Transcriber’s Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  “accordeon” should possibly be “accordion”.




THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA




     MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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     TORONTO




     THE PRINCESS
     CASAMASSIMA

     BY

     HENRY JAMES

     IN TWO VOLUMES

     VOL. I

     MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
     ST. MARTIN’S STREET LONDON
     1921




     COPYRIGHT

     First published in 1886




PREFACE


The simplest account of the origin of _The Princess Casamassima_ is,
I think, that this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the first
year of a long residence in London, from the habit and the interest of
walking the streets. I walked a great deal—for exercise, for amusement,
for acquisition, and above all I always walked home at the evening’s
end, when the evening had been spent elsewhere, as happened more often
than not; and as to do this was to receive many impressions, so the
impressions worked and sought an issue, so the book after a time was
born. It is a fact that, as I look back, the attentive exploration
of London, the assault directly made by the great city upon an
imagination quick to react, fully explains a large part of it. There
is a minor element that refers itself to another source, of which I
shall presently speak; but the prime idea was unmistakably the ripe
round fruit of perambulation. One walked of course with one’s eyes
greatly open, and I hasten to declare that such a practice, carried on
for a long time and over a considerable space, positively provokes,
all round, a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of
everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced.
“Subjects” and situations, character and history, the tragedy and
comedy of life, are things of which the common air, in such conditions,
seems pungently to taste; and to a mind curious, before the human
scene, of meanings and revelations the great grey Babylon easily
becomes, on its face, a garden bristling with an immense illustrative
flora. Possible stories, presentable figures, rise from the thick
jungle as the observer moves, fluttering up like startled game, and
before he knows it indeed he has fairly to guard himself against the
brush of importunate wings. He goes on as with his head in a cloud of
humming presences—especially during the younger, the initiatory time,
the fresh, the sharply-apprehensive months or years, more or less
numerous. We use our material up, we use up even the thick tribute
of the London streets—if perception and attention but sufficiently
light our steps. But I think of them as lasting, for myself, quite
sufficiently long; I think of them as even still—dreadfully changed
for the worse in respect to any romantic idea as I find them—breaking
out on occasion into eloquence, throwing out deep notes from their vast
vague murmur.

There was a moment at any rate when they offered me no image more vivid
than that of some individual sensitive nature or fine mind, some small
obscure intelligent creature whose education should have been almost
wholly derived from them, capable of profiting by all the civilisation,
all the accumulations to which they testify, yet condemned to see
these things only from outside—in mere quickened consideration, mere
wistfulness and envy and despair. It seemed to me I had only to imagine
such a spirit intent enough and troubled enough, and to place it in
presence of the comings and goings, the great gregarious company, of
the more fortunate than himself—all on the scale on which London could
show them—to get possession of an interesting theme. I arrived so at
the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the
London pavement. To find his possible adventure interesting I had only
to conceive his watching the same public show, the same innumerable
appearances, I had watched myself, and of his watching very much as
I had watched; save indeed for one little difference. This difference
would be that so far as all the swarming facts should speak of freedom
and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, he
should be able to revolve round them but at the most respectful of
distances and with every door of approach shut in his face. For one’s
self, all conveniently, there had been doors that opened—opened into
light and warmth and cheer, into good and charming relations; and if
the place as a whole lay heavy on one’s consciousness there was yet
always for relief this implication of one’s own lucky share of the
freedom and ease, lucky acquaintance with the number of lurking springs
at light pressure of which particular vistas would begin to recede,
great lighted, furnished, peopled galleries, sending forth gusts of
agreeable sound.

That main happy sense of the picture was always there and that retreat
from the general grimness never forbidden; whereby one’s own relation
to the mere formidable mass and weight of things was eased off and
adjusted. One learned from an early period what it might be to know
London in such a way as that—an immense and interesting discipline, an
education on terms mostly convenient and delightful. But what would
be the effect of the other way, of having so many precious things
perpetually in one’s eyes, yet of missing them all for any closer
knowledge, and of the confinement of closer knowledge entirely to
matters with which a connexion, however intimate, couldn’t possibly
pass for a privilege? Truly, of course, there are London mysteries
(dense categories of dark arcana) for every spectator, and it’s in a
degree an exclusion and a state of weakness to be without experience
of the meaner conditions, the lower manners and types, the general
sordid struggle, the weight of the burden of labour, the ignorance, the
misery and the vice. With such matters as those my tormented young man
would have had contact—they would have formed, fundamentally, from the
first, his natural and immediate London. But the reward of a romantic
curiosity would be the question of what the total assault, that of
the world of his work-a-day life and the world of his divination and
his envy together, would have made of him, and what in especial he
would have made of them. As tormented, I say, I thought of him, and
that would be the point—if one could only see him feel enough to be
interesting without his feeling so much as not to be natural.

This in fact I have ever found rather terribly the point—that the
figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting
only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since
the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited
forms for us their link of connexion with it. But there are degrees
of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely
intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete,
in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is
those moved in this latter fashion who “get most” out of all that
happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their
record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their
being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—_makes_
absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense
to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care,
comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the
blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping
to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really
sentient. Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by
the stupid and the blind, who minister in all sorts of ways to their
recorded fate. Persons of markedly limited sense would, on such a
principle as that, play a part in the career of my tormented youth; but
he wouldn’t be of markedly limited sense himself—he would note as many
things and vibrate to as many occasions as I might venture to make him.

There wouldn’t, moreover, simply be the question of his suffering—of
which we might soon get enough; there would be the question of what,
all beset and all perceptive, he should thus adventurously do, thus
dream and hazard and attempt. The interest of the attitude and the act
would be the actor’s imagination and vision of them, together with the
nature and degree of their felt return upon him. So the intelligent
creature would be required and so some picture of his intelligence
involved. The picture of an intelligence appears for the most part,
it is true, a dead weight for the reader of the English novel to
carry, this reader having so often the wondrous property of caring
for the displayed tangle of human relations without caring for its
intelligibility. The teller of a story is primarily, none the less,
the listener to it, the reader of it, too; and, having needed thus to
make it out, distinctly, on the crabbed page of life, to disengage it
from the rude human character and the more or less gothic text in which
it has been packed away, the very essence of his affair has been the
_imputing_ of intelligence. The basis of his attention has been that
such and such an imbroglio has got started—on the page of life—because
of something that some one has felt and more or less understood.

I recognise at the same time, and in planning _The Princess
Casamassima_ felt it highly important to recognise, the danger of
filling too full any supposed and above all any obviously limited
vessel of consciousness. If persons either tragically or comically
embroiled with life allow us the comic or tragic value of their
embroilment in proportion as their struggle is a measured and directed
one, it is strangely true, none the less, that beyond a certain point
they are spoiled for us by this carrying of a due light. They may carry
too much of it for our credence, for our compassion, for our derision.
They may be shown as knowing too much and feeling too much—not
certainly for their remaining remarkable, but for their remaining
“natural” and typical, for their having the needful communities with
our own precious liability to fall into traps and be bewildered. It
seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be
a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature
of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so
long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored
Olympians, mixed up with them. Therefore it is that the wary reader
for the most part warns the novelist against making his characters
too _interpretative_ of the muddle of fate, or in other words too
divinely, too priggishly clever. “Give us plenty of bewilderment,”
this monitor seems to say, “so long as there is plenty of slashing
out in the bewilderment too. But don’t, we beseech you, give us too
much intelligence; for intelligence—well, _endangers_; endangers not
perhaps the slasher himself, but the very slashing, the subject-matter
of any self-respecting story. It opens up too many considerations,
possibilities, issues; it _may_ lead the slasher into dreary realms
where slashing somehow fails and falls to the ground.”

That is well reasoned on the part of the reader, who can in spite of
it never have an idea—or his earnest discriminations would come to him
less easily—of the extreme difficulty, for the painter of the human
mixture, of reproducing that mixture aright. “Give us in the persons
represented, the subjects of the bewilderment (that bewilderment
without which there would be no question of an issue or of the fact
of suspense, prime implications in any story), as much experience as
possible, but keep down the terms in which you report that experience,
because we only understand the very simplest”: such in effect are
the words in which the novelist constantly hears himself addressed,
such the plea made him by the would-be victims of his spell on behalf
of that sovereign principle the economy of interest, a principle as
to which their instinct is justly strong. He listens anxiously to
the charge—nothing can exceed his own solicitude for an economy of
interest; but feels himself all in presence of an abyss of ambiguities,
the mutual accommodations in which the reader wholly leaves to him.
Experience, as I see it, is our apprehension and our measure of what
happens to us as social creatures—any intelligent report of which
has to be based on that apprehension. The picture of the exposed and
entangled state is what is required, and there are certainly always
plenty of grounds for keeping down the complexities of a picture.
A picture it still has to be, however, and by that condition has to
deal effectually with its subject, so that the simple device of more
and more keeping down may well not see us quite to our end or even
quite to our middle. One suggested way of keeping down, for instance,
is not to attribute feeling, or feelings, to persons who wouldn’t in
all probability have had any to speak of. The less space, within the
frame of the picture, their feelings take up the more space is left for
their doings—a fact that may at first seem to make for a refinement of
economy.

All of which is charming—yet would be infinitely more so if here at
once ambiguity didn’t yawn; the unreality of the sharp distinction,
where the interest of observation is at stake, between doing and
feeling. In the immediate field of life, for action, for application,
for getting through a job, nothing may so much matter perhaps as the
descent of a suspended weight on this, that or the other spot, with
all its subjective concomitants quite secondary and irrelevant. But
the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected
field of life, the realm not of application, but of _appreciation_—a
truth that makes our measure of effect altogether different. My report
of people’s experience—my report as a “story-teller”—is essentially my
appreciation of it, and there is no “interest” for me in what my hero,
my heroine or any one else does save through that admirable process.
As soon as I begin to appreciate simplification is imperilled: the
sharply distinguished parts of any adventure, any case of endurance
and performance, melt together as an appeal. I then see their “doing,”
that of the persons just mentioned, as, immensely, their feeling, their
feeling as their doing; since I can have none of the conveyed sense
and taste of their situation without becoming intimate with them. I
can’t be intimate without that sense and taste, and I can’t appreciate
save by intimacy, any more than I can report save by a projected
light. Intimacy with a man’s specific behaviour, with his given case,
is desperately certain to make us see it as a whole—in which event
arbitrary limitations of our vision lose whatever beauty they may on
occasion have pretended to. What a man thinks and what he feels are the
history and the character of what he does; on all of which things the
logic of intensity rests. Without intensity where is vividness, and
without vividness where is presentability? If I have called the most
general state of one’s most exposed and assaulted figures the state
of bewilderment—the condition for instance on which Thackeray so much
insists in the interest of _his_ exhibited careers, the condition of
a humble heart, a bowed head, a patient wonder, a suspended judgement,
before the “awful will” and the mysterious decrees of Providence—so it
is rather witless to talk of merely getting rid of that displayed mode
of reaction, one of the oft-encountered, one of the highly recommended,
categories of feeling.

The whole thing comes to depend thus on the _quality_ of bewilderment
characteristic of one’s creature, the quality involved in the
given case or supplied by one’s data. There are doubtless many such
qualities, ranging from vague and crepuscular to sharpest and most
critical; and we have but to imagine one of these latter to see how
easily—from the moment it gets its head at all—it may insist on playing
a part. There we have then at once a case of feeling, of ever so
many possible feelings, stretched across the scene like an attached
thread on which the pearls of interest are strung. There are threads
shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor,
the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as
we may conveniently call it, may not yield lively results. They have
their subordinate, comparative, illustrative human value—that appeal
of the witless which is often so penetrating. Verily even, I think, no
“story” is possible without its fools—as most of the fine painters of
life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray,
Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly
felt. At the same time I confess I never see the _leading_ interest of
any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and
moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement.
It is as mirrored in that consciousness that the gross fools, the
headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part for us—they have much
less to show us in themselves. The troubled life mostly at the centre
of our subject—whatever our subject, for the artistic hour, happens
to be—embraces them and deals with them for its amusement and its
anguish: they are apt largely indeed, on a near view, to be all the
cause of its trouble. This means, exactly, that the person capable of
feeling in the given case more than another of what is to be felt for
it, and so serving in the highest degree to _record_ it dramatically
and objectively, is the only sort of person on whom we can count not
to betray, to cheapen or, as we say, give away, the value and beauty of
the thing. By so much as the affair matters _for_ some such individual,
by so much do we get the best there is of it, and by so much as it
falls within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more
shallow capacity, do we get a picture dim and meagre.

The great chroniclers have clearly always been aware of this; they have
at least always either placed a mind of some sort—in the sense of a
reflecting and colouring medium—in possession of the general adventure
(when the latter has not been purely epic, as with Scott, say, as with
old Dumas and with Zola); or else paid signally, as to the interest
created, for their failure to do so. We may note, moreover, in passing
that this failure is in almost no case intentional or part of a plan,
but has sprung from their limited curiosity, their short conception
of the particular sensibility projected. Edgar of Ravenswood for
instance, visited by the tragic tempest of _The Bride of Lammermoor_,
has a black cloak and hat and feathers more than he has a mind; just
as Hamlet, while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least
equally romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume. The
situation represented is that Ravenswood loves Lucy Ashton through
dire difficulty and danger, and that she in the same way loves him;
but the relation so created between them is by this neglect of the
“feeling” question never shown us as primarily taking place. It is
shown only in its secondary, its confused and disfigured aspects—where,
however, luckily, it is presented with great romantic good faith.
The thing has nevertheless paid for its deviation, as I say, by a
sacrifice of intensity; the centre of the subject is empty and the
development pushed off, all round, toward the frame—which is, so to
speak, beautifully rich and curious. But I mention that relation to
each other of the appearances in a particular work only as a striking
negative case; there are in the connexion I have glanced at plenty
of striking positive ones. It is very true that Fielding’s hero in
_Tom Jones_ is but as “finely,” that is but as intimately, bewildered
as a young man of great health and spirits may be when he hasn’t a
grain of imagination: the point to be made is, at all events, that his
sense of bewilderment obtains altogether on the comic, never on the
tragic plane. He has so much “life” that it amounts, for the effect of
comedy and application of satire, almost to his having a mind, that is
to his having reactions and a full consciousness; besides which his
author—_he_ handsomely possessed of a mind—has such an amplitude of
reflexion for him and round him that we see him through the mellow air
of Fielding’s fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style,
which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important.

All of which furthers my remarking how much I have been interested, on
reading _The Princess Casamassima_ over, to recognise my sense, sharp
from far back, that clearness and concreteness constantly depend, for
any pictorial whole, on some _concentrated_ individual notation of
them. That notation goes forward here in the mind of little Hyacinth,
immensely quickened by the fact of its so mattering to his very life
what he does make of things: which passion of intelligence is, as I
have already hinted, precisely his highest value for our curiosity and
our sympathy. Yet if his highest it is not at all his only one, since
the truth for “a young man in a book” by no means entirely resides
in his being either exquisitely sensitive or shiningly clever. It
resides in some such measure of these things as may consort with the
fine measure of other things too—with that of the other faces of his
situation and character. If he’s too sensitive and too clever for
_them_, if he knows more than is likely or natural—for _him_—it’s as
if he weren’t at all, as if he were false and impossible. Extreme and
attaching always the difficulty of fixing at a hundred points the place
where one’s impelled _bonhomme_ may feel enough and “know” enough—or be
in the way of learning enough—for his maximum dramatic value without
feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his
proper fusion with the fable. This is the charming, the tormenting, the
eternal little matter _to be made right_, in all the weaving of silver
threads and tapping on golden nails; and I should take perhaps too
fantastic a comfort—I mean were not the comforts of the artist just of
the raw essence of fantasy—in any glimpse of such achieved rightnesses,
whether in my own work or that of others. In no work whatever,
doubtless, are they the felicities the most frequent; but they have so
inherent a price that even the traceable attempt at them, wherever met,
sheds, I think, a fine influence about.

I have, for example, a weakness of sympathy with that constant effort
of George Eliot’s which plays through Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Tito
Melema, through Daniel Deronda and through Lydgate in _Middlemarch_,
through Maggie Tulliver, through Romola, through Dorothea Brooke
and Gwendolen Harleth; the effort to show their adventures and
their history—the author’s subject-matter all—as determined by their
feelings and the nature of their minds. Their emotions, their stirred
intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently
charmed perusal, our own very adventure. The creator of Deronda and of
Romola is charged, I know, with having on occasion—as in dealing with
those very celebrities themselves—left the figure, the concrete man
and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed;
but such mischances, where imagination and humour still keep them
company, often have an interest that is wanting to agitations of the
mere surface or to those that may be only taken for granted. I should
even like to give myself the pleasure of retracing from one of my own
productions to another the play of a like instinctive disposition,
of catching in the fact, at one point after another, from _Roderick
Hudson_ to _The Golden Bowl_, that provision for interest which
consists in placing advantageously, placing right in the middle of the
light, the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject. Rowland
Mallet, in _Roderick Hudson_, is exactly such a mirror, not a bit
autobiographic or formally “first person” though he be, and I might
exemplify the case through a long list, through the nature of such
a “mind” even as the all-objective Newman in _The American_, through
the thickly-peopled imagination of Isabel Archer in _The Portrait of a
Lady_ (her imagination positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio)
down to such unmistakable examples as that of Merton Densher in _The
Wings of the Dove_, that of Lambert Strether in _The Ambassadors_
(_he_ a mirror verily of miraculous silver and quite pre-eminent, I
think, for the connexion), and that of the Prince in the first half
and that of the Princess in the second half of _The Golden Bowl_. I
should note the extent to which these persons are, so far as their
other passions permit, intense _perceivers_, all, of their respective
predicaments, and I should go on from them to fifty other examples;
even to the divided Vanderbank of _The Awkward Age_, the extreme pinch
of whose romance is the vivacity in him, to his positive sorrow and
loss, of the state of being aware; even to scanted Fleda Vetch in _The
Spoils of Poynton_, through whose own delicate vision of everything
so little of the human value of her situation is wasted for us; even
to the small recording governess confronted with the horrors of _The
Turn of the Screw_, and to the innocent child patching together all
ineffectually those of _What Maisie Knew_; even in short, since I may
name so few cases, to the disaffected guardian of an overgrown legend
in _The Birthplace_, to the luckless fine artist of _The Next Time_,
trying to despoil himself, for a “hit” and bread and butter, of his
fatal fineness, to blunt the tips of his intellectual fingers, and to
the hapless butler Brooksmith, ruined by good talk, disqualified for
common domestic service by the beautiful growth of his habit of quiet
attention, his faculty of appreciation. But though this demonstration
of a rooted vice—since a vice it would appear mainly accounted—might
yield amusement, the examples referred to must await their turn.

I had had for a long time well before me, at any rate, my small obscure
but ardent observer of the “London world,” saw him roam and wonder
and yearn, saw all the unanswered questions and baffled passions
that might ferment in him—once he should be made both sufficiently
thoughtful and sufficiently “disinherited”; but this image, however
interesting, was of course not by itself a progression, an action,
didn’t by itself make a drama. I got my action, however—failing which
one has nothing—under the prompt sense that the state of feeling I was
concerned with might develop and beget another state, might return at
a given moment, and with the greatest vivacity, on itself. To see this
was really to feel one’s subject swim into one’s ken, especially after
a certain other ingenious connexion had been made for it. I find myself
again recalling, and with the possible “fun” of it reviving too, how
I recognised, as revealed and prescribed, the particular complexion,
profession and other conditions of my little presumptuous adventurer,
with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity,
his small cluster of “dingy” London associations and the swelling
spirit in him which was to be the field of his strange experience.
Accessible through his imagination, as I have hinted, to a thousand
provocations and intimations, he would become most acquainted with
destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution. His being jealous of
all the ease of life of which he tastes so little, and, bitten, under
this exasperation, with an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social
faith, his turning to “treasons, stratagems and spoils” might be as
vivid a picture as one chose, but would move to pity and terror only by
the aid of some deeper complication, some imposed and formidable issue.

