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_.




THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA




     MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

     LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
     MELBOURNE

     THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

     NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
     DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

     THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

     TORONTO




     THE PRINCESS
     CASAMASSIMA

     BY

     HENRY JAMES

     IN TWO VOLUMES

     VOL. II

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




     COPYRIGHT

     First published in 1886




BOOK THIRD




XXII


Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as
he had scarce closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window
made him dress as quickly as a young man might who desired more than
ever that his appearance shouldn’t give strange ideas about him: an
old garden with parterres in curious figures and little intervals of
lawn that seemed to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green. At
one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick which looked down on
the other side into a canal, a moat, a quaint old pond (he hardly knew
what to call it) and from the same standpoint showed a considerable
part of the main body of the house—Hyacinth’s room belonging to a
wing that commanded the extensive irregular back—which was richly grey
wherever clear of the ivy and the other dense creepers, and everywhere
infinitely a picture: with a high-piled ancient russet roof broken
by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables
and windows on different lines, with all manner of antique patches
and protrusions and with a particularly fascinating architectural
excrescence where a wonderful clock-face was lodged, a clock-face
covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years
and the weather. He had never in his life been in the country—the
real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere
ravelled fringe of London—and there entered through his open casement
the breath of a world enchantingly new and after his recent feverish
hours unspeakably refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled
odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that
consisted for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were
tall quiet trees near by and afar off and everywhere; and the group
of objects that greeted his eyes evidently formed only a corner of
larger spaces and of a more complicated scene. There was a world to be
revealed to him: it lay waiting with the dew on it under his windows,
and he must go down and take of it such possession as he might.

On his arrival at ten o’clock the night before he had only got the
impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate;
of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly and of the glow
of several windows, suggesting indoor cheer, in a front that lifted
a range of vague grand effects into the starlight. It was much of a
relief to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration
of the lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow: the
delay would give him time to recover his balance and look about him.
This latter opportunity was offered first as he sat at supper in a vast
high hall with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South
Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should
be treated: too blank for that his conception of the way in which,
at a country-house, invidious distinctions might be made and shades
of importance marked; but it was plain the best had been ordered for
him. He was at all events abundantly content with his reception and
more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate—though his other
senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he ate, as it were,
without eating—and the grave automatic servant filled his glass with
a liquor that reminded him of some lines of Keats in the “Ode to a
Nightingale.” He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley (he
was vague about the seasons of this vocalist) and also if the butler
would attempt to talk to him, had ideas about him, knew or suspected
who he was and what: which after all there was no reason for his doing
save perhaps the aspect of the scant luggage attending the visitor from
Lomax Place. Mr. Withers, however (it was this name Hyacinth heard used
by the driver of his fly), had given no further symptom of sociability
than to ask him at what time he would be called in the morning; to
which our young man replied that he preferred not to be called at
all—he would get up by himself. The butler rejoined, “Very good, sir,”
while Hyacinth thought it probable he puzzled him a good deal and even
considered the question of giving him a precautionary glimpse of an
identity that might be later on less fortunately betrayed. The object
of this diplomacy was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed
with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing
for the simple reason that before he spoke he found himself liking
what he had feared. His impulse to deprecate services departed, he was
already aware there were none he should care to miss or was not quite
prepared for. He knew he had probably thanked Mr. Withers too much, but
he couldn’t help this—it was an irrepressible tendency and an error he
should doubtless always commit.

He had lain in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to ensure rest
that it was naturally responsible in some degree for his want of ease,
and in a large high room where long dressing-glasses emitted ghostly
glances even after the light was extinguished. Suspended on the walls
were many prints, mezzotints and old engravings which he supposed,
possibly without reason, to be of the finest and rarest. He got up
several times in the night, lighted his candle and walked about looking
at them. He looked at himself in one of the long glasses, and in a
place where everything was on such a scale it seemed to him more than
ever that Mademoiselle Vivier’s son, lacking all the social dimensions,
was scarce a perceptible person at all. As he came downstairs he
encountered housemaids with dusters and brooms, or perceived them
through open doors on their knees before fireplaces; and it was his
belief that they regarded him more boldly than if he had been a guest
of the usual kind. Such a reflexion as that, however, ceased to trouble
him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through the
park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in narrowing
circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled an hour in breathless
ecstasy, brushing the dew from the deep fern and bracken and the
rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant air and stopping
everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of some exquisite
impression. His whole walk was peopled with recognitions; he had been
dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects, such a
morning and such a chance. It was the last of April and everything
was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early air, were a blur
of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he revolved repeatedly,
catching every aspect and feeling every value, feasting on the whole
expression and wondering if the Princess would observe his proceedings
from a window and if they would be offensive to her. The house was
not hers, but only hired for three months, and it could flatter no
princely pride that he should be struck with it. There was something in
the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to
his eyes; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid
infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among
whom old age meant for the most part a grudged and degraded survival.
In the favoured resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an
accumulation of dignity and honour.

A footman sought him out in the garden to tell him breakfast was
served. He had never thought of breakfast, and as he walked back to
the house attended by the inscrutable flunkey this offer appeared a
free extravagant gift, unexpected and romantic. He found he was to
breakfast alone and asked no questions, but when he had finished the
butler came in to say that the Princess would see him after luncheon
but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand the library
to be all at his service. “After luncheon”—that threw the hour he had
come for very far into the future, and it caused him some bewilderment
that she should think it worth while to invite him to stay with her
from Saturday evening to Monday morning only to let so much of his
visit elapse without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor
impatient; the impressions already crowding on him were in themselves
a sufficient reward, and what could one do better precisely in such a
house as that than wait for a wonderful lady? Mr. Withers conducted
him to the library and left him planted in the middle of it and
staring at the treasures he quickly and widely took in. It was an old
brown room of great extent—even the ceiling was brown, though there
were figures in it dimly gilt—where row upon row of finely-lettered
backs consciously appealed for recognition. A fire of logs crackled
in a great chimney, and there were alcoves with deep window-seats,
and arm-chairs such as he had never seen, luxurious, leather-covered,
with an adjustment for holding one’s volume; and a vast writing-table
before one of the windows, furnished with a perfect magazine of paper
and pens, inkstands and blotters, seals, stamps, candlesticks, reels
of twine, paper-weights, book-knives. He had never imagined so many
aids to correspondence and before he turned away had written a note
to Millicent in a hand even nobler than usual—his penmanship was very
minute, but at the same time wonderfully free and fair—largely for
the pleasure of seeing “Medley Hall” stamped in heraldic-looking red
characters at the top of his paper. In the course of an hour he had
ravaged the collection, taken down almost every book, wishing he could
keep it a week, and then put it back as quickly as his eye caught the
next, which glowed with a sharper challenge. He came upon rare bindings
and extracted precious hints—hints by which he felt himself perfectly
capable of profiting. Altogether his vision of true happiness at
this moment was that for a month or two he should be locked into the
treasure-house of Medley. He forgot the outer world and the morning
waned—the beautiful vernal Sunday—while he lingered there.

He was on the top of a ladder when he heard a voice remark, “I’m
afraid they’re very dusty; in this house, you know, it’s the dust of
centuries,” and, looking down, saw Madame Grandoni posted in the middle
of the room. He instantly prepared to descend and greet her, but she
exclaimed: “Stay, stay, if you’re not giddy; we can talk from here! I
only came in to show you we _are_ in the house and to tell you to keep
up your patience. The Princess will probably see you in a few hours.”

“I really hope so,” he returned from his perch, rather dismayed at the
“probably.”

“_Natürlich_,” said the old lady; “but people have come sometimes and
gone away without seeing her. It all depends on her mood.”

“Do you mean even when she has sent for them?”

“Oh, who can tell whether she has sent for them or not?”

“But she sent for me, you know,” Hyacinth declared, staring down and
struck with the odd effect of Madame Grandoni’s wig in that bird’s-eye
view.

“Oh yes, she sent for you, poor young man!” The old lady looked up at
him with a smile and they communicated a little in silence. Then she
added: “Captain Sholto has come like that more than once and has gone
away no better off.”

“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.

“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She
retraced her course while he watched her, and pushed it to, then
advanced into the room again with her superannuated, shuffling step,
walking as if her shoes were too big for her. Hyacinth, moreover,
descended the ladder. “There it is. She’s a _capricciosa_.”

“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked gravely.
“You seem her friend, yet you say things not favourable to her.”

“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should
ever say to you. I’m rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I
ought to be particularly kind. But I’m not false. That’s not our German
nature. You’ll hear me some day. I _am_ the friend of the Princess; it
would be well enough if she never had a worse one! But I should like
to be yours too—what will you have? Perhaps it’s of no use. At any rate
here you are.”

“Yes, here I am decidedly!” Hyacinth uneasily laughed.

“And how long shall you stay? Pardon me if I ask that; it’s part of my
rudeness.”

“I shall stay till to-morrow morning. I must be at my work by noon.”

“That will do very well. Don’t you remember, the other time, how I told
you to remain faithful?”

“That was very good advice. But I think you exaggerate my danger.”

“So much the better,” said Madame Grandoni; “though now that I look
at you well I doubt it a little. I see you’re one of those types
that ladies like. I can be sure of that—I like you myself. At my
age—a hundred and twenty—can’t I say that? If the Princess were to
do so it would be different; remember that—that any flattery she may
ever offer you will be on her lips much less discreet. But perhaps
she will never have the chance; you may never come again. There are
people who have come only once. _Vedremo bene._ I must tell you that
I’m not in the least against a young man’s taking a holiday, a little
quiet recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued in her
disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take one
every five days; that’s no doubt too often. In Germany less often. In
this country I can’t understand if it’s an increase of effort: the
English Sunday’s so difficult! This one will in any case have been
beautiful for you. Be happy, make yourself comfortable; but go home
to-morrow!” And with this injunction Madame Grandoni took her way again
to the door while he went to open it for her. “I can say that because
it’s not my house. I’m only here like you. And sometimes I think I also
shall go to-morrow!”

“I imagine you’ve not, like me, your living to get every day. That’s
reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.

She paused in the doorway with her expressive, ugly, kindly little eyes
on his face. “I believe I’m nearly as poor as you. And I’ve not, like
you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I’m noble,” said the old lady,
shaking her wig.

“And I’m not!” Hyacinth deeply smiled.

“It’s better not to be lifted up high like our friend. It doesn’t give
happiness.”

“Not to one’s self possibly; but to others!” From where they stood he
looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted from
above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflexion of this
grandeur came into his appreciative eyes.

“Do you admire everything here very much—do you receive great
pleasure?” asked Madame Grandoni.

“Oh, so much—so much!”

She considered him a moment longer. “_Poverino!_” she murmured as she
turned away.

A couple of hours later the Princess sent for him and he was conducted
upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung with
pictures, and ushered into a large bright saloon which he afterwards
learned that his hostess used as a boudoir. The sound of music had come
to him outside the door, so that he was prepared to find her seated at
the piano, if not to see her continue to play after he appeared. Her
face was turned in the direction from which he entered, and she smiled
at him without lifting her hands from the keys while the servant, as if
he had just arrived, formally pronounced his name. The room, placed in
an angle of the house and lighted from two sides, was large and sunny,
upholstered in fresh gay chintz, furnished with all sorts of sofas and
low familiar seats and convenient little tables, most of these holding
great bowls of early flowers; littered over with books, newspapers,
magazines, photographs of celebrities slashed across by signatures,
and full of the marks of luxurious and rather indolent habitation.
Hyacinth stood there, not advancing very far, and the Princess, still
playing and smiling, nodded toward a seat near the piano. “Put yourself
there and listen to me.” He did so and she played a long time without
glancing at him. This left him the more free to rest his eyes on her
own face and person while she looked about the room, vaguely, absently,
but with an expression of quiet happiness, as if lost in her music,
soothed and pacified by it. A window near her was half-open and the
soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused
themselves and made the place cheerful and pure. The Princess struck
him as extraordinarily young and fair, and she seemed so slim and
simple, and so friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her
occupation nor offered him her hand, that he at last sank back in his
seat with the sense that all his uneasiness, his nervous tension, was
leaving him, and that he was safe in her kindness, in the free original
way with which she evidently would always treat him. This peculiar
manner, half consideration, half fellowship, seemed to him to have
already so mild and wise an intention. She played ever so movingly,
with different pieces succeeding each other; he had never listened to
music nor to a talent of that order. Two or three times she turned
her eyes on him, and then they shone with the wonderful expression
which was the essence of her beauty; that profuse mingled light which
seemed to belong to some everlasting summer and yet to suggest seasons
that were past and gone, some experience that was only an exquisite
memory. She asked him if he cared for music and then added, laughing,
that she ought to have made sure of this before; while he answered—he
had already told her so in South Street, but she appeared to have
forgotten—that he was awfully fond of it.

