wants
rubbing.”

“You know a good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,” Muniment
remarked in a moment, with a face that gave no sign of seeing a reason
in what she said. “Your mind is too poetical. There’s nothing that I
should care for that her ladyship would be willing to do for me.”

“She would marry you at a day’s notice—she’d do that.”

“I shouldn’t care for that. Besides, if I was to ask her she would
never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for that, for
you.”

“Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!” cried Rosy, gaily.

“But what’s to be gained, if I can have her, for you, without any
risk?”

“You won’t have her for me, or for any one, when she’s dead of a broken
heart.”

“Dead of a broken tea-cup!” said the young man. “And, pray, what should
we live on, when you had got us set up?—the three of us, without
counting the kids.”

He evidently was arguing from pure good-nature, and not in the least
from curiosity; but his sister replied as eagerly as if he would be
floored by her answer: “Hasn’t she got two hundred a year of her own?
Don’t I know every penny of her affairs?”

Paul Muniment gave no sign of any mental criticism he may have made on
Rosy’s conception of the delicate course, or of a superior policy;
perhaps, indeed, for it is perfectly possible, her inquiry did not
strike him as having a mixture of motives. He only rejoined, with a
little pleasant, patient sigh, “I don’t want the dear old girl’s
money.”

His sister, in spite of her eagerness, waited twenty seconds; then she
flashed at him, “Pray, do you like the Princess’s better?”

“If I did, there would be more of it,” he answered, quietly.

“How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?” Rosy cried.

“Lord, how you give me away!” laughed her brother. “Daughters of earls,
wives of princes—I have only to pick.”

“I don’t speak of the Princess, so long as there’s a prince. But if you
haven’t seen that Lady Aurora is a beautiful, wonderful exception, and
quite unlike any one else in all the wide world—well, all I can say is
that _I_ have.”

“I thought it was your opinion,” Paul objected, “that the swells should
remain swells, and the high ones keep their place.”

“And, pray, would she lose hers if she were to marry you?”

“Her place at Inglefield, certainly,” said Paul, as patiently as if his
sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.

“Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?”

“Surely you appear to think so, from the way you always question her
about it,” replied Paul.

“Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any
madder,” his sister continued. “They have given her up, and if she were
to marry you—”

“If she were to marry me, they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot
pole,” Paul broke in.

Rosy flinched a moment; then she said, serenely, “Oh, I don’t care for
that!”

“You ought to, to be consistent, though, possibly, she shouldn’t,
admitting that she wouldn’t. You have more imagination than logic—which
of course, for a woman, is quite right. That’s what makes you say that
her ladyship is in affliction because I go to a place that she herself
goes to without the least compulsion.”

“She goes to keep you off,” said Rosy, with decision.

“To keep me off?”

“To interpose, with the Princess; to be nice to her and conciliate her,
so that she may not take you.”

“Did she tell you any such rigmarole as that?” Paul inquired, this time
staring a little.

“Do I need to be told things, to know them? I am not a fine, strong,
superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” answered
Rosy, with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might
indeed have made it appear that she was capable of wizardry.

“You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the
young man rejoined. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing
for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a
little less poor.”

“Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as
one of them.”

“She knows I am not helpless so long as you are about the place, and
that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.”

“She wants to assist me to assist you, then!” the girl exclaimed, with
the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused; it was a
spirit that seemed, at moments, in argument, to mock at her own
contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring
about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you are plotting and working and
waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.”

“My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She
couldn’t if she would.”

“And no more do I, I suppose you mean.”

“No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would, you could.
However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for there’s
mighty little of it. I’m not doing much, you know.”

Rosy lay there looking up at him. “It must be pretty thick, when you
talk that way. However, I don’t care what happens, for I know I shall
be looked after.”

“Nothing will happen—nothing will happen,” Paul remarked, simply.

The girl’s rejoinder to this was to say in a moment, “You have a
different tone since you have taken up the Princess.”

She spoke with a certain severity, but he broke out, as if he had not
heard her, “I like your idea of the female aristocracy quarrelling over
a dirty brute like me.”

“I don’t know how dirty you are, but I know you smell of soap,” said
Rosy, with serenity. “They won’t quarrel; that’s not the way they do
it. Yes, you are taking a different tone, for some purpose that I can’t
discover just yet.”

“What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?” her brother
asked.

“Why then do you speak as if you were not remarkable, immensely
remarkable—more remarkable than anything any one, male or female, good
or bad, of the aristocracy or of the vulgar sort, can ever do for you?”

“What on earth have I ever done to show it?” Paul demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know your secrets, and that’s one of them. But we’re out
of the common beyond any one, you and I, and, between ourselves, with
the door fastened, we might as well admit it.”

“I admit it for you, with all my heart,” said the young man, laughing.

“Well, then, if I admit it for you, that’s all that’s required.”

The brother and sister considered each other a while in silence, as if
each were tasting, agreeably, the distinction the other conferred; then
Muniment said, “If I’m such an awfully superior chap, why shouldn’t I
behave in keeping?”

“Oh, you do, you do!”

“All the same, you don’t like it.”

“It isn’t so much what you do; it’s what _she_ does.”

“How do you mean, what she does?”

“She makes Lady Aurora suffer.”

“Oh, I can’t go into that,” said Paul. “A man feels like a muff,
talking about the women that ‘suffer’ for him.”

“Well, if they do it, I think _you_ might bear it!” Rosy exclaimed.
“That’s what a man is. When it comes to being sorry, oh, that’s too
ridiculous!”

“There are plenty of things in the world I’m sorry for,” Paul rejoined,
smiling. “One of them is that you should keep me gossiping here when I
want to go out.”

“Oh, I don’t care if I worry her a little. Does she do it on purpose?”
Rosy continued.

“You ladies must settle all that together,” Muniment answered, rubbing
his hat with the cuff of his coat. It was a new one, the bravest he had
ever possessed, and in a moment he put it on his head, as if to
reinforce his reminder to his sister that it was time she should
release him.

“Well, you do look genteel,” she remarked, complacently, gazing up at
him. “No wonder she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,” she
explained. “You never went to any such expense for her ladyship.”

“My dear, the Princess is worth it—she’s worth it,” said the young man,
speaking seriously now, and reflectively.

“Will she help you very much?” Rosy demanded, with a strange, sudden
transition to eagerness.

“Well,” said Paul, “that’s rather what I look for.”

She threw herself forward on her sofa, with a movement that was rare
with her, and shaking her clasped hands she exclaimed, “Then go off, go
off quickly!”

He came round and kissed her, as if he were not more struck than usual
with her freakish inconsequence. “It’s not bad to have a little person
at home who wants a fellow to succeed.”

“Oh, I know they will look after me,” she said, sinking back upon her
pillow with an air of agreeable security.

He was aware that whenever she said ‘they’, without further
elucidation, she meant the populace surging up in his rear, and he
rejoined, always hilarious, “I don’t think we’ll leave it much to
‘them’.”

“No, it’s not much you’ll leave to them, I’ll be bound.”

He gave a louder laugh at this, and said, “You’re the deepest of the
lot, Miss Muniment.”

Her eyes kindled at his praise, and as she rested them on her brother’s
she murmured, “Well, I pity the poor Princess, too, you know.”

“Well, now, I’m not conceited, but I don’t,” Paul returned, passing in
front of the little mirror on the mantel-shelf.

“Yes, you’ll succeed, and so shall I—but _she_ won’t,” Rosy went on.

Muniment stopped a moment, with his hand on the latch of the door, and
said, gravely, almost sententiously, “She is not only beautiful, as
beautiful as a picture, but she is uncommon sharp, and she has taking
ways, beyond anything that ever was known.”

“I know her ways,” his sister replied. Then, as he left the room, she
called after him, “But I don’t care for anything, so long as you become
prime minister of England!”

Three quarters of an hour after this Muniment knocked at the door in
Madeira Crescent, and was immediately ushered into the parlour, where
the Princess, in her bonnet and mantle, sat alone. She made no movement
as he came in; she only looked up at him with a smile.

“You are braver than I gave you credit for,” she said, in her rich
voice.

“I shall learn to be brave, if I associate a while longer with you. But
I shall never cease to be shy,” Muniment added, standing there and
looking tall in the middle of the small room. He cast his eyes about
him for a place to sit down, but the Princess gave him no help to
choose; she only watched him, in silence, from her own place, with her
hands quietly folded in her lap. At last, when, without remonstrance
from her, he had selected the most uncomfortable chair in the room, she
replied—

“That’s only another name for desperate courage. I put on my bonnet, on
the chance, but I didn’t expect you.”

“Well, here I am—that’s the great thing,” Muniment said,
good-humouredly.

“Yes, no doubt it’s a very great thing. But it will be a still greater
thing when you are there.”

“I am afraid you hope too much,” the young man observed. “Where is it?
I don’t think you told me.”

The Princess drew a small folded letter from her pocket, and, without
saying anything, held it out to him. He got up to take it from her,
opened it, and, as he read it, remained standing in front of her. Then
he went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it. At this
movement she rose quickly, as if to save the document, but the
expression of his face, as he turned round to her, made her stop. The
smile that came into her own was a little forced. “What are you afraid
of?” she asked. “I take it the house is known. If we go, I suppose we
may admit that we go.”

Muniment’s face showed that he had been annoyed, but he answered,
quietly enough, “No writing—no writing.”

“You are terribly careful,” said the Princess.

“Careful of you—yes.”

She sank down upon her sofa again, asking her companion to ring for
tea; they would do much better to have some before going out. When the
order had been given, she remarked, “I see I shall have much less keen
emotion than when I acted by myself.”

“Is that what you go in for—keen emotion?”

“Surely, Mr Muniment. Don’t you?”

“God forbid! I hope to have as little of it as possible.”

“Of course one doesn’t want any vague rodomontade; one wants to do
something. But it would be hard if one couldn’t have a little pleasure
by the way.”

“My pleasure is in quietness,” said Paul Muniment, smiling.

“So is mine. But it depends on how you understand it. Quietness, I
mean, in the midst of a tumult.”

“You have rare ideas about tumults. They are not good in themselves.”

The Princess considered this a moment; then she remarked, “I wonder if
you are too prudent. I shouldn’t like that. If it is made an accusation
against you that you have been—where we are going—shall you deny it?”

“With that prospect it would be simpler not to go at all, wouldn’t it?”
Muniment inquired.

“Which prospect do you mean? That of being found out, or that of having
to lie?”

“I suppose that if you lie you are not found out,” Muniment replied,
humorously.

“You won’t take me seriously,” said the Princess. She spoke without
irritation, without resentment, with a kind of resigned sadness. But
there was a certain fineness of reproach in the tone in which she
added, “I don’t believe you want to go at all.”

“Why else should I have come, especially if I don’t take you
seriously?”

“That has never been a reason for a man’s not going to see a woman,”
said the Princess. “It’s usually a reason in favour of it.”

Muniment turned his smiling eyes over the room, looking from one
article of furniture to another: this was a way he had when he was
engaged in a discussion, and it suggested not so much that he was
reflecting on what his interlocutor said as that his thoughts were
pursuing a cheerfully independent course. Presently he observed, “I
don’t know that I quite understand what you mean by that question of
taking a woman seriously.”

“Ah, you are very perfect,” murmured the Princess. “Don’t you consider
that the changes you look for will be also for our benefit?”

“I don’t think they will alter your position.”

“If I didn’t hope for that, I wouldn’t do anything,” said the Princess.

“Oh, I have no doubt you’ll do a great deal.”

The young man’s companion was silent for some minutes, during which he
also was content to say nothing. “I wonder you can find it in your
conscience to work with me,” she observed at last.

“It isn’t in my conscience I find it,” said Muniment, laughing.

The maid-servant brought in the tea, and while the Princess was making
a place for it on a little table beside her she exclaimed, “Well, I
don’t care, for I think I have you in my power!”

“You have every one in your power,” returned Muniment.

“Every one is no one,” the Princess replied, rather dryly; and a moment
later she said to him, “That extraordinary little sister of
yours—surely you take _her_ seriously?”

“I’m wonderful fond of her, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t think
her position will ever be altered.”

“Are you alluding to her position in bed? If you consider that she will
never recover her health,” the Princess said, “I am very sorry to hear
it.”

“Oh, her health will do. I mean that she will continue to be, like all
the most amiable women, just a kind of ornament to life.”

The Princess had already perceived that he pronounced amiable
‘emiable’; but she had accepted this peculiarity of her visitor in the
spirit of imaginative transfigurement in which she had accepted several
others. “To your life, of course. She can hardly be said to be an
ornament to her own.”

“Her life and mine are all one.”

“She is certainly magnificent,” said the Princess. While he was
drinking his tea she remarked to him that for a revolutionist he was
certainly most extraordinary; and he inquired, in answer, whether it
were not rather in keeping for revolutionists to be extraordinary. He
drank three cups, declaring that his hostess’s decoction was fine; it
was better, even, than Lady Aurora’s. This led him to observe, as he
put down his third cup, looking round the room again, lovingly, almost
covetously, “You’ve got everything so handy, I don’t see what interest
you can have.”

“How do you mean, what interest?”

“In getting in so uncommon deep.”

On the instant the Princess’s expression flashed into pure passion. “Do
you consider that I am in—really far?”

“Up to your neck, ma’am.”

“And do you think that _il y va_ of my neck—I mean that it’s in
danger?” she translated, eagerly.

“Oh, I understand your French. Well, I’ll look after you,” Muniment
said.

“Remember, then, definitely, that I expect not to lie.”

“Not even for me?” Then Muniment added, in the same familiar tone,
which was not rough nor wanting in respect, but only homely and direct,
suggestive of growing acquaintance, “If I was your husband I would come
and take you away.”

“Please don’t speak of my husband,” said the Princess, gravely. “You
have no qualification for doing so; you know nothing whatever about
him.”

“I know what Hyacinth has told me.”

“Oh, Hyacinth!” the Princess murmured, impatiently. There was another
silence of some minutes, not disconnected, apparently, from this
reference to the little bookbinder; but when Muniment spoke, after the
interval, it was not to carry on the allusion—

“Of course you think me very plain, very rude.”

“Certainly, you have not such a nice address as Hyacinth,” the Princess
rejoined, not desiring, on her side, to evade the topic. “But that is
given to very few,” she added; “and I don’t know that pretty manners
are exactly what we are working for.”

“Ay, it won’t be very endearing when we cut down a few allowances,”
said Muniment. “But I want to please you; I want to be as much as
possible like Hyacinth,” he went on.

“That is not the way to please me. I don’t forgive him; he’s very
silly.”

“Ah, don’t say that; he’s a little brick!” Muniment exclaimed.

“He’s a dear fellow, with extraordinary qualities, but so deplorably
conventional.”

“Yes, talking about taking things seriously—_he_ takes them seriously,”
remarked Muniment.

“Has he ever told you his life?” asked the Princess.

“He hasn’t required to tell me. I’ve seen a good bit of it.”

“Yes, but I mean before you knew him.”

Muniment reflected a moment. “His birth, and his poor mother? I think
it was Rosy told me about that.”

“And, pray, how did _she_ know?”

“Ah, when you come to the way Rosy knows!” said Muniment, laughing.
“She doesn’t like people in that predicament. She thinks we ought all
to be finely born.”

“Then they agree, for so does poor Hyacinth.” The Princess hesitated an
instant; then she said, as if with a quick effort, “I want to ask you
something. Have you had a visit from Mr Vetch?”

“The old gentleman who fiddles? No, he has never done me that honour.”

“It was because I prevented him, then. I told him to leave it to me.”

“To leave what, now?” Muniment looked at her in placid perplexity.

“He is in great distress about Hyacinth—about the danger he runs. You
know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Muniment replied, slowly. “But what does
_he_ know about it? I thought it was supposed to be a deadly secret.”

“So it is. He doesn’t know anything; he only suspects.”

“How do you know, then?”

The Princess hesitated again. “Oh, I’m like Rosy—I find out. Mr Vetch,
as I suppose you are aware, has known Hyacinth all his life; he takes a
most affectionate interest in him. He believes there is something
hanging over him, and he wants it to be turned off, to be stopped.” The
Princess paused at this, but her visitor made no response, and she
continued: “He was going to see you, to beg you to do something, to
interfere; he seemed to think that your power, in such a matter, would
be very great; but, as I tell you, I requested him, as a particular
favour to me, to let you alone.”

“What favour would it be to you?” Muniment asked.

“It would give me the satisfaction of feeling that you were not
worried.”

Muniment appeared struck with the curious inadequacy of this
explanation, considering what was at stake; he broke into a laugh and
remarked, “That was considerate of you, beyond everything.”

“It was not meant as consideration for you; it was a piece of
calculation.” The Princess, having made this announcement, gathered up
her gloves and turned away, walking to the chimney-piece, where she
stood a moment arranging her bonnet-ribbons in the mirror with which it
was decorated. Muniment watched her with evident curiosity; in spite
both of his inaccessibility to nervous agitation and of the sceptical
theories he entertained about her, he was not proof against her general
faculty of creating a feeling of suspense, a tension of interest, on
the part of those who associated with her. He followed her movements,
but plainly he didn’t follow her calculations, so that he could only
listen more attentively when she inquired suddenly, “Do you know why I
asked you to come and see me? Do you know why I went to see your
sister? It was all a plan,” said the Princess.

“We hoped it was just an ordinary humane, social impulse,” the young
man returned.

“It was humane, it was even social, but it was not ordinary. I wanted
to save Hyacinth.”

“To save him?”

“I wanted to be able to talk with you just as I am talking now.”

“That was a fine idea!” Muniment exclaimed, ingenuously.

“I have an exceeding, a quite inexpressible, regard for him. I have no
patience with some of his opinions, and that is why I permitted myself
to say just now that he is silly. But, after all, the opinions of our
friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don’t see why
they should be what we hate them for. Hyacinth Robinson’s nature is
singularly generous and his intelligence very fine, though there _are_
some things that he muddles up. You just now expressed strongly your
own regard for him; therefore we ought to be perfectly agreed. Agreed,
I mean, about getting him out of his scrape.”

Muniment had the air of a man who felt that he must consider a little
before he assented to these successive propositions; it being a
limitation of his intellect that he could not respond without
understanding. After a moment he answered, referring to the Princess’s
last remark, in which the others appeared to culminate, and at the same
time shaking his head a little and smiling, “His scrape isn’t
important.”

“You thought it was when you got him into it.”

“I thought it would give him pleasure,” said Muniment.

“That’s not a reason for letting people do what isn’t good for them.”

“I wasn’t thinking so much about what would be good for him as about
what would be bad for some others. He can do as he likes.”

“That’s easy to say. They must be persuaded not to call upon him.”

“Persuade them, then, dear madam.”

“How can I persuade them? If I could, I wouldn’t have approached you. I
have no influence, and even if I had my motives would be suspected. You
are the one to interpose.”

“Shall I tell them he funks it?” Muniment asked.

“He doesn’t—he doesn’t!” exclaimed the Princess.

“On what ground, then, shall I put it?”

“Tell them he has changed his opinions.”

“Wouldn’t that be rather like denouncing him as a traitor, and doing it
hypocritically?”

“Tell them then it’s simply my wish.”

“That won’t do _you_ much good,” Muniment said, with his natural laugh.

“Will it put me in danger? That’s exactly what I want.”

“Yes; but as I understand you, you want to suffer _for_ the people, not
by them. You are very fond of Robinson; it couldn’t be otherwise,” the
young man went on. “But you ought to remember that, in the line you
have chosen, our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our
shrinkings—” His voice had become low and grave, and he paused a
little, while the Princess’s deep and lovely eyes, attaching themselves
to his face, showed that in an instant she was affected by this
unwonted adjuration. He spoke now as if he were taking her seriously.
“All those things are as nothing, and must never weigh a feather beside
our service.”

The Princess began to draw on her gloves. “You’re a most extraordinary
man.”

“That’s what Rosy tells me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“Do Hyacinth’s job? Because it’s better to do my own.”

“And, pray, what is your own?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul Muniment, with perfect serenity and
good-nature. “I expect to be instructed.”

“Have you taken an oath, like Hyacinth?”

“Ah, madam, the oaths _I_ take I don’t tell,” said the young man,
gravely.

“Oh, you . . .!” the Princess murmured, with an ambiguous cadence. She
appeared to dismiss the question, but to suggest at the same time that
he was very abnormal. This imputation was further conveyed by the next
words she uttered: “And can you see a dear friend whirled away like
that?”

At this, for the first time, Paul Muniment exhibited a certain
irritation. “You had better leave my dear friend to me.”