The complication most interesting then would be that he should fall
in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at the
moment of his most feeling and most hating the famous “iniquity of
its social arrangements”; so that his position as an irreconcilable
pledged enemy to it, thus rendered false by something more personal
than his opinions and his vows, becomes the sharpest of his torments.
To make it a torment that really matters, however, he must have got
practically involved, specifically committed to the stand he has,
under the pressure of more knowledge, found impossible; out of which
has come for him the deep dilemma of the disillusioned and repentant
conspirator. He has thrown himself into the more than “shady”
underworld of militant socialism, he has undertaken to play a part—a
part that with the drop of his exasperation and the growth, simply
expressed, of his taste, is out of all tune with his passion, at any
cost, for life itself, the life, whatever it be, that surrounds him.
Dabbling deeply in revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort,
he would be “in” up to his neck, and with that precarious part of him
particularly involved, so that his tergiversation is the climax of
his adventure. What was essential with this was that he should have a
social—not less than a socialist—connexion, find a door somehow open
to him into the appeased and civilised state, into that warmer glow of
things he is precisely to help to undermine. To look for this necessary
connexion was for me to meet it suddenly in the form of that extremely
_disponible_ figure of Christina Light whom I had ten years before
found left on my hands at the conclusion of _Roderick Hudson_. She had
for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured but
not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a
function.

I shall not pretend to trace the steps and stages by which the
imputability of a future to that young woman—which was like the act of
clothing her chilled and patient nakedness—had for its prime effect
to plant her in my little bookbinder’s path. Nothing would doubtless
beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to study
the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters, more or
less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their
own and “walk” round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling
for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing
their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows. I mistrust
them, I confess, in general; my sense of a really expressed character
is that it shall have originally so tasted of the ordeal of service
as to feel no disposition to yield again to the strain. Why should
the Princess of the climax of _Roderick Hudson_ still have made her
desire felt, unless in fact to testify that she had not been—for what
she was—completely recorded? To continue in evidence, that had struck
me from far back as her natural passion; in evidence at any price, not
consenting to be laid away with folded hands in the pasteboard tomb,
the doll’s box, to which we usually relegate the spent puppet after the
fashion of a recumbent worthy on the slab of a sepulchral monument. I
was to see this, after all, in the event, as the fruit of a restless
vanity: Christina had felt herself, known herself, striking, in the
earlier connexion, and couldn’t resign herself not to strike again.
Her pressure then was not to be resisted—sharply as the question might
come up of why she should pretend to strike just _there_. I shall not
attempt to answer it with reasons (one can never tell everything); it
was enough that I could recognise her claim to have travelled far—far
from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in character—that
was what she naturally _would_ have done. Her prime note had been
an aversion to the _banal_, and nothing could be of an effect less
_banal_, I judged, than her intervention in the life of a dingy little
London bookbinder whose sensibility, whose flow of opinions on “public
questions” in especial, should have been poisoned at the source.

She would be world-weary—that was another of her notes; and the
extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would have its root
and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about something or
other—it might scarce matter what. She can, or she believes she can,
feel freshly about the “people” and their wrongs and their sorrows
and their perpetual smothered ferment; for these things are furthest
removed from those others among which she has hitherto tried to make
her life. That was to a certainty where I was to have looked for
her—quite _off_ and away (once granted the wisdom of listening to her
anew at all): therefore Hyacinth’s encounter with her could pass for
natural, and it was fortunately to be noted that she was to serve for
his experience in quite another and a more “leading” sense than any
in which he was to serve for hers. I confess I was not averse—such are
the possible weaknesses of the artist in face of high difficulties—to
feeling that if his appearance of consistency were obtained I might
at least try to remain comparatively at my ease about hers. I may add,
moreover, that the resuscitation of Christina (and, on the minor scale,
of the Prince and of Madame Grandoni) put in a strong light for me the
whole question, for the romancer, of “going on with a character”: as
Balzac first of all systematically went on, as Thackeray, as Trollope,
as Zola all more or less ingeniously went on. I was to find no small
savour in the reflexions so precipitated; though I may treat myself
here only to this remark about them—that the revivalist impulse on the
fond writer’s part strikes me as one thing, a charmingly conceivable
thing, but the effect of a free indulgence in it (effect, that is,
on the nerves of the reader) as, for twenty rather ineffable reasons,
quite another.

I remember at any rate feeling myself all in possession of little
Hyacinth’s consistency, as I have called it, down at Dover during
certain weeks that were none too remotely precedent to the autumn
of 1885 and the appearance, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ again, of
the first chapters of the story. There were certain sunny, breezy,
balconied rooms at the quieter end of the Esplanade of that cheerful
castle-crested little town—now infinitely perturbed by gigantic
“harbour works,” but then only faded and over-soldiered and all
pleasantly and humbly submissive to the law that snubs in due course
the presumption of flourishing resorts—to which I had already more
than once had recourse in hours of quickened industry and which, though
much else has been swept away, still archaically exist. To have lately
noted this again from the old benched and asphalted walk by the sea,
the twinkling Channel beyond which on occasion the opposite coast of
France used to gleam as an incident of the charming tendency of the
whole prospect (immediate picture and fond design alike) amusingly
to _shine_, was somehow to taste afresh, and with a certain surprise,
the odd quality of that original confidence that the parts of my plan
_would_ somehow hang together. I may wonder at my confidence now—given
the extreme, the very particular truth and “authority” required at
so many points; but to wonder is to live back gratefully into the
finer reasons of things, with all the detail of harsh application and
friction (that there must have been) quite happily blurred and dim. The
finest of reasons—I mean for the sublime confidence I speak of—was that
I felt in full _personal_ possession of my matter; this really seemed
the fruit of direct experience. My scheme called for the suggested
nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic
underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation
not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and
sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming
possibilities. To have adopted the scheme was to have had to meet the
question of one’s “notes,” over the whole ground, the question of what,
in such directions, one had “gone into” and how far one had gone; and
to have answered that question—to one’s own satisfaction at least—was
truly to see one’s way.

My notes then, on the much-mixed world of my hero’s both overt and
covert consciousness, were exactly my gathered impressions and stirred
perceptions, the deposit in my working imagination of all my visual
and all my constructive sense of London. The very plan of my book
had in fact directly confronted me with the rich principle of the
Note, and was to do much to clear up, once for all, my practical
view of it. If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with
truth on the human scene, it could be but because “notes” had been
from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward
energy: to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel,
to recognise, to remember, as to perform any act of understanding.
The play of the energy had been continuous and couldn’t change; what
changed was only the objects and situations pressing the spring of
it. Notes had been, in other words, the things one couldn’t _not_
take, and the prime result of all fresh experience was to remind one
of that. I have endeavoured to characterise the peremptory fashion
in which my fresh experience of London—the London of the habitual
observer, the preoccupied painter, the pedestrian prowler—reminded me;
an admonition that represented, I think, the sum of my investigations.
I recall pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for
no “authentic” information; but I recall also on the other hand the
practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small,
to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to
dip into it. To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it,
imaginatively, in as many places as possible—_that_ was to be informed,
_that_ was to pull wires, _that_ was to open doors, _that_ positively
was to groan at times under the weight of one’s accumulations.

Face to face with the idea of Hyacinth’s subterraneous politics and
occult affiliations, I recollect perfectly feeling, in short, that I
might well be ashamed if, with my advantages—and there wasn’t a street,
a corner, an hour, of London that was not an advantage—I shouldn’t be
able to piece together a proper semblance of those things, as indeed
a proper semblance of all the odd parts of his life. There was always
of course the chance that the propriety might be challenged—challenged
by readers of a knowledge greater than mine. Yet knowledge, after all,
of what? My vision of the aspects I more or less fortunately rendered
_was_, exactly, my knowledge. If I made my appearances live, what was
this but the utmost one could do with them? Let me at the same time not
deny that, in answer to probable ironic reflexions on the full licence
for sketchiness and vagueness and dimness taken indeed by my picture,
I had to bethink myself in advance of a defence of my “artistic
position.” Shouldn’t I find it in the happy contention that the value
I wished most to render and the effect I wished most to produce were
precisely those of our not knowing, of society’s not knowing, but
only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what “goes on”
irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface? I couldn’t
deal with that positive quantity for itself—my subject had another too
exacting side; but I might perhaps show the social ear as on occasion
applied to the ground, or catch some gust of the hot breath that I had
at many an hour seemed to see escape and hover. What it all came back
to was, no doubt, something like _this_ wisdom—that if you haven’t, for
fiction, the root of the matter in you, haven’t the sense of life and
the penetrating imagination, you are a fool in the very presence of the
revealed and assured; but that if you _are_ so armed you are not really
helpless, not without your resource, even before mysteries abysmal.

HENRY JAMES.




BOOK FIRST




I


“Oh yes, I daresay I can find the child, if you would like to see
him,” Miss Pynsent said; she had a fluttered 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 large, grave 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 refreshment 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 “cheffoneer,” as
Amanda was always careful to call it, yielded up a small bottle which,
formerly containing eau-de-cologne, now exhibited half a pint of a
rich gold-coloured liquid. Miss Pynsent was very delicate; she lived
on tea and watercress and kept the little bottle in the cheffoneer
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 and spell out the first page of the romances in the _Family
Herald_ and the _London Journal_, where he particularly admired 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; for 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 ’Enning, 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 whose
extraordinary luxuriance of dark brown hair was surmounted by a torn
straw hat.

The child looked up from her dandling and patting and, after a stare
of which the blankness was visibly overdone, 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 find him and tell him
there’s a lady come here 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 hateful. It was in this action and epithet he had indulged half an
hour ago; but she had reflected rapidly (while she made play with Miss
Pynsent) that it 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, who was very slow, considered her so long before
replying that she felt herself to be, to 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’re more frightened of me,” she declared
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 shouldn’t
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 real 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 real 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 and with a tight clasp of her
hands 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 tall fond fantastic structure that 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 of the sort 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 had herself as few
belongings as the desolate baby, and it had seemed to her 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 own isolation went out to
his, and in the course of time their associated solitude 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 a proud and ancient 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 mere words she couldn’t answer—of course she couldn’t
answer them—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 she prayed she might
not be questioned 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 applied 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 innocent child know it?”

“Know about Lord Frederick?” Miss Pynsent palpitated.

“Bother Lord Frederick! Know about his mother.”

“Oh, I can’t say that. I’ve 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’ve 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
judgement. 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 intensity.

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’d tell him?” Miss Pynsent plaintively gasped.

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

“What she mentioned—?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed.

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

“Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured while her
pity gushed 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 that fluent French?” she inquired as from a full mind.
“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 idea.
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 breadth of view.

“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 outlook
appeared to abound in cheerless contingencies. “You must remember that
it’s 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’re very sure she _is_ dying.”

“Do you mean she’s shamming? We’ve 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 and 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 an
intricate argument, and then answered quite in the spirit of her
official pessimism. “There’s one thing you may be sure of: whatever you
decide to do, as soon as ever he grows up he’ll make you wish you had
done the opposite.” Mrs. Bowerbank called it oppos_ite_.

“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’re very sorry to have kept her waiting.”

The child hesitated while he repaid with interest Mrs. Bowerbank’s
inspection, and then he said with a cool, conscious indifference which
Miss Pynsent instantly recognised 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 ironic; but the subject of his
allusion, who was not nimble withal, appeared not to interpret it; so
that she met it only by remarking over his head to Miss Pynsent: “It’s
the very face of her again—only for the complexion!”

“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 ’Enning’s a very bad little girl; she’ll come to no good,”
said Miss Pynsent with familiar decision and also, considering 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’s bad; I like her awfully.” 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 this
betrayal. He dimly felt that nothing but that particular accusation
could have pushed him to it, for he hated people with too few fair
interspaces, too many smutches and streaks. Millicent Henning generally
had two or three of these at least, 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 so sickly as to excite remark, it
seemed written in his attenuated little person that he would never
be either tall or positively hard. 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
formed and distributed; his head was set on a slim, straight neck;
his expression, grave and clear, showed a quick perception as well as
a great credulity; and he was altogether, in his tender fineness, an
interesting, an appealing little person.

“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 dress: 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 satiric force.

“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 know you from one, and not one of
them ‘performing’ ones either.”

“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 done for she couldn’t but feel the other side was to be considered.
In her effort to be discreet by reason 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, yet that 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 the person who had stepped into her place for
not producing him. “Certainly, in her position, 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 she was leaving her dreadfully ploughed up and without any really
fertilising seed sown. The little dressmaker packed the child upstairs
to tidy himself for his tea, and as she accompanied her visitor to the
door pleaded that if the latter would have a little more patience she
would think a day or two longer what was best and write when she should
have decided. Mrs. Bowerbank continued to move in a realm superior to
poor Miss Pynsent’s vacillations and timidities, and her detachment
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 ever so much worse!”




II


Miss Pynsent, when she found herself alone, felt she was really
quite upside down; for this lurid crisis had never entered into her
calculations: the very nature of the case had seemed to preclude
it. All she had known or had wished to know was that in one of the
dreadful establishments 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 had been no question of _that_ concession’s
being stretched any further, poor Florentine had 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 had no idea to what prison she was committed on
removal from Newgate (she had wished to keep her mind a blank about
the matter in the interest of the child), and it couldn’t occur to
her that out of such silence and darkness a second voice would reach
her, especially a voice 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
on, poor and precarious though her own subsistence, 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 had
gone to see her at Newgate (that terrible episode, nine years before,
still overshadowed all Miss Pynsent’s other memories): had gone 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 to run 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 reflexion, 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 struck 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
indeed 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 no end of good. Miss Pynsent knew it was 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 on a great occasion, within the year, obtained
for the pair an order for two seats at a pantomime, and to 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 these 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 and 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 and sensibilities of a gentleman, yet whose
fate had condemned him for the last ten years to play a fiddle at a
second-rate establishment 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, so that 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 occupied 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,
unless in more wicked words as well as more grand ones, 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 aspects
of his character—his blasphemous republican, radical views and the
licentious manner in which he expressed himself about the nobility.
On that ground he worried her extremely, though he never seemed to
her so probably well-connected, like Hyacinth himself, as when he
horrified her most. These dreadful theories (expressed so brilliantly
that really they might have been dangerous if Miss Pynsent had not been
so grounded in the Christian faith and known thereby 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 position. 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 buttonhole,
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 an at all bold 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 absurdity, 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
there 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 pin-cushions, 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 cheffoneer. 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 “connexion” was confined
to small shopkeepers, but she didn’t wish others to know it and would
have liked them to believe it important 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 treacherous untrimmed truth, about
everything in a moment. She was sure he would do so now in regard to
this solemn question that had come up for Hyacinth; he would see that,
though 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 it was too late. 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 on 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 that she had no startling revelation
to make. He was not in the least agitated to hear of Florentine’s
approaching end in prison and of her having 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, to save you a 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
if 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 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 had a
half-holiday, and she also rejoiced in a sister living 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 an informal, natural 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’ve 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 a while, blowing silently at his pipe, 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’ve done a good deal
for him. You’re 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’ve done what I could, and I don’t put myself forward above others.
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 who would tell you it would
do him good. If he didn’t like the place as a child he’d 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 returned 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 extra good? No one
else thinks it necessary.”

“I didn’t want to be extra good. That is I do want to, of course, in a
general way: but that wasn’t the reason then. You see 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 a shame an unspotted 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 bad trick on him, if it was
only to send him to the workhouse. Besides, I always was fond of tiny
creatures and I’ve 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’ll 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’re there I shall never stop. What is it you want me to
advise you? to take the child, or to leave the mother to wail herself
away?”

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

“That depends on what you do. However, he’ll probably curse you in
either case.”

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

“Precisely; and he’ll curse me too. He’ll curse every one. Much good
will our love do us! 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 at all. He brings you up.”

“That’s what you’ve 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’d say anything you like if what I say would help the matter. He’s a
thin-skinned, morbid, mooning, introspective little beggar, with a good
deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who’ll expect a good
deal more of life than he’ll 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 “introspective” 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 returned after
a series of puffs. “The youngster’s interesting; one sees he has a
mind and even a soul, and in that respect he’s—I won’t say unique, but
peculiar. I shall watch with curiosity to see what he grows into. But I
shall always be glad that I’m a selfish brute of a decent bachelor—that
I never invested in that class of goods.”

“Well, you _are_ comforting. You’d 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’s one thing I’ve
always added—that the truth never _is_ found out.”

“You’re 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’s 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’re very particular.”

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

“You’re 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’s any harm in that: a fine blooming, odoriferous conceit is
a natural appendage of youth and intelligence. I don’t say there’s any
great harm in it, but if you want a guide as to how you’re to treat the
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 _leetle_
swig—thanks. 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 rank fools’
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 that had had elements
of distinction Miss Pynsent observed a respectful, a tasteful silence
and that is why she didn’t challenge him now, though she wanted very
much to say that Hyacinth was no more “presumptious” (that was the
term she would have used) than he had reason to be, with his genteel
appearance, and his acknowledged powers; 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 any good family, 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, for all 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 perfect lady of his
acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never knew
you: I don’t think he’ll ever be such an odious little cad as that; he
probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some affection
and possibly even some gratitude in him. But his imagination (which
will always give him his cue about everything) shall subject you to
some extraordinary metamorphosis. He’ll dress you up.”

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

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

“Deary 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’s the illegitimate child of a French impropriety
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 _can_ talk!” cried Miss Pynsent with her
ever-fresh faculty of vain protest. “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, take
him straight.”

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

“You can say to him that a young man who’s sorry for having gone to his
mother when, in her last hours, she lay crying 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’m sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent,
folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated
her through 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 reflexion, 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, for all his figure, to kiss her hand with the flourish
of a troubadour and as he had seen people do on the stage. “My dear
friend, we’ve 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’ll never understand that. I want him to know everything,
and especially the worst—the very worst, as I’ve 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
reflexions; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She
remembered what she had noticed 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 immoral. “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 with 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 prostrate 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, once she had 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 committed many
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 fierce light of his
questions on Miss Pynsent’s incarcerated friend. She had to admit that
she had been her friend (since 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 severe!—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 cruel want. The woman had had a
wicked husband who maltreated and deserted her; she had been very poor,
almost starving, dreadfully pressed. Hyacinth listened to her history
with absorbed attention and then said:

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

This inquiry seemed to Miss Pynsent an omen of future embarrassments,
but she met it as bravely as she could, replying that she believed the
wretched victim of the law had had (once upon a time) a very small
baby, but 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 of his size. Miss Pynsent
fortified herself with the memory of her other pilgrimage, the visit
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 faltered
and feared, but on that of the tender sensibility over which 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-towered
building 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 air if it was erected in the interest
of justice and order—a builded protest, precisely, against vice and
villainy. This particular penitentiary struck her as about as bad and
wrong as those who were in it; it threw a blight on the face of day,
making the river seem foul and poisonous and the opposite bank, with a
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 barred and blind and deaf 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 away his hand 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’ll 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 Miss Pynsent could feel that they had already entered into relation
with her. They were near her and she was aware; 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 our pilgrim 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, were she to lead the boy away. She
looked into his pale face, perfectly conscious 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’ve come is only to be kind. If we’re kind we shan’t
mind its being disagreeable.”

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

“Hush, hush,” groaned poor Amanda, edging toward him with clasped
hands. “She’s 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 to catch him to her bosom.

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

“Has _she_ suffered very much?”

“For years and years. And now she’s dying. It proves she’s 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’re compassionate, if we make an effort,” said
the dressmaker, seeming to look up at him rather than down.

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

Miss Pynsent was bewildered, but her desperation helped. “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 and stronger than herself—to her face;
and then he put to her: “Why should I save such a creature 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—ever.”

“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, looked from his
companion back to the immense dreary jail. A great deal, to her sense,
depended on the 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 has never seen 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 she replied, 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 rummy reason,” the boy murmured, still staring across at the
Battersea shore.