The sense of the beauty of women had been given to our young man in
a high degree; it was a faculty that made him conscious to adoration
of all the forces of that power and depths of that mystery; of every
element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and tone
that contributed to charm. Therefore even if he had appreciated less
the strange harmonies the Princess drew from her instrument and her
genius there would have been no lack of interest in his situation, in
such an opportunity to watch her admirable outline and movement, the
noble form of her head and face, the gathered-up glories of her hair,
the living flower-like freshness which had no need to turn from the
light. She was dressed in fair colours and as simply as a young girl.
Before she ceased playing she asked him what he would like to do in
the afternoon: would he have any objection to taking a drive with her?
It was very possible he might enjoy the country. She seemed not to
attend to his answer, which was covered by the sound of the piano; but
if she had done so it would have left her very little doubt as to the
reality of his inclination. She remained gazing at the cornice of the
room while her hands wandered to and fro; then suddenly she stopped,
got up and came toward him. “It’s probable that’s the most I shall ever
bore you. You know the worst. Would you very kindly close the piano?”
He complied with her request and she went to another part of the room
and sank into an arm-chair. When he approached her again she said:
“Is it really true that you’ve never seen a park nor a garden nor any
of the beauties of nature and that sort of thing?” The allusion was
to something gravely stated in his letter when he answered the note
by which she proposed to him to run down to Medley, and after he had
assured her it was perfectly true she exclaimed: “I’m so glad—I’m so
glad! I’ve never been able to show any one anything new and have always
felt I should like it—especially with a fine sensitive mind. Then you
_will_ come and drive with me?” She spoke as if this would be a great
favour.

That was the beginning of the communion—so strange considering their
respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy, and it
passed into some singular phases. The Princess had an extraordinary way
of taking things for granted, of ignoring difficulties, of assuming
that her preferences might be translated into fact. After her guest
had remained with her ten minutes longer—a period mainly occupied with
her exclamations of delight at his having seen so little of the sort of
thing of which Medley consisted (Where should he have seen it, gracious
heaven? he asked himself); after she had rested thus briefly from her
exertions at the piano she proposed that they should go out-of-doors
together. She was an immense walker—she wanted her regular walk. She
left him for a short time, giving him the last number of the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_ to entertain himself withal and calling his attention in
particular to a story by M. Octave Feuillet (she should be so curious
to know what he thought of it); to reappear later with dark hat and
clear parasol, drawing on fresh loose gloves and offering herself to
our young man at that moment as a sudden incarnation of the heroine
of M. Feuillet’s novel, in which he had instantly become immersed.
On their way downstairs it occurred to her that he had not yet seen
the house and that it would be amusing for her to show it him; so she
turned aside and took him through it, up and down and everywhere,
even into the vast old-fashioned kitchen where they found a small
red-faced man in a white jacket and apron and a white cap (he removed
the latter ornament to salute the little bookbinder) with whom his
companion spoke Italian, which Hyacinth understood sufficiently to
perceive that she addressed her cook in the second person singular,
as if he had been a feudal retainer. He remembered how it was in the
same way the three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys. The Princess
explained that the gentleman in the white cap was a delightful creature
(she couldn’t endure English servants, though she was obliged to have
two or three) who would make her plenty of risottos and polentas—she
had quite the palate of a contadina. She showed Hyacinth everything:
the queer transmogrified corner that had once been a chapel; the
secret stairway which had served in the persecutions of the Catholics
(the owners of Medley were, like the Princess herself, of the old
persuasion); the musicians’ gallery over the hall; the tapestried
room which people came from a distance to see; and the haunted chamber
(the two, sometimes confounded, were quite distinct) where a horrible
figure at certain times made its appearance—a dwarfish ghost with an
enormous head, a dispossessed eldest brother of long ago who had passed
for an idiot, which he wasn’t, and had somehow been made away with.
The Princess offered her visitor the privilege of sleeping in this
apartment, declaring however that nothing would induce her even to
enter it alone, she being a benighted creature, consumed with abject
superstitions. “I don’t know if I’m religious or whether if I were
my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m
faithful to.” She made her young friend pass through the drawing-room
very cursorily, remarking that they should see it again: it was rather
stupid—drawing-rooms in English country-houses were always stupid;
indeed if it would amuse him they would sit there after dinner. Madame
Grandoni and she usually sat upstairs, but they would do anything he
should find more comfortable.

At last they came out of the house together and while they went she
explained, to justify herself against the imputation of extravagance,
that, though the place doubtless struck him as absurdly large for a
couple of quiet women and the whole thing was not in the least what
she would have preferred, yet it was all far cheaper than he probably
imagined; she would never have looked at it if it hadn’t been cheap.
It must appear to him so preposterous for a woman to associate herself
with the great uprising of the poor and yet live in palatial halls—a
place with forty or fifty rooms. This was one of her only two allusions
as yet to her infatuation with the “cause”; but it fell very happily,
for Hyacinth had not been unconscious of the anomaly she mentioned.
It had been present to him all day; it added much to the way life
practised on his sense of the tragi-comical to think of the Princess’s
having retired to a private paradise to think out the problem of the
slums. He listened therefore with great attention while she made all
conscientiously the point that she had taken the house only for three
months in any case, because she wanted to rest after a winter of
visiting and living in public (as the English spent their lives, with
all their celebrated worship of the “home”) and yet didn’t wish too
soon to return to town; though she was obliged to confess that she had
still the place in South Street on her hands, thanks to her deciding
unexpectedly to go on with it rather than move out her things. One had
to keep one’s things somewhere, and why wasn’t that as good a _dépôt_
as another? Medley was not what she would have chosen if she had been
left to herself; but she had not been left to herself—she never was;
she had been bullied into taking it by the owners, whom she had met
somewhere and who had made up to her immensely, persuading her that
she might really have it for nothing, for no more than she would give
for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old parsonage embowered in
clematis, which were really what she had been looking for. Besides,
it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so far from town, which
it was always difficult to let or to get a price for; and then it was
a wretched house for any convenience. Hyacinth, for whom his three
hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not been
struck with its geographic remoteness, and he asked the Princess what
she meant in such a connexion by her use of the word “wretched.” To
this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, impossible in
every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That’s the only reason
I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me so sunk in luxury or
that I throw away money. Never, never!” Hyacinth had no standard by
which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for her,
and he saw that though she judged him as a creature still open to every
initiation, whose _naïveté_ would entertain her, it was also her fancy
to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she might have had
the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance of the part
she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay
before him but the reason she might have for playing it.

One of the gardens at Medley took the young man’s heart beyond the
others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a
great training of apricots and plums; it had straight walks bordered
with old-fashioned homely flowers and enclosing immense squares where
other fruit-trees stood upright and mint and lavender floated in the
air. In the southern quarter it overhung a small disused canal, and
here a high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad
and covered with fine turf; so that the top of it, looking down at the
canal, made a magnificent grassy terrace, than which on a summer’s day
there could be no more delightful place for strolling up and down with
a companion—all the more that at either end was a curious pavilion,
in the manner of a tea-house, which crowned the scene in an old-world
sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or shower. One
of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and superfluous
flower-pots; the other was covered inside with a queer Chinese paper
representing ever so many times over a group of people with faces like
blind kittens, groups who drank tea while they sat on the floor. It
also contained a straddling inlaid cabinet in which cups and saucers
showed valuably through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved
cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf over a sofa which
was not very comfortable, though it had cushions of faded tapestry
that resembled samplers, stood a row of novels out of date and out of
print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only
there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves mixed with
some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness.

On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess till she
all ruefully remembered he had not had his luncheon. He protested
that this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared
she hadn’t dragged him down to Medley to starve him and that he must
go back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way,
through the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk.
She explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock,
in the foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was
so foreign he might like that better, and in this case on the morrow
they would breakfast together. He could have coffee and anything else
he wanted brought to his room at his waking. When he had sufficiently
composed himself in the presence of this latter image—he thought he saw
a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside—he mentioned that
really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in London.
There was a train at nine o’clock—he hoped she didn’t mind his taking
it. She looked at him gravely and kindly, as if considering an abstract
idea, and then said: “Oh yes, I mind it very much. Not to-morrow—some
other day.” He made no rejoinder and the Princess spoke of something
else; that is, his rejoinder was private and consisted of the reflexion
that he _would_ leave Medley in the morning, whatever she might say.
He simply couldn’t afford to stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And
then Madame Grandoni thought it so important; for though the old lady
was obscure she was decidedly impressive. The Princess’s protest,
however, was to be reckoned with; he felt it might take a form less
cursory than the words she had just uttered, a form that would make it
embarrassing. She was less solemn, less explicit, than Madame Grandoni
had been, but there was something in her light fine pressure and the
particular tone of her mentioned preference that seemed to tell him his
liberty was going—the liberty he had managed to keep (till the other
day when he gave Hoffendahl a mortgage on it) and the possession of
which had in some degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This
made him uneasy; what would become of him if he should add another
servitude to the one he had undertaken at the end of that long, anxious
cab-drive through the rain, in the back bedroom of a house as to whose
whereabouts he was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and
Schinkel, all visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and
Poupin and Schinkel—how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them
at the present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the
pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter at least, if they could
have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!

As to this Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess
touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and
conclusions she had gathered since their former meeting. It was to
such matters as these she directed the conversation; she seemed to
wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her
continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended
sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked
of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted
as before that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed
he was edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he
didn’t know what she was talking about. He at all events, if _he_ had
been with the dukes—she didn’t call her associates dukes, but he was
sure they were of that order—would have got more satisfaction from
them. She appeared on the whole to judge the English world severely; to
think poorly of its wit and even worse of its morals. “You know people
oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dreary,” she said; and Hyacinth turned
this over, feeling he certainly had not yet caught the point of view
of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of bores. He had
sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing it dubbed grossly profligate,
but he was rather disappointed in the bad account the Princess gave of
it. She dropped the remark that she herself had no sort of conventional
morality—she ought to have mentioned that before—yet had never been
accused of being stupid. Perhaps he wouldn’t discover it, but most
of the people she had had to do with thought her only too acute. The
second allusion she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and
hers) was when she said: “I determined to see it”—she was speaking
still of English society—“to learn for myself what it really is before
we blow it up. I’ve been here now a year and a half and, as I tell
you, I feel I’ve seen. It’s the old régime again, the rottenness and
extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which
the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a
reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic,
depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and
scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are
the barbarians, you know.” The Princess was pretty vague after all in
her animadversions and regaled him with no anecdotes—which indeed he
rather missed—that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed.
She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador.
By way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t
be true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she
had let him know she liked him to speak in the manner of the people)
inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them—a noble lady—who was one
of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible
to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she
asked: “Whom do you mean—a noble lady?”

“I suppose there’s no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.”

“I don’t know her. Is she nice?”

“I like her ever so much.”

“Is she pretty, clever?”

“She isn’t pretty, but she’s very uncommon,” said Hyacinth.

“How did you make her acquaintance?” As he hesitated she went on: “Did
you bind some books for her?”

“No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Camberwell.”

“And who lives there?”

“A young woman I was calling on, who’s bedridden.”

“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lady Lydia
Languish?—goes to see her?”

“Yes, very often.”

The Princess, with her eyes on him, had a pause. “Will you take me
there?”

“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the
man—the one who works for a big firm of wholesale chemists—that you’ll
perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”

“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I’m
sorry, you know,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth asked what
she might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, only
soon saying: “Perhaps she goes to see _him_.”

“Goes to see whom?”

“The young chemist—the brother.” She said this very seriously.

“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth returned, laughing. “But she’s a fine sort
of woman.”

The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again wanted to know
for what—for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied:
“No; I mean for my not being the first—what is it you call them?—noble
lady you’ve encountered.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you
don’t make an impression on me.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking you might be less fresh than
I first thought.”

“Of course I don’t know what you first thought,” Hyacinth smiled.

“No; how should you?” the Princess strangely sighed.




XXIII


He was in the library after luncheon when word was brought him that
the carriage was at the door for their drive; and when he entered the
hall he found Madame Grandoni bonneted and cloaked and awaiting the
descent of their friend. “You see I go with you. I’m always there,” she
remarked jovially. “The Princess has me with her to take care of her,
and this is how I do it. Besides, I never miss my drive.”

“You’re different from me; this will be the first I’ve ever had in my
life.” He could establish that distinction without bitterness, because
he was too pleased with his prospect to believe the old lady’s presence
could spoil it. He had nothing to say to the Princess that she mightn’t
hear. He didn’t dislike her for coming even after she had said to him
in answer to his own announcement, speaking rather more sententiously
than her wont: “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve not spent your life
in carriages. They’ve nothing to do with your trade.”