The Princess, with her eyes still fixed upon him, gave a long, soft
sigh. “Well, then, shall we go?”

Muniment took up his hat again, but he made no movement toward the
door. “If you did me the honour to seek my acquaintance, to ask me to
come and see you, only in order to say what you have just said about
Hyacinth, perhaps we needn’t carry out the form of going to the place
you proposed. Wasn’t this only your pretext?”

“I believe you _are_ afraid!” the Princess exclaimed; but in spite of
her exclamation the pair presently went out of the house. They quitted
the door together, after having stood on the step for a moment, looking
up and down, apparently for a cab. So far as the darkness, which was
now complete, permitted the prospect to be scanned, there was no such
vehicle within hail. They turned to the left, and after a walk of
several minutes, during which they were engaged in small, dull
by-streets, emerged upon a more populous way, where there were lighted
shops and omnibuses and the evident chance of a hansom. Here they
paused again, and very soon an empty hansom passed, and, at a sign,
pulled up near them. Meanwhile, it should be recorded, they had been
followed, at an interval, by a cautious figure, a person who, in
Madeira Crescent, when they came out of the house, was stationed on the
other side of the street, at a considerable distance. When they
appeared he retreated a little, still however keeping them in sight.
When they moved away he moved in the same direction, watching them but
maintaining his distance. He drew nearer, seemingly because he could
not control his eagerness, as they turned into Westbourne Grove, and
during the minute they stood there he was exposed to recognition by the
Princess if she had happened to turn her head. In the event of her
having felt such an impulse she would have discovered, in the
lamp-light, that her noble husband was hovering in her rear. But the
Princess was otherwise occupied; she failed to see that at one moment
he came so close as to suggest that he had an intention of addressing
himself to the couple. The reader scarcely needs to be informed that
his real intention was to satisfy himself as to the kind of person his
wife was walking with. The time allowed him for this research was
brief, especially as he had perceived, more rapidly than he sometimes
perceived things, that they were looking for a vehicle and that with
its assistance they would pass out of his range—a reflection which
caused him to give half his attention to the business of hailing any
second cab which should come that way. There are parts of London in
which you may never see a cab at all, but there are none in which you
may see only one; in accordance with which fortunate truth Prince
Casamassima was able to wave his stick to good purpose as soon as the
two objects of his pursuit had rattled away. Behind them now, in the
gloom, he had no fear of being seen. In little more than an instant he
had jumped into another hansom, the driver of which accompanied the
usual exclamation of “All right, sir!” with a small, amused grunt,
which the Prince thought eminently British, after he had hissed at him,
over the hood, expressively, and in a manner by no means indicative of
that nationality, the injunction, “Follow, follow, follow!”




XL


An hour after the Princess had left the house with Paul Muniment,
Madame Grandoni came down to supper, a meal of which she partook, in
gloomy solitude, in the little back parlour. She had pushed away her
plate, and sat motionless, staring at the crumpled cloth, with her
hands folded on the edge of the table, when she became aware that a
gentleman had been ushered into the drawing-room and was standing
before the fire in an attitude of discreet expectancy. At the same
moment the maid-servant approached the old lady, remarking with bated
breath, “The Prince, the Prince, mum! It’s you he ’ave asked for, mum!”
Upon this, Madame Grandoni called out to the visitor from her place,
addressed him as her poor illustrious friend and bade him come and give
her his arm. He obeyed with solemn alacrity, and conducted her into the
front room, near the fire. He helped her to arrange herself in her
arm-chair and to gather her shawl about her; then he seated himself
near her and remained with his dismal eyes bent upon her. After a
moment she said, “Tell me something about Rome. The grass in the Villa
Borghese must already be thick with flowers.”

“I would have brought you some, if I had thought,” he answered. Then he
turned his gaze about the room. “Yes, you may well ask, in such a black
little hole as this. My wife should not live here,” he added.

“Ah, my dear friend, for all that she’s your wife!” the old woman
exclaimed.

The Prince sprang up in sudden, passionate agitation, and then she saw
that the rigid quietness with which he had come into the room and
greeted her was only an effort of his good manners. He was really
trembling with excitement. “It is true—it is true! She _has_ lovers—she
_has_ lovers!” he broke out. “I have seen it with my eyes, and I have
come here to know!”

“I don’t know what you have seen, but your coming here to know will not
have helped you much. Besides, if you have seen, you know for yourself.
At any rate, I have ceased to be able to tell you.”

“You are afraid—you are afraid!” cried the visitor, with a wild
accusatory gesture.

Madame Grandoni looked up at him with slow speculation. “Sit down and
be tranquil, very tranquil. I have ceased to pay attention—I take no
heed.”

“Well, I do, then,” said the Prince, subsiding a little. “Don’t you
know she has gone out to a house, in a horrible quarter, with a man?”

“I think it highly probable, dear Prince.”

“And who is he? That’s what I want to discover.”

“How can I tell you? I haven’t seen him.”

He looked at her a moment, with his distended eyes. “Dear lady, is that
kind to me, when I have counted on you?”

“Oh, I am not kind any more; it’s not a question of that. I am angry—as
angry, almost, as you.”

“Then why don’t you watch her, eh?”

“It’s not with her I am angry. It’s with myself,” said Madame Grandoni,
meditatively.

“For becoming so indifferent, do you mean?”

“On the contrary, for staying in the house.”

“Thank God, you are still here, or I couldn’t have come. But what a
lodging for the Princess!” the visitor exclaimed. “She might at least
live in a manner befitting.”

“Eh, the last time you were in London you thought it was too costly!”
she cried.

He hesitated a moment. “Whatever she does is wrong. Is it because it’s
so bad that you must go?” he went on.

“It is foolish—foolish—foolish,” said Madame Grandoni, slowly,
impressively.

“Foolish, _chè, chè!_ He was in the house nearly an hour, this one.”

“In the house? In what house?”

“Here, where you sit. I saw him go in, and when he came out it was
after a long time, with her.”

“And where were you, meanwhile?”

Again Prince Casamassima hesitated. “I was on the other side of the
street. When they came out I followed them. It was more than an hour
ago.”

“Was it for that you came to London?”

“Ah, what I came for! To put myself in hell!”

“You had better go back to Rome,” said Madame Grandoni.

“Of course I will go back, but if you will tell me who this one is! How
can you be ignorant, dear friend, when he comes freely in and out of
the house where I have to watch, at the door, for a moment that I can
snatch? He was not the same as the other.”

“As the other?”

“Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one whom I met in the
other house, that Sunday afternoon.”

“I sit in my room almost always now,” said the old woman. “I only come
down to eat.”

“Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,” the Prince
remarked.

“Better for whom?”

“I mean that if you did not withdraw yourself you could at least answer
my questions.”

“Ah, but I have not the slightest desire to answer them,” Madame
Grandoni replied. “You must remember that I am not here as your spy.”

“No,” said the Prince, in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. “If
you had given me more information I should not have been obliged to
come here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this
evening I spent two hours walking up and down opposite the house, like
a groom waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a
personal impression. It was so that I saw him come in. He is not a
gentleman—not even like some of the strange ones here.”

“I think he is Scotch,” remarked Madame Grandoni.

“Ah, then, you _have_ seen him?”

“No, but I have heard him. He speaks very loud—the floors of this house
are not built as we build in Italy—and his voice is the same that I
have heard in the people of that country. Besides, she has told me—some
things. He is a chemist’s assistant.”

“A chemist’s assistant? _Santo Dio!_ And the other one, a year ago—more
than a year ago—was a bookbinder.”

“Oh, the bookbinder!” murmured Madame Grandoni.

“And does she associate with no people of good? Has she no other
society?”

“For me to tell you more, Prince, you must wait till I am free,” said
the old lady.

“How do you mean, free?”

“I must choose. I must either go away—and then I can tell you what I
have seen—or if I stay here I must hold my tongue.”

“But if you go away you will have seen nothing,” the Prince objected.

“Ah, plenty as it is—more than I ever expected to!”

The Prince clasped his hands together in tremulous suppliance; but at
the same time he smiled, as if to conciliate, to corrupt. “Dearest
friend, you torment my curiosity. If you will tell me this, I will
never ask you anything more. Where did they go? For the love of God,
what is that house?”

“I know nothing of their houses,” she returned, with an impatient
shrug.

“Then there are others—there are many?” She made no answer, but sat
brooding, with her chin in her protrusive kerchief. Her visitor
presently continued, in a soft, earnest tone, with his beautiful
Italian distinctness, as if his lips cut and carved the sound, while
his fine fingers quivered into quick, emphasising gestures, “The street
is small and black, but it is like all the streets. It has no
importance; it is at the end of an endless imbroglio. They drove for
twenty minutes; then they stopped their cab and got out. They went
together on foot some minutes more. There were many turns; they seemed
to know them well. For me it was very difficult—of course I also got
out; I had to stay so far behind—close against the houses. Chiffinch
Street, N.E.—that was the name,” the Prince continued, pronouncing the
word with difficulty; “and the house is number 32—I looked at that
after they went in. It’s a very bad house—worse than this; but it has
no sign of a chemist, and there are no shops in the street. They rang
the bell—only once, though they waited a long time; it seemed to me, at
least, that they did not touch it again. It was several minutes before
the door was opened; and that was a bad time for me, because as they
stood there they looked up and down. Fortunately you know the air of
this place! I saw no light in the house—not even after they went in.
Who let them enter I couldn’t tell. I waited nearly half an hour, to
see how long they would stay and what they would do on coming out;
then, at last, my impatience brought me here, for to know she was
absent made me hope I might see you. While I was there two persons went
in—two men, together, smoking, who looked like _artisti_ (I didn’t see
them near), but no one came out. I could see they took their cigars—and
you can fancy what tobacco!—into the presence of the Princess.
Formerly,” pursued Madame Grandoni’s visitor, with a touching attempt
at a jocular treatment of this point, “she never tolerated
smoking—never mine, at least. The street is very quiet—very few people
pass. Now what is the house? Is it where that man lives?” he asked,
almost in a whisper.

He had been encouraged by her consenting, in spite of her first
protests, to listen to him—he could see she _was_ listening; and he was
still more encouraged when, after a moment, she answered his question
by a question of her own: “Did you cross the river to go there? I know
that he lives over the water.”

“Ah, no, it was not in that part. I tried to ask the cabman who brought
me back to explain to me what it is called; but I couldn’t make him
understand. They have heavy minds,” the Prince declared. Then he
pursued, drawing a little closer to his hostess: “But what were they
doing there? Why did she go with him?”

“They are plotting. There!” said Madame Grandoni.

“You mean a secret society, a band of revolutionists and murderers?
_Capisco bene_—that is not new to me. But perhaps they only pretend
it’s for that,” added the Prince.

“Only pretend? Why should they pretend? That is not Christina’s way.”

“There are other possibilities,” the Prince observed.

“Oh, of course, when your wife goes away with strange men, in the dark,
to far-away houses, you can think anything you like, and I have nothing
to say to your thoughts. I have my own, but they are my own affair, and
I shall not undertake to defend Christina, for she is indefensible.
When she does the things she does, she provokes, she invites, the worst
construction; there let it rest, save for this one remark, which I will
content myself with making: if she were a licentious woman she would
not behave as she does now, she would not expose herself to
irresistible interpretations; the appearance of everything would be
good and proper. I simply tell you what I believe. If I believed that
what she is doing concerned you alone, I should say nothing about it—at
least sitting here. But it concerns others, it concerns every one, so I
will open my mouth at last. She has gone to that house to break up
society.”

“To break it up, yes, as she has wanted before?”

“Oh, more than before! She is very much entangled. She has relations
with people who are watched by the police. She has not told me, but I
have perceived it by simply living with her.”

Prince Casamassima stared. “And is _she_ watched by the police?”

“I can’t tell you; it is very possible—except that the police here is
not like that of other countries.”

“It is more stupid,” said the Prince. He gazed at Madame Grandoni with
a flush of shame on his face. “Will she bring us to _that_ scandal? It
would be the worst of all.”

“There is one chance—the chance that she will get tired of it,” the old
lady remarked. “Only the scandal may come before that.”

“Dear friend, she is the devil,” said the Prince, solemnly.

“No, she is not the devil, because she wishes to do good.”

“What good did she ever wish to do to me?” the Italian demanded, with
glowing eyes.

Madame Grandoni shook her head very sadly. “You can do no good, of any
kind, to each other. Each on your own side, you must be quiet.”

“How can I be quiet when I hear of such infamies?” Prince Casamassima
got up, in his violence, and, in a tone which caused his companion to
burst into a short, incongruous laugh as soon as she heard the words,
exclaimed, “She shall _not_ break up society!”

“No, she will bore herself before the trick is played. Make up your
mind to that.”

“That is what I expected to find—that the caprice was over. She has
passed through so many follies.”

“Give her time—give her time,” replied Madame Grandoni.

“Time to drag my name into an assize-court? Those people are robbers,
incendiaries, murderers!”

“You can say nothing to me about them that I haven’t said to her.”

“And how does she defend herself?”

“Defend herself? Did you ever hear Christina do that?” Madame Grandoni
asked. “The only thing she says to me is, ‘Don’t be afraid; I promise
you by all that’s sacred that you shan’t suffer.’ She speaks as if she
had it all in her hands. That is very well. No doubt I’m a selfish old
woman, but, after all, one has a heart for others.”

“And so have I, I think I may pretend,” said the Prince. “You tell me
to give her time, and it is certain that she will take it, whether I
give it or not. But I can at least stop giving her money. By heaven,
it’s my duty, as an honest man.”

“She tells me that as it is you don’t give her much.”

“Much, dear lady? It depends on what you call so. It’s enough to make
all these scoundrels flock around her.”

“They are not all scoundrels, any more than she is. That is the strange
part of it,” said the old woman, with a weary sigh.

“But this fellow, the chemist—to-night—what do you call him?”

“She has spoken to me of him as a most estimable young man.”

“But she thinks it’s estimable to blow us all up,” the Prince returned.
“Doesn’t _he_ take her money?”

“I don’t know what he takes. But there are some things—heaven forbid
one should forget them! The misery of London is something fearful.”

“_Che vuole?_ There is misery everywhere,” returned the Prince. “It is
the will of God. _Ci vuol’ pazienza!_ And in this country does no one
give alms?”

“Every one, I believe. But it appears that it is not enough.”

The Prince said nothing for a moment; this statement of Madame
Grandoni’s seemed to present difficulties. The solution, however, soon
suggested itself; it was expressed in the inquiry, “What will you have
in a country which has not the true faith?”

“Ah, the true faith is a great thing; but there is suffering even in
countries that have it.”

“_Evidentemente_. But it helps suffering to be borne, and, later, it
makes it up; whereas here—!” said the old lady’s visitor, with a
melancholy smile. “If I may speak of myself, it is to me, in my
circumstances, a support.”

“That is good,” said Madame Grandoni.

He stood before her, resting his eyes for a moment on the floor. “And
the famous Cholto—Godfrey Gerald—does he come no more?”

“I haven’t seen him for months, and know nothing about him.”

“He doesn’t like the chemists and the bookbinders, eh?” asked the
Prince.

“Ah, it was he who first brought them—to gratify your wife.”

“If they have turned him out, then, that is very well. Now, if only
some one could turn _them_ out!”

“_Aspetta, aspetta!_” said the old woman.

“That is very good advice, but to follow it isn’t amusing.” Then the
Prince added, “You alluded, just now, as to something particular, to
_quel giovane_, the young artisan whom I met in the other house. Is he
also estimable, or has he paid the penalty of his crimes?”

“He has paid the penalty, but I don’t know of what. I have nothing bad
to tell you of him, except that I think his star is on the wane.”

“_Poverino!_” the Prince exclaimed.

“That is exactly the manner in which I addressed him the first time I
saw him. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I felt that it would
happen somehow. It has happened through his changing his opinions. He
has now the same idea as you—that _ci vuol’ pazienza_.”

The Prince listened with the same expression of wounded eagerness, the
same parted lips and excited eyes, to every added fact that dropped
from Madame Grandoni’s lips. “That, at least, is more honest. Then _he_
doesn’t go to Chiffinch Street?”

“I don’t know about Chiffinch Street; but it would be my impression
that he doesn’t go anywhere that Christina and the other one—the
Scotchman—go together. But these are delicate matters,” the old woman
pursued.

They seemed much to interest her interlocutor. “Do you mean that the
Scotchman is—what shall I call it?—his successor?”

For a moment Madame Grandoni made no reply. “I think that this case is
different. But I don’t understand; it was the other, the little one,
that helped her to know the Scotchman.”

“And now they have quarrelled—about my wife? It is all tremendously
edifying!” the Prince exclaimed.

“I can’t tell you, and shouldn’t have attempted it, only that Assunta
talks to me.”

“I wish she would talk to me,” said the Prince, wistfully.

“Ah, my friend, if Christina were to find you getting at her servants!”

“How could it be worse for me than it is now? However, I don’t know why
I speak as if I cared, for I don’t care any more. I have given her up.
It is finished.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Madame Grandoni, gravely.

“You yourself made the distinction, perfectly. So long as she
endeavoured only to injure _me_, and in my private capacity, I could
condone, I could wait, I could hope. But since she has so recklessly
thrown herself into the most criminal undertakings, since she lifts her
hand with a determined purpose, as you tell me, against the most sacred
institutions—it is too much; ah, yes, it is too much! She may go her
way; she is no wife of mine. Not another penny of mine shall go into
her pocket, and into that of the wretches who prey upon her, who have
corrupted her.”

“Dear Prince, I think you are right. And yet I am sorry!” sighed the
old woman, extending her hand for assistance to rise from her chair.
“If she becomes really poor, it will be much more difficult for me to
leave her. _This_ is not poverty, and not even a good imitation of it,
as she would like it to be. But what will be said of me if having
remained with her through so much of her splendour, I turn away from
her the moment she begins to want?”

“Dear lady, do you ask that to make me relent?” the Prince inquired,
after an hesitation.

“Not in the least; for whatever is said and whatever you do, there is
nothing for me in decency, at present, but to pack my trunk. Judge, by
the way I have tattled.”

“If you will stay on, she shall have everything.” The Prince spoke in a
very low tone, with a manner that betrayed the shame he felt at his
attempt at bribery.

Madame Grandoni gave him an astonished glance and moved away from him.
“What does that mean? I thought you didn’t care.”

I know not what explanation of his inconsequence her companion would
have given her if at that moment the door of the room had not been
pushed open to permit the entrance of Hyacinth Robinson. He stopped
short on perceiving that Madame Grandoni had a visitor, but before he
had time to say anything the old lady addressed him with a certain
curtness: “Ah, you don’t fall well; the Princess isn’t at home.”

“That was mentioned to me, but I ventured to come in to see you, as I
have done before,” Hyacinth replied. Then he added, as if he were
retreating, “I beg many pardons. I was not told that you were not
alone.”

“My visitor is going, but I am going too,” said Madame Grandoni. “I
must take myself to my room—I am all falling to pieces. Therefore
kindly excuse me.”

Hyacinth had had time to recognise the Prince, and this nobleman paid
him the same compliment, as was proved by his asking of Madame
Grandoni, in a rapid aside, in Italian, “Isn’t it the bookbinder?”

“_Sicuro_,” said the old lady; while Hyacinth, murmuring a regret that
he should find her indisposed, turned back to the door.

“One moment—one moment, I pray!” the Prince interposed, raising his
hand persuasively and looking at him with an unexpected, exaggerated
smile. “Please introduce me to the gentleman,” he added, in English, to
Madame Grandoni.

She manifested no surprise at the request—she had none left,
apparently, for anything—but pronounced the name of Prince Casamassima,
and then added, for Hyacinth’s benefit, “He knows who you are.”

“Will you permit me to keep you a very little minute?” the Prince
continued, addressing the other visitor; after which he remarked to
Madame Grandoni, “I will speak with him a little. It is perhaps not
necessary that we should incommode you, if you do not wish to stay.”

She had for a moment, as she tossed off a satirical little laugh, a
return of her ancient drollery: “Remember that if you talk long she may
come back! Yes, yes, I will go upstairs. _Felicissima notte, signori!_”
She took her way to the door, which Hyacinth, considerably bewildered,
held open for her.

The reasons for which Prince Casamassima wished to converse with him
were mysterious; nevertheless, he was about to close the door behind
Madame Grandoni, as a sign that he was at the service of her companion.
At this moment the latter extended again a courteous, remonstrant hand.
“After all, as my visit is finished and as yours comes to nothing,
might we not go out?”