A moment later they found themselves in a vast interior dimness,
while a grinding of keys and bolts went on behind them. Hereupon Miss
Pynsent gave herself up to an overruling providence, and she remembered
afterwards no circumstance of what happened to her till the great
person of Mrs. Bowerbank loomed up in the narrowness of a strange, dark
corridor. She had only had meanwhile 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
grey, 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 trusted not to have struck 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 scene
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 to, 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 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 subsequently 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 couldn’t 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 reflexion
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 she had been hovering, and
it was into certain dismal chambers dedicated to sick criminals she
presently ushered her guests. 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, whereby your case was simple. Such
simplification, nevertheless, 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 businesslike pat to her pillow, signed 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 she was approaching a perfect stranger, so completely had nine
years of prison transformed Florentine. She felt it immediately to
have been a mercy she hadn’t told Hyacinth she was pretty (as she used
to be) since there was no beauty left in the hollow bloodless mask
that presented itself without a movement. She _had_ told him the poor
woman was good, but she didn’t look so, nor evidently was he struck
with it as he returned her gaze across the interval he declined to
traverse, though kept at the same time from retreating by this appeal
of her strange, fixed eyes, the only part of all her wasted person in
which 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 degree 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, which would be quite another matter. 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, 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 on the boy; he was too intensely
absorbed in watching the prisoner. A chair had been placed near her
pillow, 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 on 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 donc 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 her odd English—and so very
amusing,” Miss Pynsent ventured to mention 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 gruesome 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, yet felt, more than this, how she had but the thinnest pulse
of energy left and how 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 substituted guardian, 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 the confession
of a broken 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’re very glad you should have cared—that they look after you so
well,” said Miss Pynsent confusedly and 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. These 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 she know 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’d think themselves 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 taking on
so over him,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked with some sternness. She plainly
felt the occasion threaten 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 spoke up 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
crosspiece 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 who begin like that!” laughed Mrs. Bowerbank, 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 broke out again, 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
protesting 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, and laid a large red
hand on 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 on the one for contrition
and 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 the unfortunate’s hand again, protested with an almost
equal passion (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’s 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 for putting her in such a state, so we’ll just pass out
again.”

“I’m very sorry I made you cry. And you must pardon 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
on the latter an effect even more powerful than his misguided speech
of a moment before; for she found strength partly to raise herself in
her bed again and to hold out her arms to him with the same thrilling
sobs. She was talking still, but had become quite inarticulate, and
Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white ravaged face and 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 well, 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 sad charge 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 his
protectress 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 and with closed eyes, to her
pillow and given Hyacinth a businesslike little push which sent him on
in advance. Miss Pynsent went home in a cab—she was so shaken; though
she reflected very nervously, 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 looking out of
the window in silence 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 grey,
had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As
Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor so resolute, the light
filtered in from the street through the narrow dusty glass above, and
then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent: the
impression of a musty dimness with a small steep staircase at the end,
covered with the very strip of oilcloth she could recognise and made
a little less dark by a window in the turn (you could see it from the
hall) where you might almost bump your head against the house behind.
Nothing was changed but Miss Pynsent and of course the girl herself.
She had noticed outside how 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 this artist
was looking at her hat, a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons;
her eyes had travelled up and down Millicent’s whole person, but they
rested in fascination on that grandest 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 it 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
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. 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’s 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, a piece of furniture covered with a tight shrunken
shroud of 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, against 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, 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 stuck all over the front of
her dress—they might almost have figured the stiff sparse fur of a
sick animal; but there were no rustling fabrics tossed in heaps over
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 old friend’s business had not increased, and felt
some safe 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 capital.

“Now tell me, how’s old Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,”
she remarked while she extended a pair of large protrusive feet and
supported herself on the sofa by her hands.

“Old Hyacinth?” Miss Pynsent repeated with majestic blankness and as if
she had never heard of such a person. She felt the girl to be cruelly,
scathingly well dressed and couldn’t imagine who she was nor with what
design she might 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 just see if I don’t!”

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

“Well, I’m glad you’ve made up your mind. I thought you’d know me
directly and I daresay I _was_ awful. But I ain’t so bad now, hey?”
the young woman went on with confidence. “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 as I couldn’t have believed,”
Miss Pynsent returned 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 daresay it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the dressmaker,
seating herself but quite unable to take up her work, blank as she was
before the greatness of her visitor.

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

“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 at least twenty-two.” 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
certainly handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine,
free, physiognomic oval, an abundance of brown hair and a smile that
fairly flaunted the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set on a fair
strong neck and her robust 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 reflexion that she was
common, despite 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 bustling 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
clustered 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 herself made on Millicent, and how the whole place
seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and failure.
Her childish image of its mistress had shown her as neat, fine,
superior, with round loops of hair fastened on the temples by combs
and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant manipulation
of precious stuffs—tissues at least that 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 didn’t disguise the
way everything had gone. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as she had
often done before, that she hadn’t 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 on her good fortune in
being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic department of the
great drapery interest, 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 that lady’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that
her hostess felt much on her guard in 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,
the vicissitudes of which she was able to follow, as she sat near her
window at work, by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind
her—these scenes, rendering the crash of crockery and the imprecations
of the wounded frequently and peculiarly audible, had long been the
scandal of a humble but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr. Henning was
supposed to fill 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
off 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 race 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 double
the cape, that is 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 judgement that none of them
would come to any good whatever, and Millicent least of all.

When therefore this young lady reappeared with all the signs of
accomplished survival she couldn’t fail to ask herself whether, under
a specious seeming, the phenomenon didn’t 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 shock and her curiosity she
passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt the familiar mysterious
creature to be playing with her; revenging herself for former
animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a prying
little spinster who could now 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 get hold of him and somehow mislead and tempt 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 her
vigorous legs had no occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed
that with her shrewd guess of this estimate of her as a ravening wolf
and of her early playmate as an unspotted lamb she laughed out, in
Miss Pynsent’s anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly and
without deigning to explain. But what indeed had she come for if she
hadn’t come for 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—had said to herself she might dedicate
an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, might 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
scarce-dissimulated slum had never learned what their banished fellows
were to go through she herself had at least retained a deep impression
of those horrible intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone
downhill, 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 achieve miracles 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 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, an immense
one in Oxford Street, and was just thinking if 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 she had been obliged to wear
of late years, seemed still not to know what to make of her. On the
subject of her parents, 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—stood very firm. Her staying so long, her
remaining over the half-hour, proved she had come for Hyacinth, since
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 in a house
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 too lovely, quite 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’ll
say there’s more than there is here,” she went on, finding at last an
effect of irritation, or reprehension, an implication of aggressive
respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker’s 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
she herself was strong, yet she was not strong enough for that.

This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very
cruel; but she reflected 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 matching of colours she was not
absolutely 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 of a “tasty”
turn who would brighten up the business and give her new ideas. “I
can see you’ve got the same old ones, always: I can tell that by the
way you’ve stuck the braid on that dress”; and she directed a poke of
her neat little umbrella at 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 had been a public performer of some kind, a ballad-singer or a
conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself whether the creature 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 exponent of the latest thing 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, goodness 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 this 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
judgement he had passed on 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 blunder, so blinded and weakened herself with weeping
that she might for a while have believed she should never be able to
touch a needle again. She lost all interest in her work, and that play
of invention 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 that only made the wrong she
had done him seem sharper, and that determined in Mr. Vetch, so soon as
she was able to hold up her head a little, the impulse to come and sit
with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She re-established to
a certain extent, after a time, her connexion, so far as the letting of
her rooms was concerned (from the other department of her activity the
tide had ebbed apparently for ever); 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 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 as Millicent at last
got up and stood there, 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’ve 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 childhood’s
sweetheart. He may know I call him that!” Millicent continued with
her showroom laugh, as Miss Pynsent judged it to be; conferring these
permissions, successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do
give him my best 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 mirth at the sight of her hostess’s
half-hungry, 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 an agitated 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’ve 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 usually let me ’ave it then, you know!”

“Ah well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at this reminder of an acerbity
which the girl’s present development caused to appear absurdly
ineffectual, “you’re 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’ve
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’ who used to be such a puzzle to the whole
Plice? 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’ve nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried
with a trembling voice.




V


It was in this way she 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 he had heard her
last tones resound into the passage. He entered as if, young as he was,
he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called upon to
be headlong, and now evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s evident
“match” might be. She recognised on the instant her old playmate,
and without reflexion, confusion or diplomacy, in the fulness of her
vulgarity and sociability, exclaimed at no lower pitch: “Gracious,
Hyacinth Robinson, is _that_ your form?”

Miss Pynsent turned round in a flash, but kept silent; then, very white
and shaken, took up her work again and seated herself in her window.
Hyacinth on his side stood staring—he blushed all over. He knew who she
was but 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’ve 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
satisfaction 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 plastered-up Frenchman! Don’t he look like a funny little
Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?” she went on as if she were on the best
possible terms with the mistress of the establishment.

Hyacinth caught a light from that afflicted woman; he saw something
in her face that he knew very well by this time and in the sight of
which he always found an odd, perverse, unholy relish. 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 vague counter-irritant to
the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever and which had often at
night made him cry with rage in his little room under the roof. Pinnie
meant this to-day as a matter of course, and 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, often quite grandly, he felt
like one—like one of those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle.
He had picked up their language with the most extraordinary facility,
by 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 during one of his interminable, restless, melancholy,
moody, yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it, he
believed, by a natural impulse, caught the accent, the gesture, the
movement of eyebrow and shoulder; so that on any occasion of his having
to pass for a foreigner—there was no telling what might happen—he
should certainly be able to do so to admiration, especially if 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 the complications might be which should compel him to assume the
disguise of a person of a social station lower still than his own he
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.
Actually, 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 rueful profession; there was a dumb intimation,
almost as pathetic as the other, that if he cared to let her off easily
he wouldn’t 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 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 must 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 had such
looks 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 barmaid—a blowsy
beauty who handled pewter—was tempered by her more and more curious
consideration of Hyacinth’s form. He was exceedingly “rum,” but he had
a stamp as sharp for her as that of a new coin and which also agreeably
suggested value. Since he remembered so well that she had been fond of
kissing him in their early days she would have liked to show herself
prepared to repeat this graceful 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 knows a lot. 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, in mitigation of her brilliancy, by remarking
sarcastically, according to opportunity, “Miss ’Enning wouldn’t live in
Lomax Plice for the world. She thinks it too dreadfully 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 an expression of face that put him more
and more at his ease.

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

“You? Oh, I don’t care a straw what you know!” she said; and he had
at any rate a mind sufficiently enriched to see what she meant by
that. If she meant he was so good-looking that he might pass on this
score alone her judgement was conceivable, though many women would
strongly have dissented from it. He was as small as he had announced
from the first—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 noted afterwards 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 romantic, 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, almost an impertinent, candour, and
a small, soft, fair moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a
way that made him appear to smile 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 an observant eye would have caught the hint of an “arrangement” in
his dress (his appearance being plainly not a matter of indifference
to himself), while a painter (not of the heroic) would have liked to
make a sketch of him. There was something exotic in him, and yet, with
his sharp young face, destitute of bloom but not of sweetness, and a
certain conscious cockneyism that 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, but
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?” he went on, 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 their getting hold
of him and persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station.
His station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself and inquired of
Miss Pynsent what it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly
enough, wondering 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 that had made his own young
spirit so intolerably sore, the inheritance that 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’d 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 irrepressibly exclaimed.

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

“None of _your_ ‘rattling’ 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’d 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 a cruelly familiar 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 haberdashers of 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 and vaguely, 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 reflexion 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 liked the respectable ones; she couldn’t
abide the smell of fish, which the whole place seemed full of, so that
she hoped they would soon get into the Edgeware Road, toward which
they tended and which was a proper street for a lady. To Hyacinth she
appeared to have no connexion with the long-haired little girl who,
in Lomax Place, years before, was always hugging a smutty doll and
courting his society; she was a stranger, a new acquaintance, and he
observed her in suspense, 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—which last were as emphatic
as the giggles of a person tickled. She was tremendously particular,
difficult to please, he could see that; and she assured him she never
put up with anything a moment after she had ceased to care for it.
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 assured her 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 Edgeware Road (which had still
the brightness of late closing, but with more nobleness), he proposed
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 he had them in his pocket
(they had been destined in some degree for Pinnie) and therefore 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 of its propriety, suggested, among several things,
by photographs, on the walls, of young ladies in tights. He 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
thrills; it seemed the beginning of something new and rare. 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, in which he had often
felt a likeness to great square blackboards uninscribed with a stroke
of chalk. 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 ceasing to be so had hitherto left his fancy unstirred. He
knew what Millicent’s age must be, but felt her nevertheless older,
much older, than himself—she seemed 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 connexion
with the question of the character of the establishment; if this
character was what it easily might be 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 wouldn’t mind 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. “But of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I keep
forgetting.”

Hyacinth had, as he supposed, from far back cultivated 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 was prompt, as if “capping” it.
“She died very suddenly. I daresay you remember her in the Plice.”
Then, while Hyacinth disengaged from the past the obscure figure of
Mrs. Henning, of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him
as cross and dirty, the girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment,
“But I’ve 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 returned. “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 observed,
“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’d look very nice in
a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table and her shoulders
lifted, 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
reflexion that this was exactly what he was apparently 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 and 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’s 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 the girl with the
same inscrutable calmness, as he fancied; though a remark more to his
taste would have been that his mother was none of her business. But
she was too handsome for such risks, 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 some
listening ear that would be attached to some kissable cheek, 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 both safe
and happily enough attached? How much didn’t he already ask? 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 at any rate now taken up the subject of Mrs.
Henning’s death; he felt himself incapable of researches into 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 repulsive, but at least her daughter
could speak of her. “Mr. Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved
out of 17 three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t
stand the other people in the house; there was a man who played the
accordeon.”

Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote,
though wanting 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,” the
girl declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to offer him tribute
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 faced him over her cup while she drank in ladylike sips. “Do you
know what they used to say in the Plice? 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 prime-minister 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!” she archly retorted. “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 asked 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 the effect. “Well, I’m
sorry you’re only a journeyman,” she went on as she pushed away her
cup.

“So am I,” Hyacinth answered; but he called for the bill as if he had
been an employer of labour. Then while they waited 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 asserted that she perfectly understood. “But the art
of the binder’s 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,” he finely smiled.

He expected she would exclaim in answer that he was an impudent wretch,
and for a moment she seemed 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. With which she returned to her idea that
he had not done himself justice. “You used always to have your nose in
something or other. I never thought you’d 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 reg’lar 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—quite as for publication; he
was haunted with the dream of literary distinction. This appeared
to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with the agreeable
incoherence that characterised her, that she didn’t care anything for
a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she thought families and
that sort of rot were about played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave
his origin alone; and while they lingered in front of her house before
she went in he broke out:

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

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

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

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

“Who am I? I’m a wretched little ‘forwarder’ in the shop.”

“I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” she
competently cried. Then she let him know 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 enough. 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, absent,
had failed to send the explanation 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, was in fact 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 by the solemnity and candour of his attention.
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. 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. He had a marked claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem and
gratitude, for he had been his _parrain_, his protector at the bindery.
When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s young charge
to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had accidentally made
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 who 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 chilling
calm. Mr. Vetch, however, insisted; he 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, in
favouring conditions, 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 if the job 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 thing itself, 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 thing itself, 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 indefatigable 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 an aggressive 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 collectivist and a perfectionist and a visionary; he believed 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
beatitude; 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 gives wings
to our heavy-footed 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 hanging on the agitated
fiddlestick of their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure failed
to 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 camisole in
some hideous print, her uncorseted overflow 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 remarks exchanged 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 merchant prince, 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 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 had been 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 extravagance, while
the absence of any direct contact with a library represented for him
mainly the hard shock of the real; the shock, that is, he could most
easily complain of. Mr. Vetch believed him subtly intelligent, and
therefore thought it a woeful pity that he couldn’t have furtherance in
some liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still
that a youth with that expression in his eyes should be condemned to
measure tape or cut slices of cheese. He himself had no influence he
could bring into play, no connexion 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 her stars, 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 didn’t begin by carrying parcels he
couldn’t hope to be promoted, through the more refined nimbleness
of tying them up, to a position as accountant or manager; 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 fervid
Frenchman if there were 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 elegant 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 deficiency; 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 the inexhaustible 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 Hyacinth Robinson. In a day or two M. Poupin
replied to the fiddler that he had now been several years in _le vieux_
“Crook’s” employ; that during that time he had done work for him which
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 dryly 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, to cosmic, as well as to
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 fostered and drew out
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 constituting
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 stood 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_. On the windows were curtains of white muslin much
fluted and frilled and tied with pink ribbon.




VII


“I’m 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 declamatory,
reclamatory, proclamatory, the same universally inaugurative
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 a force that will
shake the globe.”

“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 returned.
“But what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It’s
before my eyes in its radiant 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 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 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, affectional sense. There were
hypocritical concessions and debasing superstitions of which this
exalted pair had 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 his French friends, and so was Pinnie, and so were
most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in old Crook’s
shop. But was old Crook himself, who wore an apron rather dirtier
than the rest of them and was a master-hand at “forwarding,” yet who,
on the other side, was the occupant of a villa all but detached, at
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, at 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 he had something to make up to him for and
had ever treated him with marked benevolence. 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 look at
him with the kindest eyes. It would make a difference therefore if he
were of the people or not, inasmuch as on 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 governmental agent, 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 governmental agent
in extraordinary disguises, the wondrous _mouchard_ of M. Poupin’s
view, 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’s 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 force that will shake the globe?” 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 took in 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. _La-la_, 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 returned. He saw 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 didn’t 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, could see 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 reflexions 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 in wonder.

“Oh, if you did you would!” the young man exclaimed and laughed again.
Such a rejoinder from any one else would have irritated our sensitive
hero, but it only made him 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 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’s very young,” said Eustache Poupin.

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

“Perhaps you’re 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. He found it a difficult
pass, 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 if he were
French or were 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 and among a people she
must have execrated—all this made him French; yet he was conscious at
the same time of qualities that didn’t mix with it. He had spun to the
last fineness, 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 spirit and his senses, when the effort to think it out didn’t
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 of 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 he was ridiculous. “Oh, I daresay
I ain’t anything,” he replied in a moment.

“_En v’là des bêtises!_” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say
you’re 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 on 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—if 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 steady eyes, light-coloured
and set very deep; for despite a want of fineness in some of its
parts his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution,
spoke somehow, as if it had showed you his soul drawing deep and even
breaths, of a state of moral health. He was dressed as 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
feeling sure he was the reverse of stupid, that he probably indeed
had a large easy brain quite as some people had big strong fists.
Our little hero had a great desire to know superior persons, and he
interested himself on the spot in this quiet stranger whose gravity, by
any fine balance, showed, like that of a precious metal, in the small
piece as well as in the big. He had the complexion of a ploughboy and
the glance of a commander-in-chief, and might have been 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 their friend 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 worthy invalid
replied. “M. Hyacinthe knows I count on him, whether or no I make him
an _interne_ to-day or only wait a little 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’re very sympathetic, but I’m afraid
you’re too young.”

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

“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other guest, but not as if he
thought it probable.

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

“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she’s 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’ve 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 viewed him a little as if he were a pleasing object
and then said to the strange young man: “He’s a little jealous of you.
But there’s no harm in that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you
must like him. We’ll tell you his history some other day; it will make
you feel that he belongs to us of necessity. It’s 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’ve my little sister at home to take care of when I
ain’t at the works,” 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,” smiled M. Paul.

“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like
that because you’ve 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’re not a cripple; you’ve 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’re patient, you other English.”

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

“You’re 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 rather a 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 volunteered
presently, giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we
ought to know each other. I’m sure I’ve nothing against it. I like to
know folk if they’re likely to be 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 taking of a stand on two or three
points.”