“Fortunately not,” he answered. “I should have made a ridiculous
coachman.”

The Princess appeared and they mounted into a great square barouche,
an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle with a green body, a faded
hammer-cloth and a rumble where the footman sat (their hostess
mentioned that it had been let with the house), which rolled
ponderously and smoothly along the winding avenue and through the
gilded park-gates that were surmounted with an immense escutcheon. The
progress of this apparently mismatched trio had a high respectability,
and that is one of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion intensely
memorable. There might still be greater joys in store for him—he was
by this time quite at sea and could recognise no shores—but he should
never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and
comprehensive, but little was said while it lasted. “I shall show you
the whole country: it’s exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the heart.”
Of so much as this his entertainer had informed him at the start; and
she added with all her foreignness and with a light allusive nod at
the rich humanised landscape: “_Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre._”
For the rest she sat there fronting him in quiet fairness and under
her softly-swaying lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she
noticed his eyes rest; allowing them when the carriage passed anything
particularly charming to meet his own; smiling as if she enjoyed the
whole affair very nearly as much as he; and now and then calling his
attention to some prospect, some picturesque detail, by three words
of a cadence as soft as a hand-stroke. Madame Grandoni dozed most of
the time, her chin resting on the rather mangy ermine tippet in which
she had enveloped herself; expanding into consciousness at moments,
however, to greet the scenery with comfortable confused ejaculations in
the first language that came into her head. If Hyacinth was uplifted
during these delightful hours he at least measured his vertiginous
eminence, and it kept him quite solemnly still, as with the fear that
a wrong movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain
to fall on the play. This was especially the case when his sensibility
swung back from the objects that sprang up by the way, every one
of which was a rich image of something he had longed for, to the
most beautiful woman in England, who sat there, well before him, as
completely for his benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to paint
her portrait. More than once he saw everything through a strange mist;
his eyes were full of tears.

That evening they sat in the drawing-room after dinner, as the Princess
had promised or, as he was inclined to consider it, threatened him.
The force of the threat was in his prevision that the ladies would
make themselves fine and that in contrast with the setting and company
he should feel dingier than ever; having already on his back the one
approach to a “cut” coat he possessed and being unable to exchange it
for a garment of the pattern that civilised people (so much he knew, if
he couldn’t emulate them) put on about eight o’clock. The ladies when
they came to dinner looked festal indeed; but he was able to make the
reflexion that he was more pleased to be dressed as he was dressed,
meanly and unsuitably as it was, than he should have been to present
such a figure as Madame Grandoni, in whose toggery there was something
comical. He was coming more and more round to the sense that if the
Princess didn’t mind his poorness of every sort he had no call to mind
it himself. His present position wasn’t of his seeking—it had been
forced on him; it wasn’t the fruit of a disposition to push. How little
the Princess minded—how much indeed she enjoyed the consciousness
that in having him about her in that manner she was playing a trick
on society, the false and conventional society she had sounded and
she despised—was manifest from the way she had introduced him to the
group they found awaiting them in the hall on the return from their
drive: four ladies, a mother and three daughters, who had come over to
call from Broome, a place some five miles off. Broome was also a great
house, as he gathered, and Lady Marchant, the mother, was the wife of a
county magnate. She explained that they had come in on the persuasion
of the butler, who had represented the return of the Princess as
imminent, and had then administered tea without waiting for this event.
The evening had drawn in chill; there was a fire in the hall and they
all sat near it, round the tea-table, under the great roof that rose
to the top of the house. Hyacinth conversed mainly with one of the
daughters, a very fine girl with a straight back and long arms, whose
neck was encircled so tightly with a fur boa that, to look a little to
one side, she was obliged to move her whole body. She had a handsome
inanimate face, over which the firelight played without making it more
lively, a beautiful voice and the occasional command of a few short
words. She asked Hyacinth with what pack he hunted and whether he went
in much for tennis, and she ate three muffins.

Our young man made out that Lady Marchant and her daughters had
already been at Medley, and even guessed that their reception by the
Princess, who probably thought them of a tiresome type, had not been
enthusiastic; and his imagination projected itself further still,
into the motives which, in spite of this tepidity, must have led
them, on consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country,
to come a second time. The talk in the firelight, while our youth
laboured rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion on his
hostess’s part was passing into his own blood) with his muffin-eating
beauty—the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate
tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd evident
_parti-pris_ of the Princess’s to put poor Lady Marchant, as the phrase
might be, through her paces. With great urbanity of manner she appealed
for the explanation of everything, and especially of her ladyship’s own
thin remarks and of the sense in which they had been meant; so that
Hyacinth was scarce able to follow her, wondering what interest she
could have in trying to appear dense. It was only afterwards he learned
that the Marchant family produced a very peculiar and at moments almost
maddening effect on her nerves. He asked himself what would happen to
that member of it with whom he was engaged if it should be revealed to
her that she was conversing (how little soever) with a beggarly London
artisan; and though he was rather pleased at her not having discovered
his station (for he didn’t attribute her brevity to this idea) he
entertained a little the question of its being perhaps his duty not
to keep it hidden from her, not to flourish in a cowardly disguise.
What did she take him for—or rather what didn’t she take him for—when
she asked him if he hunted and “went in”? Perhaps that was because it
was rather dark; if there had been more light in the great vague hall
she would have seen he was not one of themselves. He felt that by this
time he had associated a good deal with swells, but they had always
known what he was and had been able to choose how to treat him. This
was the first time a young gentlewoman hadn’t been warned, and as a
consequence he appeared to pass muster. He determined not to unmask
himself, on the simple ground that he should by the same stroke betray
the Princess. It was quite open to _her_ to lean over and say to Miss
Marchant: “You know he’s a wretched little bookbinder who earns a few
shillings a week in a horrid street in Soho. There are all kinds of
low things—and I suspect even something very horrible—connected with
his birth. It seems to me I ought to mention it.” He almost wished
she would mention it for the sake of the strange violent sensation
of the thing, a curiosity quivering within him to know what Miss
Marchant would do at such a pinch and what chorus of ejaculations—or
what appalled irremediable silence—would rise to the painted roof. The
responsibility, however, was not his; he had entered a dim passage
of his fate where responsibilities had dropped. Madame Grandoni’s
tea had waked her up; she came at every crisis to the rescue of the
conversation and talked to the visitors about Rome, where they had once
spent a winter, describing with much drollery the manner in which the
English families she had seen there for nearly half a century (and had
met of an evening in the Roman world) inspected the ruins and monuments
and squeezed into the great ceremonies of the Church. Clearly the
four ladies didn’t know what to make of the Princess; but, though they
perhaps wondered if she were a paid companion, they were on firm ground
in the fact that the queer, familiar, fat person had been acquainted
with the Millingtons, the Bunburys and the Tripps.

After dinner (during which the Princess allowed herself a considerable
licence of pleasantry on the subject of her recent visitors, declaring
that Hyacinth must positively go with her to return their call and must
see their interior, their manner at home) Madame Grandoni sat down to
the piano at Christina’s request and played to her companions for an
hour. The spaces were large in the big drawing-room, and our friends
had placed themselves at a distance from each other. The old lady’s
music trickled forth discreetly into the multiplied mild candlelight;
she knew dozens of Italian local airs, which sounded like the forgotten
tunes of a people, and she followed them by a series of tender,
plaintive German _Lieder_, rousing without violence the echoes of the
high pompous apartment. It was the music of an old woman and seemed
to quaver a little as her lifted voice might have done. The Princess,
buried in a deep chair, listened behind her fan. Hyacinth at least
supposed she listened, for she never moved. At last Madame Grandoni
left the piano and came to the young man. She had taken up on the way
a French book in a pink cover which she nursed in the hollow of her arm
as she stood looking at him.

“My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see
you again for the present, as, to take your early train, you’ll have
left the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to
gentlemen without it. I’ve looked after the Princess pretty well,
all day, to keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you for a
little. Take the same care, I earnestly beg you. I must put myself
into my dressing-gown; at my age, at this hour, it’s the only thing.
What will you have? I hate to be tight,” pursued Madame Grandoni, who
appeared even in her ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort
successfully enough. “Don’t sit up late,” she added, “and don’t
keep him, Christina. Remember that for an active young man like Mr.
Robinson, going every day to his work, there’s nothing more exhausting
than such an unoccupied life as ours. For what do we do after all? His
eyes are very heavy. _Basta!_”

During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that
part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but
after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned
shield and rested her eyes a while on Hyacinth. At last she said:
“Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something
to you that I can’t shout across the room.” He immediately got up,
but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other,
they met half-way and before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood
opening and closing her fan, then she began: “You must be surprised at
my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”

“No indeed: I’m not now surprised at anything.”

“When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all,
become friends,” said the Princess.

“I hoped we were already. Certainly after the kindness you’ve shown me
there’s no service of friendship you might ask of me——!”

“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you’re going to say,
and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do
me if all the while you think of me as a hollow-headed, hollow-hearted
trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and oppressing you with
clumsy attentions? Perhaps you believe me a bad, bold, ravening flirt.”

“Capable of wanting to flirt with _me_?” Hyacinth demurred. “I should
be very conceited.”

“Surely you’ve the right to be as conceited as you please after the
advances I’ve made you! Pray who has a better one? But you persist in
remaining humble, and that’s very provoking.”

“It’s not I who am provoking; it’s life and society and all the
difficulties that surround us.”

“I’m precisely of that opinion—that they’re exasperating; that when
I appeal to you frankly, candidly, disinterestedly—simply because I
like you, for no other reason in the world—to help me to disregard
and surmount these conventions and absurdities, to treat them with the
contempt they deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little and
make yourself small and try to edge out of the situation by pleading
general devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease
to be insignificant from the moment I’ve anything to do with you. My
dear fellow,” the Princess went on in her free, audacious, fraternising
way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, “there are
people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of
obscurity.”

“What do you wish me then to do?” Hyacinth asked as quietly as he could.

If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his
lips and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain
unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment,
he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant:
“I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends in
general—all I ever asked of the best I’ve ever had. But none of them
ever did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has
just left us. She understood me long ago.”

“That’s all I on my side ask of you,” said Hyacinth with a smile, as to
attest presence of mind, that might have come from some flushed young
captive under cross-examination for his life. “Give _me_ time, give
_me_ time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.

“Dear Mr. Hyacinth, I’ve given you months!—months since our first
meeting. And at present haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been
intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans—I
know what I’m saying. Don’t try to look stupid; with your beautiful
intelligent face you’ll never succeed. I wished to leave you free to
amuse yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve amused myself,” said Hyacinth.

“You’d have been very fastidious if you hadn’t. However, that’s
precisely in the first place what I wished you to come here for. To
observe the impression made by such a house as this on such a nature
as yours introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure
you, quite worth my while. I’ve already given you a hint of how
extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having
seen—what shall I call them?—beautiful, delightful old things. I’ve
been watching you; I’m frank enough to tell you that. I want you to see
more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed with a sudden emphasis that,
had he heard her use it to another, he would have taken for a passion
of tenderness. “And I want to talk with you about this matter as well
as others. That will be for to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?”

“I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you’re
going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little
imagination!”

He shook his head with a pale grin and had an idea his mind was made
up. “I can’t stay.”

She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching—it
was so sad, yet as a rebuke so gentle—in the tone in which she replied:
“You oughtn’t make me too abject. It isn’t nice.”

He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed
to fall from under him and crumble. He remained a moment looking on
the ground. “Princess,” he then said, “you’ve no idea—how should you
have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust
yourself. I’ve no money—I’ve no clothes.”

“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”

“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages. I live on my wages from
day to day.”

“Let me then give you wages. You’ll work for me.”

“What do you mean—work for you?”

“You’ll bind all my books. I’ve ever so many foreign ones in paper.”

“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”

“No, I don’t imagine that. I’ll give you the wages now, and you can
do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then if you
want anything you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very
good shops; I’ve used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things
at this juncture; she had that quickening effect on him. Among others
he thought of these two: first that it was indelicate (though such an
opinion was not very strongly held either in Pentonville or in Soho) to
accept money from a woman; and second that it was still more indelicate
to make such a woman as that go down on her knees to him. But it took
more than a minute for one of these convictions to prevail over the
other, and before that he had heard his friend continue in the tone of
mild, disinterested argument: “If we believe in the coming democracy,
if it seems to us right and just and we hold that in sweeping over the
world the great wave will wash away a myriad iniquities and cruelties,
why not make some attempt with our own poor means—for one must begin
somewhere—to carry out the spirit of it in our lives and our manners? I
want to do that. I try to do it—in my relations with you for instance.
But you hang ridiculously back. You’re really not a bit democratic!”