“Certainly, I will go with you,” said Hyacinth. He spoke with an
instinctive stiffness, in spite of the Prince’s queer affability, and
in spite also of the fact that he felt sorry for the nobleman, to whose
countenance Madame Grandoni’s last injunction, uttered in English, had
brought a deep and painful blush. It is needless to go into the
question of what Hyacinth, face to face with an aggrieved husband, may
have had on his conscience, but he assumed, naturally enough, that the
situation might be grave, though indeed the Prince’s manner was, for
the moment, incongruously conciliatory. Hyacinth invited his new
acquaintance to pass, and in a minute they were in the street together.

“Do you go here—do you go there?” the Prince inquired, as they stood a
moment before the house. “If you will permit, I will take the same
direction.” On Hyacinth’s answering that it was indifferent to him the
Prince said, turning to the right, “Well, then, here, but slowly, if
that pleases you, and only a little way.” His English was far from
perfect, but his errors were mainly errors of pronunciation, and
Hyacinth was struck with his effort to express himself very distinctly,
so that in intercourse with a little representative of the British
populace his foreignness should not put him at a disadvantage. Quick as
he was to perceive and appreciate, Hyacinth noted how a certain quality
of breeding that was in his companion enabled him to compass that
coolness, and he mentally applauded his success in a difficult feat.
Difficult he judged it because it seemed to him that the purpose for
which the Prince wished to speak to him was one which must require a
deal of explanation, and it was a sign of training to explain
adequately, in a foreign tongue, especially if one were agitated, to a
person in a social position very different from one’s own. Hyacinth
knew what the Prince’s estimate of _his_ importance must be (he could
have no illusions as to the character of the people his wife received);
but while he heard him carefully put one word after the other he was
able to smile to himself at his needless precautions. Hyacinth
reflected that at a pinch he could have encountered him in his own
tongue; during his stay at Venice he had picked up an Italian
vocabulary. “With Madame Grandoni I spoke of you,” the Prince
announced, dispassionately, as they walked along. “She told me a thing
that interested me,” he added; “that is why I walk with you.” Hyacinth
said nothing, deeming that better by silence than in any other fashion
he held himself at the disposal of his interlocutor. “She told me you
have changed—you have no more the same opinions.”

“The same opinions?”

“About the arrangement of society. You desire no more the assassination
of the rich.”

“I never desired any such thing!” said Hyacinth, indignantly.

“Oh, if you have changed, you can confess,” the Prince rejoined, in an
encouraging tone. “It is very good for some people to be rich. It would
not be right for all to be poor.”

“It would be pleasant if all could be rich,” Hyacinth suggested.

“Yes, but not by stealing and shooting.”

“No, not by stealing and shooting. I never desired that.”

“Ah, no doubt she was mistaken. But to-day you think we must have
patience,” the Prince went on, as if he hoped very much that Hyacinth
would allow this valuable conviction to be attributed to him. “That is
also my view.”

“Oh, yes, we must have patience,” said Hyacinth, who was now smiling to
himself in the dark.

They had by this time reached the end of the little Crescent, where the
Prince paused under the street-lamp. He considered Hyacinth’s
countenance for a moment by its help, and then he pronounced, “If I am
not mistaken, you know very well the Princess.”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “She has been very kind to me.”

“She is my wife—perhaps you know.”

Again Hyacinth hesitated, but after a moment he replied, “She has told
me that she is married.” As soon as he had spoken these words he
thought them idiotic.

“You mean you would not know if she had not told you, I suppose.
Evidently, there is nothing to show it. You can think if that is
agreeable to me.”

“Oh, I can’t think, I can’t judge,” said Hyacinth.

“You are right—that is impossible.” The Prince stood before his
companion, and in the pale gaslight the latter saw more of his face. It
had an unnatural expression, a look of wasted anxiety; the eyes seemed
to glitter, and Hyacinth conceived the unfortunate nobleman to be
feverish and ill. He continued in a moment: “Of course you think it
strange—my conversation. I want you to tell me something.”

“I am afraid you are very unwell,” said Hyacinth.

“Yes, I am unwell; but I shall be better if you will tell me. It is
because you have come back to good ideas—that is why I ask you.”

A sense that the situation of the Princess’s husband was really
pitiful, that at any rate he suffered and was helpless, that he was a
gentleman and even a person who would never have done any great harm—a
perception of these appealing truths came into Hyacinth’s heart, and
stirred there a desire to be kind to him, to render him any service
that, in reason, he might ask. It appeared to Hyacinth that he must be
pretty sick to ask any service at all, but that was his own affair. “If
you would like me to see you safely home, I will do that,” our young
man remarked; and even while he spoke he was struck with the oddity of
his being already on such friendly terms with a person whom he had
hitherto supposed to be the worst enemy of the rarest of women. He
found himself unable to consider the Prince with resentment.

This personage acknowledged the civility of his offer with a slight
inclination of his high slimness. “I am very much obliged to you, but I
will not go home. I will not go home till I know this—to what house she
has gone. Will you tell me that?”

“To what house?” Hyacinth repeated.

“She has gone with a person whom you know. Madame Grandoni told me
that. He is a Scotch chemist.”

“A Scotch chemist?” Hyacinth stared.

“I saw them myself—two hours, three hours, ago. Listen, listen; I will
be very clear,” said the Prince, laying his forefinger on the other
hand with an explanatory gesture. “He came to that house—this one,
where we have been, I mean—and stayed there a long time. I was here in
the street—I have passed my day in the street! They came out together,
and I watched them, I followed them.”

Hyacinth had listened with wonder, and even with suspense; the Prince’s
manner gave an air of such importance, such mystery, to what he had to
relate. But at this he broke out: “This is not my business—I can’t hear
it! _I_ don’t watch, _I_ don’t follow.”

The Prince stared a moment, in surprise; then he rejoined, more quickly
than he had spoken yet, “But they went to a house where they conspire,
where they prepare horrible acts. How can you like that?”

“How do you know it, sir?” Hyacinth inquired, gravely.

“It is Madame Grandoni who has told me.”

“Why, then, do you ask me?”

“Because I am not sure, I don’t think she knows. I want to know more,
to be sure of what is done in that house. Does she go there only for
the revolution,” the Prince demanded, “or does she go there to be alone
with him?”

“With _him?_” The Prince’s tone and his excited eyes infused a kind of
vividness into the suggestion.

“With the tall man—the chemist. They got into a hansom together; the
house is far away, in the lost quarters.”

Hyacinth drew himself together. “I know nothing about the matter, and I
don’t care. If that is all you wish to ask me, we had better separate.”

The Prince’s face elongated; it seemed to grow paler. “Then it is not
true that you hate those abominations!”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “How can you know about my opinions? How
can they interest you?”

The Prince looked at him with sick eyes; he raised his arms a moment, a
certain distance, and then let them drop at his sides. “I hoped you
would help me.”

“When we are in trouble we can’t help each other much!” our young man
exclaimed. But this austere reflection was lost upon the Prince, who at
the moment Hyacinth spoke had already turned to look in the direction
from which they had proceeded, the other end of the Crescent, his
attention apparently being called thither by the sound of a rapid
hansom. The place was still and empty, and the wheels of this vehicle
reverberated. The Prince peered at it through the darkness, and in an
instant he cried, under his breath, excitedly, “They have come
back—they have come back! Now you can see—yes, the two!” The hansom had
slackened pace and pulled up; the house before which it stopped was
clearly the house the two men had lately quitted. Hyacinth felt his arm
seized by the Prince, who, hastily, by a strong effort, drew him
forward several yards. At this moment a part of the agitation that
possessed the unhappy Italian seemed to pass into his own blood; a wave
of anxiety rushed through him—anxiety as to the relations of the two
persons who had descended from the cab; he had, in short, for several
instants, a very exact revelation of the state of feeling of a jealous
husband. If he had been told, half an hour before, that he was capable
of surreptitious peepings, in the interest of such jealousy, he would
have resented the insult; yet he allowed himself to be checked by his
companion just at the nearest point at which they might safely consider
the proceedings of the couple who alighted. It was in fact the
Princess, accompanied by Paul Muniment. Hyacinth noticed that the
latter paid the cabman, who immediately drove away, from his own
pocket. He stood with the Princess for some minutes at the door of the
house—minutes during which Hyacinth felt his heart beat insanely,
ignobly, he couldn’t tell why.

“What does he say? what does _she_ say?” hissed the Prince; and when he
demanded, the next moment, “Will he go in again, or will he go away?”
our sensitive youth felt that a voice was given to his own most eager
thought. The pair were talking together, with rapid sequences, and as
the door had not yet been opened it was clear that, to prolong the
conversation on the steps, the Princess delayed to ring. “It will make
three, four, hours he has been with her,” moaned the Prince.

“He may be with her fifty hours!” Hyacinth answered, with a laugh,
turning away, ashamed of himself.

“He has gone in—_sangue di Dio!_” cried the Prince, catching his
companion again by the arm and making him look. All that Hyacinth saw
was the door just closing; the Princess and Muniment were on the other
side of it. “Is _that_ for the revolution?” the trembling nobleman
panted. But Hyacinth made no answer; he only gazed at the closed door
an instant, and then, disengaging himself, walked straight away,
leaving the Italian, in the darkness, to direct a great helpless,
futile shake of his stick at the indifferent house.




XLI


Hyacinth waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the
door the splendour of her appearance did much to justify her delay. He
heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a creaking
of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward into the
narrow, dusky passage where he had been standing for a quarter of an
hour. She looked flushed; she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume; and she
instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle, at him,
to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large vulgar hands.
Hyacinth opened the door—it was so natural an assumption that they
would not be able to talk properly in the passage—and they came out to
the low steps, lingering there in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud
ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as
we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. The winter was not
over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the
baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could
refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the
geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low
perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its
folds; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty sun-tints
and faint transparencies. There was warmth and there was light, and a
view of the shutters of shops, and the church bells were ringing. Miss
Henning remarked that it was a ‘shime’ she couldn’t have a place to ask
a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such a
grind for your living, and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger
than a pill-box? She couldn’t, herself, abide waiting outside; she knew
something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose (the
time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!) and it always
made her feel quite miserable. It was something cruel. If she could
have what she liked she knew what she would have; and she hinted at a
mystic bower where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the
morning paper, or a nice view out of the window, or even a glass of
sherry—so that, in an adjacent apartment, she could dress without
getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.

“I don’t know how I _’ave_ pitched on my things,” she remarked,
presenting her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware that she had
put a small plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being
so fine, he had come to propose to her to take a walk with him, in the
manner of ancient times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park
and stroll beside the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it, if she
liked, and watch the lambkins, or feed the ducks, if she would put a
crust in her pocket. The prospect of paddling Miss Henning entirely
declined; she had no idea of wetting her flounces, and she left those
rough pleasures, especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young
woman. But she didn’t mind if she did go for a turn, though he didn’t
deserve any such favour, after the way he hadn’t been near her, if she
had died in her garret. She was not one that was to be dropped and
taken up at any man’s convenience—she didn’t keep one of those offices
for servants out of place. Millicent expressed the belief that if the
day had not been so lovely she would have sent Hyacinth about his
business; it was lucky for him that she was always forgiving such was
her sensitive, generous nature) when the sun was out. Only there was
one thing—she couldn’t abide making no difference for Sunday; it was
her personal habit to go to church, and she should have it on her
conscience if she gave it up for a lark. Hyacinth had already been
impressed, more than once, by the manner in which his blooming friend
stickled for the religious observance: of all the queer disparities of
her nature, her devotional turn struck him as perhaps the queerest. She
held her head erect through the longest and dullest sermon, and came
out of the place of worship with her fine face embellished by the
publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by the general secularity
of Hyacinth’s behaviour, especially taken in conjunction with his
general straightness, and was only consoled a little by the fact that
if he didn’t drink, or fight, or steal, at least he indulged in
unlimited wickedness of opinion—theories as bad as anything that people
got ten years for. Hyacinth had not yet revealed to her that his
theories had somehow lately come to be held with less tension; an
instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a grievance
which ministered so much to sociability. He had not reflected that she
would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if
her condemnation of his godlessness had been deprived of confirmatory
indications.

On the present occasion she let him know that she would go for a walk
with him if he would first accompany her to church; and it was in vain
he represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their
morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine, and in the
interval there would be no time left. She replied, with a toss of her
head, that she dined when she liked; besides on Sundays she had cold
fare—it was left out for her; an argument to which Hyacinth had to
assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete, thanks to
the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and explanation, in
which, in spite of great freedom of complaint, perpetual announcements
of intended change, impending promotion and high bids for her services
in other quarters, she had always enshrouded her private affairs.
Hyacinth walked by her side to the place of worship she preferred—her
choice was made apparently from a large experience; and as they went he
remarked that it was a good job he wasn’t married to her. Lord, how she
would bully him, how she would ‘squeeze’ him, in such a case! The worst
of it would be that—such was his amiable, peace-loving nature—he would
obey like a showman’s poodle. And pray, whom was a man to obey, asked
Millicent, if he was not to obey his wife? She sat up in her pew with a
majesty that carried out this idea; she seemed to answer, in her proper
person, for creeds and communions and sacraments; she was more than
devotional, she was almost pontifical. Hyacinth had never felt himself
under such distinguished protection; the Princess Casamassima came back
to him, in comparison, as a Bohemian, a shabby adventuress. He had come
to see her to-day not for the sake of her austerity (he had had too
gloomy a week for that), but for that of her genial side; yet now that
she treated him to the severer spectacle it struck him for the moment
as really grand sport—a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She
had her phases and caprices, like the Princess herself; and if they
were not the same as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent they proved
at least that she was as brave a woman. No one but a capital girl could
give herself such airs; she would have a consciousness of the large
reserve of pliancy required for making up for them. The Princess wished
to destroy society and Millicent wished to uphold it; and as Hyacinth,
by the side of his childhood’s friend, listened to practised intonings,
he was obliged to recognise the liberality of a fate which had
sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the best
opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the original and the
beauty of the conventional.

Fortunately, on this particular Sunday, there was no sermon
(fortunately, I mean, from the point of view of Hyacinth’s heretical
impatience), so that after the congregation dispersed there was still
plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our friends traversed that
barely-interrupted expanse of irrepressible herbage which stretches
from the Birdcage Walk to Hyde Park Corner, and took their way to
Kensington Gardens, beside the Serpentine. Once Millicent’s religious
exercises were over for the day (she as rigidly forbore to repeat them
in the afternoon as she made a point of the first service), once she
had lifted her voice in prayer and praise, she changed her _allure;_
moving to a different measure, uttering her sentiments in a high, free
manner, and not minding that it should be perceived that she had on her
very best gown and was out, if need be, for the day. She was mainly
engaged, for some time, in overhauling Hyacinth for his long absence,
demanding, as usual, some account of what he had been ‘up to’. He
listened to her philosophically, liking and enjoying her chaff, which
seemed to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and absolutely
declining to satisfy her. He remarked, as he had had occasion to do
before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had a
right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily;
and even the indignation with which she received this plea did not make
him feel that an _éclaircissement_ between them could be a serious
thing. There was nothing to explain and nothing to forgive; they were a
pair of very fallible individuals, united much more by their weaknesses
than by any consistency or fidelity that they might pretend to practise
toward each other. It was an old acquaintance—the oldest thing, to-day,
except Mr Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and strange as this
may appear, it inspired our young man with a kind of indulgent piety.
The probability that Millicent ‘kept company’ with other men had quite
ceased to torment his imagination; it was no longer necessary to his
happiness to be certain about it in order that he might dismiss her
from his mind. He could be as happy without it as with it, and he felt
a new modesty in regard to prying into her affairs. He was so little in
a position to be stern with her that her assumption that he recognised
a right on her own part to chide him seemed to him only a part of her
perpetual clumsiness—a clumsiness that was not soothing but was
nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of the things he liked her
for.

“If you have come to see me only to make jokes at my expense, you had
better have stayed away altogether,” she said, with dignity, as they
came out of the Green Park. “In the first place it’s rude, in the
second place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”

“My dear Millicent, the motions you go through, the resentment you
profess, are purely perfunctory,” her companion replied. “But it
doesn’t matter; go on—say anything you like. I came to see you for
recreation, for a little entertainment without effort of my own. I
scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you would make me laugh—I have
been so dismal for a long time. In fact, I am dismal still. I wish I
had your disposition! My mirth is feverish.”

“The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect me,”
Miss Henning announced. “You lead a bad life. I know what to think
about that,” she continued, irrelevantly.

“And is it out of respect for you that you wish me to lead a better
one? To-day, then, is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us get on
the grass,” Hyacinth continued; “it is innocent and pastoral to feel it
under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you; you understand
everything.”

“I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything you
hide,” the young woman returned, as the great central expanse of Hyde
Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before
them.

“Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean from this time
forth to cease to seek safety in concealment. You’ll know nothing about
me then, for it will be all under your nose.”

“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed,
surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields that extend
from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “What will you do when you’re
so bad you can’t go to the shop?” she added, with a sudden transition.
And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that, she said she
could see he _was_ in a fever; she hadn’t noticed it at first, because
he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was it something he
had caught in some of those back slums, where he went prying about with
his wicked ideas? It served him right for taking as little good into
such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine friends—a precious
lot _they_ were, that put it off on him to do all the nasty part!—would
they find the doctor, and the port wine, and the money, and all the
rest, when he was laid up—perhaps for months—through their putting such
rot into his head and his putting it into others that could carry it
even less? Millicent stopped on the grass, in the watery sunshine, and
bent on her companion an eye in which he perceived, freshly, an
awakened curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a pledge of substantial
comradeship. Suddenly she exclaimed, quitting the tone of exaggerated
derision which she had used a moment before, “You little rascal, you’ve
got something on your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?”

“My poor girl, your talk is a queer mixture,” Hyacinth murmured. “But
it may well be. It is not queerer than my life.”

“Well, I’m glad you admit that!” the young woman cried, walking on with
a flutter of her ribbons.

“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth continued. “Yes, you should see
me in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”

“You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t
believe that half the time you know what you do mean, yourself. I don’t
believe you even know, with all your thinking, what you do think.
That’s your disease.”

“It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,”
Hyacinth rejoined. “I mean to think no more—I mean to give it up. Avoid
it yourself, my dear Millicent—avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It
confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective
contemplation—let us live in the present hour.”

“I don’t care how I live, nor where I live,” said Millicent, “so long
as I can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut
it fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend
should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the
concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which
had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember
that day I came back to Lomax Place ever so long ago, and called on
poor dear Miss Pynsent (she couldn’t abide me; she didn’t like my
form), and waited till you came in, and went out for a walk with you,
and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you
weren’t satisfactory to me then, and that I consider myself remarkably
good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark.
You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything,
and you never told one nothing at all.”

“What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth inquired,
putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything you like.”

“I dare say you’ll tell me a lot of trash! Certainly, I tried
kindness,” Miss Henning declared.

“Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her companion, strolling along
with her in close association.

She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well,
then, has she—_has_ she chucked you over?”

Hyacinth turned his eyes away; he looked at the green expanse, misty
and sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem
larger; at the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of
Kensington Gardens; at a shining reach of the Serpentine on one side
and the far façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and
the privilege of their view, on the other. “Well, you know I rather
think so,” he replied, in a moment.

“Ah, the nasty brute!” cried Millicent, as they resumed their walk.

Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of
Kensington Gardens, those scattered over the slope which rises gently
from the side of the water most distant from the old red palace. They
had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed there for the
convenience of that part of the public for which a penny is not, as the
French say, an affair, and Millicent, of whom such speculations were
highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the
question whether the functionary charged with collecting the said penny
would omit to come and ask for his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy her
pleasures _gratis_, as well as to see others do so, and even that of
sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion as
she might feel that nothing would be paid for it. The man came round,
however, and after that her pleasure could only take the form of
sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This question had
been settled, and two or three others, of a much weightier kind, had
come up. At the moment we again participate in the conversation of the
pair Millicent was leaning forward, earnest and attentive, with her
hands clasped in her lap and her multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled
forward upon her wrists. Her face, with its parted lips and eyes
clouded to gentleness, wore an expression which Hyacinth had never seen
there before and which caused him to say to her, “After all, dear
Milly, you’re a good old fellow!”

“Why did you never tell me before—years ago?” she asked.

“It’s always soon enough to commit an imbecility! I don’t know why I
tell you to-day, sitting here in a charming place, in balmy air, amid
pleasing suggestions, without any reason or practical end. The story is
hideous, and I have held my tongue for so long! It would have been an
effort, an impossible effort, at any time, to do otherwise. Somehow,
to-day it hasn’t been an effort; and indeed I have spoken just
_because_ the air is sweet, and the place ornamental, and the day a
holiday, and your company exhilarating. All this has had the effect
that an object has if you plunge it into a cup of water—the water
overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very foul liquid
indeed. Excuse the bad odour!”