“_Ah bien, voilà du propre_; between us we’ve 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.
Her patient 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; their friend must be perfectly
quiet. They accordingly withdrew with apologies and promises to return
for further news on the morrow, and two minutes later Hyacinth found
himself standing face to face with his companion 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 as he looked 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 friend 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
for a firm of wholesale chemists 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’m going to toddle.”

“And may I toddle with you?”

Mr. Muniment considered him further and then 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 daresay I shall like your company.”

There was something in his face, taken in connexion with the idea
that he was concerned in the taking of a stand—it offered our quick
youth the image of a rank of bristling bayonets—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, exchanging 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 the “points” of his reference or Hyacinth,
on his side, had detailed the circumstances involved in his being,
according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t
wish to press, wouldn’t for the world have appeared indiscreet, and
moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to Muniment, was not
quite prepared as yet to be pressed himself. Therefore it failed to
become very clear how his companion had made Poupin’s acquaintance and
how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless was to a certain
extent communicative, especially on the question of his living 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 bob 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 Saint 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 penetrate 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’s Rosy.” He spoke as if this would be a great privilege and
added, for the joke, 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 the room on
the threshold of which they stood to be unlighted.

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

The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker
was indistinguishable. “Well now, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment
rejoined. “You’ll have a party then, for I’ve brought some one else.
We’re poor, you know, but honest, and not afraid of showing up, and I
daresay 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 and
a flowing umbrageous 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.” Both the tone and the purport of the words announced to
Hyacinth that they proceeded from 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 object stretched
upon it—an object 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 presented moreover, 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 wonderful people. Lady Aurora hovered before him with an odd
drooping, swaying erectness, and she laughed a good deal, vaguely and
shyly, as for the awkwardness of her being found still on the premises.
“Rosy, girl, I’ve brought you a visitor,” Hyacinth’s guide soon said.
“This young man has walked all the way from Lisson Grove to make your
acquaintance.” Rosy continued to look at the visitor 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 slippery trout’s 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 put this question in a light, gay tone, with a dart of shining
eyes at her companion, who replied at once with still greater hilarity
and in a voice which struck Hyacinth as strange and affected: “Oh
mercy, no; it seems quite the natural place!” Then she added: “And it’s
such a lovely 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_ as a _w_.

“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’ve 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,” the young man returned loudly and with a kind
of inconsequent cheerfulness.

“Yes, I’ve thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be room
for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time with all gravity.

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

“We’re also thirteen at home,” Lady Aurora hastened to mention. “We’re
also rather crowded.”

“Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy demanded from her dusky
nook.

“I don’t know about Inglefield. I’m 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’re not all _your_ size!” Paul Muniment
declared 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 the life of a capital; and later still he
wished to know 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 almost
rock 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’s
standing up that she’s so, you gawk? _We’re_ not thirteen, at any rate,
and we’ve got all the furniture we want, so 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’m 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 small 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 accomplishment—he judged it impossible to tell her
age. Lady Aurora pleaded that she ought to have gone, long since; but
she seated herself nevertheless on the chair that Paul pushed toward
her.

“Here’s a go!” this young man exclaimed to the other guest. “You told
me your name, but I’ve clean forgotten it.” Then when Hyacinth had
pronounced 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 all right; 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 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?” Rose Muniment addressed this question to Hyacinth
while Lady Aurora gazed at her shyly and mutely and as if admiring
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 she should be called
the dawn when she brings light where she goes? The Puppins are the
charming foreigners I’ve 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’re 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
gift of tongues it would bring me on.”

“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I
feel the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked finely, becoming
conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora toward
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 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 that had
resulted from fortunate touch after touch. She was not a common woman;
she was one of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth didn’t define
her in this manner to himself, but he received from her the impression
that if she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was
not) aristocracies were yet complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked
that there were many delightful books in French, and he proclaimed
it a torment to know that (as he did very well) when you saw no 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 method surreptitiously during his first weeks at old Crook’s
and come very near being sacked in consequence) while he wondered how
such a system 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 lucky 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 the 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’s worse than me,” Hyacinth returned 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
learning 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 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 the master of
the scene, who had been sitting silent and sidewise in a chair that
was too narrow for him, his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been
entertaining an angel unawares?”

Hyacinth made out he was chaffing him, but he knew the way to face that
sort of thing was to exaggerate one’s 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 any one.”

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

“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something that will take
your head off if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so
well in French.”

“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried
Rosy in perfect good faith and clasping her hands for 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 he was far
from being ready with an impressive formula. He replied, however, with
a candour in which he tried as far as possible to sink 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’re 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 a spark of the sacred fire. The principal
conclusion 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’s one of the best,” said Lady Aurora as if she were pleading for
him.

“Very likely, but he’s a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and
a park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we’re bundled
together into this sort of kennel.” Hyacinth admired the young man’s
consistency till he saw he was amusing himself; after which he still
admired the way he could mix that up with the tremendous opinions
it must have been certain he entertained. In his own imagination he
associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young
chemical expert, 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’ve 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 universal participation. “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’re much better than I, and I know very few people so good
as you,” Lady Aurora brought out, 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 who’ve 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 scoundrels!” 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’d all go abroad.”

“Go abroad?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh dear, yes,” she replied with a familiar confidence 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’ll 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 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’s 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’d 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’re going to trample over their betters it isn’t
on account of her having seemed to give up everything to us here that
they’ll let _her_ off. They’ll trample on her just the same as on the
others, and they’ll say 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 the powers above have 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 on 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
pleading gasps, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density, which
was deliberate, and acute too, not seeing, or at any rate not heeding,
that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister, inflicted a fresh
humiliation in 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. Eat your pudding while you
have it; you mayn’t have it 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 she
had taken offence and he would have liked to show her he thought she
had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance, not glancing
at him for a moment. Then he saw 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’re 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, but Paul, without protesting in return, only
took up his hat and smiled at her as if he knew his duty. On this 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 told Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She
neglected to take leave of 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 cards 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 Saint
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) if 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 on it all with a kind of terror—a
sort of shivering sinking state 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 connexion. The little woman, the little girl,
as she lay there (Hyacinth scarce 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 precipitate a 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 a 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 a real one by the way he listened) to know what was thought of
him by them that had an experience of intellect. 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, sharp, crippled, chattering
sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she
expressed herself far better than Pinnie or than Milly 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 truly high spirit. 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 flood
that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some
brighter, happier vision—the vision of societies where, in splendid
rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who
were both proud and gentle, talked of 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 straight questions of her guest, 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 didn’t in the least repudiate the imputation. “Oh yes,
I daresay we seem very curious. I think we’re 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’re ill; perhaps if you had your health you’d
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’d say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the
mines, where the filthy coal’s 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 the awfulness 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. Yet 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 very nature. He invented, for use
in machine-shops, a mechanical improvement—a new kind of beam-fixing,
whatever that is—and he sold it at Bradford for fifteen pounds: I mean
the whole right and profit of it and every hope and comfort 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
home, or only came 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 won’t ever touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and
that I’ve only 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 but
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’d have been a bold man that had taken on
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 of it. How he got it’s more than I can say, as we never
had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s head wouldn’t have
been of much use if he hadn’t had a head himself. Well, it was all in
the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow poster
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 really grand character 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
jolly good brains at least to give us.”

Hyacinth listened to this eloquence—the clearest statement of anything
he had ever heard made by a woman—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 talked of brains made him feel this; she pronounced
the word as if she were distributing prizes for intellectual eminence
from off a platform. No doubt the weak inventor and the strong worker
had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their
highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence on 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 aimless wonder as to the
difference it would have made for his life to have had some rich warm
presence like that in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that the way you’re going to make me like you—contradicting me so?”
Miss Muniment asked 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’re 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 ring of laughter. “You
say that just like a man my brother described to me three days ago,
a little man at some club whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way
he raved and stamped. I don’t mean that you do either, but you use
almost the same words as him.” Hyacinth scarce knew what to make of
this allusion or of the picture offered him of Paul Muniment casting
ridicule on 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 great things 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 returned.

“Oh, you’re making me like you very fast! And pray who’s 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,” Miss Muniment
hastened to add.

“I’ll bring her some day,” he said; and then he went on rather
incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it
a shame 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’re 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’re very much mistaken!”

Such an attitude could only exasperate him, and his exasperation made
him indifferent to the mistake of his having appeared to sniff at Miss
Muniment’s quarters. 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
cross?” he asked, smiling, of his present entertainer.

“Cross? 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 space 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—” What should he
call the mystery?

“Deep in what?”

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

“I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to—you may ask him!” cried Rosy,
who laughed gaily again as the opening door re-admitted the subject
of their conversation. “You must have crossed the water with her
ladyship,” she pursued. “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 licence,” Paul scoffed, 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 struck out.

“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 deadly 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 that 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 that hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment
asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had got on together, and the girl replied
that Mr. Robinson had made himself most 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 found himself amused 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 guessing the truth, said to him all pertinently: “It’s very
wonderful—she can describe things she has never seen. And they’re just
like the reality.”

“There’s nothing I’ve never seen,” Rosy declared. “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
his revolutionary 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 he perceived in a moment to
be facetiously 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 ugly black holes?” Muniment
asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder and shaking it gently.

“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” our young man gravely
demanded.

“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!”
Paul cried in not unkindly derision 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 candidly pleaded, rejoicing all the
while to feel himself in such a relation. It was his view of himself,
and not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never sue
for a favour; but now he felt that in any connexion with Paul Muniment
such a law would be suspended. This rare man he could go on his knees
to without a sense of humiliation.

“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul pursued,
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
as he twirled his hat. It was an effort for a moment to keep the
tears from his eyes; he saw himself forced to put such a different
construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy
impression that Muniment had divined in him a possible associate of
a high type in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of
things, whereas it now 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 justified at the
present juncture the high estimate Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of
his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question
would have been he invented straight off 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’d be afraid.”

What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally
vague; but he answered quickly enough: “I think you’ve only to try me
to see.”

“I’m sure that 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,” Hyacinth rang out.

His sincerity appeared to touch his friend. “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_.” And Muniment led
him good-humouredly out.




X


Several months after Hyacinth had made his acquaintance, Millicent
Henning remarked that it was high time our hero should take her to some
first-class place of amusement. He proposed hereupon the Canterbury
Music Hall; at which 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 give her an evening at 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 had come
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; the flaring cometary creature had become a fixed star. She
had never spoken to him of Millicent but once, several weeks after her
interview with the girl; and this had not been 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 of vain semblance
that he had forgotten the wrong she had done him, so that she could
almost forget 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, cocking it with a victorious exalted
air. He hummed to himself; he fingered his moustache; he looked out
of window when there was nothing to look at; he seemed preoccupied,
launched in intellectual excursions, half anxious and half in spirits.
During the whole winter Miss Pynsent explained everything by four words
murmured beneath her breath: “That beastly forward jade!” On the single
occasion, however, on which she had sought relief from her agitation in
an appeal to Hyacinth she didn’t trust herself to designate the girl by
epithet or title.

“There’s 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 for a moment. “Aren’t
there plenty of vulgar fellows 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 the question, and she had seen
something in his face to make 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,” he remarked for
answer. “What sort of a mess do you suppose I shall 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—the way she sees it.”

“Then how the dickens does she see it?”

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

“Oh laws, 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 declared with his little manner of a man of the
great world.

“Under your protection? Oh I say!” 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 heavenly when he needn’t
have been at all. At such moments Pinnie wanted to kiss him and had
often tried to make Mr. Vetch understand what fascinating traits of
character she was always noting in their young friend. This particular
one 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, though 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 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 the youth’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 question 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 sigh as
for long experience.

“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
’Ennings?”

“You don’t understand, my poor Pinnie,” he wearily pleaded. “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 of that bloated kind. She
doesn’t want to end her career to-day—she wants to begin it.”

“Well, I wish she’d take you later!” the dressmaker returned.

Hyacinth said nothing for a little, but then 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 conciliatory
eagerness. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk!”

“Do you think I’d marry any one who would marry me?” Hyacinth went
on. “The kind of girl who’d look at me is the kind of girl I’d never
look at.” He struck Pinnie as having thought it all out; which didn’t
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 that 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 yet 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 worse danger. This the
dressmaker considered to be the chance of his marrying some person
of her own base order. Still it came over her that his taste might be
lowered, and before the subject was dropped, on the present occasion,
she said that of course he must be quite aware of all that was wanting
to such a girl as Millicent ’Enning—who visibly wasn’t worth any
struggle for her aspirate.

“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’s impossible I should discuss these matters with you,” Hyacinth
grandly enough replied.

“Of course I see that. But I should think she’d bore you sometimes,”
Miss Pynsent threw off 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 old Crook’s, under Eustache
Poupin’s influence, was a kind of education of the taste, trained him
in the finest discriminations, in the recognition of the rare and the
hatred of the cheap. 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 had been 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, nothing in
life had such an interest or such a price for him as his impressions
and reflexions. They came from everything he touched, they made him
vibrate, kept him thrilled and throbbing, for most of his waking
consciousness, and they constituted as yet the principal events
and stages of his career. Fortunately they were often an immense
amusement. Everything in the field of observation suggested this or
that; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had in a word
more news of life, as he might have called it, than he knew what to
do with—felt sometimes as he could have imagined an overwhelmed man of
business to whom the post brought too many letters. The man of business
indeed could keep a secretary, but what secretary could have cleared
up for Hyacinth some of the strange communications of life? He liked
to talk about these things, but it was only a few here and there he
could discuss with Milly. He allowed Miss Pynsent to 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 he at this crude period of his growth held
it was his lot to languish. It didn’t matter if one was a little more
or a little less misunderstood. He might indeed have remembered it
mattered to Pinnie, who, after her first relief at hearing him express
himself so properly on the subject of a matrimonial connexion with
Miss Henning, allowed her faded, kind, weak face little by little to
lengthen out to its old solemnity. This came back 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, however, 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 more than fifty years in a
world of wickedness; like so many London women of her class and kind
she had little sentimental softness for her own sex, whose general
“paying” seemed the simplest and most natural arrangement; 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 young person
who had taken a gross risk and a premature, lowering marriage for her
beloved little boy she very well knew which she preferred. It should be
added that her view of Millicent’s power to look after herself was such
as to make it absurd to pity her in advance. Pinnie thought Hyacinth
the cleverest young man in the, or at least in their, world, but her
state of mind implied that the young lady in Pimlico was cleverer. Her
ability, at any rate, was of a kind that precluded the knowledge of
suffering, whereas Hyacinth’s was somehow fairly founded on 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 element of romance which
overshadowed, though by no means eclipsing, 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 playfellow off and without indeed demanding of him an
account she was not on her own side prepared to give. Hyacinth was,
in the language of the circle in which she moved, her personal fancy,
and she was content to fill as regards himself the same eminent and
somewhat irresponsible position. She had the assurance that she was a
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; looking after him generally as no one, poor child,
had ever done. Millicent made light of the dingy dressmaker in this
view of her friend’s meagre little past (she thought Pinnie no better
than a starved cat) and enjoyed herself immensely in the character of
guide and philosopher. She felt that character never so high as when
she pushed the young man with a robust elbow or said to him, “Well,
you _are_ a sharp ’un, you are!” Her theory of herself, as we know,
was that she was the “best sort” in the world, as well as one of the
greatest beauties and quickest wits, 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 immense, 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
he was fastidious, will be wondered at; the judgement will be that she
didn’t represent it very favourably.

It may easily be believed that he criticised his inclination even while
he gave himself up to it, and that he often wondered he should find so
much to attract in a girl in whom he found so much to condemn. She was
vulgar, clumsy and grotesquely ignorant; her conceit was proportionate
and she hadn’t a grain of tact or of quick perception. And yet there
was something so elementally free in her, by his loose measure,
she carried with such an air the advantages she did possess, that
her figure constantly mingled itself even with those bright visions
hovering before him after Paul Muniment had opened a queerly-placed
but far-reaching window. She was bold and generous and incalculable,
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 would cry with
their tears. When he himself was not letting his imagination wander
among the haunts of the aristocracy and stretching it in the shadow
of an ancestral beech to read 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 raise it to passion, 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 as
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, for being 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 (with Pinnie to put sugar in his tea and let him never want for
neckties) like a regular little swell.

Millicent, to hear her talk, only asked to keep her skirts clear
and marry some respectable tea-merchant. But for our hero she was
magnificently plebeian, in the sense that implied 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 oiled hair and plates in rows on dressers and stuffed birds
under glass and family photographs of a quite similar effect 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 Capital—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 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 him she was so
handsome. If she had been ugly he couldn’t have listened to her; but
the rare bloom and grand style of her person 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 commerce had
been 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 having put up for her. He invariably
pronounced the objects of her selection hideous and made no scruple to
assure her she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing he
could say to her affronted her so much, for her pretensions in the way
of a cultivated judgement 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
made the point that 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 attitude of being
difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among the
smartest things. She had given herself out originally as very knowing,
but he could make her gape with doubts. 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 and bruised him with
her elbow, declaring 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
couldn’t rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in
his judgement and was angry at not finding herself as positive as any
one. Then he would reply that it was no use attempting to tell her;
she wouldn’t understand and had better continue to admire the insipid
productions of an age that had lost the sense of fineness—a phrase 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 that united him to his childhood’s
friend; but the effect followed on Millicent’s side and the girl was
proud to think herself 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 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 and she delivered herself according to her wont at
such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing the perverse
sentiments that 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 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 her fellow-sufferer the case was very different; the
remedy for him was terribly vague and inaccessible. He was liable to
moods in which the sense of exclusion from all he would have liked most
to enjoy in life settled on 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 reflexion, in which he felt how in this world of effort
and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in
the best conditions, and how 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 involve.

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 on themselves to
make him smart with the sense that _he_ was above all out of it. He
felt, moreover, that there was neither consolation nor 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 on our young man his brothers of the people fared,
collectively, very ill 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 mightn’t do full
justice. It was not so much that he wanted to enjoy as that he
wanted to know; his desire wasn’t 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 on the stage of his
inner consciousness. 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 “bloated” as they passed didn’t so much as rest
their eyes on 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 fencing the “likes” of him off from social
recognition.

And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a
jealousy that couldn’t be intelligent; his personal discomfort was
the result of an intense 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 yet 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 appeared to expect him
nevertheless to have them ready on demand, and Hyacinth had ever a
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 wasn’t there one half of him always
either 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 had sickened
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 that had transformed the whole
face of his future. It was one January afternoon when he had come in
from a walk. She was seated at her lamp, as usual, with her work, and
had begun to tell him of a letter 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 had listened to her story, standing in front
of her, and then by way of response had suddenly said to her: “Who was
that awful 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—this 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 awful woman?”

“That woman in the prison years ago—how old was I?—who was dying and
who kissed me so, as I’ve 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 had lasted a week;
it was to leave her spent and sore for ever after, and before it was
over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she had
retracted the falsehoods with which she had previously tried to put
the boy off, and had made at last a confession and a report which he
was satisfied to believe as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could
never have told you why the crisis had occurred on such a day, why his
question had broken 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 had reconstructed
his antecedents, taken the measure, so far as was possible, of his
heredity. His having the courage to disinter from 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
Pinnie knew that 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 scarce
understood 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 judgement
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 they had refused absolutely to
recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie had to admit this
under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she couldn’t 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 immutably as the son of the recreant
and sacrificed 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 Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine
had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father, his gun
in his hand, had fallen in the blood-stained streets of Paris on a
barricade; but on the other side it took an English aristocrat to
account for him, though a poor specimen apparently had to suffice.
This, with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of
faith; the reflexion that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable
manner the reflexion that he was a gentleman. He was conscious 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 him resided; his mother wouldn’t have armed herself
on account of any injury less cruel than the passage 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, hopeless brat, lay there in her lap. _He_ was the one
properly to have been sacrificed: that remark our young man often made
to himself. That his judgement of the whole question was passionate and
personal and took little account of any disturbing conflict of evidence
is proved by the importance 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 had insinuated himself into her confidence he had had reasons
for preferring to be known as plain Mr. Robinson—reasons, however,
into which, in spite of the light thrown upon them at the trial, it was
difficult after so many years to enter.