Her accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke;
nevertheless it left him lucidity (though he still hesitated
an instant, wondering if the words wouldn’t offend her) to say
straightforwardly enough: “I’ve been strongly warned against you.”

The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that.
Of course my proceedings—though after all I’ve done little enough as
yet—must appear most unnatural. _Che vuole?_ as Madame Grandoni says.”

A certain knot of light blue ribbon which formed part of the trimming
of her dress hung down at her side in the folds of it. On these glossy
loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and he now
took up one of them and carried it to his lips. “I’ll do all the work
for you that you’ll give me. If you give it on purpose and by way of
munificence that’s your own affair. I myself will estimate the price.
What decides me is that I shall do the job so well; certainly it shall
be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will
have been at least that reason. I’ve brought you a book—so you can see.
I did it for you last year and went to South Street to give it to you,
but you had already gone.”

“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so
exclusively the calmness of relief at finding he could be reasonable,
as well as a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he
was surprised when in the next breath she said irrelevantly: “Who was
it warned you against me?”

He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the
plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady and reflecting
how, as the likelihood was small that his friend in Camberwell would
ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her plan of going there)
no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in London—Paul Muniment.”

“Paul Muniment?”

“I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.”

“The person who said something good? I forget what it was.”

“It was sure to be something good if he said it. He’s awfully wise.”

“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about
me?”

“Oh nothing of course but the little I could tell him. He only spoke on
general grounds.”

“I like his odd name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he
resembles it I think I should like him.”

“You’d like him much better than me.”

“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I’m determined to
keep hold of you simply for what you can show me.” She paused a moment
with her beautiful deep eyes lighted as by possibilities that half
dazzled and half defied him; then again her wondrous words took it
up. “On general grounds, _bien entendu_, your friend was quite right
to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I’ve undertaken
to make as small as possible. It’s to reduce them to nothing that I
talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I’ve done.
What in the world is it I’m trying to do but by every clever trick
I can think of fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my
position and yours? You know what I make of ‘positions’—I told you in
London. For heaven’s sake let me feel that I’ve—a little—succeeded!” He
satisfied her sufficiently to enable her five minutes later apparently
to entertain no further doubt on the question of his staying over. On
the contrary she burst into a sudden explosion of laughter, replacing
her argumentative pressure by one of her singular sallies. “You must
absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants. It will be lovely to
see you there!”

As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room after she had a trifle
abruptly and, as struck him, almost unceremoniously and inconsequently
left him, it occurred to him to wonder if that was mainly what she
was keeping him for—so that he might help her to play one of her
tricks on the good people at Broome. He paced there in the still
candlelight for a longer time than he measured; until the butler came
and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently and fixedly as to
let him know that he interfered with the custom of the house. He had
told the Princess that what determined him was the thought of the
manner in which he might exercise his craft in her service; but this
was only half the influence that pressed him into forgetfulness of
what he had most said to himself when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of
unprecedented introspection, he wrote the letter by which he accepted
the invitation to Medley. He would go there, he reasoned, because a
man must be gallant, especially if he be a poor little bookbinder;
but after he should be there he would insist at every step on knowing
what he was in for. The change that had taken place in him now, from
one moment to another, was that he had simply ceased to wonder what
that mystery might be. All warnings, reflexions, considerations of
verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the possible, of the
value of his independence, had become as nothing to him. The cup of
an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted palace, a week of
such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crook as he had never dreamed
of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of romance, of reality,
of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without drinking. He
might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in his mouth
the taste of nectar. He went upstairs under the eye of the butler and
on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found himself
face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just issued from
her own apartment, the door of which stood open near her; she might
have been hovering there at watch for his footstep. She had donned her
dressing-gown, which seemed to give her all respiratory and other ease,
but had not yet parted with her wig. She still had her pink French book
under her arm, and her fat little hands, tightly locked together in
front of her, formed the clasp of her generous girdle.

“Do tell me it’s positive, Mr. Robinson!” she said as she stopped short.

“What’s positive, Madame Grandoni?”

“That you take the train in the morning.”

“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary
it has been settled I shall stay over. I’m very sorry if it distresses
you—but _che vuole_?” he heard himself almost “cheekily” risk.

Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in
return; she only looked at him hard a moment and then, shrugging her
shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.




XXIV


“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He’s Diedrich
Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly the next
morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped
altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes on
Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at
noon with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had
fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed he
should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him how her
venerable friend had, while the day was still very young, pronounced
it in the worst possible taste that she shouldn’t let their companion
yet depart in peace; to which she had replied that about tastes there
was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before
without any one’s being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that
they wouldn’t dispute about _him_—of all thankless subjects in the
world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about
anything. She held that there were other ways than this of arranging
one’s relations with people; and he guessed how thoroughly she meant
that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her
side then there was as little possibility as on his that they should
ever quarrel: their acquaintance would be a grand friendship or would
be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this
quality, and it may be figured how safe her guest felt by the time he
began to tell her that something had happened to him in London three
months before, one night, or rather in the small hours of the morning,
that had altered his life altogether—had indeed as he might say changed
the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly
what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently
well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable,
tantalising cab-drive in the rain.

The Princess had led to this almost as soon as they left the house;
making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying
suddenly: “Now tell me what’s going on among your friends. I don’t
mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers.
_Où en êtes-vous_ at the present time? Is there anything new, is
anything going to be done? I’m afraid you’re always simply dawdling
and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if of late he had by no means either
dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as
to refute the imputation she broke out with a different effect: “How
annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the
right to say to yourself, ‘After all what do I know? Mayn’t she be in
the pay of the police—?’”

“Oh that doesn’t occur to me,” Hyacinth gallantly protested.

“It might at all events; by which I mean it may at any moment. Indeed
I think it ought.”

“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head
about me.”

“I should make you think that certainly! That would be my first care.
However, if you’ve no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said
the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the
scenes.

In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he was
sure he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she
might be an agent on the wrong side—he didn’t open himself immediately;
but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important
event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in
the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted he
said: “I pledged myself by everything that’s sacred.”

“To what did you pledge yourself?”

“I took a vow—a tremendous solemn vow—in the presence of four
witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.

“And what was it about, your vow?”

“I gave my life away,” he consciously smiled.

She looked at him askance as if to see how he would indeed carry off
such a statement as that; but she betrayed no levity of criticism—her
face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a
glance in silence, and then she said: “Ah well then I’m all the more
glad you stayed!”

“That was one of the reasons.”

“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” it occurred to
her, however, to remark.

“Why till after I had been here?”

“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have
seen reasons for keeping it.” With which, like Hyacinth, she sacrificed
to the brighter bravery. He replied that he had not the least doubt
that on the whole her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this
she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and
he related what had happened at the place known to him in Bloomsbury
and during that night of which I have given some account. The Princess
listened intently while they strolled under the budding trees with a
more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing
themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day or naked in some grey
November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences
since the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy
slopes and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things our young
man mentioned that he didn’t go to the “Sun and Moon” any more; he
now perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this
particular temple of their faith, with everything that pretended to get
hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff from the
first to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of
his in whom he had confidence appeared to set him the example; but now
it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again by the way)
had always thought the men who went there a pack of shufflers and was
trying them only to try everything. There was nobody you could begin to
call a first-rate man, putting aside another friend of his, a Frenchman
named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent but wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth
had a standard now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation
of a strong plan. You felt _him_ a big chap the very moment you came
into his presence.

“Into whose presence, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess demanded.

“I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you!
I’m speaking of the extraordinary man with whom I entered into that
engagement.”

“To give away your life?”

“To do something that in a certain contingency he’ll require of me.
He’ll require my poor little carcass.”

“Those ‘strong’ plans have a way of failing—unfortunately,” the
Princess murmured, adding the last word more quickly.

“Is that a consolation or a regret?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shan’t
fail—so far as depends on me. They wanted an obliging young man. Well,
the place was vacant and I stepped in.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re right. We must pay for all we do.” She noted this
hard law calmly and coldly and then said: “I think I know the person in
whose power you’ve placed yourself.”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“You can’t believe I’ve already gone so far? Why not? I’ve given you a
certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back.”

“Well, if you know my friend you’ve gone very far indeed.”

The Princess appeared on the point of pronouncing a name; but she
checked herself and said instead, suddenly eager: “Don’t they also want
by chance an obliging young woman?”

“I happen to know he doesn’t think much of women, my first-rate man. He
doesn’t trust them.”

“Is that why you call him first-rate? You’ve very nearly betrayed him
to me.”

“Do you imagine there’s only one of that opinion?” Hyacinth returned.

“Only one who, having it, still remains a superior man. That’s a very
difficult opinion to reconcile with others it’s important to have.”

“Schopenhauer did so, successfully,” said Hyacinth.

“How delightful you should know old Schopenhauer!” the Princess
exclaimed. “The gentleman I have in my eye is also German.” Hyacinth
let this pass, not challenging her, because he wished not to be
challenged in return, and she went on: “Of course such an engagement as
you speak of must make a tremendous difference in everything.”

“It has made this difference, that I’ve now a far other sense from any
I had before of the reality, the solidity, of what’s being prepared.
I was hanging about outside, on the steps of the temple, among the
loafers and the gossips, but now I’ve been in the innermost sanctuary.
Yes, I’ve seen the holy of holies.”

“And it’s very dazzling?”

“Ah Princess!” the young man strangely sighed.

“Then it _is_ real, it _is_ solid?” she pursued. “That’s exactly what
I’ve been trying to make up my mind about so long.”

“It’s beyond anything I can say. Nothing of it appears above the
surface; but there’s an immense underworld peopled with a thousand
forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it’s
organised is what astonished me. I knew that, or thought I knew it,
in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it
all society lives. People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink
and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and
suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the
misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil,’ and
generations rot away and starve in the midst of it, and day follows
day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds.
All that’s one half of it; the other half is that everything’s doomed!
In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the
revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the
lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is
complete there will be a great rehearsal. That rehearsal is what they
want me for. The invisible, impalpable wires are everywhere, passing
through everything, attaching themselves to objects in which one
would never think of looking for them. What could be more strange and
incredible for instance than that they should exist just here?”

“You make me believe it,” said the Princess thoughtfully.

“It matters little whether one believes it or not!”

“You’ve had a vision,” she continued.

“_Pardieu_, I’ve had a vision! So would you, if you had been there.”

“I wish I had!” she declared in a tone charged with such ambiguous
implications that Hyacinth, catching them a moment after she had
spoken, rejoined with a quick, incongruous laugh—

“No, you’d have spoiled everything. He made me see, he made me feel, he
made me do, everything he wanted.”

“And why should he have wanted you in particular?”

“Simply because I struck him as the right person. That’s his affair:
I can’t tell you. When he meets the right person he chalks him. I
sat on the bed. There were only two chairs in the dirty little room
and by way of curtain his overcoat was hung up before the window. He
himself didn’t sit; he leaned against the wall straight in front of
me, his hands behind him. He told me certain things and his manner was
extraordinarily quiet. So was mine, I think I may say; and indeed it
was only poor Poupin who made a row. It was for my sake somehow: he
didn’t think we were all conscious enough; he wanted to call attention
to my sublimity. There was no sublimity about it—I simply couldn’t help
myself. He and the other German had the two chairs and Muniment sat
on a queer old, battered, hair-covered trunk, a most foreign-looking
article.” Hyacinth had taken no notice of the little ejaculation with
which his companion greeted in this last sentence the word “other.”

“And what did Mr. Muniment say?” she presently asked.

“Oh he said it was all right. Of course he thought so from the moment
he determined to bring me. He knew what the other fellow was looking
for.”

“I see.” Then the Princess added: “We’ve a curious way of being fond of
you.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”

“Your friends. Mr. Muniment and I for instance.”

“I like it as well as any other. But you don’t feel alike. I’ve an idea
you yourself are sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“That I’ve put my head into a noose.”

“Ah you’re rather snubby—I thought I concealed it so well!” the
Princess cried. He recognised that his discrimination had been
invidious, as there might have been for an instant a hint of tears
in her voice. She looked away from him, and it was after this that,
stopping short, she remarked as I have related: “Your man’s Diedrich
Hoffendahl.”

Hyacinth took it with a stare and parted lips. “Well, you _are_ in
it—more than I supposed!”

“You know he doesn’t trust women,” his companion smiled.

“Why in the world should you have cared for any light _I_ can throw if
you’ve ever been in relation with him?”

She hesitated a little. “Oh you’re very different. I like you better,”
she added.

“Ah if it’s for that!” murmured Hyacinth.

The Princess coloured as he had seen her colour before, and in
this liability on her part there was even after repetition an
unexpectedness, something all too touching. “Don’t try to fix my
inconsistencies on me,” she said with a humility that matched her
blush. “Of course there are plenty of them, but it will always be
kinder of you to let them pass. Besides, in this case they’re not so
serious as they seem. As a product of the ‘people’ and of that strange
fermenting underworld (what you say of it’s so true!) you interest me
more and have more to say to me even than Hoffendahl—wonderful creature
as he assuredly is.”