There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she
listened to what had gone before; it lingered there, and as a colour
heightened by emotion is never unbecoming to a handsome woman, it
enriched her exceptional expression. “I wouldn’t have been so rough
with you,” she presently remarked.

“My dear lass, _this_ isn’t rough!” her companion exclaimed.

“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own,
as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.

“Very likely. I’m a nervous little beast,” said Hyacinth.

“Any one would be nervous, to think of anything so awful. And when it’s
yourself!” And the girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a
contingency. “You require sympathy,” she added, in a tone that made
Hyacinth smile; the words sounded like a medical prescription.

“A tablespoonful every half-hour,” he rejoined, keeping her hand, which
she was about to draw away.

“You would have been nicer, too,” Millicent went on.

“How do you mean, I would have been nicer?”

“Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away
her hand, as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.

“It’s a pity I have always been so terribly under the influence of
women,” Hyacinth murmured, folding his arms.

He was surprised at the delicacy with which Millicent replied: “You
must remember that they have a great deal to make up to you.”

“Do you mean for my mother? Ah, _she_ would have made it up, if they
had let her! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he
continued. “It’s wonderful the kindness they have shown me, and the
amount of pleasure I have derived from their society.”

It would perhaps be inquiring too closely to consider whether this
reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from
her own bosom had an irritating effect on Millicent; at all events
after a moment’s silence she answered it by asking, “Does _she_
know—your trumpery Princess?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t mind it.”

“That’s most uncommonly kind of her!” cried the girl, with a scornful
laugh.

“It annoys me very much to hear you apply invidious epithets to her.
You know nothing about her.”

“How do you know what I know, please?” Millicent asked this question
with the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she
dropped her voice, as if she remembered that she was in the presence of
a great misfortune. “Hasn’t she treated you most shamefully, and you
such a regular dear?”

“Not in the least. It is I that, as you may say, have rounded on her.
She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as
she was. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some
reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent, and I have been
fickle.”

“Your interest has declined, in the Princess?” Millicent questioned,
following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.

“Oh dear, no. I mean only in some views that I used to have.”

“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good
job!” Miss Henning exclaimed, with an indulgent laugh, as if, after
all, Hyacinth’s views and the changes in his views were not what was
most important. “And your grand lady still holds for the
costermongers?”

“She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery; she
wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her
means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to
be done, and of the courage and devotion of those that set themselves
to do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples
I’m a very poor creature.”

“You _are_ a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on
yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself,
I promise you I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t chucked you over why
in the name of common sense did you say just now that she has? And why
is your dear old face as white as my stocking?”

Hyacinth looked at her awhile without answering, as if he took a placid
pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”

She put out her hand and took possession of his own; for a minute she
held it, as if she wished to check herself, finding some influence in
his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the
ornamental water and the landscape-gardening beyond, which was
reflected in it; until Millicent turned her eyes again upon her
companion and remarked, “Well, that’s the way I’d have served him too!”

It took him a moment to perceive that she was alluding to the vengeance
wrought upon Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again
hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”

“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on.

“A queer variety, _cara mia_,” her companion rejoined, not very
candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this
point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s incurable indiscretions.
They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now.
It’s time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking
up.”

“Oh, it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”

“Pray, what did I ever say, in those days?”

“It wasn’t what you said,” Millicent answered, with refinement. “I
guessed the whole business—except, of course, what she got her time
for, and you being taken to that death-bed—that day I came back to the
Place. Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it
up at you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say
now is no more than I thought then; it only makes you nicer.”

She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of unskillful
exaggeration, for he himself honestly could not understand how the
situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty
of affection that was in her rose, as it were, to the surface, it
diffused a sense of rest, almost of protection, deepening, at any rate,
the luxury of the balmy holiday, the interlude in the grind of the
week’s work; so that, though neither of them had dined, Hyacinth would
have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It
seemed a pause in something bitter that was happening to him, making it
stop awhile or pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about
that with a pertinacity of which they themselves were weary; but they
regarded it now with a kind of wounded indifference. It would be too
much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a
compensation, but it seemed at least a resource. She too, evidently,
was highly content; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She
interrogated him about his father’s family, and whether they were going
to let him go on like that always, without ever holding out so much as
a little finger to him; and she declared, in a manner that was meant to
gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of
the turn made him smile, that if she were one of them she couldn’t
‘abear’ the thought of a relation of hers being in such a poor way.
Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old
Crookenden’s and of the feebleness of a young man of his parts
contenting himself with a career which was after all a mere getting of
one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books; but so had any
shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers;
and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practised
differed from that of a plumber, a glazier. He had not forgotten the
shock he once administered to her by letting her know that he wore an
apron; she looked down on such conditions from the summit of her own
intellectual profession, for _she_ wore mantles and jackets and shawls,
and the long trains of robes exhibited in the window on dummies of wire
and taken down to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had
never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about
them and showing them off, and persuading people of their beauty and
cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her
arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands.
Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by
asking her what those people owed to the son of a person who had
brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether
she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question made
her reflect for a moment; after which she returned, with the finest
spirit, “Well, if your position was so miserable, ain’t that all the
more reason they should give you a lift? Oh, it’s something cruel!” she
cried; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to
bring herself under their notice. _She_ wouldn’t have drudged out her
life in Soho if she had had gentlefolks’ blood in her veins! “If they
had noticed you they would have liked you,” she was so good as to
observe; but she immediately remembered, also, that in that case he
would have been carried away quite over her head. She was not prepared
to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever
got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and
she emphasised the ‘real’ by way of a thrust at the fine lady of
Madeira Crescent—an artifice which was wasted, however, inasmuch as
Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed
history of the personage in question. Millicent was tender and tenderly
sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really
made little impression upon her; she accounted it an accident much less
grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and
moved; but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful
revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail, with
the later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things
produced a generous agitation—something the same in kind as the
impressions she had occasionally derived from the perusal of the
_Family Herald_. What affected her most, and what she came back to, was
the whole element of Lord Frederick and the misery of Hyacinth’s having
got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She
couldn’t get over his friends not having done something, though her
imagination was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the
queerest thing in the world, to Hyacinth, to find her apparently
assuming that if he had not been so inefficient he might have ‘worked’
the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory. _She_
wouldn’t have been a nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh, the left hand
was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, didn’t
care for that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put
her out of patience, and there was a strange candour in her wonderment
at his not having bragged about his grand relations. They had become
vivid and concrete to her now, in comparison with the timid shadows
that Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about
in the hushed past of her companion with the oddest mixture of sympathy
and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane
voices holloaing for echoes.

“Me only—me and her? Certainly, I ought to be obliged, even though it
is late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told
her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have
worse to tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak
the truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend
in the chemical line?”

“No, we have never talked about it.”

“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as
mentioned it?”

“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his
sister.”

“How do you know that, if he never spoke?”

“Oh, because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And
how did his sister know it?”

“Oh, I don’t know; she guessed it.”

Millicent stared. “It was none of her business.” Then she added, “He
_was_ jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?” She asked this
question in her loud, free voice, which rang through the bright
stillness of the place.

Hyacinth delayed for a minute to answer her, and when at last he did so
it was without looking at her: “I don’t know; I can’t make it out.”

“Well, I can, then!” And Millicent jerked him round toward her and
inspected him with her big bright eyes. “You silly baby, has _he_ been
serving you?” She pressed her question upon him; she asked if that was
what disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently,
after an instant, she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to
her ladyship—is that his game?” she broke out. “Do you mean to say
she’d look at the likes of him?”

“The likes of him? He’s as fine a man as stands!” said Hyacinth. “They
have the same views, they are doing the same work.”

“Oh, he hasn’t changed _his_ opinions, then—not like you?”

“No, he knows what he wants; he knows what he thinks.”

“Very much the same work, I’ll be bound!” cried Millicent, in large
derision. “He knows what he wants, and I dare say he’ll get it.”

Hyacinth got up, turning away from her; but she also rose, and passed
her hand into his arm. “It’s their own business; they can do as they
please.”

“Oh, don’t try to be a saint; you put me out of patience!” the girl
responded, with characteristic energy. “They’re a precious pair, and it
would do me good to hear you say so.”

“A man shouldn’t turn against his friends,” Hyacinth went on, with
desperate sententiousness.

“That’s for them to remember; there’s no danger of _your_ forgetting
it.” They had begun to walk, but she stopped him; she was suddenly
smiling at him, and her face was radiant. She went on, with caressing
inconsequence: “All that you have told me—it _has_ made you nicer.”

“I don’t see that, but it has certainly made you so. My dear girl,
you’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added, as they strolled on again.




XLII


He had no intention of going in the evening to Madeira Crescent, and
that is why he asked his companion, before they separated, if he might
not see her again, after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now, and
he feared them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element;
it had visions for him that passed even before his closed eyes—sharp
doubts and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of
suffering. He wanted company, to light up his gloom, and this had
driven him back to Millicent, in a manner not altogether consistent
with the respect which it was still his theory that he owed to his
nobler part. He felt no longer free to drop in at the Crescent, and
tried to persuade himself, in case his mistrust should be overdone,
that his reasons were reasons of magnanimity. If Paul Muniment were
seriously occupied with the Princess, if they had work in hand for
which their most earnest attention was required (and Sunday was very
likely to be the day they would take: they had spent so much of the
previous Sunday together), it would be delicate on his part to stay
away, to leave his friend a clear field. There was something
inexpressibly representative to him in the way that friend had abruptly
decided to re-enter the house, after pausing outside with its mistress,
at the moment he himself stood peering through the fog with the Prince.
The movement repeated itself innumerable times, to his moral
perception, suggesting to him things that he couldn’t bear to learn.
Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous, even after he had become so, and
to prove to himself that he was not he had gone to see the Princess one
evening in the middle of the week. Hadn’t he wanted Paul to know her,
months and months before, and now was he to entertain a vile feeling at
the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested, in each party to
it, upon aspirations that he respected? The Princess had not been at
home, and he had turned away from the door without asking for Madame
Grandoni; he had not forgotten that on the occasion of his previous
visit she had excused herself from remaining in the drawing-room. After
the little maid in the Crescent had told him the Princess was out he
walked away with a quick curiosity—a curiosity which, if he had
listened to it, would have led him to mount upon the first omnibus that
travelled in the direction of Camberwell. Was Paul Muniment, who was
such a rare one, in general, for stopping at home of an evening—was he
also out, and would Rosy, in this case, be in the humour to mention
(for of course she would know) where he had gone? Hyacinth let the
omnibus pass, for he suddenly became aware, with a throb of horror,
that he was in danger of playing the spy. He had not been near Muniment
since, on purpose to leave his curiosity unsatisfied. He allowed
himself however to notice that the Princess had now not written him a
word of consolation, as she had been so kind as to do once or twice
before when he had knocked at her door without finding her. At present
he had missed her twice in succession, and yet she had given no sign of
regret—regret even on his own behalf. This determined him to stay away
awhile longer; it was such a proof that she was absorbingly occupied.
Hyacinth’s glimpse of the Princess in earnest conversation with
Muniment as they returned from the excursion described by the Prince,
his memory of Paul’s relenting figure crossing the threshold once more,
could leave him no doubt as to the degree of that absorption.

Millicent hesitated when Hyacinth proposed to her that they should
finish the day together. She smiled, and her splendid eyes rested on
his with an air of indulgent interrogation; they seemed to ask whether
it were worth her while, in face of his probable incredulity, to
mention the _real_ reason why she could not have the pleasure of
acceding to his delightful suggestion. Since he would be sure to deride
her explanation, would not some trumped-up excuse do as well, since he
could knock that about without hurting her? I know not exactly in what
sense Miss Henning decided; but she confessed at last that there _was_
an odious obstacle to their meeting again later—a promise she had made
to go and see a young lady, the forewoman of her department, who was
kept in-doors with a bad face, and nothing in life to help her pass the
time. She was under a pledge to spend the evening with her, and it was
not her way to disappoint an expectation. Hyacinth made no comment on
this speech; he received it in silence, looking at the girl gloomily.

“I know what’s passing in your mind!” Millicent suddenly broke out.
“Why don’t you say it at once, and give me a chance to contradict it? I
oughtn’t to care, but I do care!”

“Stop, stop—don’t let us fight!” Hyacinth spoke in a tone of pleading
weariness; she had never heard just that accent before.

Millicent considered a moment. “I’ve a mind to play her false. She is a
real lady, highly connected, and the best friend I have—I don’t count
men,” the girl interpolated, smiling—“and there isn’t one in the world
I’d do such a thing for but you.”

“No, keep your promise; don’t play any one false,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, you _are_ a gentleman!” Miss Henning murmured, with a sweetness
that her voice occasionally took.

“Especially—” Hyacinth began; but he suddenly stopped.

“Especially what? Something impudent, I’ll engage! Especially as you
don’t believe me?”

“Oh, no! Don’t let’s fight!” he repeated.

“Fight, my darling? I’d fight _for_ you!” Miss Henning declared.

Hyacinth offered himself, after tea, the choice between a visit to Lady
Aurora and a pilgrimage to Lisson Grove. He was in a little doubt about
the former experiment, having an idea that her ladyship’s family might
have returned to Belgrave Square. He reflected, however, that he could
not recognise that as a reason for not going to see her; his relations
with her were not clandestine, and she had given him the kindest
general invitation. If her august progenitors were at home she was
probably at dinner with them; he would take that risk. He had taken it
before, without disastrous results. He was determined not to spend the
evening alone, and he would keep the Poupins as a more substantial
alternative, in case her ladyship should not be able to receive him.

As soon as the great portal in Belgrave Square was drawn open before
him, he perceived that the house was occupied and animated—if the
latter term might properly be applied to a place which had hitherto
given Hyacinth the impression of a magnificent mausoleum. It was
pervaded by subdued light and tall domestics; Hyacinth found himself
looking down a kind of colonnade of colossal footmen, an array more
imposing even than the retinue of the Princess at Medley. His inquiry
died away on his lips, and he stood there struggling with dumbness. It
was manifest to him that some high festival was taking place, at which
his presence could only be deeply irrelevant; and when a large
official, out of livery, bending over him for a voice that faltered,
suggested, not unencouragingly, that it might be Lady Aurora he wished
to see, he replied in a low, melancholy accent, “Yes, yes, but it can’t
be possible!” The butler took no pains to controvert this proposition
verbally; he merely turned round, with a majestic air of leading the
way, and as at the same moment two of the footmen closed the wings of
the door behind the visitor, Hyacinth judged that it was his cue to
follow him. In this manner, after traversing a passage where, in the
perfect silence of the servants, he heard the shorter click of his
plebeian shoes upon a marble floor, he found himself ushered into a
small apartment, lighted by a veiled lamp, which, when he had been left
there alone, without further remark on the part of his conductor, he
recognised as the scene—only now more amply decorated—of one of his
former interviews. Lady Aurora kept him waiting a few moments, and then
fluttered in with an anxious, incoherent apology. The same
transformation had taken place in her own appearance as in the aspect
of her parental halls: she had on a light-coloured, crumpled-looking,
faintly-rustling dress; her head was adorned with a kind of languid
plume, terminating in little pink tips; and in her hand she carried a
pair of white gloves. All her repressed eagerness was in her face, and
she smiled as if she wished to anticipate any scruples or
embarrassments on the part of her visitor; frankly recognising the
brilliancy of her attire and the startling implications it might
convey. Hyacinth said to her that, no doubt, on perceiving her family
had returned to town, he ought to have backed out; he knew that must
make a difference in her life. But he had been marched in, in spite of
himself, and now it was clear that he had interrupted her at dinner.
She answered that no one who asked for her at any hour was ever turned
away; she had managed to arrange that, and she was very happy in her
success. She didn’t usually dine—there were so many of them, and it
took so long. Most of her friends couldn’t come at visiting-hours, and
it wouldn’t be right that she shouldn’t ever receive them. On that
occasion she _had_ been dining, but it was all over; she was only
sitting there because she was going to a party. Her parents were dining
out, and she was just in the drawing-room with some of her sisters.
When they were alone it wasn’t so long, though it was rather long
afterwards, when they went up again. It wasn’t time yet: the carriage
wouldn’t come for nearly half an hour. She hadn’t been to an evening
thing for months and months, but—didn’t he know?—one sometimes had to
do it. Lady Aurora expressed the idea that one ought to be fair all
round and that one’s duties were not all of the same species; some of
them would come up from time to time that were quite different from the
others. Of course it wasn’t just, unless one did all, and that was why
she was in for something to-night. It was nothing of consequence; only
the family meeting the family, as they might do of a Sunday, at one of
their houses. It was there that papa and mamma were dining. Since they
had given her that room for any hour she wanted (it was really
tremendously convenient), she had determined to do a party now and
then, like a respectable young woman, because it pleased them—though
why it should, to see _her_ at a place, was more than she could
imagine. She supposed it was because it would perhaps keep some people,
a little, from thinking she was mad and not safe to be at large—which
was of course a sort of thing that people didn’t like to have thought
of their belongings. Lady Aurora explained and expatiated with a kind
of nervous superabundance; she talked more continuously than Hyacinth
had ever heard her do before, and the young man saw that she was not in
her natural equilibrium. He thought it scarcely probable that she was
excited by the simple prospect of again dipping into the great world
she had forsworn, and he presently perceived that he himself had an
agitating effect upon her. His senses were fine enough to make him feel
that he revived certain associations and quickened certain wounds. She
suddenly stopped talking, and the two sat there looking at each other,
in a kind of occult community of suffering. Hyacinth made several
mechanical remarks, explaining, insufficiently, why he had come, and in
the course of a very few moments, quite independently of these
observations, it seemed to him that there was a deeper, a measurelessly
deep, confidence between them. A tacit confession passed and repassed,
and each understood the situation of the other. They wouldn’t speak of
it—it was very definite that they would never do that; for there was
something in their common consciousness that was inconsistent with the
grossness of accusation. Besides, the grievance of each was an
apprehension, an instinct of the soul—not a sharp, definite wrong,
supported by proof. It was in the air and in their restless pulses, and
not in anything that they could exhibit or complain of. Strange enough
it seemed to Hyacinth that the history of each should be the
counterpart of that of the other. What had each done but lose that
which he or she had never had? Things had gone ill with them; but even
if they had gone well, if the Princess had not combined with his friend
in that manner which made his heart sink and produced an effect exactly
corresponding upon that of Lady Aurora—even in this case what would
prosperity, what would success, have amounted to? They would have been
very barren. He was sure the singular creature before him would never
have had a chance to take the unprecedented social step for the sake of
which she was ready to go forth from Belgrave Square for ever; Hyacinth
had judged the smallness of Paul Muniment’s appetite for that
complication sufficiently to have begun really to pity her ladyship
long ago. And now, even when he most felt the sweetness of her
sympathy, he might wonder what she could have imagined for him in the
event of his not having been supplanted—what security, what completer
promotion, what honourable, satisfying sequel. They were unhappy
because they were unhappy, and they were right not to rail about that.

“Oh, I like to see you—I like to talk with you,” said Lady Aurora,
simply. They talked for a quarter of an hour, and he made her such a
visit as any gentleman might have made to any lady. They exchanged
remarks about the lateness of the spring, about the loan-exhibition at
Burlington House—which Hyacinth had paid his shilling to see—about the
question of opening the museums on Sunday, about the danger of too much
coddling legislation on behalf of the working-classes. He declared that
it gave him great pleasure to see any sign of her amusing herself; it
was unnatural never to do that, and he hoped that now she had taken a
turn she would keep it up. At this she looked down, smiling, at her
frugal finery, and then she replied, “I dare say I shall begin to go to
balls—who knows?”

“That’s what our friends in Audley Court think, you know—that it’s the
worst mistake you can make, not to drink deep of the cup while you have
it.”

“Oh, I’ll do it, then—I’ll do it for them!” Lady Aurora exclaimed. “I
dare say that, as regards all that, I haven’t listened to them enough.”
This was the only allusion that passed on the subject of the Muniments.

Hyacinth got up—he had stayed long enough, as she was going out; and as
he held out his hand to her she seemed to him a heroine. She would try
to cultivate the pleasures of her class if the brother and sister in
Camberwell thought it right—try even to be a woman of fashion in order
to console herself. Paul Muniment didn’t care for her, but she was
capable of considering that it might be her duty to regulate her life
by the very advice that made an abyss between them. Hyacinth didn’t
believe in the success of this attempt; there passed before his
imagination a picture of the poor lady coming home and pulling off her
feathers for ever, after an evening spent in watching the agitation of
a ball-room from the outer edge of the circle, with a white,
irresponsive face. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” he
said, laughing.