Hyacinth had never known of Mr. Vetch’s saying 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 had answered, with some
ingenuity, by remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she
had murdered, as one must suppose her unwilling to publish to every
one his connexion 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
judgement 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 a feature of the general fact of the poor
woman’s professional life—so much cutting and trimming and shaping and
embroidering, so much turning and altering and doing-up. When it came
over him that she had for years 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 over which he spent nine-tenths of his own time in all gloomily
brooding. 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 her to be 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 impracticability 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 she was making
up by so much for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his
father’s kin in the newspaper, but he then always cast the sheet away.
He had nothing to ask of them and 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. A thousand times yes, 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 he had
blood in his veins that 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 bob apiece?” he asked of her on a note of that
too uniform irony which formed the basis of almost all their talk.
She had replied that she would content herself with a seat in the
second balcony, in the very front; and as such a position involved
an expenditure still beyond his compass he waited one night on Mr.
Vetch, to whom he had already more than once had recourse in moments of
pecuniary embarrassment. His relations with the caustic fiddler were
of the oddest and much easier when put to the proof than 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 at the crisis of
that question of her captive’s being taken to call on Mrs. Bowerbank;
and Hyacinth, in the face of this information, had asked with some
sublimity what the devil the fiddler had had to do with his private
affairs. Their neighbour had replied that it was not as an affair of
his but as an affair of Pinnie’s he had considered the matter; and our
hero had afterwards let it drop, though he had never been formally
reconciled to so officious a critic. Of course his feeling on this
head had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr. Vetch had taken to
get him a place with old Crook; and at the period of which I write it
had long been familiar to him that the author of that benefit didn’t
care a straw what he thought of his advice at the dark hour and in
fact took a perverse pleasure in “following” the career of a youth put
together of such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to be
conscious that this projected attention was kindly; and to-day, at any
rate, he would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for
not knowing the truth, horrible as it might be. His miserable mother’s
embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of motive, and
in the conditions that was a support. What he chiefly objected to in
Mr. Vetch was the betrayed habit of still regarding him as extremely
juvenile; he would have got on much better with a better recognition
of his being already a man of the world. The obscure virtuoso knew an
immense deal about society and 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 boon in life was a private
diverting commentary on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth
felt that he gave considerable evidence of patience with this when
he occasionally asked his fellow-resident in Lomax Place to lend him
half-a-crown. Somehow circumstances had of old 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 of him some substantial
service. Mr. Vetch had never once refused. It was satisfactory to
Hyacinth to remember as much when knocking at his door late, after
allowing him time to come home from the theatre. He knew his habits:
he never went straight to bed, but sat by his fire an hour, smoking his
pipe, mixing a grog and reading some old book. Hyacinth could tell 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 his neighbour 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 as on the spot to
settle 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 with a fine stare.

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

“A few? How many do you suppose?” But our friend checked himself. “Do
you suppose if I had been serious I’d tell?”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” sighed Mr. Vetch. 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’m sorry to say
I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres and
I’ve heard you say that you do each other little favours from place
to place, _à charge de revanche_, it occurred to me 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 said: “Do you want a box?”

“Oh no; something more modest.”

“Why not a box?” asked the fiddler in a tone the youth knew.

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

“And your young lady—has _she_ the clothes?”

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

“Where does she get ’em?”

“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; and while the young man helped himself he puffed a
while in silence. “What will she do with you?” he finally asked.

“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’re talking about,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, now the other thing—what do they call it? the Subterranean?—are
you very deep in that?” the fiddler went on as if he had not heard him.

“Did Pinnie tell you also about that?”

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

“How do you see it, pray?”

“You’ve got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you,
that you’ve taken some oath on bloody bones, that you belong to some
terrible gang. 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 Subterranean.”

“Is it more terrible, more deadly secret?” his companion asked with
extreme seriousness.

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

“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 observed
more sententiously than he intended.

“Is the time coming then, my dear young friend?”

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

“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 crowd in
all possible enjoyment with the young ladies: that’s a very natural
inclination.” To which Mr. Vetch irrelevantly added: “Do you see many
foreigners?”

“Yes, a good many.”

“And what do you think of them?”

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

“Mr. Muniment for example?”

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

“I’ve seen him at the Puppins’. I know you and he are as thick as
thieves.”

“He’ll distinguish himself some day very much,” said Hyacinth, who was
perfectly willing and indeed very proud to be thought a close ally of
a highly original man.

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

Hyacinth got up; they looked at each other hard. “Do get me two good
places in the second balcony.”

Mr. Vetch replied that he would do what he could, and three days
afterwards he handed his young friend the coveted order. He accompanied
it with the injunction, “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 on _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 powerfully laced, presented a splendid appearance
and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a 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 of 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
entertained 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 she was rather
flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in season
for the rising of the curtain on the farce preceding 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, losing itself so effectually in the fictive world that
the end of the piece, however long or however short, brought with
it something of the alarm of 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 intermittently
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 at his
own point of view, his companion made him feel all the characteristic
points he had missed. Her interpretations differed from his largely
in being so very bold and irreverent. Miss Henning’s observation of
the London world 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 hypocrites and had in all ways a low opinion
of her own sex, which more than once before this she had justified to
Hyacinth by narrating observations of a 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 circumstances appearing 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! 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’d 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 to the back, which must have had considerable
depth. There were other persons there, 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 piece proceeded regarded it with a certain interest;
but till 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 while the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape
their instruments for the interlude.

“Of course; I’m 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 friend was
once more at the front and leaning forward with his arms on the edge.
Hyacinth saw 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 didn’t immediately appear. “I say, I
say—is it one of your grand relations?” she promptly asked. “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
reflexions. 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 no less surprised and
puzzled him, producing altogether, in his easily-excited organism, an
agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the air
he had for Millicent was the sign. They had met three times, he and
his fellow-spectator; but they had met in quarters that, 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.
Our friend 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, lean and loose-jointed; he fell into lounging,
dawdling attitudes and even at a distance looked lazy. He had a long,
amused, contented face, unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his
brown hair, parted at the side, came forward on either temple in a
rich, well-brushed lock, after the fashion of the portraits of 1820.
Millicent 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 continually smiled at something, 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 of any strength. 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 reserve.

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

“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 that
amount of evidence of the intention she imputed to him. “I don’t think
I’m at all clear that I’ve a right to tell his name.” Hyacinth spoke
responsibly, yet with all disposition 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 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 reflexion 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 and crumpled white shawl—a
stout, odd, foreign-looking woman with a fair, nodding, wiggy head. She
had a placid, patient air and a round wrinkled face in which, however,
a pair of small bright eyes 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 daresay 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 of the
moment she declared that in that case, were he to come to see them, she
shouldn’t fear for herself. No wonder he wanted to get out of _that_
box! The party in the wig—and what a 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 he quite liked her
appearance and admired in her a charm of her own; 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 she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his
strange clubmate and that she would be disappointed if he didn’t come.
This idea didn’t 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, was 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 in more positive fashion than by Millicent’s
supposing it come out of the stage-box to see him, he would bring with
him rare influences. His view of this possibility made suspense akin to
preparation; therefore when at the end of a few minutes he became aware
that his young woman, with her head turned, was taking the measure
of some one who had come in behind them, he felt fate to be 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 she on her side
had performed with deliberation the ceremony of appraising him. The
Captain had his hands in his pockets and wore his crush-hat pushed a
good deal back. He laughed to 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, as if he were treating them rather too much
as a pair of children on whom he had stolen to startle them; 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—quite as
if Hyacinth had had at least an equal experience of that part of the
theatre.

“It’s hot enough here too,” Millicent’s companion returned. He had
suddenly become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his
proximity to the fierce chandelier, and he mentioned 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’s 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
start. She sustained his glance with composure, but with just enough
of emphasised reserve to intimate (what was perfectly true) that she
was not in the habit of conversing with gentlemen with whom she was
unacquainted. 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, facing toward 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 didn’t
know what one could talk of at such short notice to a person whom
he immediately perceived to be, and the more finely that it was all
unaggressively, a man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto
didn’t 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 couldn’t in the presence of a third person allude to the
matters they had discussed at the “Sun and Moon”; nor might he suppose
his visitor would expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a
man of humours and whims, disposed to amuse 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 slightly embarrassed, now that he was completely launched
in his attempt at fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit
a smile from Millicent’s rare 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’s a very
different affair,” he said again to Millicent, who this time replied
“Oh yes, of course,” and, considering afresh the old woman in the box,
reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that
she at least hadn’t seen.

“We’ve never been abroad,” Hyacinth candidly said while he looked 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; on which Hyacinth remained uncertain of his reference and
Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.

“They’re 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’ve the best seats
in the house,” said their visitor. “I should like very much to finish
my evening beside you. The trouble is I’ve ladies—a pair of them,”
he pursued 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’s 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 turn pale; the
first impulse he could have in connexion 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—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in
a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to look in at her if
he didn’t mind.

“She has a tremendous desire to meet 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 declared
I must introduce you at any cost. I hope you don’t mind just for a
quarter of an hour. I ought perhaps to tell you that she’s a person
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’s really
very much in earnest: I don’t mean about wishing to see you—that goes
without saying—but about our whole job, yours and mine. Then I should
add—it doesn’t spoil anything—that she’s the most charming woman in the
world, simply! Honestly, my dear boy, she’s 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 capricious not to say presumptuous 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 avoidance. Of course the lady in the box couldn’t be
sincere; she might think she was, though even that was questionable;
but you didn’t really care for the cause exemplified in the guarded
back room in Bloomsbury when 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 indulge her. None the less, I must add, the whole proposal
continued to make things dance, to appear fictive and phantasmagoric;
so that it sounded in comparison like a note of reality when Millicent,
who had been turning from one of the men to the other, exclaimed—

“That’s all very well, but who’s 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 charitable to her alarm
than the manner in which Captain Sholto reassured her. “My dear young
lady, can you suppose I’ve been unmindful of that? I’ve been hoping
that after I’ve taken down our friend and introduced him you might
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 grandly to the occasion. “I’m much
obliged to you, but I don’t know who you are.”

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

“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’ve 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 on 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 put off to some other opportunity the honour of making
the acquaintance of your friend,” he added to their visitor.

“Ah, my dear fellow, we might manage it so easily now,” this
gentleman murmured with evident disappointment. “It’s 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 good graces;
then he wondered 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 face 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
this crudity: “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 ideas 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’d 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 inscrutable good: “Having been in the army you’ll 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’s 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 put before Millicent
that he would do just as she liked; he was determined not to let a
member of a justly-doomed patriciate suppose 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 spoke 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 returned with his perfect
ease 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


His first consciousness after his companion had opened it was of his
proximity to the stage, on which the curtain had now again risen. 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 would at any rate not be left long
to languish in solitude. 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
odd party he had already viewed at a distance; she looked queerer still
on a closer view and gave him a little friendly gratified nod. The
other was partly overshadowed by the curtain of the box, drawn forward
with the intention of shielding her 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 dazzled him. 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; then
for ten minutes he 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 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 consciously embarrassed, overturned
and bewildered; he made a great effort to collect himself, to consider
the situation lucidly. He wondered if he ought to speak, to look at
her again, to behave differently in some way; if she would take him
for a clown, for an idiot; if she were really as beautiful as she had
seemed or it were only a superficial glamour which a renewed inspection
would dissipate. While he so pondered the minutes lapsed and neither
of his hostesses spoke; they watched the play in perfect stillness, so
that he divined this to be the proper thing and that he himself must
remain dumb until a word should be addressed 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 bright benevolence. She might well be a
princess—it was impossible to conform more to the finest evocations of
that romantic word. She was fair, shining, slender, with an 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 still not have set that down to his simplicity,
for this was the effect the Princess Casamassima produced on persons
of a wider experience and greater pretensions. Her dark eyes, blue or
grey, something that was not brown, were as kind 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, something 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 her
visitor, as he held himself in his chair trembling with the revelation,
questioned if she were really of the same substance with the humanity
he had hitherto known. She might be divine, but he could see she
understood human needs—that she wished him to be at his ease and happy;
there was something familiar in her benignity, 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. He took in all these
things and finally said to himself that if she wanted nothing more of
him he was content, he would like it to go on; so pleasant was it to
be enthroned 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 charity,
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 so keeping her eyes
on her friend from Lomax Place, whose position she thus endeavoured
to gauge. He 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 if she would say anything. The
consideration of this problem as the moment of the solution drew nearer
made his heart again beat fast. He watched the old lady on his left
and supposed it was natural 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 on
his making 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 full anomaly of his situation. She seemed to argue 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 on her guest 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 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’d 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 so obliging as you.”

Hyacinth could think immediately of no proper answer 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’d
come—to two strange women.”

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

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

The Princess glanced at her and then remarked to Hyacinth: “Her name
is Madame Grandoni.” The tone was not familiar, but there was a happy
shade in it, as if he had really taken so much trouble for them that
it was but 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’m not Italian—ah no!” the old lady cried. “In spite of my
name I’m an honest, ugly, unfortunate German. But _cela n’a pas
d’importance_. She also, with such a name, isn’t Italian either. It’s
an accident; the world’s 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 droll. In a
moment she added: “That was a very charming person you were with.”

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

The Princess made no remark on this subject, and Hyacinth saw 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 find the play
very interesting?”

He hesitated, then told the simple truth. “I must confess I’ve 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’re annoyed at being
here now you’ll 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 whatever in the people; I don’t
understand them and I know nothing about them. An honourable nature, of
any class, I always respect; but I won’t pretend to a passion for the
ignorant masses, because I have it not. Moreover that doesn’t touch the
gentleman.”

The Princess Casamassima had a clear faculty of completely ignoring
things of which she wished to take no account; it was not in the least
the air of contempt, but thoughtful, tranquil, convenient 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
vaguely conscious she had been committing herself in some absurd way:
“She lives with me; she’s everything to me; she’s the best woman in the
world.”

“Yes, fortunately, with many superficial defects I’m as good as good
bread,” Madame Grandoni conceded.

Hyacinth was by this time less embarrassed than when he had presented
himself, but he was not less mystified; he wondered afresh if he were
not being practised on for some inconceivable end: so strangely did
it strike him that two such products of another world than his own
should of their own movement take the trouble to explain each other
to a dire little bookbinder. This idea made him flush; it might have
come over him that he had fallen into a trap. He was conscious he
looked frightened, and he was conscious the moment afterwards that the
Princess noticed it. This was apparently what made her say: “If you’ve
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 asked.

“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
hand 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 witless stranger
to amuse her; perhaps that was the way the foreign aristocracy lived.
There was no sharpness in her face—for the present hour at least: there
was nothing but luminous charity, 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 almost of direct tenderness in the tone in which
she said: “Do you know I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten what they have
been doing—? It’s terribly complicated; some one or other was hurled
over a precipice.”

“Ah, you’re a brilliant pair,” Madame Grandoni declared with a laugh
of long experience. “I could describe everything. The person who was
hurled over the precipice was the virtuous hero, and you’ll see him in
the next act all the better for it.”

“Don’t describe anything; I’ve so much to ask.” Hyacinth had looked
away in tacit deprecation at hearing himself “paired” with the
Princess, and he felt 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 surprise 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.” But he had no sooner uttered the words than
it struck him they were far from brilliant, were poor and flat and very
little calculated to satisfy the Princess. Indeed he had said nothing
at all that could place him in a favourable light; so he continued at a
venture: “I mean I’ve never seen him at home.” That sounded still more
silly.

“At home? Oh, he’s never at home; he’s all over the world. To-night
he was as likely to have been in Paraguay for instance—though what a
place to be!” she smiled—“as here. He is what they call a cosmopolite.
I don’t know if 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 lot of very interesting talk with you. That was what made
me say: ‘Oh, do ask him to come in and see me. A little interesting
talk, that would be a change!’”

“She’s 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 describes to me. I should like so much to be present.
Why not?”

“I haven’t seen any ladies,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t know if it’s a
rule, but I’ve seen nothing but men”; and he subjoined, 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 he ought to go
about reporting our proceedings.”

“I see. Perhaps you think he’s a spy, an _agent provocateur_ 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.” He spoke as with mild amusement.

“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 beautiful deep 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,”
she said of herself, however, “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 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 I tell you. Perhaps you didn’t know how he was drawing
you out.”

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

“I’m 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’d be incapable of betraying you. However,
don’t trust him: not because he’s not safe, but because—!” She took
herself up. “No matter, you’ll 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’s so
difficult, especially for a woman in my position, who’s tiresomely
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,
but her tone perfectly natural and easy, with a charming assumption—for
you could call it nothing else—of more wonderful things than he
could count. Her manner of speaking was in fact altogether new to
her listener, for whom the pronunciation of her words and the very
punctuation of her sentences were the revelation of what he supposed
to be society—the very Society to the destruction of which he was
dedicated.

“Surely Captain Sholto doesn’t suppose _I’m_ a leading spirit!” he
exclaimed with the resolve not to be laughed at any more than he could
help.

“He told me you were very original.”

“He doesn’t know, and—if you’ll allow me to say so—I don’t think _you_
know. How should you? I’m 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’s nothing original about me at all. I’m 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 could possibly do. I’m a mere
particle,” Hyacinth wound up, “in the grey 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 betray ridiculous
effort, to stammer and emit vulgar sounds. For a moment she said
nothing, only looking at him with her exquisite smile. “I do draw you
out!” she exclaimed at last. “You’re 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 you’re remarkable enough.”

“What do you think I’m remarkable for?”

“Well, you’ve general ideas.”

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

“Who’s 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 and who’s in the employ of a big
wholesale chemist.”

If he had designed in this description of his friend a stronger dose
than his hostess would be able to digest he was greatly mistaken.
She seemed to gaze tenderly at the picture suggested by his words,
and she immediately inquired if the young man were also clever and
if she mightn’t 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, as he believed, had had no
particular conversation with him, the Princess asked with startling
frankness if her visitor wouldn’t bring the person so vividly described
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 eyeglass with a
long gilt handle. He had perceived much 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 great lady compliments, even had
he 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; after all
he had a French heredity and it wasn’t so easy for him to say things
as ill as his other idiom mainly required. But Madame Grandoni, laying
down her eyeglass, almost took the words out of his mouth with the
cheerful exhortation: “Go and see her—go and see her once or twice.
She’ll 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’d find I’d go with you—pretty far. I was answering just
now for Captain Sholto; but who in the world’s to answer for _me_?”
And her sadness merged itself in a smile that affected Hyacinth as
indescribably 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 spirit was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to
her, “I’d trust _you_, if you did!” though he felt the next minute that
this was even a more familiar speech than if he had expressed a want of
confidence.

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

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

“Ah you, my friend, you’ve 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’m sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young
man responded in his glow. The pure, high dignity with which the
Princess had just spoken and which appeared to cover a suppressed
tremor of passion set his pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw
what she meant—her aspirations appearing as yet so vague—her tone, her
voice, her wonderful face showed she had a generous soul.

She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a
melancholy head-shake. “I’ve no such pretensions and my good old
friend’s laughing at me. Of course that’s 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’ve a right
to say. I’m 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’s
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 and almost
as if he could tell her on the spot. Then suddenly she added in quite
a different tone: “Pardon me, I’ve an idea you know French. Didn’t
Captain Sholto tell me so?”

“I’ve some little acquaintance with it,” Hyacinth replied. “I’ve French
blood in my veins.”

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

“I’m just a bookbinder.”

“That must be delightful. I wonder if you’d bind me some books.”

“You’d 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
freely professed.

“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,” he laughed.

She seemed to reflect his innocent gaiety; she wasn’t a bit afraid
to let him see she liked him. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of it.
I don’t know London very well; I haven’t lived here long. I’ve spent
most of my life abroad. My husband’s a foreigner, a South Italian. We
don’t live always together. I haven’t the manners of this country—not
of any class, have I, eh? Oh this country—there’s 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?” she asked, a little oddly, by
way of allowance for this.