“Would you object to telling me how and where you came to know him?”
her visitor asked.

“Through a couple of friends of mine in Vienna, two of the affiliated,
both passionate revolutionists and clever men. They’re Neapolitans,
originally _poveretti_ like yourself, who emigrated years ago to seek
their fortune. One of them’s a teacher of singing, the wisest, most
accomplished person in his line I’ve ever known. The other, if you
please, is a confectioner! He makes the most delicious _pâtisserie
fine_. It would take long to tell you how I made _their_ acquaintance
and how they put me into relation with the Maestro, as they called him,
of whom they spoke with bated breath. It’s not from yesterday—though
you don’t seem able to believe it—that I’ve had a care for these
interests. I wrote to Hoffendahl and had several letters from him; the
singing-master and the pastry-cook went bail for my sincerity. The next
year I had an interview with him at Wiesbaden; but I can’t tell you the
circumstances of our meeting in that place without implicating another
person to whom just now at least I’ve no right to give you a clue. Of
course Hoffendahl made an immense impression on me; he struck me as
the Master indeed, the very genius of a new social order, and I fully
understand the manner in which you were affected by him. When he was
in London three months ago I knew it and knew where to write to him. I
did so and asked him if he wouldn’t see me somewhere. I said I’d meet
him anywhere, in any darkness, if it should have to be, that he might
designate. He answered by a charming letter which I’ll show you—it
has nothing in the least compromising—but declined my offer, pleading
his short stay and a press of engagements. He’ll write to me but won’t
trust me. However, he shall some day!”

Hyacinth was thrown quite off his balance by this representation of
the ground the Princess had already traversed, and the explanation
was still but half restorative when, on his asking her why she hadn’t
exhibited her titles before, she replied: “Well, I thought my being
quiet was the better way to draw you out.” There was but little
difficulty in drawing him out now, and before their walk was over he
had told her more definitely what Hoffendahl demanded. This was simply
that he should hold himself ready for the next five years to do at a
given moment an act which would in all probability cost him his life.
The act was as yet indefinite, but one might get an idea of it from
the penalty involved, which would certainly be capital. The only thing
settled was that it was to be done instantly and absolutely, without
a question, a condition or a scruple, in the manner that should be
prescribed at the moment from headquarters. Very likely it would be
to shoot some one—some blatant humbug in a high place; but whether
the individual should deserve it or shouldn’t deserve it was not to
be one’s affair. If he recognised generally Hoffendahl’s wisdom—and
the other night it had seemed to shine like a great cold, splendid,
northern aurora—it was not in order that he might challenge it in the
particular case. He had taken a vow of blind obedience, the vow as
of the Jesuit fathers to the head of their order. It was because the
Jesuits had carried out their vows (having in the first place great
administrators) that their organisation had been mighty, and this sort
of mightiness was what people who felt as Hyacinth and the Princess
felt should go in for. It was not certain sure he should be bagged
after his _coup_ any more than it was certain sure he should bring
down his man; but it was much to be looked for and was what he counted
on and indeed preferred. He should probably take little trouble to
save his skin, and he should never enjoy the idea of dodging or hiding
or disavowing. If it were a question of really placing his bullet he
himself should naturally deserve what would come to him. If one did
that sort of thing there was an indelicacy in not being ready to pay
for it, and he at least was perfectly willing. He shouldn’t judge,
he should simply execute. He didn’t pretend to say what good his
little job might do or what _portée_ it might have; he hadn’t the data
for appreciating it and simply took upon himself to believe that at
headquarters they knew what they were about. The thing was to be part
of a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure the scope—something
that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen different countries. The
impression was to be very much in this immense coincidence. It was to
be hoped it wouldn’t be spoiled by any muffing. At all events _he_
wouldn’t hang fire, whatever the other fellows might do. He didn’t
say it because Hoffendahl had done him the honour of giving him the
business to do, but he believed the Master knew how to pick out his
men. To be sure they had known nothing about him in advance; he had
only been suggested from one day to the other by those who were always
looking out. The fact remained, however, that when Hyacinth stood
before him he recognised him as the sort of little chap he had in his
eye—one who could pass through a very small opening. Humanity, in his
scheme, was classified and subdivided with a truly German thoroughness
and altogether of course from the point of view of the revolution—as
it might forward or obstruct that cause. Hyacinth’s little job was a
very small part of what Hoffendahl had come to England for; he had in
his hand innumerable other threads. Hyacinth knew nothing of these and
didn’t much want to know, except for the portentous wonder of the way
Hoffendahl kept them apart. He had exactly the same mastery of them
that a great musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of
the piano; he treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so
many notes in his great symphonic massacre. The day would come when—far
down in the treble—one would feel one’s self touched by the little
finger of the composer, would grow generally audible (with a small
sharp crack) for a second.

It was impossible that our young man shouldn’t become aware at the
end of ten minutes that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest,
most genuine attention: she was listening to him as she had never
listened before. He enjoyed that high effect on her, and his sense
of the tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by
his hearing himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present
anything in the line of enjoyment, any scrap filched from the feast
of life, was so much gained for eager young experience. The reader may
judge if he had held his breath and felt his heart-beats after placing
himself on his new footing of utility in the world; but that emotion
had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of
vain conjecture—through an exaltation which alternated with despair
and which, equally with the despair, he concealed more successfully
than he supposed. He would have detested the idea that his companion
might have heard his voice tremble while he told his story; but though
to-day he had really grown used to his danger and resigned, as it were,
to his consecration, and though it couldn’t fail to be agreeable to
him to perceive that, like some famous novel, he was thrilling, he
still couldn’t guess how very remarkable, in such a connexion, the
Princess thought his composure, his lucidity, his good humour. It is
true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it to her self-respect
to let it still appear that even such a one as she was prepared for a
personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she endeavoured to
have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted for himself;
nevertheless there was something rather forced in the smile (lovely as
it might be) with which she covered him while she said after a little:
“It’s very serious—it’s very serious indeed, isn’t it?” He replied that
the serious part was to come—there was no particular grimness for him
(comparatively) in strolling in that fine park and gossiping with her
about the matter; and it occurred to her presently to suggest to him
that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign at all, so that
he might wait, all the while _sur les dents_, in a false suspense. He
admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that either way he
should be sold, though differently; and that at any rate he would have
conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were
to be one’s last.

“In holiness, you mean—in great _recueillement_?” the Princess asked.

“Oh dear no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every good minute
that’s added.”

“Ah well, there will probably be a great many good minutes,” she
returned.

“The more the better—if they’re as good as this one.”

“That won’t be the case with many of them in Lomax Place.”

“I assure you that since that night Lomax Place has improved.” Hyacinth
stood there smiling, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back.

The Princess appeared to consider this quaint truth, as well as
the charming facts of his appearance and attitude, with an extreme
intellectual curiosity. “If after all then you’re not called you’ll
have been positively happy.”

“I shall have had some fine moments. Perhaps Hoffendahl’s plot is
simply for that: Muniment may have put him up to it!”

“Who knows? However, with me you must go on as if nothing were changed.”

“Changed from what?”

“From the time of our first meeting at the theatre.”

“I’ll go on in any way you like,” said Hyacinth. “Only the real
difference will be there, you know.”

“The real difference?”

“That I shall have ceased to care for what you care for.”

“I don’t understand,” she confessed with all the candour of her beauty.

“Isn’t it enough now to give my life to the beastly cause,” the young
man broke out, “without giving my sympathy?”

“The beastly cause?” the Princess murmured, opening her deep eyes.

“Of course it’s really just as holy as ever; only the people I find
myself pitying now are the rich, the happy.”

“I see. You’re very remarkable. You’re splendid. Perhaps you pity my
husband,” she added in a moment.

“Do you call him one of the happy?” Hyacinth inquired as they walked on
again.

But she only repeated: “You’re very remarkable. Yes, you’re splendid.”

To which he made answer: “Well, it’s what I want to be!”

I have related the whole of this conversation because it supplies a
highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but we may not take
time to trace all the stages and reproduce all the passages through
which the friendship of the Princess Casamassima with the young man she
had constituted her bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the
standard of fitness she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties
appeared the model of justice and convenience; and during this period,
a season of strange revelations for our young man, many other things
happened. One of them was that he drove over to Broome with his
hostess and called on Lady Marchant and her daughters; an episode that
appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee. When
they came away he asked her why she hadn’t told the ladies who he was.
Otherwise where was the point? And she replied: “Simply because they
wouldn’t have believed me. That’s your fault!” This was the same note
she had struck when the third day of his stay (the weather had changed
for the worse and a rainy afternoon kept them indoors) she remarked
to him irrelevantly and abruptly: “It _is_ most extraordinary, your
knowing poor dear old ‘Schop’!” He answered that she really seemed
quite unable to accustom herself to his little talents; and this led
to a long talk, longer than the one I have already narrated, in which
he took her still further into his confidence. Never had the pleasure
of conversation, the greatest he knew, been so largely opened to him.
The Princess admitted frankly that he would to her sense take a great
deal of accounting for; she observed that he was, no doubt, pretty well
used to himself, but must give stupider persons time. “I’ve watched
you constantly since you came—in every detail of your behaviour—and I’m
more and more _intriguée_. You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t
a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything
exactly in the right way. You come out of the poor cramped hole you’ve
described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all
your life. You’re much better than if you had! _Jugez donc_, from the
way I talk to you! I’ve to make no allowances—not one little allowance.
I’ve seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and ease, but I
didn’t know it was ever to be found in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it
hadn’t been cultivated at a vast expense; unless perhaps in certain
horribly ‘refined’ little American women.”

“Do you mean I’m a gentleman?” asked Hyacinth in a peculiar tone while
he looked out into the wet garden.

She faltered and then said: “It’s I who make the mistakes!” Five
minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost
more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion
of her delicacy and sympathy, putting him before himself as vividly
as if the words were a little portrait. “Fancy the strange, the bitter
fate: to be constituted as you’re constituted, to be conscious of the
capacity you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only
through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!”

“Every class has its pleasures,” he made answer with perverse
sententiousness in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn’t darken
their mutual intelligence, which was to expand to still greater
wonders, and before they separated that evening he told her the things
that had never yet passed his lips—the things to which he had awaked
when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the prison. He told her
in short what he was.




XXV


He took several long walks by himself beyond the gates of the park
and through the neighbouring country—walks during which, committed as
he was to reflexion on the general “rumness” of his destiny, he had
still a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy
lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and
seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields;
the hedges thick with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew
no names, the picture-making power of thatched cottages, the mystery
and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of rural complexions, the
quaintness of little girls bobbing curtsies by waysides (a sort of
homage he had never prefigured); the soft sense of the turf under feet
that had never ached but from paving-stones. One morning as he had his
face turned homeward after a long stroll he heard behind him the sound
of a horse’s hoofs and, looking back, perceived a gentleman who would
presently pass him advancing up the road which led to the lodge-gates
of Medley. He went his way and as the horse overtook him noticed that
the rider slackened pace. Then he turned again and recognised in this
personage his occasional florid friend Captain Sholto. The Captain
pulled up alongside of him, saluting him with a smile and a movement
of the whip-handle. Hyacinth stared with surprise, not having heard
from the Princess that she was expecting him. He gathered, however, in
a moment that she was not; and meanwhile he received an impression on
Sholto’s part of riding-gear that was “knowing”—of gaiters and spurs
and a hunting-crop and a curious waistcoat; perceiving this to be a
phase of the Captain’s varied nature that he had not yet had occasion
to observe. He struck him as very high in the air, perched on his big
lean chestnut, and Hyacinth noticed that if the horse was heated the
rider was cool.

“Good-morning, my dear fellow. I thought I should find you here!”
the Captain exclaimed. “It’s a good job I’ve met you this way without
having to go to the house.”

“Who gave you reason to think I was here?” Hyacinth asked; partly
occupied with the appositeness of this inquiry and partly thinking,
as his eyes wandered over his handsome friend bestriding so handsome
a beast, what a jolly thing it would be to know how to ride. He had
already, during the few days he had been at Medley, had time to observe
that the knowledge of luxury and the wider range of sensation begot in
him a taste for still bolder pleasures.

“Why, I knew the Princess was capable of asking you,” Sholto said; “and
I learned at the ‘Sun and Moon’ that you had not been there for a long
time. I knew furthermore that as a general thing you go there a good
deal, don’t you? So I put this and that together and judged you were
out of town.”