“Oh, I don’t mind dying.”

“I think I do,” Hyacinth declared, as he turned away. There had been no
mention whatever of the Princess.

It was early enough in the evening for him to risk a visit to Lisson
Grove; he calculated that the Poupins would still be sitting up. When
he reached their house he found this calculation justified; the
brilliancy of the light in the window appeared to announce that Madame
was holding a salon. He ascended to this apartment without delay (it
was free to a visitor to open the house-door himself), and, having
knocked, obeyed the hostess’s invitation to enter. Poupin and his wife
were seated, with a third person, at a table in the middle of the room,
round a staring kerosene lamp adorned with a globe of clear glass, of
which the transparency was mitigated only by a circular pattern of
bunches of grapes. The third person was his friend Schinkel, who had
been a member of the little party that waited upon Hoffendahl. No one
said anything as Hyacinth came in; but in their silence the three
others got up, looking at him, as he thought, rather strangely.




BOOK SIXTH




XLIII


“My child, you are always welcome,” said Eustache Poupin, taking
Hyacinth’s hand in both his own and holding it for some moments. An
impression had come to our young man, immediately, that they were
talking about him before he appeared and that they would rather have
been left to talk at their ease. He even thought he saw in Poupin’s
face the kind of consciousness that comes from detection, or at least
interruption, in a nefarious act. With Poupin, however, it was
difficult to tell; he always looked so heated and exalted, so like a
conspirator defying the approach of justice. Hyacinth contemplated the
others: they were standing as if they had shuffled something on the
table out of sight, as if they had been engaged in the manufacture of
counterfeit coin. Poupin kept hold of his hand; the Frenchman’s ardent
eyes, fixed, unwinking, always expressive of the greatness of the
occasion, whatever the occasion was, had never seemed to him to
protrude so far from his head. “Ah, my dear friend, _nous causions
justement de vous_,” Eustache remarked, as if this were a very
extraordinary fact.

“Oh, _nous causions—nous causions!_” his wife exclaimed, as if to
deprecate an indiscreet exaggeration. “One may mention a friend, I
suppose, in the way of conversation, without taking such a liberty.”

“A cat may look at a king, as your English proverb says,” added
Schinkel, jocosely. He smiled so hard at his own pleasantry that his
eyes closed up and vanished—an effect which Hyacinth, who had observed
it before, thought particularly unbecoming to him, appearing as it did
to administer the last perfection to his ugliness. He would have
consulted his interests by cultivating immobility of feature.

“Oh, a king, a king!” murmured Poupin, shaking his head up and down.
“That’s what it’s not good to be, _au point où nous en sommes_.”

“I just came in to wish you good-night,” said Hyacinth. “I’m afraid
it’s rather late for a call, though Schinkel is here.”

“It’s always too late, my very dear, when you come,” the Frenchman
rejoined. “You know if you have a place at our fireside.”

“I esteem it too much to disturb it,” said Hyacinth, smiling and
looking round at the three.

“We can easily sit down again; we are a comfortable party. Put yourself
beside me.” And the Frenchman drew a chair close to the one, at the
table, that he had just quitted.

“He has had a long walk, he is tired—he will certainly accept a little
glass,” Madame Poupin announced with decision, moving toward the tray
containing the small gilded _liqueur_ service.

“We will each accept one, _ma bonne;_ it is a very good occasion for a
drop of _fine_,” her husband interposed, while Hyacinth seated himself
in the chair his host had designated. Schinkel resumed his place, which
was opposite; he looked across at Hyacinth without speaking, but his
long face continued to flatten itself into a representation of mirth.
He had on a green coat, which Hyacinth had seen before; it was a
garment of ceremony, such as our young man judged it would have been
impossible to procure in London or in any modern time. It was eminently
German and of high antiquity, and had a tall, stiff, clumsy collar,
which came up to the wearer’s ears and almost concealed his perpetual
bandage. When Hyacinth had sat down Eustache Poupin did not take
possession of his own chair, but stood beside him, resting his hand on
his head. At that touch something came over Hyacinth, and his heart
sprang into his throat. The idea that occurred to him, conveyed in
Poupin’s whole manner as well as in the reassuring intention of that
caress and in his wife’s uneasy, instant offer of refreshment,
explained the embarrassment of the circle and reminded our young man of
the engagement he had taken with himself to exhibit an extraordinary
quietness when a certain crisis in his life should have arrived. It
seemed to him that this crisis was in the air, very near—that he should
touch it if he made another movement; the pressure of the Frenchman’s
hand, which was meant as a solvent, only operated as a warning. As he
looked across at Schinkel he felt dizzy and a little sick; for a
moment, to his senses, the room whirled round. His resolution to be
quiet appeared only too easy to keep; he couldn’t break it even to the
extent of speaking. He knew that his voice would tremble, and that is
why he made no answer to Schinkel’s rather honeyed words, uttered after
an hesitation: “_Also_, my dear Robinson, have you passed your Sunday
well—have you had an ’appy day?” Why was every one so endearing? His
eyes questioned the table, but encountered nothing but its well-wiped
surface, polished for so many years by the gustatory elbows of the
Frenchman and his wife, and the lady’s dirty pack of cards for
‘patience’ (she had apparently been engaged in this exercise when
Schinkel came in), which indeed gave a little the impression of
gamblers surprised, who might have shuffled away the stakes. Madame
Poupin, who had dived into a cupboard, came back with a bottle of green
chartreuse, an apparition which led the German to exclaim, “_Lieber
Gott_, you Vrench, you Vrench, how well you manage! What would you have
more?”

The hostess distributed the liquor, but Hyacinth was scarcely able to
swallow it, though it was highly appreciated by his companions. His
indifference to this luxury excited much discussion and conjecture, the
others bandying theories and contradictions, and even ineffectual
jokes, about him, over his head, with a volubility which seemed to him
unnatural. Poupin and Schinkel professed the belief that there must be
something very curious the matter with a man who couldn’t smack his
lips over a drop of that tap; he must either be in love or have some
still more insidious complaint. It was true that Hyacinth was always in
love—that was no secret to his friends—and it had never been observed
to stop his thirst. The Frenchwoman poured scorn on this view of the
case, declaring that the effect of the tender passion was to make one
enjoy one’s victual (when everything went straight, _bien entendu;_ and
how could an ear be deaf to the whisperings of such a dear little
_bonhomme_ as Hyacinth?), in proof of which she deposed that she had
never eaten and drunk with such relish as at the time—oh, it was far
away now—when she had a soft spot in her heart for her rascal of a
husband. For Madame Poupin to allude to her husband as a rascal
indicated a high degree of conviviality. Hyacinth sat staring at the
empty table with the feeling that he was, somehow, a detached,
irresponsible witness of the evolution of his fate. Finally he looked
up and said to his friends, collectively, “What on earth’s the matter
with you all?” And he followed this inquiry by an invitation that they
should tell him what it was they had been saying about him, since they
admitted that he had been the subject of their conversation. Madame
Poupin answered for them that they had simply been saying how much they
loved him, but that they wouldn’t love him any more if he became
suspicious and _grincheux_. She had been telling Mr Schinkel’s fortune
on the cards, and she would tell Hyacinth’s if he liked. There was
nothing much for Mr Schinkel, only that he would find something, some
day, that he had lost, but would probably lose it again, and serve him
right if he did! He objected that he had never had anything to lose,
and never expected to have; but that was a vain remark, inasmuch as the
time was fast coming when every one would have something—though indeed
it was to be hoped that he would keep it when he had got it. Eustache
rebuked his wife for her levity, reminded her that their young friend
cared nothing for old women’s tricks, and said he was sure Hyacinth had
come to talk over a very different matter—the question (he was so good
as to take an interest in it, as he had done in everything that related
to them) of the terms which M. Poupin might owe it to himself, to his
dignity, to a just though not exaggerated sentiment of his value, to
make in accepting Mr Crookenden’s offer of the foremanship of the
establishment in Soho; an offer not yet formally enunciated but visibly
in the air and destined—it would seem, at least—to arrive within a day
or two. The old foreman was going to set up for himself. The Frenchman
intimated that before accepting any such proposal he must have the most
substantial guarantees. “_Il me faudrait des conditions
très-particulières_.” It was singular to Hyacinth to hear M. Poupin
talk so comfortably about these high contingencies, the chasm by which
he himself was divided from the future having suddenly doubled its
width. His host and hostess sat down on either side of him, and Poupin
gave a sketch, in somewhat sombre tints, of the situation in Soho,
enumerating certain elements of decomposition which he perceived to be
at work there and which he would not undertake to deal with unless he
should be given a completely free hand. Did Schinkel understand, and
was that what Schinkel was grinning at? Did Schinkel understand that
poor Eustache was the victim of an absurd hallucination and that there
was not the smallest chance of his being invited to assume a
lieutenancy? He had less capacity for tackling the British workman
to-day than when he began to rub shoulders with him, and Mr Crookenden
had never in his life made a mistake, at least in the use of his tools.
Hyacinth’s responses were few and mechanical, and he presently ceased
to try to look as if he were entering into the Frenchman’s ideas.

“You have some news—you have some news about me,” he remarked,
abruptly, to Schinkel. “You don’t like it, you don’t like to have to
give it to me, and you came to ask our friends here whether they
wouldn’t help you out with it. But I don’t think they will assist you
particularly, poor dears! Why do you mind? You oughtn’t to mind more
than I do. That isn’t the way.”

“_Qu’est-ce qu’il dit—qu’est-ce qu’il dit, le pauvre chéri?_” Madame
Poupin demanded, eagerly; while Schinkel looked very hard at her
husband, as if to ask for direction.

“My dear child, _vous vous faites des idées!_” the latter exclaimed,
laying his hand on him remonstrantly.

But Hyacinth pushed away his chair and got up. “If you have anything to
tell me, it is cruel of you to let me see it, as you have done, and yet
not to satisfy me.”

“Why should I have anything to tell you?” Schinkel asked.

“I don’t know that, but I believe you have. I perceive things, I guess
things, quickly. That’s my nature at all times, and I do it much more
now.”

“You do it indeed; it is very wonderful,” said Schinkel.

“Mr Schinkel, will you do me the pleasure to go away—I don’t care
where—out of this house?” Madame Poupin broke out, in French.

“Yes, that will be the best thing, and I will go with you,” said
Hyacinth.

“If you would retire, my child, I think it would be a service that you
would render us,” Poupin returned, appealing to his young friend.
“Won’t you do us the justice to believe that you may leave your
interests in our hands?”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment; it was now perfectly clear to him that
Schinkel had some sort of message for him, and his curiosity as to what
it might be had become nearly intolerable. “I am surprised at your
weakness,” he observed, as sternly as he could manage it, to Poupin.

The Frenchman stared at him an instant, and then fell on his neck. “You
are sublime, my young friend—you are sublime!”

“Will you be so good as to tell me what you are going to do with that
young man?” demanded Madame Poupin, glaring at Schinkel.

“It’s none of your business, my poor lady,” Hyacinth replied,
disengaging himself from her husband. “Schinkel, I wish you would walk
away with me.”

“_Calmons-nous, entendons-nous, expliquons-nous!_ The situation is very
simple,” Poupin went on.

“I will go with you, if it will give you pleasure,” said Schinkel, very
obligingly, to Hyacinth.

“Then you will give me that letter first!” Madame Poupin, erecting
herself, declared to the German.

“My wife, you are an imbecile!” Poupin groaned, lifting his hands and
shoulders and turning away.

“I may be an imbecile, but I won’t be a party—no, God help me, not to
that!” protested the Frenchwoman, planted before Schinkel as if to
prevent his moving.

“If you have a letter for me, you ought to give it to me,” said
Hyacinth to Schinkel. “You have no right to give it to any one else.”

“I will bring it to you in your house, my good friend,” Schinkel
replied, with a little wink that seemed to say that Madame Poupin would
have to be considered.

“Oh, in his house—I’ll go to his house!” cried the lady. “I regard you,
I have always regarded you, as my child,” she declared to Hyacinth,
“and if this isn’t an occasion for a mother!”

“It’s you that are making it an occasion. I don’t know what you are
talking about,” said Hyacinth. He had been questioning Schinkel’s eye,
and he thought he saw there a little twinkle of assurance that he might
really depend upon him. “I have disturbed you, and I think I had better
go away.”

Poupin had turned round again; he seized the young man’s arm eagerly,
as if to prevent his retiring before he had given a certain
satisfaction. “How can you care, when you know everything is changed?”

“What do you mean—everything is changed?”

“Your opinions, your sympathies, your whole attitude. I don’t approve
of it—_je le constate_. You have withdrawn your confidence from the
people; you have said things in this spot, where you stand now, that
have given pain to my wife and me.”

“If we didn’t love you, we should say that you had betrayed us!” cried
Madame Poupin, quickly, taking her husband’s idea.

“Oh, I shall never betray you,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

“You will never betray us—of course you think so. But you have no right
to act for the people when you have ceased to believe in the people.
_Il faut être conséquent, nom de Dieu!_” Poupin went on.

“You will give up all thoughts of acting for me—_je ne permets pas
ça!_” exclaimed his wife.

“It is probably not of importance—only a little fraternal greeting,”
Schinkel suggested, soothingly.

“We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you!” shouted Poupin, more
and more excited.

“My poor friends, it is you who have broken down, not I,” said
Hyacinth. “I am much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the
inconsequence is yours. At all events, good-night.”

He turned away from them, and was leaving the room, when Madame Poupin
threw herself upon him, as her husband had done a moment before, but in
silence and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being
stout and powerful she quickly got the better of him, and pressed him
to her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” said Hyacinth, as soon as he
could speak. “It’s for me to judge of my convictions.”

“We want you to do nothing, because we _know_ you have changed,” Poupin
replied. “Doesn’t it stick out of you, in every glance of your eye and
every breath of your lips? It’s only for that, because that alters
everything.”

“Does it alter my engagement? There are some things in which one can’t
change. I didn’t promise to believe; I promised to obey.”

“We want you to be sincere—that is the great thing,” said Poupin,
edifyingly. “I will go to see them—I will make them understand.”

“Ah, you should have done that before!” Madame Poupin groaned.

“I don’t know whom you are talking about, but I will allow no one to
meddle in my affairs.” Hyacinth spoke with sudden vehemence; the scene
was cruel to his nerves, which were not in a condition to bear it.

“When it is Hoffendahl, it is no good to meddle,” Schinkel remarked,
smiling.

“And pray, who is Hoffendahl, and what authority has he got?” demanded
Madame Poupin, who had caught his meaning. “Who has put him over us
all, and is there nothing to do but to lie down in the dust before him?
Let him attend to his little affairs himself, and not put them off on
innocent children, no matter whether they are with us or against us.”

This protest went so far that, evidently, Poupin felt a little ashamed
of his wife. “He has no authority but what we give him; but you know
that we respect him, that he is one of the pure, _ma bonne_. Hyacinth
can do exactly as he likes; he knows that as well as we do. He knows
there is not a feather’s weight of compulsion; he knows that, for my
part, I long since ceased to expect anything from him.”

“Certainly, there is no compulsion,” said Schinkel. “It’s to take or to
leave. Only _they_ keep the books.”

Hyacinth stood there before the three, with his eyes on the floor. “Of
course I can do as I like, and what I like is what I _shall_ do.
Besides, what are we talking about, with such sudden passion?” he
asked, looking up. “I have no summons, I have no sign. When the call
reaches me, it will be time to discuss it. Let it come or not come:
it’s not my affair.”

“Certainly, it is not your affair,” said Schinkel.

“I can’t think why M. Paul has never done anything, all this time,
knowing that everything is different now!” Madame Poupin exclaimed.

“Yes, my dear boy, I don’t understand our friend,” her husband
remarked, watching Hyacinth with suspicious, contentious eyes.

“It’s none of his business, any more than ours; it’s none of any one’s
business!” Schinkel declared.

“Muniment walks straight; the best thing you can do is to imitate him,”
said Hyacinth, trying to pass Poupin, who had placed himself before the
door.

“Promise me only this—not to do anything till I have seen you first,”
the Frenchman begged, almost piteously.

“My poor old friend, you are very weak.” And Hyacinth opened the door,
in spite of him, and passed out.

“Ah, well, if you _are_ with us, that’s all I want to know!” the young
man heard him say, behind him, at the top of the stairs, in a different
voice, a tone of sudden, exaggerated fortitude.




XLIV


Hyacinth hurried down and got out of the house, but he had not the
least intention of losing sight of Schinkel. The odd behaviour of the
Poupins was a surprise and annoyance, and he had wished to shake
himself free from it. He was candidly astonished at the alarm they were
so good as to feel for him, for he had never perceived that they had
gone round to the hope that the note he had signed (as it were) to
Hoffendahl would not be presented. What had he said, what had he done,
after all, to give them the right to fasten on him the charge of
apostasy? He had always been a free critic of everything, and it was
natural that, on certain occasions, in the little parlour in Lisson
Grove, he should have spoken in accordance with that freedom; but it
was only with the Princess that he had permitted himself really to rail
at the democracy and given the full measure of his scepticism. He would
have thought it indelicate to express contempt for the opinions of his
old foreign friends, to whom associations that made them venerable were
attached; and, moreover, for Hyacinth, a change of heart was, in the
nature of things, much more an occasion for a hush of publicity and a
kind of retrospective reserve; it couldn’t prompt one to aggression or
jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what could be said on
the opposite side one didn’t want to boast of one’s sharpness—not even
when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked like the ghosts of
the old.

Hyacinth lingered in the street, a certain distance from the house,
watching for Schinkel’s exit and prepared to remain there if necessary
till the dawn of another day. He had said to his friends, just before,
that the manner in which the communication they looked so askance at
should reach him was none of his business—it might reach him as it
could. This was true enough in theory, but in fact his desire was
overwhelming to know what Madame Poupin had meant by her allusion to a
letter, destined for him, in Schinkel’s possession—an allusion
confirmed by Schinkel’s own virtual acknowledgment. It was indeed this
eagerness that had driven him out of the house, for he had reason to
believe that the German would not fail him, and it galled his suspense
to see the foolish Poupins try to interpose, to divert the missive from
its course. He waited and waited, in the faith that Schinkel was
dealing with them in his slow, categorical Teutonic way, and only
objurgated the cabinet-maker for having in the first place paltered
with his sacred trust. Why hadn’t he come straight to him—whatever the
mysterious document was—instead of talking it over with French
featherheads? Passers were rare, at this hour, in Lisson Grove, and
lights were mainly extinguished; there was nothing to look at but the
vista of the low black houses, the dim, interspaced street-lamps, the
prowling cats who darted occasionally across the road, and the
terrible, mysterious, far-off stars, which appeared to him more than
ever to see everything and to tell nothing. A policeman creaked along
on the opposite side of the way, looking across at him as he passed,
and stood for some minutes on the corner, as if to keep an eye on him.
Hyacinth had leisure to reflect that the day was perhaps not far off
when a policeman might have his eye on him for a very good reason—might
walk up and down, pass and repass, as he mounted guard over him.

It seemed horribly long before Schinkel came out of the house, but it
was probably only half an hour. In the stillness of the street he heard
Poupin let his visitor out, and at the sound he stepped back into the
recess of a doorway on the same side, so that, in looking out, the
Frenchman should not see him waiting. There was another delay, for the
two stood talking together interminably and in a low tone on the
doorstep. At last, however, Poupin went in again, and then Schinkel
came down the street towards Hyacinth, who had calculated that he would
proceed in that direction, it being, as Hyacinth happened to know, that
of his own lodging. After he had heard Poupin go in he stopped and
looked up and down; it was evidently his idea that Hyacinth would be
waiting for him. Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in which he
had been flattening himself, and came straight to him, and the two men
stood there face to face, in the dusky, empty, sordid street.

“You didn’t let them have the letter?”

“Oh no, I retained it,” said Schinkel, with his eyes more than ever
like invisible points.

“Then hadn’t you better give it to me?”

“We will talk of that—we will talk.” Schinkel made no motion to satisfy
his friend; he had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his
appearance was characterised by an exasperating assumption that they
had the whole night before them. He was intolerably methodical.

“Why should we talk? Haven’t you talked enough with those people, all
the evening? What have they to say about it? What right have you to
detain a letter that belongs to me?”