“Captain Sholto’s leaving the young lady—he’s 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 had just hesitated. “I live with a dressmaker.”

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

“Do you mean she’s your wife?” asked Madame Grandoni more bravely.

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

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

“You had better command a dress of her,” Madame Grandoni threw off.

“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 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’s 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 as she opened and
closed it; after which she said: “Well then, you’ll come some day.
We’ll arrange it.” Hyacinth felt the answer to this could be only a
silent inclination of his utmost stature, and to make it he rose from
his chair. As he stood there, conscious 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’ll be a crisis—that you’ll make yourselves felt?”

In this beautiful woman’s face there was to his 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’re 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’d give up everything—everything!” And the
Princess kept looking up at him. 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 sounded at 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 grasped his shoulder once more and shook him in that free
yet insinuating manner for which this officer appeared 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’ve the faculty, the precious
faculty, of inspiring women with an interest—but an interest!”

“Yes, ask them in the box there! I behaved like an awful muff,”
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?”

“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 out: “Don’t be afraid—you’ll go far.”

When the young man took his place in the balcony beside Millicent she
gave him no greeting nor asked any question about his adventures in the
more privileged 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 what may that have been?”

“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; in spite of which he would have liked to be
able to reply to Miss Henning that he didn’t believe a word of it. He
withheld the doubt and after a moment simply remarked: “Well, 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 at 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!” Hyacinth then wondered if
Captain Sholto had given her this formula.




XIV


He didn’t 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 in a degree that was hostile to fine
loose talk; but he discovered in him later 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 unexasperated, was indulgent even to contempt. 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 humour had no ferocity—the fault 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
of a 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 never dragged in with the least snarl 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 save in so far as 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 merely, an imperturbably intelligent
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
pronounced the young bookbinder a suggestive little beggar, and
Hyacinth’s opinion of him was by this time so exalted that the remark
had almost the value of a patent of nobility. Our hero treated himself
to a high unlimited faith in him; he had always dreamed of some grand
friendship and this was the best opening he had yet encountered. No one
could entertain a sentiment of that sort more nobly, more ingeniously
than Hyacinth, or cultivate with more art the intimate personal
relation. It disappointed him sometimes that his confidence was not
more unreservedly repaid; that on certain important points of the
socialistic programme Muniment would never commit himself and had not
yet shown the _fond du sac_, as Eustache Poupin called it, to so ardent
an admirer. He answered particular appeals freely enough, and answered
them occasionally in a manner that made Hyacinth jump, as when in reply
to a question about his attitude on 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 any real poverty of programme Hyacinth
was sure 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, gasp and turn pale.

“She wants to see you; she asked me to bring you; she was very
serious,” our young man meanwhile said, reporting 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 it ought to be enough for me that she’s a friend of
yours? I’ve a notion you’ll have some queer ones before you’ve 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 said as he exhibited ten
work-stained fingers.

“Buy a pair of gloves—” Hyacinth 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, good Lord! 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’re not obliged to find excuses for the pampered classes. Their
bloated luxury begets evil, impudent desires; they’re capable of doing
harm for the sake of harm. Besides, is she genuine?”

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

“Oh, it doesn’t matter; at night all cats are grey. Whatever she
is, she’s an idle, bedizened trifler; perhaps even a real profligate
female.”

“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’re already such a little mass of
corruption?”

“You don’t think that—?” and Hyacinth looked 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 dark as a fish.”

Paul Muniment glanced at his friend as if 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 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’s going on among the like of us?”

“It depends on what class you mean.”

“Well, a woman with a lot of wonderful jewels and wonderful scents
and the manners of an angel. I wonder if even the young ladies in the
perfumery shops have such manners—they can’t have such pearls. It’s
queer of course, that sort of interest, 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’m not in the least surprised at the aristocracy being
curious to know what we’re 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 tender
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 turned away. “You don’t trust me—you never have.”

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

“Well, _you_ won’t,” Hyacinth returned. And then he asked if his friend
thought the Princess Casamassima a spy of spies—the devil she’d have
to be!—and why, if she were in that line, Sholto was not, since it
must be supposed he was not when they had seen fit to let him walk in
and out, at any rate, at the place in Bloomsbury. Muniment didn’t even
know whom he meant, not having had any relations with the gentleman;
but he summoned a sufficient image after his companion had described
the Captain’s appearance. He then remarked with his usual geniality
that he didn’t take him for anything worse than a jackass; 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
workingmen’s clubs (Paul remembered now the first night he came; he
had been brought by that German cabinet-maker who always had a bandaged
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 halfway 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 armchairs and flunkies, in Pall Mall. And what did
he see after all in Bloomsbury? Nothing but a remarkably stupid “social
gathering” where there were clay pipes and a sanded floor and not half
enough gas and the principal papers; 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 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 objected.

“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’s natural, but I’ve 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 said: “You show Lady Aurora over;
you seem to wish to give her the information she desires; therefore
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 on her. If the Princess will do
as much I’ll see what _I_ can do; 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, 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 incident at the
theatre more remarkable and romantic. He seemed to regard his mate’s
explanation of the passage as all-sufficient; but when a moment later
he made use, in referring to the mysterious lady, of the expression
that she was “quaking” that critic 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 resumed 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 and give it to her badly.
That’s your line, you know—to go in for what’s going, to live your
life, to gratify the ‘sex.’ I’m an ugly, grimy brute, I’ve got to watch
the fires and mind the shop; but you’re one of those taking little
beggars who _must_ run about and see the world. You ought to be an
ornament to society, like a young man in an illustrated storybook. Only
you know,” Muniment added in a moment, “if she should hurt you very
much I _would_ have a go at 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 she was his godmother—it
sounded so right) should pay this civility; but the affair had been
delayed by wan hesitations on the part of the dressmaker, the poor
woman having hard work to imagine to-day that there were people in
London forlorn enough for her countenance to be of value to them.
Her social curiosity had quite died out and she knew 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 him of taking an
unnatural interest in politics and of being 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 breast 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 soiree
at a scavenger’s. There was no more danger of Rose Muniment’s being
out than that one of the bronze couchant lions in Trafalgar Square
should have 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 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 their meeting there. He presented his companion to
their reclining hostess, and Rosy immediately repeated her name to the
representative of Belgrave Square. Pinnie curtseyed down to the ground
as Lady Aurora put out her hand to her, and then 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 seen him.
His attention, however, was mainly given to Pinnie: he watched her
jealously, to see if on this important occasion she wouldn’t put forth
a certain stiff, quaint, polished politeness of which she possessed
the secret and which made him liken her extraction of the sense of
things to the nip of a pair of old-fashioned silver sugar-tongs. Not
only for Pinnie’s sake but for his own as well he wished her to figure
as a superior little woman; so 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
while 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: which it hadn’t done yet and perhaps never would—she lay so
quiet, pushing it about so little. “Perhaps you’d think it’s me that
trimmed the little handkerchief I wear round my neck,” Miss Muniment
said; “perhaps you’d 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 how it strikes you.” The girl
pulled off the bit of muslin from her neck and thrust it at Pinnie,
who looked at it confusedly and gasped “Dear, dear, dear!” partly in
sympathy, partly as if, in spite of the consideration she owed every
one, those were very odd 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) to spend
the evening with me at the height of the London season, 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’s very jocular indeed, but
fortunately I know how to take it. You can see 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—!” poor Pinnie floundered.

“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 returned. “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 he
took the two; for how should I find (by which I naturally mean 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’s my dwelling-place, the prize was a beautiful
counterpane of every colour of the rainbow. Oh there never was such
luck as mine!” Rosy chattered, flashing her gay demented eyes at
Hyacinth as if to irritate him with her contradictious optimism.

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

Rose Muniment laid her little hand on the dressmaker’s arm and
responded straight: “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 invented or dreamed of since
the world began.” And with her other hand she stroked affectionately
her variegated quilt. “You’ve 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’ve
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
to associate and blend them as closely as possible in their interest
in her. “In connexion 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’ve explained it: my idea is just simply a sweet pink
dressing-gown!”

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

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

“That would be very pretty,” said Pinnie. “I’ve made them like that in
my time. Or a carefully-selected 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
lack! Anything at all I should fancy, you were so good as to say. Well
now, I fancy that! Your ladyship does see the connexion by this time,
doesn’t she?”

Lady Aurora looked distressed, as if she felt 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 small 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, since 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 flat on your back like that you had the right to reach out your
hands (it wasn’t far you could reach at best) and grab what you could
get. Pinnie declared she knew just the article Miss Muniment wanted and
that she would undertake to make a perfect duck 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 shone 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 idea
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 just the right sort of rub—there _are_ such wrong
sorts!—or another spoonful of that American stuff. We’re 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 connexion with the pink dressing-gown,” she
pursued 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
discretion, 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 bent far away
in the country 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. Presently, to Hyacinth’s astonishment, Lady Aurora
said to him: “You never came after to get the books.”

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

She gave an uneasy laugh. “I’ve picked them out; they’re quite ready.”

“It’s awfully kind of you,” the young man hastened to say. “I’ll come
and get them some day with pleasure.” He wasn’t very sure he would, but
it was the least he could profess.

“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’ve no doubt she knows the way—she could tell me every street and
every turn!” Hyacinth laughed.

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

“She’s a wonderful little witch—she terrifies me!” he acknowledged.

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

“Yes, and so preternaturally wise and so awfully all there.”

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

“The cleverer?”

“Of the girl or her brother.”

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

“Do you really? I’m so glad!” she cried with a flush of colour. “I do
rejoice if 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
on her ladyship’s feelings, but when he felt her intense agreement
it was as if he had been making sport of her. Still he said no more
than he believed when he observed in a moment that he had the greatest
expectations of Paul Muniment’s future: he was sure the world would
hear of him, that England would need him, that the public some day
would acclaim him. It was impossible to know him without feeling he was
very strong and must play some important part.

“Yes, people wouldn’t believe—they wouldn’t believe.” She abounded in
his sense and he could measure the good he did her. 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 or 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 hadn’t been intended he should do something supreme for
his fellow-men. Hyacinth confided to her ladyship that he thought the
people in his own class generally very stupid—distinctly what he should
call third-rate minds. He wished it hadn’t been so, for heaven knew 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 housing hadn’t a favourable effect
on the higher faculties. All the more reason that when there was a
splendid exception like their friend it should count for a tremendous
force—it had so much to make up for, so many 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 such judgements made his
fellow-guest very uncomfortable; she turned about, she twisted herself
vaguely as if she wished to protest, but she was far too considerate
to interrupt him. He had no wish to worry her, but there were times
when he couldn’t withstand the perverse satisfaction of insisting on
his lowliness of station, of turning the knife in the wound inflicted
by such explicit reference, and of 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 species. Lady Aurora replied as quickly as
possible that she knew a great deal about the poor—not the poor after
the fashion of Rosy, 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 and their quick wit, with
their command of conversation really of much more interest to her than
most of 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 rich and rare 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 swagger, but she brought it out. “I daresay I know more than any
one.” There was something touching and beautiful to Hyacinth in this
simple and diffident claim: it confirmed his impression that she was
in some mysterious, incongruous and even slightly ludicrous manner a
true heroine, a creature of a noble ideal. She perhaps guessed he was
indulging in reflexions 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 dear Rosy 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 he replied:

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

She 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’ve blood in my veins that’s 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 way of taking it was the kindest in the world, but it didn’t
blind Hyacinth to the fact that from his own point of view he had been
extraordinarily indiscreet. He had 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 treat it as 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 his impression that people had ideas
about him, and with some of Miss Henning’s he had been made acquainted:
these were of such a nature that he sometimes wondered if the tie
uniting 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 he was impenetrable, and none the less he had
begun to swagger idiotically the first time a temptation (really 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 from the model of
civility 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. But
as soon as possible he gave himself a lesson in humility by remarking:
“I gather you spend most of your time among the poor and I’m sure you
carry blessings with you. But I frankly confess I don’t understand a
lady’s giving herself up to people like us when there’s no obligation.
Wretched company we must be when there’s so much better to be had.”

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

“Precisely—that’s what I say. Our little friend on the bed is
perpetually talking about your house, your family, your splendours,
your gardens and greenhouses. 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’re 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 and as if he were unexpectedly
discouraging.

“But when all’s said I think 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, all
thankful for the word. “I don’t know if 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 faltered as if there might be something indecent in the confession
or uncertain in the recipient; and then evidently 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 intense things. “Already when I was fifteen years
old I wanted to sell all I had and give to the poor. And ever since
I’ve 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 didn’t prevent
his presently saying, though in words that sounded patronising even to
himself: “I suppose you’re very religious.”

She looked away into the thickening dusk, at the smutty housetops,
the blurred emanation of lamp-light above the streets. “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 daresay
we had too many always at home; my father likes them so particularly.
I think I’ve known too many bishops, I’ve had the church too much on
my back. I daresay 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’re twelve at home and eight of us 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’s only one of us, Eva,
married, and we’re not at all handsome, and—oh there are all kinds
of things,” the young woman went on, looking round at him an instant
through her sense of being launched. “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 daresay 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’s 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 daresay I oughtn’t to say such things to you, but, as I tell you,
I’m quite a proper lunatic and I might as well keep up the character.
When one’s one of eight daughters and there’s very little money (for
any of _us_ at least) and nothing to do but to go out with three or
four others in mackintoshes, 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 goodness knows they’re in want of
it; but one must work with the vicarage, and at the vicarage are four
more daughters, all old maids, and it’s dreary and dreadful and one has
too much of it, for 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’re 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 contortions, as if afraid that
from one moment to the other she would repent, not of her confidence
but of her egotism.

It placed her for Hyacinth in an unexpected light, making 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 this timorous, scrupulous, though clearly
all generous, creature to be evidently most a person not to spare,
wherever she could prick them, the institutions among which she had
been brought up and against which she had violently reacted. He had
always supposed a reactionary to mean 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 held 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
that was a tribute to her sudden vividness while he 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 regular 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 on 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. Paul had brought
him up for Rosy’s entertainment, being ready, and more than ready,
always to introduce 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 can’t 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 dressed with ingenious cheapness, to an effect coinciding,
however different the cause, with poor Hyacinth’s own; but his disguise
prompted our young man to wonder what made him so unmistakably a
gentleman in spite of it—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 intense when it rested on our hero, whom
he greeted 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—he was altogether a problem.

Rosy was a match for him, however; he evidently didn’t puzzle her
in the least and she thought his visit the most natural thing in
the world. She expressed all the gratitude 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, since the way he sealed a new
acquaintance was usually by bringing the person immediately to call
on 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 she disapproved: as yet,
however, she had not been obliged to draw the line. This was perhaps
partly because he hadn’t brought up any of his awful firebrands, the
people he knew for unmentionable reasons. Of such in general she had
a very small opinion, and she wouldn’t conceal from Captain Sholto
that she hoped he wasn’t 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 nevertheless entered quite into her views and told her
that it was as common friends of Mr. Hyacinth Robinson 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 his head; he
saw Captain Sholto might be trusted to make as great an effort for
Rosy’s entertainment as he gathered he had made for Milly Henning’s
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 had 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 arrived at as by a quick
freemasonry, the idea that Miss Pynsent should go home to Belgrave
Square with her ladyship and 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 brown “breadths” that
had proved their quality in honourable service and might be dyed to
the proper hue. 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 couldn’t 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
and the observation 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 of the prospect of their
getting one of their own men—one of the Bloomsbury lot—into the House.
“He was mighty civil,” Muniment said, “and I don’t find that he has yet
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 makes up for it by not paying any attention to
the answers. He told me he’d give the world to see a really superior
workingman’s ‘interior.’ I didn’t know at first just where he proposed
to cut me open: 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’s, the cabinetmaker’s, neat home, 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 in 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 work to return him if that’s to be his
platform. 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 asked 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 rum, but he is certainly rummer. Don’t you think so now
you know him?”

Paul eyed his young friend. “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 deep-sea 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?” Hyacinth eagerly asked.

“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 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, his
friend was destined to draw ejaculations and echoes.

Paul glanced toward the Captain, who was apparently more and more
engaged by Rosy. “In him I think there’s no great harm. He’s only a
patient angler.”

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 Rosy asked Miss Pynsent to be
so good as to hand it about. They must let her poor ladyship rest a
little, mustn’t they?—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, however, and begged Pinnie
to let him relieve her, taking a cup from her hand; and poor Pinnie,
who noted in a moment that he was some kind of uncanny masquerader, 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 example of a tenement of its class?” It was with such
inquiries as this that the good gentleman beguiled their tea-drinking,
while Hyacinth made the reflexion that, though he evidently meant
them very well, they were characterised by a want of fine tact, by
too patronising a curiosity. The Captain invited 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 extreme animation. He had the manner of having made
over their visitor altogether to Rosy and of thinking that whatever
that personage said or did was all so much grist to her indefatigable
little mill. Lady Aurora writhed in her pain, and it is a proof of the
degree to which our slight 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 picked up by mysterious processes of her own.
At last her ladyship, on whom Paul Muniment had not been at pains to
bestow much conversation, took leave of her, signifying to Hyacinth
that for the rest of the evening she would assume the care of Miss
Pynsent. Pinnie might have been consciously laid bare for monstrous
rites 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 on she
reminded him under her breath and with a small sad smile of the many
years during which, after nightfall, she 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 Paul had indulged him and
too promiscuously investigating as he had just shown himself, this
ingratiating character 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 their host coming up, and Hyacinth felt rather ashamed, he could
scarce tell why, that his friend should see him marching off with the
“tout.” After all, if Paul had brought him to see his sister might not
Paul’s pupil and devotee at least walk with him? “I’m coming again, you
know, very often. I daresay you’ll find me a great bore!” the Captain
announced as he bade good-night to Muniment. “Your sister’s a most
interesting creature, one of the most interesting creatures I’ve ever
seen, and the whole thing, you know, exactly the type of place I wanted
to get at, only much more—really much more—original and curious. It has
been a jolly glimpse—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 expensive 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 Saint
Thomas’s Hospital) Sholto brought out: “By the way, why shouldn’t
you come home with me and see my little place? I’ve 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 demur; he had still in his ear the reverberation of
the Captain’s inquiries in Rosy’s room, and he saw no reason why he
on his side shouldn’t 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, where he had filled
the high wainscoted rooms with the spoils of travel and the ingenuities
of modern taste. There was not a country in the world he appeared
not 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,
solemnised the very 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 youth that he felt
himself hushed and depressed, so poignant was the thought that it took
thousands of things he then should never possess nor know to make a
civilised being. He had often in evening walks wondered what was behind
the walls of certain ample bright-windowed houses in the West End, and
now he got an idea. The first effect of the idea was to lay him rather
flat.

“Well now, tell me what you thought of our friend the Princess,” the
Captain said, thrusting out the loose yellow slippers 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 while
his eyes wandered all over the room.

“She was so interested in all you said to her; she’d 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 chap?”

“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 its dim rich curiosities
hanging on the walls and glinting in the light of that rose-coloured
lamp. You yourself too—you’re strangest of all.”

The Captain looked at him so silently and so fixedly, 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 signs 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 points 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 Milly had said about her at
the theatre—asked if this young lady had correctly understood him in
believing 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, that the Prince would at the
present hour give everything he owns in the world to get her back.
Fancy such an absurd 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 demand
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’ve seen many women, and the women of many
countries,” the Captain went on, “and I’ve seen them as intimately
as you like, and I know what I’m talking about; and when I tell you
that that one—that one—!” Then he suddenly paused, laughing in his
democratic way. “But perhaps I’m going too far: you must always pull
me up, you know, when I do. At any rate I congratulate you; I do right
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 go
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 pecuniary gains. 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 one somehow
of certain of Bulwer’s novels. His host gratified this pretension most
liberally and told him twenty stories of things of interest, often
of amazement, 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 his friend’s books, which he told
him frankly, with the conscience of an artist, were not up to the
mark. 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 grey London streets began to 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. Our personage, 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.” He made two reflexions: 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 always, wherever she was,
the most charming room 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 this to be
only when he had been baited past endurance, so 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 didn’t permit himself even
to murmur at the long delay he had to accept. 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 at first all a renouncement of words. She came to
him with both hands outstretched, and took his own and held them a
while, looking up at him with full benignity. She had elongated her
florid, humorous face to a degree that was almost comical, and the
pair might have passed, in their silent solemnity, for acquaintances
meeting in a house in which last obsequies were 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 sustain that
note 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 brow on which a more genial appreciation of the facts had
already begun to appear.