This was very clear and straightforward and might have satisfied
just exactions save for that irritating reference to the Princess’s
being “capable of asking him.” He knew as well as the Captain that
it had been tremendously eccentric in her to do so, but somehow a
transformation had lately taken place in him which made it unpleasant
he should receive that view from another, and particularly from a
gentleman of whom at a certain juncture several months before he had
had strong grounds for thinking unfavourably. He had not seen Sholto
since the evening when a queer combination of circumstances caused him
to sit more queerly still and listen to comic songs in the company of
Millicent Henning and this admirer. The Captain had not concealed his
admiration; Hyacinth had his own ideas about his taking that line in
order to look more innocent. When he accompanied Millicent that evening
to her lodgings (they parted with Sholto on coming out of the Pavilion)
the situation was tense between the young lady and her childhood’s
friend. She let him have it, as she said; she gave him a dressing
which she evidently intended should be memorable for having suspected
her, for having insulted her before one of the military. The tone
she took and the magnificent audacity with which she took it reduced
him to an odd, gratified helplessness; he watched her at last with
something of the excitement with which he would have watched a clever
but uncultivated actress while she worked herself into a passion that
he believed to be fictitious. He gave more credence to his jealousy
and to the whole air of the case than to her loud rebuttals, enlivened
though these were by tremendous head-tossings and skirt-shakings. But
he felt baffled and outfaced, and had recourse to sarcasms which after
all proved no more than her high gibes; seeking a final solution in one
of those beastly little French shrugs, as Millicent called them, with
which she had already denounced him for interlarding his conversation.

The air was never cleared, though the subject of their dispute was
afterwards dropped, Hyacinth promising himself to watch his playmate as
he had never done before. She let him know, as may well be supposed,
that she had her eye on _him_, and it must be confessed that as
regards the exercise of a right of supervision he had felt himself at a
disadvantage ever since the night at the theatre. It scantly mattered
that she had pushed him into the Princess’s box (for she herself had
not been jealous beforehand; she had wanted too much to know what such
a person could be “up to,” desiring perhaps to borrow a hint) and it
signified as little also that his relations with the great lady were
all for the sake of suffering humanity. The atmosphere, however these
things might be, was full of thunder for many weeks, and of what
importance was the quarter from which the flash and the explosion
should proceed? Hyacinth was a good deal surprised to find he could
care whether Millicent deceived him or not, and even tried to persuade
himself that he didn’t; but it was as if he yet felt between them a
personal affinity deeper than any difference, so that it would torment
him more never to see her at all than to see her go into tantrums in
order to cover her tracks. An inner sense told him that her mingled
beauty and grossness, her vulgar vitality, the spirit of contradiction
yet at the same time of attachment that was in her, had ended by
making her indispensable to him. She bored as much as she irritated;
but if she was full of excruciating taste she was also full of life,
and her rustlings and chatterings, her wonderful stories, her bad
grammar and good health, her insatiable thirst, her shrewd perceptions
and grotesque opinions, her blunders and her felicities, were now all
part of the familiar human sound of his little world. He could say to
himself that she made up to him far more than he to her, and it helped
him a little to believe, though the logic was but lame, that she was
not “larking” at his expense. If she were really in with a swell he
didn’t see why she wished to retain a bookbinder. Of late, it must
be added, he had ceased to devote much consideration to Millicent’s
ambiguities; for although he was lingering on at Medley for the sake
of suffering humanity he was quite aware that to say so (should she
ask him for a reason) would have almost as low a value as some of the
girl’s own speeches. As regards Sholto he was in the awkward position
of having let him off, as it were, by accepting his hospitality, his
bounty; thus he couldn’t quarrel with him save on a fresh pretext.
This pretext the Captain had apparently been careful not to give, and
Millicent had told him after the triple encounter in the street that
he had driven him out of England, the poor gentleman he insulted by
his vulgar insinuations even more (why ‘even more’ Hyacinth hardly
could think) than he outraged herself. When he asked her what she knew
about the Captain’s movements she made no scruple to announce to him
that the latter had come to her great shop to make a little purchase
(it was a pair of silk braces, if she remembered rightly, and she
acknowledged unreservedly the thinness of the pretext) and had asked
her with much concern whether his gifted young friend (that’s what
he called him—Hyacinth could see he meant well) was still in a huff.
Millicent had replied that she was afraid he was—the more shame to him;
and then the Captain had declared it didn’t matter, as he himself was
on the point of leaving England for several weeks (Hyacinth—he called
him Hyacinth this time—couldn’t have ideas about a man in a foreign
country, could he?) and hoped that by the time he returned the little
cloud would have blown over. Sholto had added that she had better
tell him frankly—recommending her at the same time to be gentle with
their morbid friend—about his visit to the shop. Their candour, their
humane precautions, were all very well; but after this, two or three
evenings, Hyacinth passed and repassed the Captain’s chambers in Queen
Anne Street to see if there were signs at the window of his being in
London. Darkness in fact prevailed and he was forced to comfort himself
a little when, at last making up his mind to ring at the door and
inquire, as a test, for the occupant, he was informed by the superior
valet whose acquaintance he had already made and whose air of wearing
a jacket left behind by his master confirmed the statement, that the
gentleman in question was at Monte Carlo.

“Have you still got your back up a little?” the Captain now demanded
without rancour; and in a moment he had swung a long leg over the
saddle and dismounted, walking beside his young friend and leading his
horse by the bridle. Hyacinth pretended not to know what he meant, for
it came over him that after all, even if he had not condoned at the
time the Captain’s suspected treachery, he was in no position, sitting
at the feet of the Princess, to sound the note of jealousy in relation
to another woman. He reflected that the Princess had originally been
in a manner Sholto’s property, and if he did _en fin de compte_ wish
to quarrel with him about Millicent he would have to cease to appear
to poach on the Captain’s preserves. It now occurred to him for the
first time that the latter might have intended a practical exchange;
though it must be added that the Princess, who on a couple of occasions
had alluded slightingly to her military friend, had given him no sign
of recognising this gentleman’s claim. Sholto let him know at present
that he was staying at Bonchester, seven miles off; he had come down
from London and put up at the inn. That morning he had ridden over on a
hired horse (Hyacinth had supposed this steed to be a very fine animal,
but Sholto spoke of it as an infernal screw); he had felt a sudden
prompting to see how his young friend was coming on.

“I’m coming on very well, thank you,” said Hyacinth with some
shortness, not knowing exactly what business it was of the Captain’s.

“Of course you understand my interest in you, don’t you? I’m
responsible for you—I put you forward.”

“There are a great many things in the world I don’t understand, but
I think the thing I understand least is your interest in me. Why
the devil——?” And Hyacinth paused, breathless with the force of his
inquiry. Then he went on: “If I were you I shouldn’t care tuppence for
the sort of person I happen to be.”

“That proves how different my nature is from yours! But I don’t
believe it, my dear boy; you’re too generous for that.” Sholto’s
imperturbability always appeared to grow with the irritation it
produced, and it was proof even against the just resentment excited by
his deficiency of tact. That deficiency was marked when he went on to
say: “I wanted to see you here with my own eyes. I wanted to see how
it looked, your domesticated state—and it _is_ a rum sight! Of course
you know what I mean, though you’re always trying to make a fellow
explain. I don’t explain well in any sense, and that’s why I go in only
for clever people who can do without it. It’s very grand, her having
brought you down.”

“Grand, no doubt, but hardly surprising, considering that, as you say,
I was put forward by you.”

“Oh that’s a great thing for me, but it doesn’t make any difference to
her!” Sholto returned. “She may care for certain things for themselves,
but it will never signify a jot to her what I may have thought about
them. One good turn deserves another. I wish you’d put _me_ forward!”

“I don’t understand you and I don’t think I want to,” said Hyacinth as
his companion strolled beside him.

The latter put a hand on his arm, stopping him, and they stood face to
face a moment. “I say, my dear Robinson, you’re not spoiled already, at
the end of a week—how long is it? It isn’t possible you’re jealous!”

“Jealous of whom?” asked Hyacinth, whose measure of the allusion was,
amid the strangeness of everything, imperfect.

Sholto looked at him a moment; then with a laugh: “I don’t mean Miss
Henning.” Hyacinth turned away and the Captain resumed his walk, now
taking the young man’s arm and passing his own through the bridle of
the horse. “The courage of it, the insolence, the _crânerie_! There
isn’t another woman in Europe who could carry it off.”

Hyacinth was silent a little; after which he remarked: “This is
nothing, here. You should have seen me the other day over at Broome, at
Lady Marchant’s.”

“Gad, did she take you there? I’d have given ten pounds to see it.
There’s no one like her!” cried the Captain gaily, enthusiastically.

“There’s no one like me, I think—for going.”

“Why, didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Too much—too much. Such excesses are dangerous.”

“Oh. I’ll back you,” said the Captain; then checking their pace, “Is
there any chance of our meeting her?” he asked. “I won’t go into the
park.”

“You won’t go to the house?” Hyacinth demanded in wonder.

“Oh dear no, not while you’re there.”

“Well, I shall ask the Princess about you, and so have done with it
once for all.”

“Lucky little beggar, with your fireside talks!” the Captain lamented.
“Where does she sit now in the evening? She won’t tell you anything
except that I’m a beastly nuisance; but even if she were willing to
take the trouble to throw some light on me it wouldn’t be of much use,
because she doesn’t understand me herself.”

“You’re the only thing in the world then of which that can be said,”
Hyacinth returned.

“I daresay I am, and I’m rather proud of it. So far as the head’s
concerned the Princess is all there. I told you when I presented
you that she was the cleverest woman in Europe, and that’s still my
opinion. But there are some mysteries you can’t see into unless you
happen to have a little decent human feeling, what’s commonly called
a bit of heart. The Princess isn’t troubled with that sort of thing,
though doubtless just now you may think it her strong point. One of
these days you’ll see. I don’t care a rap myself about her quantity
of heart. She has hurt me already so much that she can’t hurt me any
more, and my interest in her is quite independent of it. To watch her,
to adore her, to see her lead her life and act out her extraordinary
nature, all the while she pays me no more attention than if I were the
postman’s knock several doors on, that’s absolutely the only thing that
appeals to me. It doesn’t do me a scrap of good, but all the same it’s
my principal occupation. You may believe me or not—it doesn’t in the
least matter; but I’m the most disinterested human being alive. She’ll
tell you one’s the biggest kind of donkey, and so of course one is. But
that isn’t all.”

It was Hyacinth who stopped this time, arrested by something new and
natural in the tone of his companion, a simplicity of emotion he had
not hitherto associated with him. He stood there a moment looking up
at him and thinking again what improbable confidences it decidedly
appeared to be his lot to receive from gentlefolk. To what quality
in himself were they a tribute? The honour was one he could easily
dispense with; though as he scrutinised Sholto he found something in
his odd light eyes—a sort of wasted flatness of fidelity—which made of
an accepted relation with him a less fantastic adventure. “Please go
on,” he said in a moment.

“Well, what I mentioned just now is my real and only motive in
anything. The rest’s the mere gabble of the juggler to cover up his
trick and help himself do it.”

“What do you mean by the rest?” asked Hyacinth, thinking of Millicent
Henning.

“Oh all the straw one chews to cheat one’s appetite; all the rot one
dabbles in because it may lead to something which it never does lead
to; all the beastly buncombe (you know) that you and I have heard
together in Bloomsbury and that I myself have poured out, damme, with
an assurance worthy of a better cause. Don’t you remember what I’ve
said to you—all as my own opinion—about the impending change of the
relations of class with class? Impending collapse of the crust of the
earth! I believe those on top of the heap are better than those under
it, that they mean to stay there, and that if they’re not a pack of
poltroons they will.”

“You don’t care for the social question then?” Hyacinth inquired with
an aspect of the blankness of which he was conscious.

“I only took it up because she did. It hasn’t helped me,” Sholto
smiled. “My dear Robinson,” he went on, “there’s only one thing I care
for in life: to have a look at that woman when I can—and when I can’t
to approach her in the sort of way I’m doing now.”

“It’s a very funny sort of way.”

“Indeed it is; but if it’s good enough for me it ought to be good
enough for you. What I want you to do is this—to induce her to ask me
over to dine.”

“To induce her——?” Hyacinth echoed.

“Tell her I’m staying at Bonchester and it would be an act of common
humanity.”

They proceeded till they reached the gates and in a moment Hyacinth
said: “You took up the social question then because she did. But do you
happen to know why _she_ took it up?”

“Ah my dear fellow, you must worry that out for yourself. I found you
the place, but I can’t do your work for you!”

“I see—I see. But perhaps you’ll tell me this: if you had free access
to her a year ago, taking her to the theatre and that sort of thing,
why shouldn’t you have it now?”

This time Sholto’s yellow eyes were strange again. “_You_ have it now,
my dear chap, but I’m afraid it doesn’t follow that you’ll have it a
year hence. She was tired of me then, and of course she’s still more
tired of me now, for the simple reason that I’m more tiresome. She has
sent me to Coventry and I want to come out for a few hours. See how
awfully decent I am—I won’t pass the gates.”