“_Erlauben Sie_: I will light my pipe,” the German remarked. And he
proceeded to this business, methodically, while Hyacinth’s pale,
excited face showed in the glow of the match that he ignited on the
rusty railing beside them. “It is not yours unless I have given it to
you,” Schinkel went on, as they walked along. “Be patient, and I will
tell you,” he added, passing his hand into his companion’s arm. “Your
way, not so? We will go down toward the Park.” Hyacinth tried to be
patient, and he listened with interest when Schinkel said, “She tried
to take it; she attacked me with her hands. But that was not what I
went for, to give it up.”

“Is she mad? I don’t recognise them,” Hyacinth murmured.

“No, but they lofe you.”

“Why, then, do they try to disgrace me?”

“They think it is no disgrace, if you have changed.”

“That’s very well for her; but it’s pitiful for him, and I declare it
surprises me.”

“Oh, he came round, and he helped me to resist. He pulled his wife off.
It was the first shock,” said Schinkel.

“You oughtn’t to have shocked them, my dear fellow,” Hyacinth replied.

“I was shocked myself—I couldn’t help it.”

“Lord, how shaky you all are!”

“You take it well. I am very sorry. But it is a fine chance,” Schinkel
went on, smoking away. His pipe, for the moment, seemed to absorb him,
so that after a silence Hyacinth resumed—

“Be so good as to reflect that all this while I don’t in the least
understand what you are talking about.”

“Well, it was this morning, early,” said the German. “You know in my
country we don’t lie in bed late, and what they do in my country I try
to do everywhere. I think it is good enough. In winter I get up, of
course, long before the sun, and in summer I get up almost at the same
time. I should see the fine spectacle of the sunrise, if in London you
could see. The first thing I do of a Sunday is to smoke a pipe at my
window, which is at the front, you remember, and looks into a little
dirty street. At that hour there is nothing to see there—you English
are so slow to leave the bed. Not much, however, at any time; it is not
important, my little street. But my first pipe is the one I enjoy most.
I want nothing else when I have that pleasure. I look out at the new,
fresh light—though in London it is not very fresh—and I think it is the
beginning of another day. I wonder what such a day will bring; whether
it will bring anything good to us poor devils. But I have seen a great
many pass, and nothing has come. This morning, however, brought
something—something, at least, to you. On the other side of the way I
saw a young man, who stood just opposite to my house, looking up at my
window. He looked at me straight, without any ceremony, and I smoked my
pipe and looked at him. I wondered what he wanted, but he made no sign
and spoke no word. He was a very nice young man; he had an umbrella,
and he wore spectacles. We remained that way, face to face, perhaps for
a quarter of an hour, and at last he took out his watch—he had a watch,
too—and held it in his hand, just glancing at it every few minutes, as
if to let me know that he would rather not give me the whole day. Then
it came over me that he wanted to speak to me! You would have guessed
that before, but we good Germans are slow. When we understand, however,
we act; so I nodded to him, to let him know I would come down. I put on
my coat and my shoes, for I was only in my shirt and stockings (though
of course I had on my trousers), and I went down into the street. When
he saw me come he walked slowly away, but at the end of a little
distance he waited for me. When I came near him I saw that he was a
very nice young man indeed—very young, with a very pleasant, friendly
face. He was also very neat, and he had gloves, and his umbrella was of
silk. I liked him very much. He said I should come round the corner, so
we went round the corner together. I thought there would be some one
there waiting for us; but there was nothing—only the closed shops and
the early light and a little spring mist which told that the day would
be fine. I didn’t know what he wanted; perhaps it was some of our
business—that’s what I first thought—and perhaps it was only a little
game. So I was very careful; I didn’t ask him to come into the house.
Yet I told him that he must excuse me for not understanding more
quickly that he wished to speak with me; and when I said that, he said
it was not of consequence—he would have waited there, for the chance to
see me all day. I told him I was glad I had spared him that, at least,
and we had some very polite conversation. He _was_ a very nice young
man. But what he wanted was simply to put a letter in my hand; as he
said himself, he was only a kind of private postman. He gave me the
letter—it was not addressed; and when I had taken it I asked him how he
knew, and if he wouldn’t be sorry if it should turn out that I was not
the man for whom the letter was meant. But I didn’t give him a start;
he told me he knew all it was necessary for him to know—he knew exactly
what to do and how to do it. I think he is a valuable member. I asked
him if the letter required an answer, and he told me he had nothing to
do with that; he was only to put it in my hand. He recommended me to
wait till I had gone into the house again to read it. We had a little
more talk—always very polite; and he mentioned that he had come so
early because he thought I might go out, if he delayed, and because,
also, he had a great deal to do and had to take his time when he could.
It is true that he looked as if he had plenty to do—as if he was in
some very good occupation. I should tell you that he spoke to me always
in English, but he is not English; he sounded his words like some kind
of foreigner. I suppose he is not German, or he would have spoken to me
in German. But there are so many, of all countries! I said if he had so
much to do I wouldn’t keep him; I would go to my room and open my
letter. He said it wasn’t important; and then I asked him if he
wouldn’t come into my room, also, and rest. I told him it wasn’t very
handsome, my room—because he looked like a young man who would have,
for himself, a very neat lodging. Then I found he meant it wasn’t
important that we should talk any more, and he went away without even
offering to shake hands. I don’t know if he had other letters to give,
but he went away, as I have said, like a postman on his rounds, without
giving me any more information.”

It took Schinkel a long time to unfold this story—his calm and
conscientious thoroughness made no allowance for any painful acuteness
of curiosity that Hyacinth might feel. He went from step to step, and
treated his different points with friendly explicitness, as if each
would have exactly the same interest for his companion. The latter made
no attempt to hurry him, and indeed he listened, now, with a kind of
intense patience; for he _was_ interested, and, moreover, it was clear
to him that he was safe with Schinkel; the German would satisfy him in
time—wouldn’t worry him with attaching conditions to their transaction,
in spite of the mistake he had made in going for guidance to Lisson
Grove. Hyacinth learned in due course that on returning to his
apartment and opening the little packet of which he had been put into
possession, Mr Schinkel had found himself confronted with two separate
articles: one a sealed letter superscribed with our young man’s name,
the other a sheet of paper containing in three lines a request that
within two days of receiving it he would hand the letter to the ‘young
Robinson’. The three lines in question were signed D. H., and the
letter was addressed in the same hand. Schinkel professed that he
already knew the writing; it was that of Diedrich Hoffendahl. “Good,
good,” he said, exerting a soothing pressure upon Hyacinth’s arm. “I
will walk with you to your door, and I will give it to you there;
unless you like better that I should keep it till to-morrow morning, so
that you may have a quiet sleep—I mean in case it might contain
anything that will be disagreeable to you. But it is probably nothing;
it is probably only a word to say that you need think no more about
your engagement.”

“Why should it be that?” Hyacinth asked.

“Probably he has heard that you repent.”

“That I repent?” Hyacinth stopped him short; they had just reached the
top of Park Lane. “To whom have I given a right to say that?”

“Ah well, if you haven’t, so much the better. It may be, then, for some
other reason.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Schinkel,” Hyacinth returned, as they walked along.
And in a moment he went on, “What the devil did you go and tattle to
the Poupins for?”

“Because I thought they would like to know. Besides, I felt my
responsibility; I thought I should carry it better if they knew it. And
then, I’m like them—I lofe you.”

Hyacinth made no answer to this profession; he asked the next instant,
“Why didn’t your young man bring the letter directly to me?”

“Ah, I didn’t ask him that! The reason was probably not complicated,
but simple—that those who wrote it knew my address and didn’t know
yours. And wasn’t I one of your guarantors?”

“Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Muniment. Why
was the letter not sent to me through him?”

“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend upon it,
there are always good reasons. I should have liked it better if it had
been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him—” Schinkel interrupted
himself; the remainder of his sentence was lost in a cloud of smoke.

“Well, if they didn’t send to him,”—Hyacinth persisted.

“You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?”

At this Hyacinth looked up at his companion askance, and caught an odd
glance, accompanied with a smile, which the mild, circumspect German
directed toward him. “If it’s anything against him, my being his friend
makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.”

“Well, it’s a possibility that they are not satisfied.”

“How do you mean it—not satisfied?”

“How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.”

“Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!”

“Ah, my boy, depend upon it, there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and
in a moment he added, “They know everything—everything. Oh, they go
straight!”

The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence,
Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his
companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin
had said when Schinkel, that evening, first told him what he had come
to see him about. “_Il vaut du galme—il vaut du galme_:” that was the
German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them
over to himself several times, almost with the same accent. They had a
certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was soothing
altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of
his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face, while Hyacinth
waited—waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away, and he
watched without irritation the loving manner in which the German shook
the ashes out of his big pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was
only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention
to every detail of it that he said, “_Also_, now for the letter,” and,
putting his hand inside of his waistcoat, drew forth the important
document. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man
transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he
saw a shade of disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face, at this
indication that he should have no present knowledge of its contents;
but he liked that better than his pretending to say again that it was
nothing—that it was only a release. Schinkel had now the good sense, or
the good taste, not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed
against his heart Hyacinth felt still more distinctly that it was
something—that it was a command. What Schinkel did say, in a moment,
was: “Now that you have got it, I am very glad. It is more comfortable
for me.”

“I should think so!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “If you hadn’t done your job
you would have paid for it.”

Schinkel hesitated a moment while he lingered; then, as Hyacinth turned
away, putting in his door-key, he replied, “And if you don’t do yours,
so will you.”

“Yes, as you say, _they_ go straight! Good-night.” And our young man
let himself in.

The passage and staircase were never lighted, and the lodgers either
groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice or scraped
the wall with a casual match which, in the milder gloom of day, was
visible in a hundred rich streaks. Hyacinth’s room was on the second
floor, behind, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a
light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of
which was in this manner vividly illustrated. He stopped and considered
this mysterious brightness, and his first impulse was to connect it
with the incident just ushered in by Schinkel; for what could anything
that touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was natural
that some punctual emissary should be awaiting him. Then it occurred to
him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora, after tea, he had
simply left a tallow candle burning, and that it showed a cynical
spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so close-fisted for
herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly, it came over him
that he had had a visitor, in his absence, and that the visitor had
taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking sources of
comfort, as was perfectly just. When he opened the door he found that
this last prevision was the right one, though his visitor was not one
of the figures that had risen before him. Mr Vetch sat there, beside
the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing, with his head
resting on his hand and his eyes bent on the floor. He looked up when
Hyacinth appeared, and said, “Oh, I didn’t hear you; you are very
quiet.”

“I come in softly, when I’m late, for the sake of the house—though I am
bound to say I am the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides, you
have been asleep,” Hyacinth said.

“No, I have not been asleep,” returned the old man. “I don’t sleep much
nowadays.”

“Then you have been plunged in meditation.”

“Yes, I have been thinking.” Then Mr Vetch explained that the woman of
the house wouldn’t let him come in, at first, till he had given proper
assurances that his intentions were pure and that he was moreover the
oldest friend Mr Robinson had in the world. He had been there for an
hour; he thought he might find him, coming so late.

Hyacinth answered that he was very glad he had waited and that he was
delighted to see him, and expressed regret that he hadn’t known in
advance of his visit, so that he might have something to offer him. He
sat down on his bed, vaguely expectant; he wondered what special
purpose had brought the fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. But he
only spoke the truth in saying that he was glad to see him. Hyacinth
had come upstairs in a tremor of desire to be alone with the revelation
that he carried in his pocket, yet the sight of Anastasius Vetch gave
him a sudden relief by postponing solitude. The place where he had put
his letter seemed to throb against his side, yet he was thankful to his
old friend for forcing him still to leave it so. “I have been looking
at your books,” the fiddler said; “you have two or three exquisite
specimens of your own. Oh yes, I recognise your work when I see it;
there are always certain little finer touches. You have a manner, like
a master. With such a talent, such a taste, your future leaves nothing
to be desired. You will make a fortune and become a great celebrity.”

Mr Vetch sat forward, to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on his
knees and looked very hard at his young friend, as if to challenge him
to dispute his flattering views. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his
face was to give him immediately the idea that the fiddler knew
something, though it was impossible to guess how he could know it. The
Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even
granting that they were capable of that baseness; an unwarrantable
supposition, in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour
before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion
there rushed into Hyacinth’s mind an intense determination to dissemble
before his visitor to the last; he might imagine what he liked, but he
should not have a grain of satisfaction—or rather he should have that
of being led to believe, if possible, that his suspicions were
positively vain and idle. Hyacinth rested his eyes on the books that Mr
Vetch had taken down from the shelf, and admitted that they were very
pretty work and that so long as one didn’t become blind or maimed the
ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of
confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each
other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his
probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these
latter times and completely changed their character, grew so
intolerable that to defend himself Hyacinth took the aggressive and
asked him boldly whether it were simply to look at his work, of which
he had half a dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a
nocturnal pilgrimage. “My dear old friend, you have something on your
mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous _idée fixe_. Why has
it taken you to-night, in particular? Whatever it is, it has brought
you here, at an unnatural hour, you don’t know why. I ought of course
to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am, in so far
as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it makes _you_
miserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed upstairs;
she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right—if he isn’t
uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr Vetch, don’t, don’t
worry; the blanket’s up to my chin, and I haven’t tumbled yet.”

Hyacinth heard himself say these things as if he were listening to
another person; the impudence of them, under the circumstances, seemed
to him, somehow, so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of
an episode in which impudence, evidently, must play a considerable
part, and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way
the old man gazed at him might have indicated that he too was able to
take the measure of his perversity—that he knew he was false as he sat
there declaring that there was nothing the matter, while a brand-new
revolutionary commission burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr Vetch
said, very mildly, as if he had really been reassured, “It’s wonderful
how you read my thoughts. I don’t trust you; I think there are beastly
possibilities. It’s not true, at any rate, that I come to look at you
every five minutes. You don’t know how often I have resisted my
fears—how I have forced myself to let you alone.”

“You had better let me come and live with you, as I proposed after
Pinnie’s death. Then you will have me always under your eyes,” said
Hyacinth, smiling.

The old man got up eagerly, and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid his
hands upon his shoulders, holding him close. “Will you now, really, my
boy? Will you come to-night?”

“To-night, Mr Vetch?”

“To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After
my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I couldn’t keep quiet; I was
very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie—she seemed to be in the
room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed
in ghosts I should believe I had seen her. She wasn’t there for
nothing; she was there to add her fears to mine—to talk to me about
you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no use—she drove me out of the
house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and stick and came down here.
You may judge whether I thought it important, as I took a cab.”

“Ah, why do you spend your money so foolishly?” asked Hyacinth, in a
tone of the most affectionate remonstrance.

“Will you come to-night?” said the old man, for all rejoinder, holding
him still.

“Surely, it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly that
you are ill and nervous. You can take the bed, and I’ll spend the night
in the chair.”

The fiddler thought a moment. “No, you’ll hate me if I subject you to
such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.”

“It won’t be a bit different in your room; there, as here, I shall have
to sleep in a chair.”

“I’ll get another room; we shall be close together,” the fiddler went
on.

“Do you mean you’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with
your little house stuffed full and your people all in bed? My poor
Anastasius, you are very bad; your reason totters on its throne,” said
Hyacinth, humorously and indulgently.

“Very good, we’ll get a room to-morrow. I’ll move into another house,
where there are two, side by side.” Hyacinth’s tone was evidently
soothing to him.

“_Comme vous y allez!_” the young man continued. “Excuse me if I remind
you that in case of my leaving this place I have to give a fortnight’s
notice.”

“Ah, you’re backing out!” the old man exclaimed, dropping his hands.

“Pinnie wouldn’t have said that,” Hyacinth returned. “If you are
acting, if you are speaking, at the prompting of her pure spirit, you
had better act and speak exactly as she would have done. She would have
believed me.”

“Believed you? Believed what? What is there to believe? If you’ll make
me a promise, I will believe that.”

“I’ll make you any promise you like,” said Hyacinth.

“Oh, any promise I like—that isn’t what I want! I want just one very
particular little pledge; and that is really what I came here for
to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass, all this time, never
to have demanded it of you before. Give it to me now, and I will go
home quietly and leave you in peace.” Hyacinth, assenting in advance,
requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then the old
man said, “Well, promise me that you will never, under any
circumstances whatever, do anything.”

“Do anything?”

“Anything that those people expect of you.”

“Those people?” Hyacinth repeated.

“Ah, don’t torment me with pretending not to understand!” the old man
begged. “You know the people I mean. I can’t call them by their names,
because I don’t know them. But you do, and they know you.”

Hyacinth had no desire to torment Mr Vetch, but he was capable of
reflecting that to enter into his thought too easily would be
tantamount to betraying himself. “I suppose I know the people you have
in mind,” he said, in a moment; “but I’m afraid I don’t grasp the idea
of the promise.”

“Don’t they want to make use of you?”

“I see what you mean,” said Hyacinth. “You think they want me to touch
off some train for them. Well, if that’s what troubles you, you may
sleep sound. I shall never do any of their work.”

A radiant light came into the fiddler’s face, and he stared, as if this
assurance were too fair for nature. “Do you take your oath on that?
Never anything, anything, anything?”

“Never anything at all.”

“Will you swear it to me by the memory of that good woman of whom we
have been speaking and whom we both loved?”

“My dear old Pinnie’s memory? Willingly.”

The old man sank down in his chair and buried his face in his hands;
the next moment his companion heard him sobbing. Ten minutes later he
was content to take his departure, and Hyacinth went out with him to
look for another cab. They found an ancient four-wheeler stationed
languidly at a crossing of the ways, and before Mr Vetch got into it he
asked his young friend to kiss him. That young friend watched the
vehicle get itself into motion and rattle away; he saw it turn a
neighbouring corner. Then he approached the nearest gas-lamp and drew
from his breast-pocket the letter that Schinkel had given him.




XLV


“And Madame Grandoni, then?” asked Hyacinth, reluctant to turn away. He
felt pretty sure that he should never knock at that door again, and the
desire was strong in him to see once more, for the last time, the
ancient, troubled _suivante_ of the Princess, whom he had always liked.
She had seemed to him ever to be in the slightly ridiculous position of
a confidant of tragedy in whom the heroine should have ceased to
confide.

“_E andata via, caro signorino_,” said Assunta, smiling at him as she
stood there holding the door open.

“She has gone away? Bless me, when did she go?”

“It is now five days, dear young sir. She has returned to our country.”

“Is it possible?” exclaimed Hyacinth, disappointedly.

“_E possibilissimo!_” said Assunta. Then she added, “There were many
times when she almost went; but this time—_capisce_—” And without
finishing her sentence the Princess’s Roman tirewoman indulged in a
subtle, suggestive, indefinable play of expression, to which her hands
and shoulders contributed, as well as her lips and eyebrows.

Hyacinth looked at her long enough to catch any meaning that she might
have wished to convey, but gave no sign of apprehending it. He only
remarked, gravely, “In short she is here no more.”

“And the worst is that she will probably never come back. She didn’t go
for a long time, but when she decided herself it was finished,” Assunta
declared. “_Peccato!_” she added, with a sigh.

“I should have liked to see her again—I should have liked to bid her
good-bye.” Hyacinth lingered there in strange, melancholy vagueness;
since he had been told the Princess was not at home he had no reason
for remaining, save the possibility that she might return before he
turned away. This possibility, however, was small, for it was only nine
o’clock, the middle of the evening—too early an hour for her to
reappear, if, as Assunta said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up
and down the Crescent, gently swinging his stick, and became conscious
in a moment that Assunta was regarding him with tender interest.

“You should have come back sooner; then perhaps she wouldn’t have gone,
_povera vecchia_,” she rejoined in a moment. “It is too many days since
you have been here. She liked you—I know that.”

“She liked me, but she didn’t like me to come,” said Hyacinth. “Wasn’t
that why she went, because we came?”

“Ah, that other one—with the long legs—yes. But you are better.”

“The Princess doesn’t think so, and she is the right judge,” Hyacinth
replied, smiling.

“Eh, who knows what she thinks? It is not for me to say. But you had
better come in and wait. I dare say she won’t be long, and it would
gratify her to find you.”

Hyacinth hesitated. “I am not sure of that.” Then he asked, “Did she go
out alone?”

“_Sola, sola_,” said Assunta, smiling. “Oh, don’t be afraid; you were
the first!” And she flung open the door of the little drawing-room,
with an air of irresistible solicitation and sympathy.