“Never—never—never?” said the Prince in a deep hoarse voice, a voice
at variance with his attenuated capacity. He had much of the complexion
which in late-coming members of long-descended races we qualify to-day
as effete; but his tone might have served for the battle-cry 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’ve been talking with her: that’s what has made me keep you.
I’ve urged her to see you. I’ve told her that this could do no harm and
would pledge her to nothing. But you know your wife,” Madame Grandoni
repeated with an intensity now much relaxed.

Prince Casamassima looked down at his boots. “How can one ever know a
person like that? I hoped she’d see me five little 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 asked as he turned his
blighted gaze to the opposite side of South Street.

“In London, such a day as this, _già_,” said the old lady
sympathetically. “I’m very sorry for you; but if I had known you were
coming I’d have written to you that you might spare yourself the pain.”

He gave a deep interminable sigh. “You ask me what I wish to propose.
What I wish to propose is that my wife shouldn’t kill me inch by inch.”

“She’d be much more likely to do that if you lived with her!” Madame
Grandoni cried.

“_Cara amica_, she doesn’t appear to have killed you,” the melancholy
nobleman returned.

“Oh, me? I’m past killing. I’m as hard as a stone. I went through my
miseries long ago; I suffered what you’ve not had to suffer; I wished
for death many times and I survived it all. Our troubles don’t kill
us, _Principe mio_; it’s we who must try to kill them. I’ve buried not
a few. Besides, Christina’s fond of me, the devil knows why!” Madame
Grandoni added.

“And you’re so good to her,” said the Prince, who laid his hand on her
fat wrinkled fist.

“_Che vuole?_ I’ve known her so long. And she has some such great
qualities.”

“Ah, to whom do you say it?” And he gazed at his boots again, for some
moments, in silence. Suddenly he resumed: “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
a little and he replied with eagerness: “Ah, she’s the only woman I’ve
ever seen whose beauty never for a moment falls below itself. She has
no bad days. She’s so handsome when she’s angry!”

“She’s very handsome to-day, but she’s 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.

His old friend had a pause. “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 as he turned on her his
sad grateful eyes.

“I’m very sorry for you. _Ma che vuole?_”

The Prince had apparently nothing to suggest and only exhaled in reply
another gloomy groan. Then he inquired if his wife pleased herself in
that country and if 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 English capital 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 prepared or promised? She always at
the last moment did the other thing, the one that had been out of the
question; and it was for this Madame Grandoni herself privately made
her preparations. Christina, now that everything was over, would leave
London from one day to the other; but they shouldn’t know where they
were going till they arrived. The old lady concluded by asking if the
Prince himself liked England. He thrust forward his full lips. “How can
I like anything? Besides, I’ve been here before; I’ve many friends.”

His companion saw 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—in spite of his position
of discomfiture, really very great—might find it difficult to square
itself. He looked vaguely round the room and presently remarked: “I
wanted to see for myself how she’s living.”

“Yes, that’s very natural.”

“I’ve heard—I’ve heard—” And Prince Casamassima stopped.

“You’ve heard great rubbish, I’ve 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’s a model
of thrift—that she counts every shilling,” Madame Grandoni continued.
“If there’s 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”—he just hesitated, then went on—“spend
almost nothing at all. But I’d rather live on dry bread than that in a
country like this, in this great English society, she shouldn’t make a
proper appearance.”

“Her appearance is all you could wish. How can it help being proper
with me to set her off?”

“You’re the best thing she has, dear friend. So long as you’re 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’ll stay in the
bath when the hot water’s on. When I begin to be scalded I’ve to jump
out—naked as I may naturally be. I’ll stay while I can, but I shouldn’t
stay if she were to do certain things.” Madame Grandoni uttered
these last words with a clear emphasis, 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’s utterly impossible to predict on any
occasion what Christina will do. She’s 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 spot.”

“So that if you’ve not left it yet—?” he asked with extreme eagerness.

“It’s because I’ve thought I may do some good by staying.”

He seemed but half content 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.—You might interpose, you might arrest—” He stopped short
before her large Germanic grimace.

“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 under a slow spasm of pain.
“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’ll drag my name, do
what no one has ever dared to do? That I’d never forgive,” he declared
almost under his breath; and the hoarseness of his whisper lent it a
great effect.

Madame Grandoni hastily wondered if 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
reflexion 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 connexion with an ignorant and superstitious Italian
race whom she despised for their provinciality, their parsimony and
their futility (she thought their talk the climax of childishness)
and whose fatuous conception of their importance in the great modern
world she had on various public occasions sufficiently riddled with her
derision. She finally contented herself with remarking: “Dear Prince,
your wife’s a very proud woman.”

“Ah, how could my wife be anything else? But her pride’s 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’re not there.”

“Why then do you say that you enter into my fears—that you recognise
the stories I’ve heard?”

I know not whether the good lady lost patience with his pressure;
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
herself much more!”

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 if suffering from his long
thin feet. He stopped before one of the windows and took another survey
of South Street; then turning he suddenly asked 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’s thought very strange of course. But she sees whom she likes. And
they mostly bore her to death!” Madame Grandoni conscientiously added.

“Why then do you tell me this country pleases her?”

The old woman left her place. She had promised Christina, who detested
the sense of being under the same roof with her husband, that the
latter’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’s the common people who please her,” she returned with
her hands folded on her crumpled satin stomach and her ancient eyes,
still keen for all comedy, raised to his face. “It’s the lower orders,
the _basso popolo_.”

“The _basso popolo_?” The Prince stared at this fantastic announcement.

“The _povera gente_,” pursued his friend, amused at his dismay.

“The London mob—the most horrible, the most brutal—?”

“Oh, she wishes to raise them.”

“After all, something like that’s 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 this comforting assurance lost upon him; his
face was turned to the door of the room, which had been thrown open,
and all his attention given to the person who crossed the threshold.
She 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—afterwards informing her old friend that she had sent for him
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.

Hyacinth stood, while she 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
if 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 script could make them.

“Good-morning, good-morning. I hope you’re well,” said Madame Grandoni
with quick friendliness, but turning her back upon him at the same time
in order to ask of their companion, in the other idiom, as she extended
her hand: “And don’t you leave London soon—in a day or two?”

The Prince made no answer; he still scanned the little bookbinder
from head to foot, as if 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
the heat of wonder in his fine 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 said as a prompt
precaution; in case he should have incurred the reproach of undue
precipitation.

“Oh yes, I daresay.” And Madame Grandoni guided the Prince to the door
with an expression of the desire he might have a comfortable journey
back to Italy.

But he stood stiff there; he appeared to have jumped to a dark
conclusion about 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 intensity: “Dearest friend, I beg you on
my knees!” After she had agreed that if he would write to her proposing
a day and place she would see him were it possible, he raised her
ancient knuckles to his lips and, without further notice of Hyacinth,
turned away. She bade the servant announce the other visitor to the
Princess, and then approached Mr. Robinson, rubbing her hands and
smiling, her head very much to 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’m twenty-four.”

“And I hope you’re industrious, and temperate in all ways and—what do
you call it in English?—steady.”

“I don’t think I’m very wild,” said Hyacinth without offence. 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’s considered meddling or impertinent.”

“I like the way you speak,” Hyacinth hastened to profess.

She stared, and then with a comical affectation of dignity: “You’re
very good. I’m glad it amuses you. You’re evidently intelligent and
clever,” she went on, “and if you’re disappointed it will be a pity.”

“How do you mean if I’m disappointed?”

“Well, I daresay you expect great things when you come into a house
like this. You must tell me if I upset you. I’m very old-fashioned and
I’m not of this country. I speak as one speaks to young men like you in
other places.”

“I’m not so easily upset!” Hyacinth assured her with a flight of
imagination. “To expect anything one must know something, one must
understand: isn’t it so? And I’m here without knowing, without
understanding. I’ve 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 struck by his good looks,
by something delicate stamped on him everywhere. “I can see you’re very
clever, very intelligent; no, you’re not like the young men I mean. All
the more reason—!” And she paused, giving a short sigh. Her case might
have been all too difficult. “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 the Eternal City. If I hurt you, you
can explain it that way. No, you’re not like them.”

“You don’t hurt me—please believe that; you interest me very much,”
said Hyacinth, to whom it didn’t occur that he himself might seem
patronising. “Of what do you want to warn me?”

“Well—only to advise you a little. Don’t give up anything.”

“What can I give up?”

“Don’t give up _yourself_. I say that to you in your interest. I think
you’ve some honest little trade—I forget what. But whatever it may
be remember that to do it well is the best thing; better than paying
extraordinary visits, better even than being liked by Princesses!”

“Ah yes, I see what you mean!” Hyacinth returned, exaggerating a
little. “I’m very fond of my trade indeed, I assure you.”

“I’m delighted to hear it. Hold fast to it then and be quiet; be
diligent and good and get on. I gathered the other night that you’re
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 who
even think it 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’m 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’re 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’ll 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


He 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
couldn’t fail to deepen the emotion which, any time these three days,
had made him draw his breath more quickly. That emotion, nevertheless,
didn’t actually 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 his adventure
would throw him on 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 and of which the legs
and frame appeared of pure gold. Here he sat perfectly still, only
with 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 didn’t scruple to keep him
waiting 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 character 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 temperament.

When at last the door opened and the servant, reappearing, threw it
far back as 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 arrived she was so simply dressed—besides his seeing her now
on her feet—that she looked quite a different figure. She approached
him rapidly and a little stiffly and shyly, but in the prompt manner
in which she shook hands was an evident desire to be very direct and
perfectly easy. She might have been another 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 assailing and bewildering
him as to the reality of the vision bequeathed to him by his former
interview. And in this peculiar high grace of her presence he couldn’t
have told you if she struck him as more proud or more kind.

“I’ve 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’ve noticed some of them. Over on that side for instance is rather
a curious collection of miniatures.” She spoke abruptly, quickly, as
if 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 if 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 wouldn’t have appeared to him 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; immediately adding, however, that she was
afraid he had not many opportunities of seeing them, though of course
there were the public collections, open to all. He replied 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 fact appeared
to interest her greatly, so that she straightway begged him to tell her
what he thought of certain pictures and antiques. In this way it was
that in an incredibly short time, as appeared to him, he found himself
discussing the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin Marbles with one
of the most remarkable women in Europe. It was true that she herself
talked most, passing precipitately from one point to another, putting
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 in
the least, but absurdly loved it. It didn’t occur to him to think these
discriminations pedantic. Suddenly she threw off, “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 decently pleaded.

“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!”—and the young man stared, 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—naturally—nervous.” Later on, when he had
left the house, he wondered how at that stage he could have ventured on
such a familiar remark.

But she had taken it with a quick, surprised laugh. “How do you know
that?” Before he had time to tell 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’ve 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’s your cousin the dressmaker?” she inquired
abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor
Pinnie—described her as 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’ve 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 with a sense of great
presence of mind.

“It’s charming 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!” he smiled.

There was a considerable silence, after which she pursued: “All I ask
of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my
indifference.”

Hyacinth wondered what reply he ought to make to such an announcement
as that, and it seemed to him 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’m odious? I _can_ be—oh there’s no doubt of that!
However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I’ve 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’ll tell me it’s none of my business.”

“Very true—she might!” the Princess inconsequently laughed. “And I
don’t know either why I should bore you with my domestic affairs;
except that I’ve been wondering what I could do to show you confidence
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 on me I just mention it, though the subject’s tiresome
enough. Moreover, I ought to let you know that I’ve very little respect
for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so much of in
this country. They’re 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’re
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’m more and more impressed with the fact that
you’re 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
wasn’t easily shocked; and then restlessly, eagerly, as if it relieved
her to talk and made their queer conjunction 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 question, “What could really 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 on 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’ll help you with pleasure to the best of my humble ability. But
you’ll 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 through the
aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the same 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 drove
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 aspect and the address, and that perhaps made
their curiosity the more significant.

“I haven’t the least doubt of it,” this investigator answered; “there’s
nothing in life in which I’ve 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 _naïfs_. The upper classes are so deadly _banals_.
My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the
greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to
by my marriage. Oh, if you knew what I’ve been through you’d 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
beautiful. “The only objection to you individually is that you’ve
nothing of the people about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes
wandered over him from head to foot, and their recognitions 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 returned.

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 mentioned her
parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and
how she had led from her youngest 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 great name, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy
could have wished. 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 uneasy but 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 woman’s attachment. 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 she had for
several years 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 which was to throw herself into some effort
that 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 willing submission; she
seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By
the time he had been with her half an hour she had made the situation
itself easy and usual, and a third person who should have joined them
at this moment would have noticed nothing to suggest 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 her visitor’s eyes no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and
interesting whim, and why mightn’t he stand for the hour at any rate
in the silvery moonshine it cast on his path? It must be added that he
was far from taking in everything she said, some of her allusions and
implications being 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 such 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 and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the
revolutionary spirit. He surely needn’t 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, didn’t
make her affect him any the less as a creature compounded of the
finest elements; brilliant, delicate, complicated, but complicated with
something divine.

It was not till after he had left her that he became conscious she
had forced him to talk in spite of talking so much herself. He drew
a long breath as he reflected that he hadn’t made quite such an ass
of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by
the thrill of his interest 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, conscious
tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity,
some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the
grimmest subterranean circles. He had said indeed much more than he had
warrant for when she questioned him on his “radical” 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 pride. 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’ve nothing
more remarkable to put before me?”—a question to which of course he
would have had an answer ready but for its being so impossible to say
he had never asked to come and that 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 if I shall ever see you again!” he replied with perfect
sincerity that it was scarce possible 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’s 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’s nothing essentially inconceivable in my seeing
you again; but it may very well be that you’ll never again find it
so pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any
rate, you know, I’m going away.”

“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town—!” Hyacinth rose to that
occasion.

“Do _you_, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess asked.

“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless it’s possible that this
year I may get three or four days at the seaside. I should like to take
my old lady. I’ve done it before.”

“And except for that shall you be always at work?”

“Yes; but you must understand that I love 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,” our friend replied judicially.

She looked a little chagrined, but after a moment pursued: “I wonder
whether you’d come to see me in the country somewhere.”

“Oh cracky!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You’re 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’re
going to be _banal_ too? I ask if you’d come.”

He couldn’t have said at this moment whether he were plunging or
soaring. “Yes, I think I’d 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’d come.”

“You mean you can’t leave your work like that? You might lose it if you
did, and then 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 and complications 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 struck her visitor as quite sacred. “After all I don’t
know where I shall be. I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits
where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump.
Every one here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there’s no doubt I am!
I might be ever so much more so if you’d 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’ve
got through that _corvée_; I shall be here next year. In the meantime
don’t forget me,” she went on as she rose 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 high radiance. Then in a manner almost equally
quaint 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’m not by nature persevering, and am really very easily put
off, I don’t consider they’ll prove insurmountable. They exist on my
side as well, and if you’ll help me to overcome mine I’ll do the same
for you with yours.”

These words, repeating themselves again and again in his 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 despite much handling. 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 old Crook’s, 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 to him the fruit of his
toil, and much more freely expressed than that of old Crook himself,
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 major-domo
in charge of the house, opening the door yet looking down at him as
if from a second-story window, took the life out of his vision and
erected instead of it, by a touch, a high blank wall. The Princess had
been absent for some days; her representative 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 “jucal” circle. He decided to retain
his little package for the present; he would offer it to her when he
should see her again, and he retreated without giving it up. Later on
it seemed to create a manner of material link between the Princess and
himself, and at the end of three months it had almost come to appear
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 our young man, 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 to a virtual
proof and gage—as if a ghost in vanishing from sight had left a
palpable relic.




XVIII


The matter touched him but indirectly, yet 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 in the foreign fashion at twelve o’clock—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 tepid and tasteless _réchauffé_, as it
struck our old friend, of the typical London fog. 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 threw into high relief. They remained
there nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning
to friendly interpretations, couldn’t have told herself what comfort
it was to her afflicted companion. She had nothing to say to him that
could better his case as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect 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. She 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 conducted himself after the fashion of
a spoiled child, a 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 judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she
cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had
been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as
to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been
showy. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to make good his
valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to ground where his
wife was far too accomplished a combatant not to obtain the appearance
of victory.

There was another reflexion for Madame Grandoni to make 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 (mixed 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 reached that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various,
ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have
tolerated long the simple deadly dulness of the Prince’s company. The
old lady had begun on meeting him: “Of course what you want to know at
once 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 assures me she has
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’ve made the mistake,
as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked of you last
night after your note came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked in
my independent way and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end
she spoke briefly, 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’s 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 contentedly
alone!’ Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they’re 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 they might form a wholesome admonition, but she now
saw 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 after all neither
a crime nor a design nor a preference. How could the Prince occupy
himself, what interests could he create and what faculties, gracious
heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as one of the dingy London
sheep browsing before them, and as contracted as his hat-band. His
expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult,
felt it more than saw it—felt he couldn’t plead incapacity without
putting his wife largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his
face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry right
out. But he said nothing—perhaps because he was afraid of that—so
that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand on his
own, remained his sole answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t
that when Christina touched on 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 taken more form.
But at last, as if he had not heard her, he broke out on the identity
of the young man who had come in the day he called, just as he was
going.

Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”

“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”

“Prince, how can you dream she’ll 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_,” he added as if the
declaration justified him.

“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the
lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” She couldn’t help
laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth
elicited no echo.

“I’ve thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less I
understand. Would it be your idea that she’s quite crazy? I must tell
you I don’t care if she is!”

“We’re 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’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”

“_Santo Dio!_” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when
they see the bookbinder?”

“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t
matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be
extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is
all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”

The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”

“I don’t know what you’re 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’re full of gin; their faces are awful, 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?”

His friend looked at him a little sternly. “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’ll 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 didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw 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’s better to conceal.”

“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I
grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching
her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not
stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she
doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since
you’re here and I mayn’t 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 her seem to you a
little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the
fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”

“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.

“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more
insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her
having told you—how 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’t for the
rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”

“Yes, I know 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,” the old woman smiled.
“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’re not anything of that low sort, thank God! _Dio mio, Dio
mio!_” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions
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 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 South Street (she wished him to come no further) 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’s 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’s he who has occupied you most!”
Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last
one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”

“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’s 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 that 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 detailed this episode
minutely 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’re all there together and
everything’s 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 hadn’t been afraid to
appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been
so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to
me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who
had 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 dressing up the cat. This
was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t 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 puppy 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 “confidential”
housekeeper, a person 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 Pinnie at once announced to him that
her ladyship had been there to look at it—to pass judgement before the
last touches were conferred. The dressmaker intimated that in such
a case as that her judgement was rather wild and she seemed to have
embarrassing ideas 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 “Plice”: not in a meddling, prying way, either, like some of
those condescending swells, 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 on my life, 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 it all: “How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you’re
lying? I’m 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’d never condescend to that.” Pinnie suffered acutely from this
imputation, yet exposed herself to it often, because she could never
deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting
Hyacinth know he was appreciated, admired and, for those “charming
manners” commended by Lady Aurora, even all but wondered at in so many
words; 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 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 as a man of the world; and meanwhile he considered much
the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life which 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 were even taking up poor Pinnie as a means of
getting at him; so that he wondered with gaiety and irony if 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 appeal,
conducted him through the house and ushered him into her ladyship’s
presence without the smallest relaxation of a pair of tightly-closed
lips. His good hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour
by the light of a couple of candles and apparently immersed in a
collection of 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 hair 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’ve 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 noted that
her nervousness and 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, staying half an
hour, 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,
_Le 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
consistent 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 our
young man 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 prohibitory
presences. She spoke again of the poor people in the south of London
and of 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 their state—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: the rich
couldn’t consider poverty in the light of experience. Their mistakes
and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of
want and dirt when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less
irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this deficient
perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness it would be a
queer enough business when he should come to pretending to hold the
candlestick for the Princess Casamassima.