“I’ll tell her I met you,” said Hyacinth. Then, irrelevantly, he added:
“Is that what you mean by her having no heart?”

“Her treating me as she treats me? Oh dear no. Her treating _you_!”

This had a portentous sound, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from
turning round with his visitor—for it was the greatest part of the
oddity of the present meeting that the hope of a little conversation
with him, if accident were favourable, had been the motive not only of
Sholto’s riding over to Medley but of his coming down to stay, in the
neighbourhood, at a musty inn in a dull market-town—it didn’t prevent
him, I say, from bearing the Captain company for a mile on his backward
way. Our young man pursued this particular topic little further, but
he discovered still another reason or two for admiring the light, free
action with which his companion had unmasked himself, as well as the
nature of his interest in the revolutionary idea, after he had asked
him abruptly what he had had in his head when he travelled over that
evening, the summer before—and he didn’t appear to have come back as
often as he promised—to Paul Muniment’s place in Camberwell. What was
he looking for, whom was he looking for there?

“I was looking for anything that would turn up, that might take her
fancy. Don’t you understand that I’m always looking? There was a time
when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I
collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a belief in
ghosts) all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to
the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I
collected you.”

“Muniment made you out exactly then. And what did you find to your
purpose in Audley Court?”

“Well, I think the little woman with the popping eyes—she reminded me
of a bedridden grasshopper—will do. And I made a note of the other one,
the old virgin with the high nose, the aristocratic sister of mercy.
I’m keeping them in reserve for my next propitiatory offering.”

Hyacinth had a pause. “And Muniment himself—can’t you do anything with
him?”

“Oh my dear fellow, after you he’s poor!”

“That’s the first stupid thing you’ve said. But it doesn’t matter, for
he dislikes the Princess—what he knows of her—too much ever to consent
to see her.”

“That’s his line, is it? Then he’ll do!” Sholto cried.




XXVI


“Of course he may come, and may stay as long as he likes!” the Princess
exclaimed when Hyacinth, that afternoon, told her of his encounter:
she spoke with the sweet, bright surprise her face always wore when
people went through the form (supererogatory she apparently meant to
declare it) of asking her leave. From the manner in which she granted
Sholto’s petition—with a facility that made light of it, as if the
question were not worth talking of one way or the other—the account
he had given Hyacinth of their relations might have passed for an
elaborate but none the less foolish hoax. She sent a messenger with a
note over to Bonchester, and the Captain arrived just in time to dress
for dinner. The Princess was always late, and Hyacinth’s toilet on
these occasions occupied him considerably (he was acutely conscious
of its deficiencies, and yet tried to persuade himself that they
were positively honourable and that the only garb of dignity for him
was the costume, as it were, of his profession); therefore when the
fourth member of the little party descended to the drawing-room Madame
Grandoni was the only person he found there.

“_Santissima Vergine!_ I’m glad to see you! What good wind has sent
you?” she exclaimed as soon as Sholto came into the room.

“Didn’t you know I was coming?” he asked. “Has the idea of my arrival
produced so little agitation?”

“I know nothing of the affairs of this house. I’ve given them up at
last, and it was time. I remain in my room.” There was nothing at
present in the old lady’s countenance of her usual spirit of cheer; it
expressed anxiety and even a certain sternness, and the excellent woman
had perhaps at this moment more than she had ever had in her life of
the air of a duenna who took her duties seriously. She looked almost
august. “From the moment you come it’s a little better. But it’s very
bad.”

“Very bad, dear madam?”

“Perhaps you’ll be able to tell me where Christina _veut en venir_.
I’ve always been faithful to her—I’ve always been loyal. But to-day
I’ve lost patience. It has no sense.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Sholto said; “but if
I understand you I must tell you I think it all magnificent.”

“Yes, I know your tone; you’re worse than she, because you’re cynical.
It passes all bounds. It’s very serious. I’ve been thinking what I
should do.”

“Precisely. I know what you’ll probably do.”

“Oh this time I shouldn’t come back!” the old lady declared. “The
scandal’s too great. It’s intolerable. But my danger’s of making it
worse.”

“Dear Madame Grandoni, you can’t make it worse and you can’t make it
better,” Sholto returned as he seated himself on the sofa beside her.
“In point of fact no idea of scandal can possibly attach itself to our
friend. She’s above and outside all such considerations, such dangers.
She carries everything off; she heeds so little, she cares so little.
Besides, she has one great strength—she does no wrong.”

“Pray what do you call it when a lady sends for a bookbinder to come
and live with her?”

“Why not for a bookbinder as well as for a bishop? It all depends upon
who the lady is and what she is.”

“She had better take care of one thing first,” cried Madame
Grandoni—“that she shall not have been separated, with a hundred
stories, from her husband!”

“The Princess can carry off even that. It’s unusual, it’s eccentric,
it’s fantastic if you will, but it isn’t necessarily wicked. From
her own point of view our friend goes straight. Besides, she has her
opinions.”

“Her opinions are perversity itself.”

“What does it matter,” asked Sholto, “if they keep her quiet?”

“Quiet! Do you call this quiet?”

“Surely, if you’ll only be so yourself. Putting the case at the worst,
moreover, who’s to know he’s her bookbinder? It’s the last thing you’d
take him for.”

“Yes, for that she chose him carefully,” the old woman murmured, still
with a ruffled eyebrow.

“_She_ chose him? It was I who chose him, dear lady!” the Captain cried
with a laugh that showed how little he shared her solicitude.

“Yes, I had forgotten. At the theatre,” said Madame Grandoni, gazing at
him as if her ideas were confused, yet as if a certain repulsion from
her interlocutor nevertheless disengaged itself. “It was a fine turn
you did him there, poor young man!”

“Certainly he’ll have to be sacrificed. But why was I bound to consider
him so much? Haven’t I been sacrificed myself?”

“Oh if he bears it like you!”—and she almost snorted with derision.

“How do you know how I bear it? One does what one can,” said the
Captain while he settled his shirt-front. “At any rate remember this:
she won’t tell people who he is for his own sake, and he won’t tell
them for hers. So, as he looks much more like a poet or a pianist or a
painter, there won’t be that sensation you fear.”

“Even so it’s bad enough,” said Madame Grandoni. “And he’s capable of
bringing it out suddenly himself.”

“Ah if he doesn’t mind it _she_ won’t! But that’s his affair.”

“It’s too terrible to spoil him for his station,” the old lady went on.
“How can he ever go back?”

“If you want him kept then indefinitely you’re inconsistent. Besides,
if he pays for it he deserves to pay. He’s an abominable little
conspirator against society.”

Madame Grandoni was silent a time; then she looked at the Captain
with a gravity which might have been impressive to him had not his
accomplished jauntiness suggested an insensibility to that sort
of influence. “What then does Christina deserve?” she asked with
solemnity.

“Whatever she may get; whatever in the future may make her suffer. But
it won’t be the loss of her reputation. She’s too distinguished.”

“You English are strange. Is it because she’s a princess?” Madame
Grandoni reflected audibly.

“Oh dear no, her princedom’s nothing here. We can easily beat that. But
we can’t beat——!” And he had a pause.

“What then?” his companion asked.

“Well, the perfection of her indifference to public opinion and the
unaffectedness of her originality; the sort of thing by which she has
bedevilled me.”

“Oh _you_!” Madame Grandoni tossed off.

“If you think so poorly of me why did you say just now that you were
glad to see me?” Sholto demanded in a moment.

“Because you make another person in the house, and that’s more regular;
the situation is by so much less—what did you call it?—eccentric.
_Nun_,” she presently went on, “so long as you’re here I won’t go off.”

“Depend upon it I shall hang on tight till I’m turned out.”

She rested her small troubled eyes on him, but they betrayed no
particular enthusiasm at this announcement. “I don’t understand how for
yourself on such an occasion you should like it.”

“Dear Madame Grandoni, the heart of man, without being such a hopeless
labyrinth as the heart of woman, is still sufficiently complicated.
Don’t I know what will become of the little beggar?”

“You’re very horrible,” said the old woman. Then she added in a
different tone: “He’s much too good for his fate.”

“And pray wasn’t I for mine?” the Captain asked.

“By no manner of means!” Madame Grandoni returned as she rose and moved
away from him.

The Princess had come into the room accompanied by Hyacinth. As it
was now considerably past the dinner-hour the old lady judged that
this couple, on their side, had met in the hall and had prolonged
their conversation there. Hyacinth watched with extreme interest the
way the Princess greeted the Captain—taking it for very simple, easy
and friendly. At dinner she made no stranger of him, including him in
everything as if he had been a useful familiar like Madame Grandoni,
only a little less venerable, yet not giving him any attention that
might cause their eyes to meet. She had told Hyacinth she didn’t
like his eyes, nor indeed very much any part of him. Of course any
admiration from almost any source couldn’t fail to be in some degree
grateful to an amiable woman, but of any unintended effect one might
ever have produced the impression made on Godfrey Sholto in an evil
hour ministered least to her vanity. He had been useful undoubtedly
at times, but at others had been as a droning in her ears. He was
so uninteresting in himself, so shallow, so unoccupied and futile,
and really so frivolous in spite of his pretension (of which she
was unspeakably weary) of being all wrapped up in a single idea. It
had never by itself been sufficient to interest her in any man, the
fact that he was in love with her; but indeed she could honestly say
that most of the people who had liked her had had on their own side
something, something in their character or conditions, that she could
trouble her head about. Not so far as would do any harm save perhaps in
one or two cases; but still some personal mark.

Sholto was a curious and not particularly edifying English type,
as the Princess further described him; one of those odd figures
produced by old societies that have run to seed, corrupt and exhausted
civilisations. He was a cumberer of the earth—purely selfish for
all his devoted, disinterested airs. He was nothing whatever in
himself and had no character or merit save by tradition, reflexion,
imitation, superstition. He had a longish pedigree—he came of some
musty, mouldy “county family,” people with a local reputation and an
immense lack of general importance; he had taken the greatest care
of his little fortune. He had travelled all over the globe several
times, “for the shooting,” in that murdering, ravaging way of the
English, the destruction, the extirpation of creatures more beautiful,
more soaring and more nimble than themselves. He had a little taste,
a little cleverness, a little reading, a little good furniture, a
little French and Italian (he exaggerated these latter quantities),
an immense deal of assurance and unmitigated leisure. That, at bottom,
was all he represented—idle, trifling, luxurious, yet at the same time
pretentious leisure, the sort of thing that led people to invent false,
humbugging duties because they had no real ones. Sholto’s great idea
of himself, after his profession of being her slave, was that he was
a cosmopolite and exempt from every prejudice. About the prejudices
the Princess couldn’t say and didn’t care; but she had seen him in
foreign countries, she had seen him in Italy, and she was bound to say
he understood nothing of those people. It was several years before,
shortly after her marriage, that she had first encountered him. He
had not begun immediately to go in for adoring her—it had come little
by little. It was only after she had separated from her husband that
he had taken so to hanging about her—since when she had suffered much
from him. She would do him one justice, however: he had never, so far
as she knew, had the impudence to represent himself as anything but
hopeless and helpless. It was on this he took his stand—he wanted
to pass for the great model of unrewarded constancy. She couldn’t
imagine what he was waiting for—perhaps it was for the death of the
Prince. But the Prince would never die, nor had she the least desire
he should. She had no wish to be harsh, for of course that sort of
thing was from any one very flattering; but really, whatever feeling
poor Sholto might have, four-fifths of it were purely theatrical. He
was not in the least a natural, quiet person, and had only a hundred
affectations and attitudes, the result of never having been obliged
to put his hand to anything, of having no serious tastes and yet being
born to a little position. The Princess remarked that she was so glad
Hyacinth had no position, had been forced to do something else in life
but amuse himself; that was the way she liked her friends now. She had
said to Sholto again and again: “There are plenty of others who will
be much more pleased with you; why not go to _them_? It’s such a waste
of time.” She was sure indeed he had in some degree taken her advice,
was by no means, as regards herself, the absorbed, annihilated creature
he endeavoured to pass for. He had told her once he was trying to take
an interest in other women—though indeed he had added that it was of
no use. Of what use did he expect anything he could possibly do to be?
Hyacinth, at this, didn’t tell the Princess he had reason to believe
the Captain’s effort in that direction had not been absolutely vain;
but he made the reflexion privately and with increased confidence. He
recognised a further truth even when his companion said at the end that
with all she had touched upon poor Sholto was a queer combination.
Trifler as he was there was something sinister in him too; and she
confessed she had had a vague feeling at times that some day he might
do her a hurt. It was a remark that caused our young man to stop short
on the threshold of the drawing-room and ask in a low voice: “Are you
afraid of him?”