He sat there nearly an hour, in the chair the Princess habitually used,
under her shaded lamp, with a dozen objects around him which seemed as
much a part of herself as if they had been folds of her dress or even
tones of her voice. His thoughts were tremendously active, but his body
was too tired for restlessness; he had not been at work, and had been
walking about all day, to fill the time; so that he simply reclined
there, with his head on one of the Princess’s cushions, his feet on one
of her little stools—one of the ugly ones, that belonged to the
house—and his respiration coming quickly, like that of a man in a state
of acute agitation. Hyacinth was agitated now, but it was not because
he was waiting for the Princess; a deeper source of emotion had been
opened to him, and he had not on the present occasion more sharpness of
impatience than had already visited him at certain moments of the past
twenty hours. He had not closed his eyes the night before, and the day
had not made up for that torment. A fever of reflection had descended
upon him, and the range of his imagination had been wide. It whirled
him through circles of immeasurable compass; and this is the reason
that, thinking of many things while he sat in the Princess’s chair, he
wondered why, after all, he had come to Madeira Crescent, and what
interest he could have in seeing the lady of the house. He had a very
complete sense that everything was over between them; that the link had
snapped which bound them so closely together for a while. And this was
not simply because for a long time now he had received no sign nor
communication from her, no invitation to come back, no inquiry as to
why his visits had stopped. It was not because he had seen her go in
and out with Paul Muniment, nor because it had suited Prince
Casamassima to point the moral of her doing so, nor even because, quite
independently of the Prince, he believed her to be more deeply absorbed
in her acquaintance with that superior young man than she had ever been
in her relations with himself. The reason, so far as he became
conscious of it in his fitful meditations, could only be a strange,
detached curiosity—strange and detached because everything else of his
past had been engulfed in the abyss that opened before him as, after Mr
Vetch had left him, he stood under the lamp in a paltry Westminster
street. That had swallowed up all familiar feelings, and yet out of the
ruin had sprung the impulse which brought him to where he sat.

The solution of his difficulty—he flattered himself he had arrived at
it—involved a winding-up of his affairs; and though, even if no
solution had been required, he would have felt clearly that he had been
dropped, yet as even in that case it would have been sweet to him to
bid her good-bye, so, at present, the desire for some last vision of
her own hurrying fate could still appeal to him. If things had not gone
well for him he was still capable of wondering whether they looked
better for her. It is a singular fact, but there rose in his mind a
sort of incongruous desire to pity her. All these were odd feelings
enough, and by the time half an hour had elapsed they had throbbed
themselves into weariness and into slumber. While he remembered that he
was waiting now in a very different frame from that in which he waited
for her in South Street the first time he went to see her, he closed
his eyes and lost himself. His unconsciousness lasted, he afterwards
perceived, nearly half an hour; it terminated in his becoming aware
that the lady of the house was standing before him. Assunta was behind
her, and as he opened his eyes she took from her mistress the bonnet
and mantle of which the Princess divested herself. “It’s charming of
you to have waited,” the latter said, smiling down at him with all her
old kindness. “You are very tired—don’t get up; that’s the best chair,
and you must keep it.” She made him remain where he was; she placed
herself near him on a smaller seat; she declared that she was not tired
herself, that she didn’t know what was the matter with her—nothing
tired her now; she exclaimed on the time that had elapsed since he had
last called, as if she were reminded of it simply by seeing him again;
and she insisted that he should have some tea—he looked so much as if
he needed it. She considered him with deeper attention, and wished to
know what was the matter with him—what he had done to use himself up;
adding that she must begin and look after him again, for while she had
the care of him that kind of thing didn’t happen. In response to this
Hyacinth made a great confession: he admitted that he had stayed away
from work and simply amused himself—amused himself by loafing about
London all day. This didn’t pay—he was beginning to discover it as he
grew older; it was doubtless a sign of increasing years when one began
to perceive that wanton pleasures were hollow and that to stick to
one’s tools was not only more profitable but more refreshing. However,
he did stick to them, as a general thing; that was no doubt partly why,
from the absence of the habit of it, a day off turned out to be rather
a grind. When Hyacinth had not seen the Princess for some time he
always, on meeting her again, had a renewed, tremendous sense of her
beauty, and he had it to-night in an extraordinary degree. Splendid as
that beauty had ever been, it seemed clothed at present in transcendent
glory, and (if that which was already supremely fine could be capable
of greater refinement) to have worked itself free of all earthly
grossness and been purified and consecrated by her new life. Her
gentleness, when she was in the mood for it, was quite divine (it had
always the irresistible charm that it was the humility of a high
spirit), and on this occasion she gave herself up to it. Whether it was
because he had the consciousness of resting his eyes upon her for the
last time, or because she wished to be particularly pleasant to him in
order to make up for having, amid other preoccupations, rather dropped
him of late (it was probable the effect was a product of both causes),
at all events the sight of her loveliness seemed none the less a
privilege than it had done the night he went into her box, at the play,
and her presence lifted the weight from his soul. He suffered himself
to be coddled and absently, even if radiantly, smiled at, and his state
of mind was such that it could produce no alteration of his pain to see
that on the Princess’s part these were inexpensive gifts. She had sent
Assunta to bring them tea, and when the tray arrived she gave him cup
after cup, with every restorative demonstration; but he had not sat
with her a quarter of an hour before he perceived that she scarcely
measured a word he said to her or a word that she herself uttered. If
she had the best intention of being nice to him, by way of
compensation, this compensation was for a wrong that was far from
vividly present to her mind. Two points became perfectly clear: one was
that she was thinking of something very different from her present, her
past, or her future relations with Hyacinth Robinson; the other was
that he was superseded indeed. This was so completely the case that it
did not even occur to her, it was evident, that the sense of
supersession might be cruel to the young man. If she was charming to
him it was because she was good-natured and he had been hanging off,
and not because she had done him an injury. Perhaps, after all, she
hadn’t, for he got the impression that it might be no great loss of
comfort not to constitute part of her life to-day. It was manifest from
her eye, from her smile, from every movement and tone, and indeed from
all the irradiation of her beauty, that that life to-day was
tremendously wound up. If he had come to Madeira Crescent because he
was curious to see how she was getting on, it was sufficiently
intimated to him that she was getting on well; that is that she was
living more than ever on high hopes and bold plans and far-reaching
combinations. These things, from his own point of view, ministered less
to happiness, and to be mixed up with them was perhaps not so much
greater a sign that one had not lived for nothing, than the grim
arrangement which, in the interest of peace, he had just arrived at
with himself. She asked him why he had not been to see her for so long,
quite as if this failure were only a vulgar form of social neglect; and
she scarcely seemed to notice whether it were a good or a poor excuse
when he said he had stayed away because he knew her to be extremely
busy. But she did not deny the impeachment; she admitted that she had
been busier than ever in her life before. She looked at him as if he
would know what that meant, and he remarked that he was very sorry for
her.

“Because you think it’s all a mistake? Yes, I know that. Perhaps it is;
but if it is, it’s a magnificent one. If you were scared about me three
or four months ago, I don’t know what you would think to-day—if you
knew! I have risked everything.”

“Fortunately I don’t know,” said Hyacinth.

“No, indeed, how should you?”

“And to tell the truth,” he went on, “that is really the reason I
haven’t been back here till to-night. I haven’t wanted to know—I have
feared and hated to know.”

“Then why did you come at last?”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “Out of a kind of inconsistent curiosity.”

“I suppose then you would like me to tell you where I have been
to-night, eh?”

“No, my curiosity is satisfied. I have learned something—what I mainly
wanted to know—without your telling me.”

She stared an instant. “Ah, you mean whether Madame Grandoni was gone?
I suppose Assunta told you.”

“Yes, Assunta told me, and I was sorry to hear it.”

The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been
indeed a very serious incident. “You may imagine how I feel it! It
leaves me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an
immense difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes
of the world. At any rate, she couldn’t put up with me any more—it
appears that I am more and more shocking; and it was written!” On
Hyacinth’s asking what the old lady would do, she replied, “I suppose
she will go and live with my husband.” Five minutes later she inquired
of him whether the same reason that he had mentioned just before was
the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr Muniment had told
her that he had not been near him and his sister for more than a month.

“No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy:
because, somehow, in the first place it isn’t natural to feel uneasy
about Paul, and in the second, if it were, he never lets one see
anything. It is simply the general sense of real divergence of view.
When that divergence becomes sharp, it is better not to pester each
other.”

“I see what you mean. But you might go and see his sister.”

“I don’t like her,” said Hyacinth, simply.

“Ah, neither do I!” the Princess exclaimed; while her visitor remained
conscious of the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with
which she had referred to their common friend. But she was silent after
this, and he judged that he had stayed long enough and sufficiently
taxed a preoccupied attention. He got up, and was bidding her
good-night, when she checked him by saying, suddenly, “By the way, your
not going to see so good a friend as Mr Muniment, because you
disapprove to-day of his work, suggests to me that you will be in an
awkward fix, with your disapprovals, the day you are called upon to
serve the cause according to your vow.”

“Oh, of course I have thought of that,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

“And would it be indiscreet to ask what you have thought?”

“Ah, so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.”

“I have never talked to you about this, because it seemed to me
indelicate, and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast
for even so intimate a friend as I have been to have a right to meddle
with it. But I have wondered much—seeing that you cared less and less
for the people—how you would reconcile your change of heart with the
performance of your engagement. I pity you, my poor friend,” the
Princess went on, with a heavenly sweetness, “for I can imagine nothing
more terrible than to find yourself face to face with such an
engagement, and to feel at the same time that the spirit which prompted
it is dead within you.”

“Terrible, terrible, most terrible,” said Hyacinth, gravely, looking at
her.

“But I pray God it may never be your fate!” The Princess hesitated a
moment; then she added, “I see you feel it. Heaven help us all!” She
paused, then went on: “Why shouldn’t I tell you, after all? A short
time ago I had a visit from Mr Vetch.”

“It was kind of you to see him,” said Hyacinth.

“He was delightful, I assure you. But do you know what he came for? To
beg me, on his knees, to snatch you away.”

“To snatch me away?”

“From the danger that hangs over you. Poor man, he was very pathetic.”

“Oh yes, he has talked to me about it,” Hyacinth said. “He has picked
up the idea, but he knows nothing whatever about it. And how did he
expect that you would be able to snatch me?”

“He left that to me; he had only a general conviction of my influence
with you.”

“And he thought you would exercise it to make me back out? He does you
injustice; you wouldn’t!” Hyacinth exclaimed, with a laugh. “In that
case, taking one false position with another, yours would be no better
than mine.”

“Oh, speaking seriously, I am perfectly quiet about you and about
myself. I know you won’t be called,” the Princess returned.

“May I inquire how you know it?”

After a slight hesitation she replied, “Mr Muniment tells me so.”

“And how does he know it?”

“We have information. My dear fellow,” the Princess went on, “you are
so much out of it now that if I were to tell you, you wouldn’t
understand.”

“Yes, no doubt I am out of it; but I still have a right to say, all the
same, in contradiction to your imputation of a moment ago, that I care
for the people exactly as much as I ever did.”

“My poor Hyacinth, my dear infatuated little aristocrat, was that ever
very much?” the Princess asked.

“It was enough, and it is still enough, to make me willing to lay down
my life for anything that will really help them.”

“Yes, and of course you must decide for yourself what that is; or,
rather, what it’s not.”

“I didn’t decide when I gave my promise. I agreed to take the decision
of others,” Hyacinth said.

“Well, you said just now that in relation to this business of yours you
had thought of many things,” the Princess rejoined. “Have you ever, by
chance, thought of anything that _will_ help the people?”

“You call me fantastic names, but I’m one of them myself.”

“I know what you are going to say!” the Princess broke in. “You are
going to say that it will help them to do what you do—to do their work
and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what do
you propose for the thousands and thousands for whom no work—on the
overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be found? There is
less and less work in the world, and there are more and more people to
do the little that there is. The old ferocious selfishnesses _must_
come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must be smashed!”

The tone in which the Princess uttered these words made Hyacinth’s
heart beat fast, and there was something so inspiring in her devoted
fairness that the vision of a great heroism flashed up again before
him, in all the splendour it had lost—the idea of a tremendous risk and
an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at such a moment, made
every scruple seem a prudence and every compunction a cowardice. “I
wish to God I could see it as you see it!” he exclaimed, after he had
looked at her a minute in silent admiration.

“I see simply this: that what we are doing is at least worth trying,
and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means,
will try anything else, on _their_ head be the responsibility, on
_their_ head be the blood!”

“Princess,” said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he
trembled, “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to _you_—” and
his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her
possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him,
as he had already seen them in sinister musings; they seemed to him
worse than anything he had imagined for himself.

She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. “To me! And
pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more
than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?”

“Simply because there is no one in the world, and there has never been
any one in the world, like you.”

“Oh, thank you!” said the Princess, with a kind of dry impatience,
turning away.

The manner in which she spoke put an end to their conversation. It
expressed an indifference to what it might interest him to think about
her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to his
eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent his
head over her hand, which he had taken to kiss; after which he left the
room without looking at her.




XLVI


“I have received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to the
Princess, the next evening, as soon as he came into the room. He
announced this fact with a kind of bald promptitude and with a
familiarity of manner which showed that his visit was one of a
closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little
surprised by it, and immediately asked how in the world the Prince
could know his address. “Couldn’t it have been by your old lady?”
Muniment inquired. “He must have met her in Paris. It is from Paris
that he writes.”

“What an incorrigible cad!” the Princess exclaimed.

“I don’t see that—for writing to me. I have his letter in my pocket,
and I will show it to you if you like.”

“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched,”
the Princess replied.

“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked, with the quiet
smile of a man who sees things as they are.

The Princess hesitated a little. “Yes, I make an exception for that,
because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.”

“I should think, on the contrary, it would gratify him by showing you
in a condition of weakness and dependence.”

“Not when he knows I don’t use it for myself. What exasperates him is
that it is devoted to ends that he hates almost as much as he hates me
and yet which he can’t call selfish.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” said Muniment, with that tone of pleasant
reasonableness that he used when he was most imperturbable. “His letter
satisfies me of that.” The Princess stared, at this, and asked him what
he was coming to—whether he was leading up to advising her to go back
and live with her husband. “I don’t know that I would go so far as to
advise,” he replied; “when I have so much benefit from seeing you here,
on your present footing, that wouldn’t sound well. But I’ll just make
bold to prophesy that you will go before very long.”

“And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?”

“On this plain fact—that you will have nothing to live upon. You
decline to read the Prince’s letter, but if you were to look at it it
would give you evidence of what I mean. He informs me that I need count
upon no more supplies from your hands, as you yourself will receive no
more.”

“He addresses you that way, in plain terms?”

“I can’t call them very plain, because the letter is written in French,
and I naturally have had a certain difficulty in making it out, in
spite of my persevering study of the tongue and the fine example set me
by poor Robinson. But that appears to be the gist of the matter.”

“And you can repeat such an insult to me without the smallest apparent
discomposure? You’re the most remarkable man!” the Princess broke out.

“Why is it an insult? It is the simple truth. I do take your money,”
said Paul Muniment.

“You take it for a sacred cause; you don’t take it for yourself.”

“The Prince isn’t obliged to look at that,” Muniment rejoined,
laughing.

His companion was silent for a moment; then, “I didn’t know you were on
his side,” she replied, gently.

“Oh, you know on what side I am!”

“What does he know? What business has he to address you so?”

“I suppose he knows from Madame Grandoni. She has told him that I have
great influence upon you.”

“She was welcome to tell him that!” the Princess exclaimed.

“His reasoning, therefore, has been that when I find you have nothing
more to give to the cause I will let you go.”

“Nothing more? And does he count _me_, myself, and every pulse of my
being, every capacity of my nature, as nothing?” the Princess cried,
with shining eyes.

“Apparently he thinks that I do.”

“Oh, as for that, after all, I have known that you care far more for my
money than for me. But it has made no difference to me,” said the
Princess.

“Then you see that by your own calculation the Prince is right.”

“My dear sir,” Muniment’s hostess replied, “my interest in you never
depended on your interest in me. It depended wholly on a sense of your
great destinies. I suppose that what you began to tell me is that he
stops my allowance.”

“From the first of next month. He has taken legal advice. It is now
clear—so he tells me—that you forfeit your settlements.”

“Can I not take legal advice, too?” the Princess asked. “Surely I can
contest that. I can forfeit my settlements only by an act of my own.
The act that led to our separation was _his_ act; he turned me out of
his house by physical violence.”

“Certainly,” said Muniment, displaying even in this simple discussion
his easy aptitude for argument; “but since then there have been acts of
your own—” He stopped a moment, smiling; then he went on: “Your whole
connection with a secret society constitutes an act, and so does your
exercise of the pleasure, which you appreciate so highly, of feeding it
with money extorted from an old Catholic and princely family. You know
how little it is to be desired that these matters should come to
light.”

“Why in the world need they come to light? Allegations in plenty, of
course, he would have, but not a particle of proof. Even if Madame
Grandoni were to testify against me, which is inconceivable, she would
not be able to produce a definite fact.”

“She would be able to produce the fact that you had a little bookbinder
staying for a month in your house.”

“What has that to do with it?” the Princess demanded. “If you mean that
that is a circumstance which would put me in the wrong as against the
Prince, is there not, on the other side, this circumstance, that while
our young friend was staying with me Madame Grandoni herself, a person
of the highest and most conspicuous respectability, never saw fit to
withdraw from me her countenance and protection? Besides, why shouldn’t
I have my bookbinder, just as I might have (and the Prince should
surely appreciate my consideration in not having) my physician and my
chaplain?”

“Am I not your chaplain?” said Muniment, with a laugh. “And does the
bookbinder usually dine at the Princess’s table?”

“Why not, if he’s an artist? In the old times, I know, artists dined
with the servants; but not to-day.”

“That would be for the court to appreciate,” Muniment remarked. And in
a moment he added, “Allow me to call your attention to the fact that
Madame Grandoni _has_ left you—_has_ withdrawn her countenance and
protection.”

“Ah, but not for Hyacinth!” the Princess returned, in a tone which
would have made the fortune of an actress if an actress could have
caught it.

“For the bookbinder or for the chaplain, it doesn’t matter. But that’s
only a detail,” said Muniment. “In any case, I shouldn’t in the least
care for your going to law.”

The Princess rested her eyes upon him for a while in silence, and at
last she replied, “I was speaking just now of your great destinies, but
every now and then you do something, you say something, that makes me
doubt of them. It’s when you seem afraid. That’s terribly against your
being a first-rate man.”

“Oh, I know you have thought me a coward from the first of your knowing
me. But what does it matter? I haven’t the smallest pretension to being
a first-rate man.”

“Oh, you are deep, and you are provoking!” murmured the Princess, with
a sombre eye.

“Don’t you remember,” Muniment continued, without heeding this somewhat
passionate ejaculation—“don’t you remember how, the other day, you
accused me of being not only a coward but a traitor; of playing false;
of wanting, as you said, to back out?”

“Most distinctly. How can I help its coming over me, at times, that you
have incalculable ulterior views and are only using me—only using us
all? But I don’t care!”

“No, no; I’m genuine,” said Paul Muniment, simply, yet in a tone which
might have implied that the discussion was idle. And he immediately
went on, with a transition too abrupt for perfect civility: “The best
reason in the world for your not having a lawsuit with your husband is
this: that when you haven’t a penny left you will be obliged to go back
and live with him.”

“How do you mean, when I haven’t a penny left? Haven’t I my own
property?” the Princess demanded.

“The Prince tells me that you have drawn upon your own property at such
a rate that the income to be derived from it amounts, to his positive
knowledge, to no more than a thousand francs—forty pounds—a year.
Surely, with your habits and tastes, you can’t live on forty pounds. I
should add that your husband implies that your property, originally,
was but a small affair.”

“You have the most extraordinary tone,” observed the Princess, gravely.
“What you appear to wish to express is simply this: that from the
moment I have no more money to give you I am of no more value than the
skin of an orange.”

Muniment looked down at his shoe awhile. His companion’s words had
brought a flush into his cheek; he appeared to admit to himself and to
her that, at the point at which their conversation had arrived, there
was a natural difficulty in his delivering himself. But presently he
raised his head, showing a face still slightly embarrassed but none the
less bright and frank. “I have no intention whatever of saying anything
harsh or offensive to you, but since you challenge me perhaps it is
well that I should let you know that I _do_ consider that in giving
your money—or, rather, your husband’s—to our business you gave the most
valuable thing you had to contribute.”

“This is the day of plain truths!” the Princess exclaimed, with a laugh
that was not expressive of pleasure. “You don’t count then any
devotion, any intelligence, that I may have placed at your service,
even rating my faculties modestly?”

“I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one is
nothing without the other. You are not trusted at headquarters.”