His present hostess said no word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed
she must have wished to place him on the footing on which people don’t
express approbation or surprise at the decency or good-breeding of
each other’s relatives. He saw how 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 shouldn’t
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 at once the sense
of learning more about life, a sense always delightful to him, 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
and reform might have implied he was a benevolent nobleman (of the type
of Lord Shaftesbury) who had endowed many charities and was noted,
in philanthropic schemes, for the breadth of his views. 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 if she did) 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 and encouragingly: “I suppose one
of these days you’ll be setting up in business for yourself.” This was
not so cruelly patronising that he couldn’t 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’ve no turn at all for that sort of thing.”

Lady Aurora looked a little surprised. “Oh, I see; you don’t like—you
don’t like—!” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say he didn’t like
the idea of going in to that extent for a trade; but he stopped her in
time from imputing to him a sentiment so foolish and declared what he
meant to be simply that his one faculty was the faculty of doing his
little piece of work, whatever it was, of liking to do it skilfully
and prettily, and of liking still better to get his money for it when
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 left her she asked 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 he think
him a very odd sort of person? Hyacinth confessed to this impression;
whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider
him 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 form relations with any one of that kind.”

“They” of course meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person
who may be vulgar?”—Hyacinth regarded this solicitude as exquisite.
“But think of the people they know—think of those they’re 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 if she wouldn’t find the
Princess herself a bit vulgar.




XX


It must not be supposed that his relations with Millicent had remained
unaffected by the remarkable incident that had brushed her with its
wing at the theatre. The whole occurrence had made a great impression
on the young lady from Pimlico; he never saw her, for weeks afterwards,
that she had not an immense deal to say about it; and though it
suited her to cultivate the shocked state at the crudity of such
proceedings and to denounce 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 she enjoyed having
rubbed shoulders across the house with a person so splendid and having
found her own critical estimate of her friend confirmed in such high
quarters. She professed to draw 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 notes of it having nothing in common save that
they were alike unflattering to the Princess. Hyacinth had many doubts
of the Captain’s having talked indiscreetly; it would be in such a case
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 fine faculty of free invention of which he had
had frequent glimpses, under pressure of 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)
didn’t 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 as to whom she only knew that she disliked her and
could hope for no esteem, and indeed for no recognition of any kind,
in return. When people were fully 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 didn’t pretend to repeat the remainder of his conversation,
taking on her air of grand indifference when Hyacinth amused himself
with repaying her criticism of his new acquaintance by drawing a
sufficiently derisive portrait of hers.

His line was 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 revolutionist and
should like therefore to confer with the little firebrand above 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 showing so much
more charm than might have been expected. He described with sportive
variations his visit in South Street, conscious 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, emphasised
the frankness, the passion and pluck 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 couldn’t take upon himself to say,
but her affection would never assume 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 any actual ground for the girl’s jealousy of the Princess
he never thought; it couldn’t 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 bouncing shop-girl in a contest
for a prize which should have anything of _his_ figure. How could they
show the least common mark—even so small a one as a desire to possess
themselves of Hyacinth Robinson? A fact he didn’t impart to Millicent
and could have no wish to impart to her was the different 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 Milly make free with the ministering angel
of Audley Court. The distinction was perhaps somehow in her appearing
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, but offered in its unsuspected rear a security still 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 one had a secret hope one should some day command more light,
he was probably buffeting breezy 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 mused, while his imagination followed him through
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 that unite these regions of labour. He had told the Princess 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
lack of this convenience and was forcibly reminded that the society
of agreeable women was a direct and constant appeal to the pocket.
He not only hadn’t a penny, but was much in debt, owed pence and
shillings, as he would have largely put it, all over the place, and
the explanation of his pinched feeling was in a vague half-remorseful,
half-resigned reference to the numerous occasions when he had had not
to fail of funds 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 had come over him that one
couldn’t call on a princess just as one was. So this year he didn’t
ask old Crook 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 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 in 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. Our young friend’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 in a manner a 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 way that marked
him as a queer lot, but capable of queerness in the line of equanimity
too. He hadn’t 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 one be only 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 a daily dusky exhibition of
projected shadows, confined to the passive part of life and giving
no hostages to reality, or at least to ambition, save an insufficient
number of shillings on Saturday night and stray spasmodic reminiscences
of delicate work that might have been more delicate still, as well as
of such applications of the tool as he flattered himself unsurpassed
unless by the supreme Eustache.

One evening in November he had after discharging himself of a
considerable indebtedness to Pinnie still a sovereign in his pocket—a
sovereign that seemed to spin there under the equal breath of a
dozen different lively 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 of how nice it would be to take
something to Rose Muniment, who delighted in a sixpenny present and
to whom he hadn’t for some time rendered any such homage. At last,
after he had wandered a while, hesitating between the pilgrimage to
Lambeth and the possibility of still associating the two or three hours
with those perhaps in some lucky way or other at Millicent Henning’s
disposal, he reflected that if a sovereign was to be pulled to pieces
it was a simplification to get it changed. He had struck through
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 with a rush it was so much gained to plunge into
a quarter where, 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
the large district abutting on Grosvenor Square partake of the general
gentility of the neighbourhood, so that our friend 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
lonely reveller 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,”
Hyacinth said.

“Ah, because I’ve not been at the ‘Sun and Moon’? Well, I’ve 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 daresay 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, were it 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. Yet it was
not any lower 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 the pang of the felt charm that a good
tailor would add 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 and his like had the world in their pocket. Sholto
requested the barmaid to please not dawdle in preparing the brandy
and soda 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 didn’t he
appear to encourage him not to linger as he drank it and to smile down
at him very kindly and amusedly, as if the combination of so small a
bookbinder and so big a tumbler were sufficiently droll? The Captain
took time, however, to ask how he had spent his autumn and what was the
news in Bloomsbury; he further inquired about those jolly people across
the river. “I can’t tell you what an impression they made on me—that
evening you know.” After this he went on suddenly and irrelevantly:
“And so you’re just going to stay on for the winter quietly?” Our hero
stared: he wondered what other high course could be imputed to him;
he couldn’t 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’ve got your work, and that sort of thing”; and as Hyacinth
didn’t succeed in swallowing at a gulp the contents of his big tumbler
he asked him presently if he had heard anything from the Princess. Our
youth replied that he could have no news except what the Captain might
be good enough to give him; but he added that he had been to see her
just before she left town.

“Ah, you did go? That was quite right—jolly right.”

“I went because she very kindly wrote me to come.”

“Ah, she wrote to you to come?” The Captain fixed him a moment with
his curious colourless eyes. “Do you know you’re a devilish privileged
mortal?”

“Certainly I know it.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the barmaid,
who had heard this odd couple talking of a princess, was staring at him
too with her elbows on the counter.

“Do you know there are people who’d give their heads that she should
write them to come?”

“I’ve no doubt of it whatever!”—and he took refuge in a laugh that
sounded less natural than he would have liked, and wondered if his
interlocutor weren’t precisely one of these people. In this case the
barmaid 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 re-enforced 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’re in
correspondence with her why do you say you can hear from her only
through me? My dear fellow, I’m not in correspondence with her. You
might think I’d naturally be, but I’m 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 but
once, and mentioned her having told him how her letter-writing came
on 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 knowingly returned. “Look out for the next fit! She’s
visiting about, you know—at a lot of great houses. It’s a great thing
to be somewhere 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 place 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 rum
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
good bust? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth
had instinctively 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 a prompt encounter with a young woman who, coming in the opposite
direction, turned the angle as briskly as themselves. At this moment
he gave his friend a great jerk, but not before Hyacinth 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.

“Hullo, Millicent!” This was the simple cry that escaped from his lips
while the Captain, still going on, but threw off, “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 he saw 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, and with violence, and
to ask him why he should look 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:

“Whatever 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 not at once placing 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—and she had not, however slightly, hesitated. “I at least
disavow the indiscretion. Where may not a charming woman be going when
she trips with a light foot through the deepening dusk?”

“I say, what are you talking about?” the girl demanded with dignity of
Hyacinth’s companion. She spoke as if with a resentful suspicion that
her foot had not really been felt to be light.

“On what errand of mercy, on what secret ministration?” the Captain
laughed.

“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, you know.”

“We met in that public-house,” the Captain said, “and 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 the sense
of a certain dishonesty in the air and glad 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’re playing me false?” Hyacinth flashed out.
He had been thinking with still intentness as they walked; at once
nursing and strangling a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the idea
that he had been bamboozled, yet was able to say to himself that one
must allow in life, thank goodness, 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 on 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 apt to be 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
wonderfully smiled.

Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by
his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify
but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to
the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me
to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil
are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind
flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled
and worried and escaped him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot
everything that had beguiled.

“My dear fellow, whatever I am I’m 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’m 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’re 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 declared them a dear delightful abominable pair; he pronounced
it rarely interesting to see how in people of their sort the prime
passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s
arms and then wound up with 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 by his
having eventually placed this idea in so attractive a light that his
companions 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 our young man’s 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 this understanding
flourished at his expense the whole evening constituted for them indeed
an opportunity, and that thought rendered his diversion but scantly
absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a big private box
and ordered ices 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 repeatedly on his lips—the impulse
to demand 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, before leaving the Pavilion he
decided with one of his highest flights of intelligence that he could
quite well see what Lady Aurora had meant by calling 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 to the retention of breath, and when he
said nothing 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 divined him at moments bored or irritated by the serious manner
in which his small worrying bookbinder couldn’t conceal from the world
that he regarded him. He wondered if this were a system, a calculated
prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of the superior
brutality latent in his composition and which, without an intention of
direct harshness, was naturally impatient 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 crude fatuity 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
bob—with seventeen bloody bob? What am I to do with them—will ye tell
me that?” an interrogation which in truth usually ended by producing
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 haul ’em straight up. A
little shoemaker with red eyes and a greyish 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 v’ice of the company on that question.”

When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace save for
whistling a little and 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 his young comrade—too valuable a weapon, so that he 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 amount, 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 wouldn’t 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 sore, sharp, tantalising desirableness into that
of solid, seated reality. Muniment was listened to unanimously when
he spoke and much talked about, usually with a knowing, implicit
allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally admitted he could
see further than most. But it was suspected 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
’eave a brick this was far enough. There was an idea he had nothing
particular to complain of personally, or perhaps that if he had he
didn’t complain of it—an attitude which could only contain the germs
of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth was aware of being himself 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 by announcing
that he hadn’t had a penn’orth 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 cruellest 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 held in his hand a fine bread-winning tool on which he might
absolutely count. He was also not unadvised, however, that his position
in this little band of malcontents (it was small only if measured
by the numbers gathered on any one occasion; he liked to think it
large in its latent possibilities, its mysterious ramifications and
affiliations) was peculiar and distinguished: it would be favourable
if he should develop 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 on 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
Crook’s had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of
his discretion: “Remember, my child, that I’m 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’s a mystic
language which dispenses with proofs—a freemasonry, a reciprocal
divination: they understand each other at half a word.” It was at half
a word then in Bloomsbury that Hyacinth had been understood; but there
was a certain delicacy in him that forbade him to push his advantage,
to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being
awkward and obscure, 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 imposed 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
and stiffen its claws—at these hours, some of them thrilling enough,
Hyacinth waited for the voice that should allot 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 he
waited for the sacred 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 reached
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 affected him as wiser then, as more richly
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 hell am I
to do with half a quid?” 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 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 even
in their most infuriated hours felt as Britons, appeared never to have
made the subtle reflexion, though they made many others, that there
was a want of tact in his calling on 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 supreme France one was
nowhere worth speaking of, and ended by producing an impression that
that country had a quite supernatural charm. Muniment had once said
to Hyacinth that he was sure Poupin would be very sorry to be enabled
to go home again (as he really 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 so suffered from it.

“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’re 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 an untidy bandage round his neck, as if for a local ailment. “You
remind us—that’s very well; but we shall forget it in half an hour.
We’re not serious.”

“_Pardon, pardon_; for myself I don’t admit that!” Poupin replied,
striking the table with his finger-tips several times, very fast. “If
I’m not serious I’m nothing.”

“Oh no, you’re something,” said the German, smoking his monumental pipe
with a contemplative air. “We’re all something, but I’m not sure it’s
anything very useful.”

“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d jolly rather be in
here, in _this_ kind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who
understood dogs.

“Certainly, it’s very pleasant, especially if you’ve your beer; but
not so pleasant over there at the Docks, where fifty thousand people
starve. It’s a very unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.

“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin asked while he looked at the
German as to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflexion. “It’s 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 grey-faced shoemaker
demanded. “I daresay 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 a bloody rap 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’s 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’s too much to expect. Mr. Muniment’s very
serious; he looks as if he was waiting for the signal, but he doesn’t
speak—he never speaks if I want particularly to hear him. He only
deliberates very deeply—oh I’m sure. But it’s 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 at 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
collected at the “Sun and Moon,” looked at him or listened to him all
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 rather
awful in twenty.

Muniment smiled 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 little to look at him. “If I keep quiet 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’ve seen him I shall be perfectly satisfied.”

“Upon my word I should hope so! Do you think he’s the kind of bloke 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 while he resumed
his muffled whistle again.

“Take care—take care; you’ll 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 daresay
it’s 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 bloody 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’s useful,” the German remarked philosophically among
his yellow clouds.

“Do you mean to say you’re not prepared for that yourself?” Muniment
asked 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’ll smash best who’ve been inside,” the German said; “unless
they’ve only gone bad, like fish too long caught. But Hoffendahl’s all
there yet.”

“Ah no; no smashing, no smashing of any valuable property,” Muniment
went on. “There are no wrong places—there are only wrong uses for them.
We want to keep them standing and even to put up a few more; but the
difference will be that we shall put the correct sort into them.”

“I take your idea—that Griffin’s 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 protested; 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 his would-be
butchers the names they wanted. Was it possible they didn’t remember
that great combined assault, 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 ’im 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.

“_Ç’aurait été d’un bel exemple!_” said the Frenchman with an
impressive moderation of statement which made even those who
couldn’t understand him see he was saying something fine; while the
cabinet-maker observed 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 daresay 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’s 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’s 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!” Muniment laughed.

Poupin stared at him and his coarse mirth, 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’s he going to do for _us_?—that’s what _I_
want to know,” brought out 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, as well as with the manner in
which he thrust over his ear, as if it were a barber’s comb, the pencil
addressed to his careful note-taking on the discussions conducted
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 had at heart. He had had a great
experience, which they might very well find it useful to appeal to.
If there was a way for them then and there he would be sure to know
the way. “I quite agree with the majority of you—as I take it to be,”
Muniment went on in 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 infamous
and 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’d be glad to see him—perhaps he’d show where the
thumbscrews 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 for something or for some one;
to go out somewhere and smash something on the spot—why not?—smash
it that very night. While they sat still and talked there were about
half a million of people in London that didn’t know where the hell 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, a quick pulse of
high fever, 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 certainly Paul but
played 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, possessed by an intense desire to stand
face to face with the sublime Hoffendahl, to hear his voice and touch
his mutilated hand. He was ready for anything: he knew he was himself
safe to breakfast and dine, if poorly still sufficiently, and that his
colleagues were perhaps even more crude and clumsy than usual; but a
breath of popular passion had warmed his cheek and his heart, and he
seemed to see, immensely magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers
and sores of London—the sick, eternal misery crying out of 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 he
felt there was no need to consider, to reason: the facts themselves
were as imperative as the cry of the drowning, since while pedantry
gained time didn’t starvation and anguish gain it too? He knew 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 judicious friend had given him a more definite
warrant than ever before for numbering him in the party of immediate
action, though indeed he remarked on this occasion, once more, that
that particular formula the little bookbinder appeared to have taken
such a fancy to was mere gibberish. He hated this 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
transcending logic he would have found it in his recall 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
any vociferation; he had called Schinkel to come round and sit beside
him, and the two appeared to confer together in honest ease while the
brown atmosphere grew denser, the passing to and fro of firebrands 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 patient
conscious ache, 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 were
something to be silent and devoted about Hyacinth ardently hoped that
to him in particular would a chance 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 communicating with the
outer world, went forth into the street. The air was foul and sleety
but 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, for 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 but 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 world and gather the myriad miserable out of their slums
and burrows, should roll into the selfish squares and lift a tremendous
hungry voice and awaken the gorged indifferent to a terror that would
bring them down. He lingered a quarter of an hour, but this grand
treat 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 the meeting was breaking up in
disorder, or at all events in confusion, and that certainly no
organised attempt at the rescue of any number of victims would take
place that night. All the men were on their feet and were turning away
amid a shuffle of benches and chairs, a hunch of shabby shoulders,
a frugal abatement of flaring 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 of you 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 he found
he had himself sprung up on a chair opposite the barber and that at
the sight of so prompt a display the commotion had suddenly turned to
almost amused suspense. It was the first time he had asked the ear of
the company, which was given on the spot. He was sure he looked very
white—it was even possible they could see him tremble. He could only
hope 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 damned 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’s sure one isn’t
afraid, and one’s accused, why shouldn’t one say so?”

It appeared to him 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 one
say, “Did ye hear the little bloody 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 had emptied itself, yet clearly not to be reconstituted
outside in a revolutionary procession. Paul Muniment had taken hold of
him and said, “I’ll trouble you to stay, you small desperado: I’ll be
blowed if I ever expected to see _you_ on the stump!” Muniment remained
and M. Poupin and Mr. Schinkel lingered, donning overcoats, beneath a
dim surviving gas-burner in the unventilated medium in which at each
renewed gathering the Bloomsbury club seemed to recognise itself.

“Upon my life 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.

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” said Muniment.

“All the lot of us. There are plenty of them ready.”

“Ready for what? There’s nothing to be done here.”

Hyacinth stared. “Then why the deuce do you come?”

“I daresay I shan’t come much more. It’s a place in which you’ve always
seen too much.”

“I wonder if I’ve seen too much in you,” Hyacinth risked, 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 right man, Robinson, that is the real
thing?” Muniment asked with the same rare grave sound.

“The real thing?” Hyacinth looked from one of his companions to the
other.

“You’ve never seen it yet—though you think you have.”

“And why haven’t you shown it me before?”

“Because I had never seen you on the stump.” This was more lightly said.

“Bother the stump! I was trusting you.”

“Exactly so. That gave me time.”

“Don’t come unless your mind’s made up, _mon petit_,” said Poupin.

“Are you going now—and to see Hoffendahl? Is _he_ the right man?”
Hyacinth cried.

“Don’t shout it all over the place. He wants a perfect little
gentleman, and if you’re not one—!” Muniment went on.

“Is it true? Are we all going?” Hyacinth eagerly went on.

“Yes, these two are in it. They’re not very wise, but they’re decent,”
said Muniment, looking at Poupin and Schinkel.

“Are _you_ the real thing, Muniment?” asked Hyacinth, catching this
look.

Muniment dropped his eyes on him. “Yes, you’re the lamb of sacrifice he
wants. It’s at the other end of London. We must have a growler.”

“Be calm, my child; _me voici_!” And Poupin led their young friend 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
so deepened and dignified their purpose. After they were seated in it
Hyacinth learned that the “right man” 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 Muniment, who passed a strong arm round him, holding him all
the way as if for a tacit sign of indebtedness. This gave Hyacinth
pleasure till he began to wonder if it mightn’t represent also the
instinct to make sure of him as against possible weak afterthoughts.
They all ended by sitting silent as the cab jogged along murky miles,
and by the time it stopped our young man had wholly lost, in the
drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts.


END OF VOL. I


Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.