“Not trusted!” the Princess repeated, with her splendid stare. “Why, I
thought I could be hanged to-morrow!”

“They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You are
liable to be weary of us,” Paul Muniment went on; “and, indeed, I think
you are weary of us already.”

“Ah, you _must_ be a first-rate man—you are such a brute!” replied the
Princess, who noticed, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced
‘weary’ _weery_.

“I didn’t say you were weary of _me_,” said Muniment, blushing again.
“You can never live poor—you don’t begin to know the meaning of it.”

“Oh, no, I am not tired of you,” the Princess returned, in a strange
tone. “In a moment you will make me cry with passion, and no man has
done that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,” she added, in
a different manner. “You yourself recognised it just now, in speaking
of the insignificant character of my fortune.”

“It had to be a fortune, to be insignificant,” said Muniment, smiling.
“You will go back to your husband!”

To this declaration she made no answer whatever; she only sat looking
at him in a sort of desperate calmness. “I don’t see, after all, why
they trust you more than they trust me,” she remarked.

“I am not sure that they do,” said Muniment. “I have heard something
this evening which suggests that.”

“And may one know what it is?”

“A communication which I should have expected to be made through me has
been made through another person.”

“A communication?”

“To Hyacinth Robinson.”

“To Hyacinth—” The Princess sprang up; she had turned pale in a moment.

“He has got his ticket; but they didn’t send it through me.”

“Do you mean his orders? He was here last night,” the Princess said.

“A fellow named Schinkel, a German—whom you don’t know, I think, but
who was a sort of witness, with me and another, of his undertaking—came
to see me this evening. It was through him the summons came, and he put
Hyacinth up to it on Sunday night.”

“On Sunday night?” The Princess stared. “Why, he was here yesterday,
and he talked of it, and he told me nothing.”

“That was quite right of him, bless him!” Muniment exclaimed.

The Princess closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again
Muniment had risen and was standing before her. “What do they want him
to do?” she asked.

“I am like Hyacinth; I think I had better not tell you—at least till
it’s over.”

“And when will it be over?”

“They give him several days and, I believe, minute instructions,” said
Muniment, “with, however, considerable discretion in respect to seizing
his chance. The thing is made remarkably easy for him. All this I know
from Schinkel, who himself knew nothing on Sunday, being a mere medium
of transmission, but who saw Hyacinth yesterday morning.”

“Schinkel trusts you, then?” the Princess remarked.

Muniment looked at her steadily a moment. “Yes, but he won’t trust you.
Hyacinth is to receive a card of invitation to a certain big house,” he
went on, “a card with the name left in blank, so that he may fill it
out himself. It is to be good for each of two grand parties which are
to be given at a few days’ interval. That’s why they give him the
job—because at a grand party he’ll look in his place.”

“He will like that,” said the Princess, musingly—“repaying hospitality
with a pistol-shot.”

“If he doesn’t like it he needn’t do it.”

The Princess made no rejoinder to this, but in a moment she said, “I
can easily find out the place you mean—the big house where two parties
are to be given at a few days’ interval and where the master is worth
your powder.”

“Easily, no doubt. And do you want to warn him?”

“No, I want to do the business first, so that it won’t be left for
another. If Hyacinth will look in his place at a grand party, should
not I look still more in mine? And as I know the individual I should be
able to approach him without exciting the smallest suspicion.”

Muniment appeared to consider her suggestion a moment, as if it were
practical and interesting; but presently he answered, placidly, “To
fall by your hand would be too good for him.”

“However he falls, will it be useful, valuable?” the Princess asked.

“It’s worth trying. He’s a very bad institution.”

“And don’t you mean to go near Hyacinth?”

“No, I wish to leave him free,” Muniment answered.

“Ah, Paul Muniment,” murmured the Princess, “you _are_ a first-rate
man!” She sank down upon the sofa and sat looking up at him. “In God’s
name, why have you told me this?” she broke out.

“So that you should not be able to throw it up at me, later, that I had
not.”

She threw herself over, burying her face in the cushions, and remained
so for some minutes, in silence. Muniment watched her awhile, without
speaking; but at last he remarked, “I don’t want to aggravate you, but
you _will_ go back!” The words failed to cause her even to raise her
head, and after a moment he quietly went out.




XLVII


That the Princess had done with him, done with him for ever, remained
the most vivid impression that Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira
Crescent the night before. He went home, and he flung himself on his
narrow bed, where the consolation of sleep again descended upon him.
But he woke up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day
was a quick revival of pain. He was over-past, he had become vague, he
was extinct. The things that Sholto had said to him came back to him,
and the compassion of foreknowledge that Madame Grandoni had shown him
from the first. Of Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder whether he
knew. An insurmountable desire to do justice to him, for the very
reason that there might be a temptation to oblique thoughts, forbade
him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely wondered
whether _he_ would ever be superseded; but this possibility faded away
in a stronger light—a kind of dazzling vision of some great
tribuneship, which swept before him now and again and in which the
figure of the Princess herself seemed merged and extinguished. When
full morning came at last, and he got up, it brought with it, in the
restlessness which made it impossible to him to remain in his room, a
return of that beginning of an answerless question, ‘After all—after
all—?’ which the Princess had planted there the night before when she
spoke so bravely in the name of the Revolution. ‘After all—after all,
since nothing else was tried, or would, apparently, ever be tried—’ He
had a sense of his mind, which had been made up, falling to pieces
again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was
already familiar—the horror of the reappearance, on his part, of the
imbrued hands of his mother. This loathing of the idea of a
_repetition_ had not been sharp, strangely enough, till his summons
came; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance to
act for the ‘party of action’ had not been the fear of a personal
stain, but the simple extension of his observation. Yet now the idea of
the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to make
service impossible. It rose before him like a kind of backward
accusation of his mother; to suffer it to start out in the life of her
son was in a manner to place her own forgotten, redeemed pollution
again in the eye of the world. The thought that was most of all with
him was that he had time—he had time; he was grateful for that, and saw
a kind of delicacy in their having given him a margin—not condemned him
to be pressed by the hours. He had another day, he had two days, he
might take three, he might take several. He knew he should be terribly
weary of them before they were over; but for that matter they would be
over whenever he liked. Anyhow, he went forth again into the streets,
into the squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to
steep himself yet once again in the great indifferent city which he
knew and loved and which had had so many of his smiles and tears and
confidences. The day was gray and damp, though no rain fell, and London
had never appeared to him to wear more proudly and publicly the stamp
of her imperial history. He passed slowly to and fro over Westminster
bridge and watched the black barges drift on the great brown river, and
looked up at the huge fretted palace that rose there as a fortress of
the social order which he, like the young David, had been commissioned
to attack with a sling and a pebble. At last he made his way to St
James’s Park, and he strolled about a long time. He revolved around it,
and he went a considerable distance up the thoroughfare that
communicates with Pimlico. He stopped at a certain point and came back
again, and then he retraced his steps in the former direction. He
looked in the windows of shops, and he looked in particular into the
long, glazed expanse of that establishment in which, at that hour of
the day, Millicent Henning discharged superior functions. Millicent’s
image had descended upon him after he came out, and now it moved before
him as he went, it clung to him, it refused to quit him. He made, in
truth, no effort to drive it away; he held fast to it in return, and it
murmured strange things in his ear. She had been so jolly to him on
Sunday; she was such a strong, obvious, simple nature, with such a
generous breast and such a freedom from the sophistries of
civilisation. All that he had ever liked in her came back to him now
with a finer air, and there was a moment, during which he hung over the
rail of the bridge that spans the lake in St James’s Park and
mechanically followed the movement of the swans, when he asked himself
whether, at bottom, he hadn’t liked her better, almost, than any one.
He tried to think he had, he wanted to think he had, and he seemed to
see the look her eyes would have if he should tell her that he had.
Something of that sort had really passed between them on Sunday; only
the business that had come up since had superseded it. Now the taste of
the vague, primitive comfort that his Sunday had given him came back to
him, and he asked himself whether he mightn’t know it a second time.
After he had thought he couldn’t again wish for anything, he found
himself wishing that he might believe there was something Millicent
could do for him. Mightn’t she help him—mightn’t she even extricate
him? He was looking into a window—not that of her own shop—when a
vision rose before him of a quick flight with her, for an undefined
purpose, to an undefined spot; and he was glad, at that moment, to have
his back turned to the people in the street, because his face suddenly
grew red to the tips of his ears. Again and again, all the same, he
indulged in the reflection that spontaneous, uncultivated minds often
have inventions, inspirations. Moreover, whether Millicent should have
any or not, he might at least feel her arms around him. He didn’t
exactly know what good it would do him or what door it would open; but
he should like it. The sensation was not one he could afford to defer,
but the nearest moment at which he could enjoy it would be that
evening. _He_ had thrown over everything, but she would be busy all
day; nevertheless, it would be a gain, it would be a kind of foretaste,
to see her earlier, to have three words with her. He wrestled with the
temptation to go into her haberdasher’s, because he knew she didn’t
like it (he had tried it once, of old); as the visits of gentlemen,
even when ostensible purchasers (there were people watching about who
could tell who was who), compromised her in the eyes of her employers.
This was not an ordinary case, however; and though he hovered about the
place a long time, undecided, embarrassed, half ashamed, at last he
went in, as by an irresistible necessity. He would just make an
appointment with her, and a glance of the eye and a single word would
suffice. He remembered his way through the labyrinth of the shop; he
knew that her department was on the second floor. He walked through the
place, which was crowded, as if he had as good a right as any one else;
and as he had entertained himself, on rising, with putting on his
holiday garments, in which he made such a distinguished little figure,
he was not suspected of any purpose more nefarious than that of looking
for some nice thing to give a lady. He ascended the stairs, and found
himself in a large room where made-up articles were exhibited and
where, though there were twenty people in it, a glance told him he
shouldn’t find Millicent. She was perhaps in the next one, into which
he passed by a wide opening. Here also were numerous purchasers, most
of them ladies; the men were but three or four, and the disposal of the
wares was in the hands of neat young women attired in black dresses
with long trains. At first it appeared to Hyacinth that the young woman
he sought was even here not within sight, and he was turning away, to
look elsewhere, when suddenly he perceived that a tall gentleman,
standing in the middle of the room, was none other than Captain Sholto.
It next became plain to him that the person standing upright before the
Captain, as still as a lay-figure and with her back turned to Hyacinth,
was the object of his own quest. In spite of her averted face he
instantly recognised Millicent; he knew her shop-attitude, the dressing
of her hair behind, and the long, grand lines of her figure, draped in
the last new thing. She was exhibiting this article to the Captain, and
he was lost in contemplation. He had been beforehand with Hyacinth as a
false purchaser, but he imitated a real one better than our young man,
as, with his eyes travelling up and down the front of Millicent’s
person, he frowned, consideringly, and rubbed his lower lip slowly with
his walking-stick. Millicent stood admirably still, and the back-view
of the garment she displayed was magnificent. Hyacinth, for a minute,
stood as still as she. At the end of that minute he perceived that
Sholto saw him, and for an instant he thought he was going to direct
Millicent’s attention to him. But Sholto only looked at him very hard,
for a few seconds, without telling her he was there; to enjoy that
satisfaction he would wait till the interloper was gone. Hyacinth gazed
back at him for the same length of time—what these two pairs of eyes
said to each other requires perhaps no definite mention—and then turned
away.

That evening, about nine o’clock, the Princess Casamassima drove in a
hansom to Hyacinth’s lodgings in Westminster. The door of the house was
a little open, and a man stood on the step, smoking his big pipe and
looking up and down. The Princess, seeing him while she was still at
some distance, had hoped he was Hyacinth, but he proved to be a very
different figure indeed from her devoted young friend. He had not a
forbidding countenance, but he looked very hard at her as she descended
from her hansom and approached the door. She was used to being looked
at hard, and she didn’t mind this; she supposed he was one of the
lodgers in the house. He edged away to let her pass, and watched her
while she endeavoured to impart an elasticity of movement to the limp
bell-pull beside the door. It gave no audible response, so that she
said to him, “I wish to ask for Mr Hyacinth Robinson. Perhaps you can
tell me—”

“Yes, I too,” the man replied, smiling. “I have come also for that.”

The Princess hesitated a moment. “I think you must be Mr Schinkel. I
have heard of you.”

“You know me by my bad English,” her interlocutor remarked, with a sort
of benevolent coquetry.

“Your English is remarkably good—I wish I spoke German as well. Only
just a hint of an accent, and evidently an excellent vocabulary.”

“I think I have heard, also, of you,” said Schinkel, appreciatively.

“Yes, we know each other, in our circle, don’t we? We are all brothers
and sisters.” The Princess was anxious, she was in a fever; but she
could still relish the romance of standing in a species of back-slum
and fraternising with a personage looking like a very tame horse whose
collar galled him. “Then he’s at home, I hope; he is coming down to
you?” she went on.

“That’s what I don’t know. I am waiting.”

“Have they gone to call him?”

Schinkel looked at her, while he puffed his pipe. “I have called him
myself, but he will not say.”

“How do you mean—he will not say?”

“His door is locked. I have knocked many times.”

“I suppose he is out,” said the Princess.

“Yes, he may be out,” Schinkel remarked, judicially.

He and the Princess stood a moment looking at each other, and then she
asked, “Have you any doubt of it?”

“Oh, _es kann sein_. Only the woman of the house told me five minutes
ago that he came in.”

“Well, then, he probably went out again,” the Princess remarked.

“Yes, but she didn’t hear him.”

The Princess reflected, and was conscious that she was flushing. She
knew what Schinkel knew about their young friend’s actual situation,
and she wished to be very clear with him, and to induce him to be the
same with her. She was rather baffled, however, by the sense that he
was cautious, and justly cautious. He was polite and inscrutable, quite
like some of the high personages—ambassadors and cabinet-ministers—whom
she used to meet in the great world. “Has the woman been here, in the
house, ever since?” she asked in a moment.

“No, she went out for ten minutes, half an hour ago.”

“Surely, then, he may have gone out again in that time!” the Princess
exclaimed.

“That is what I have thought. It is also why I have waited here,” said
Schinkel. “I have nothing to do,” he added, serenely.

“Neither have I,” the Princess rejoined. “We can wait together.”

“It’s a pity you haven’t got some room,” the German suggested.

“No, indeed; this will do very well. We shall see him the sooner when
he comes back.”

“Yes, but perhaps it won’t be for long.”

“I don’t care for that; I will wait. I hope you don’t object to my
company,” she went on, smiling.

“It is good, it is good,” Schinkel responded, through his smoke.

“Then I will send away my cab.” She returned to the vehicle and paid
the driver, who said, “Thank you, my lady,” with expression, and drove
off.

“You gave him too much,” observed Schinkel, when she came back.

“Oh, he looked like a nice man. I am sure he deserved it.”

“It is very expensive,” Schinkel went on, sociably.

“Yes, and I have no money, but it’s done. Was there no one else in the
house while the woman was away?” the Princess asked.

“No, the people are out; she only has single men. I asked her that. She
has a daughter, but the daughter has gone to see her cousin. The mother
went only a hundred yards, round the corner there, to buy a pennyworth
of milk. She locked this door, and put the key in her pocket; she
stayed at the grocer’s, where she got the milk, to have a little
conversation with a friend she met there. You know ladies always stop
like that—_nicht wahr?_ It was half an hour later that I came. She told
me that he was at home, and I went up to his room. I got no sound, as I
have told you. I came down and spoke to her again, and she told me what
I say.”

“Then you determined to wait, as I have done,” said the Princess.

“Oh, yes, I want to see him.”

“So do I, very much.” The Princess said nothing more, for a minute;
then she added, “I think we want to see him for the same reason.”

“_Das kann sein—das kann sein_.”

The two continued to stand there in the brown evening, and they had
some further conversation, of a desultory and irrelevant kind. At the
end of ten minutes the Princess broke out, in a low tone, laying her
hand on her companion’s arm, “Mr Schinkel, this won’t do. I’m
intolerably nervous.”

“Yes, that is the nature of ladies,” the German replied, imperturbably.

“I wish to go up to his room,” the Princess pursued. “You will be so
good as to show me where it is.”

“It will do you no good, if he is not there.”

The Princess hesitated. “I am not sure he is not there.”

“Well, if he won’t speak, it shows he likes better not to have
visitors.”

“Oh, he may like to have me better than he does you!” the Princess
exclaimed.

“_Das kann sein—das kann sein_.” But Schinkel made no movement to
introduce her into the house.

“There is nothing to-night—you know what I mean,” the Princess
remarked, after looking at him a moment.

“Nothing to-night?”

“At the Duke’s. The first party is on Thursday, the other is next
Tuesday.”

“_Schön_. I never go to parties,” said Schinkel.

“Neither do I.”

“Except that _this_ is a kind of party—you and me,” suggested Schinkel.

“Yes, and the woman of the house doesn’t approve of it.” The footstep
of the personage in question had been audible in the passage, through
the open door, which was presently closed, from within, with a little
reprehensive bang. Something in this incident appeared to quicken
exceedingly the Princess’s impatience and emotion; the menace of
exclusion from the house made her wish more even than before to enter
it. “For God’s sake, Mr Schinkel, take me up there. If you won’t, I
will go alone,” she pleaded.

Her face was white now, and it need hardly be added that it was
beautiful. The German considered it a moment in silence; then turned
and reopened the door and went in, followed closely by his companion.

There was a light in the lower region, which tempered the gloom of the
staircase—as high, that is, as the first floor; the ascent the rest of
the way was so dusky that the pair went slowly and Schinkel led the
Princess by the hand. She gave a suppressed exclamation as she rounded
a sharp turn in the second flight. “Good God, is that his door, with
the light?”

“Yes, you can see under it. There was a light before,” said Schinkel,
without confusion.

“And why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I thought it would worry you.”

“And doesn’t it worry _you?_”

“A little, but I don’t mind,” said Schinkel. “Very likely he may have
left it.”

“He doesn’t leave candles!” the Princess returned, with vehemence. She
hurried up the few remaining steps to the door, and paused there with
her ear against it. Her hand grasped the handle, and she turned it, but
the door resisted. Then she murmured, pantingly, to her companion, “We
must go in—we must go in!”

“What will you do, when it’s locked?” he inquired.

“You must break it down.”

“It is very expensive,” said Schinkel.

“Don’t be abject!” cried the Princess. “In a house like this the
fastenings are certainly flimsy; they will easily yield.”

“And if he is not there—if he comes back and finds what we have done?”

She looked at him a moment through the darkness, which was mitigated
only by the small glow proceeding from the chink. “He _is_ there!
Before God, he is there!”

“_Schön, schön_,” said her companion, as if he felt the contagion of
her own dread but was deliberating and meant to remain calm. The
Princess assured him that one or two vigorous thrusts with his shoulder
would burst the bolt—it was sure to be some wretched morsel of tin—and
she made way for him to come close. He did so, he even leaned against
the door, but he gave no violent push, and the Princess waited, with
her hand against her heart. Schinkel apparently was still deliberating.
At last he gave a low sigh. “I know they found him the pistol; it is
only for that,” he murmured; and the next moment Christina saw him sway
sharply to and fro in the gloom. She heard a crack and saw that the
lock had yielded. The door collapsed: they were in the light; they were
in a small room, which looked full of things. The light was that of a
single candle on the mantel; it was so poor that for a moment she made
out nothing definite. Before that moment was over, however, her eyes
had attached themselves to the small bed. There was something on
it—something black, something ambiguous, something outstretched.
Schinkel held her back, but only for an instant; she saw everything,
and with the very act she flung herself beside the bed, upon her knees.
Hyacinth lay there as if he were asleep, but there was a horrible
thing, a mess of blood, on the bed, in his side, in his heart. His arm
hung limp beside him, downwards, off the narrow couch; his face was
white and his eyes were closed. So much Schinkel saw, but only for an
instant; a convulsive movement of the Princess, bending over the body
while a strange low cry came from her lips, covered it up. He looked
about him for the weapon, for the pistol, but the Princess, in her rush
at the bed, had pushed it out of sight with her knees. “It’s a pity
they found it—if he hadn’t had it here!” he exclaimed to her. He had
determined to remain calm, so that, on turning round at the quick
advent of the little woman of the house, who had hurried up, white,
scared, staring, at the sound of the crashing door, he was able to say,
very quietly and gravely, “Mr Robinson has shot himself through the
heart. He must have done it while you were fetching the milk.” The
Princess got up, hearing another person in the room, and then Schinkel
perceived the small revolver lying just under the bed. He picked it up
and carefully placed it on the mantel-shelf, keeping, equally
carefully, to himself the reflection that it would certainly have
served much better for the Duke.