The Princess smiled as he had not yet seen her. “_Dio mio_, how you say
that! Should you like to kill him for me?”

“I shall have to kill some one, you know. Why not him while I’m about
it if he troubles you?”

“Ah my friend, if you should begin to kill every one who has troubled
me!” she wonderfully wailed as they went into the room.




XXVII


He knew there was something out of the way as soon as he saw Lady
Aurora’s face look forth at him in answer to his tap while she held
the door ajar. What was she doing in Pinnie’s bedroom?—a very poor
place, into which the dressmaker, with her reverence, would never have
admitted a person of that quality unless things had got pretty bad. She
was solemn too and without her usual incoherent laugh; she had removed
her large hat, with its limp old-fashioned veil, and she raised her
finger to her lips. Hyacinth’s first alarm had been immediately after
he let himself into the house with his latch-key, as he always did, and
found the little room on the right of the passage, in which Pinnie had
lived ever since he remembered, fireless and untenanted. As soon as he
had paid the cabman who put down his portmanteau for him in the hall—he
was not used to paying cabmen and was conscious he gave too much,
but was too impatient in his sudden anxiety to care—he had hurried up
the vile staircase that seemed viler, even through his preoccupation,
than ever, and given the knock, accompanied by a call the least bit
tremulous, precipitately answered by Lady Aurora. She had drawn back
into the room a moment while he stared in his dismay; then she emerged
again, closing the door behind her—all with the air of enjoining him
to be terribly quiet. He felt suddenly so sick at the idea of having
lingered at Medley while there was distress in the wretched little
house to which he owed so much that he scarcely found strength for an
articulate question and obeyed mechanically the mute, urgent gesture by
which their noble visitor appealed to him to go downstairs with her.
It was only when they stood together in the deserted parlour—where
he noted as for the first time what an inelegant odour prevailed—that
he asked: “Is she dying—is she dead?” That was the least the strained
sadness looking out of Lady Aurora’s face appeared to announce.

“Dear Mr. Robinson, I’m so sorry for you. I wanted to write, but I
promised her I wouldn’t. She’s very ill, poor dear—we’re very anxious.
It began ten days ago and I suppose I _must_ tell you how much
she has gone down.” Lady Aurora spoke with more than all her usual
embarrassments and precautions—eagerly, yet as if it cost her much
pain: pausing a little after everything to see how he would take it,
then going on with a small propitiatory rush. He learned presently
what was the matter, what doctor she had sent for, and that if he
would wait a little before going into the room it would be so much
better; the invalid having sunk within half an hour into a doze of a
less agitated kind than she had had for some time, from which it would
be an immense pity to run the risk of waking her. The doctor gave her
the right things, as it seemed to her ladyship, but he admitted that
she had very little power of resistance. He was of course not a very
large practitioner, Mr. Buffery from round the corner, yet he seemed
really clever; and she herself had taken the liberty (as she confessed
to this she threw off one of her odd laughs and her colour rose) of
sending an elderly, respectable person—a decent nursing body known
to many doctors. She was out just then, she had to go once a day for
the air—“only when I come of course” Lady Aurora hastened to note.
Dear Miss Pynsent had had a cold hanging about her and had not taken
care of it. Hyacinth would know how plucky she was about that sort of
thing; she took so little interest in herself. “Of course a cold’s a
cold, whoever has it; isn’t it?” his friend asked as if superior to
the old discrimination against the power of the lowly to do justice
to such visitations. Ten days previous she had taken an additional
chill through falling asleep in her chair, at night, down there, and
letting the fire go out. “It would have been nothing if she had been
like you or me, you know,” his benefactress went on; “but as she was
then it made the difference. The day was horribly damp—the chill had
struck into the lungs and inflammation come on. Mr. Buffery says she
was impoverished, you know—so weak and low she had nothing to _go_ on.”
The next morning she had bad pains and a good deal of fever, yet had
got up. Poor Pinnie’s gracious ministrant didn’t make clear to Hyacinth
what time had elapsed before she came to the rescue, nor by what means
she had been notified, and he saw that she slurred this over, from
the admirable motive of wishing him not to feel that their patient had
suffered by his absence or called for him in vain. This indeed appeared
not to have been the case if Pinnie had opposed successfully his being
written to. “I came in very soon,” Lady Aurora only said—“it was such
a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything—if it wasn’t so
sad to see a person _need_ so little. She did want you to stay where
you were: she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr.
Robinson.”

“I don’t know what to say to you—you’re so extraordinarily good, so
angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and sickened by a strange,
unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he
had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to
which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother
struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the
presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—this
whole contrast cut him like a knife and made the ugly accident of his
absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you when you’re so
kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke out.

Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of
course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to
consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that
your visit should _not_ be cut short. When you should come of yourself
it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you’ve been, but
she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would
do you so much good.”

Hyacinth felt his eyes fill with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying! How
can she live when she’s like that?”

He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so
many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A
succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated
emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had
possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind
of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips
gently on his hand. So for a minute, while his tears flowed and she
said nothing, he felt her timid touch of consolation. At the end of the
minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said “we”
just before, and he asked her whom she meant.

“Oh Mr. Vetch, don’t you know? I’ve made his charming acquaintance;
it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then while for a space Hyacinth was
silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden
to the fiddler while _he_ was masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora
added: “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once at first to bring
his violin; she thought it would soothe her.”

“I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble
him,” said Hyacinth.

Apparently there had been a certain dryness in his tone, which was the
cause of her ladyship’s venturing to reply after an hesitation: “Do
let him come, Mr. Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder if you know
that—that he has a great affection for you.”

“The more fool he; I’ve always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth
declared, colouring.

The way Lady Aurora spoke proved to him later that she now definitely
did know his secret, or one of those mysteries rather; for at the rate
things had been going for the last few months he was making a regular
collection. She knew the smaller secret—not of course the greater; she
had decidedly been illuminated by Pinnie’s divagations. At the moment
he made that reflexion, however, he was almost startled to perceive
how completely he had ceased to resent such betrayals and how little
it suddenly seemed to signify that the innocent source of them was
about to be quenched. The sense of his larger treasure of experience
swallowed up that particular anxiety, making him ask himself what it
mattered, for the little time now left him, that people should exchange
allusions, below their breath, to the hidden mark he now bore. The day
came quickly when he believed, and yet didn’t care, that it had been in
that manner immensely talked about.

After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first
moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale
parlour sunk in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing
Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much of late in
the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker,
in taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious
discipline. What was most vivid to him in the deserted field of her
unsuccessful industry was the changed vision with which he had come
back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the same,
and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in the
impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a
dismal _chiaroscuro_—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of
his own little life; yet the eyes with which he looked at it had new
terms of comparison. He had known the scene for hideous and sordid,
but its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he
couldn’t believe that for years he had accepted and even a little
revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service his experience
of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have assimilated
that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for himself; but
with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement could one
come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising?
Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle and the
room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from
the muddy street where the shallow defensive areas were a narrow slit.
No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, no wonder her small underfed
organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her
limited, stinted life, the patient humdrum effort of her needle and
scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing
to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn,
the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he
heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened
by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the
solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a particularly
lamentable, conscious squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes
that didn’t match, though of an equal antiquity and intimately emulous
in the facility with which they dropped off. He had not heard Mr.
Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper;
but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not
to make the door creak, their neighbour came into the parlour. The
fiddler said nothing to him at first; they only looked at each other
for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he
knew the worst about Pinnie: but what was further in his eyes, which
had an expression considerably different from any hitherto seen in
them, defined itself to our hero only little by little.

“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth at
last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but
he thought the question fair. None the less he expected a sarcastic
answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr.
Vetch replied—

“I assure you that no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever
did more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you
back, and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I
balanced one thing against the other. It was very difficult.”

“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest
are dying they’re usually sent for.”

The visitor gave a strange argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and
Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to
Hyacinth it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties
of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr. Vetch’s old age
was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley
had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy,
this case was exceptional,” the fiddler returned. “Your visit had a
character of importance.”

“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you
anything.”

“No certainly, you’ve never told me much. But if, as is probable,
you’ve seen that kind lady who’s now upstairs you’ll have learned
that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed.
She threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back.
You know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As at this Hyacinth turned
away with a gesture of irritation Mr. Vetch went on: “No doubt she’s
absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t now cast any disrespect
on it. I assure you that if she had been here alone, suffering,
sinking, without a creature to tend her and nothing before her but to
die in a corner like a starved cat, she would still have faced that
fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel
scenes.”

Hyacinth turned it miserably over. “Of course I know what you mean.
But she spun her delusion—she always did all of them—out of nothing.
I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of
scenes. I told her when I went out of town very little more than I told
you.”

“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been at any rate enough. She
has made up her mind that you’ve formed a connexion by means of which
you’ll come somehow or other into your own. She has done nothing but
talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the
aristocracy; and nothing’s simpler than that the person—very exalted,
as she believes—with whom you’ve been to stay should undertake your
business with her friends.”

“Oh well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of
that entertainment.”

“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added: “My
dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”

“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth returned. “I’ll tell her
my great relations have adopted me and that I’ve come back in the
character of Lord Robinson.”

“She’ll need nothing more to die happy,” said Mr. Vetch.

Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend
a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition,
this worthy explaining that he came over like that to see how she was
half-a-dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended
upon the pair while our youth awaited some sign from Lady Aurora that
he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked
out of the window as if the view were a chart of all the grey past;
and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with
his hands in his pockets. At last Mr. Vetch observed without taking his
pipe out of his lips or looking round: “I think you might be a little
more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”

Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment all sincerely
what his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of
an effort to conceal anything he could possibly tell—there were some
things of course he couldn’t: on the contrary his life seemed to him
particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious comment.
It was at this moment he first noticed a certain difference; there was
a tone in Mr. Vetch’s voice he seemed never to have felt before—an
absence of that note which had made him say in other days that the
impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It was
as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate,
in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part,
his having grown older or more important, or even grown simply more
surpassingly odd. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s
old neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his
being a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so
perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr. Vetch in a mind familiar
now for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not
favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience in
Hyacinth’s breast was soon corrected by one of the sudden reactions
or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim.
In the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than
it said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had for years
a small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of
it, even his visible expression of ultimate parsimony and of having
ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more
for something else—these things became so many reasons for turning
round, going over to him, touching marks of an invincible fidelity,
the humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an
art after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the
species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting with fidgeted
from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the
same place for three months together.

“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to
know what I’ve been doing in the country? I should have first to know
myself,” Hyacinth decently pleaded.

“Have you enjoyed it very much?”

“Yes certainly, very much—not knowing anything about Pinnie. I’ve been
in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman.”

Mr. Vetch had turned round; he looked very impartial through the smoke
of his pipe. “Is she really a princess?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really’: I suppose all titles are great
rot. But every one seems agreed to call her so.”

“You know I’ve always liked to enter into your life, and to-day the
wish is stronger than ever,” the old man presently said, while he fixed
his eyes steadily on his companion’s.

Hyacinth returned his gaze a moment. “What makes you say that just now?”

The fiddler appeared to deliberate and at last replied: “Because you’re
in danger of losing the best friend you’ve ever had.”

“Be sure I feel it. But if I’ve got _you_——!” his companion added.

“Oh me! I’m very old and very tired of life.”

“I suppose that that’s what one arrives at. Well, if I can help you in
any way you must lean on me, you must make use of me.”

“That’s precisely what I was going to say to you,” said Mr. Vetch.
“Should you like any money?”

“Of course I should! But why should you offer it to me?”

“Because in saving it up little by little I’ve had you in mind.”

“Dear Mr. Vetch,” our young man returned, “you have me too much in
mind. I’m not worth it, please believe that; and for all sorts of
reasons. I should make money enough for any uses I have for it, or have
any right to have, if I stayed quietly in London and attended to my
work. As you know, I can earn a decent living.”

“Yes, I can see that. But if you stayed quietly in London what would
become of your princess?”

“Oh they can always manage, ladies in that position.”

“Hanged if I understand her position!” cried Mr. Vetch, but without
laughing. “You’ve been for three weeks without work and yet you look
uncommonly smart.”

“Well, my living, you see, has cost me nothing. When you stay with
great people you don’t pay your score,” Hyacinth explained with great
gentleness. “Moreover, the lady whose hospitality I’ve been enjoying
has made me a very handsome offer of work.”

“What kind of work?”

“The only kind I know. She’s going to send me a lot of books to do up
for her.”

“And to pay you fancy prices?”

“Oh no; I’m to fix the prices myself.”

“Are not transactions of that kind rather disagreeable—with a lady
whose hospitality one has been enjoying?” Mr. Vetch inquired.

“Exceedingly! That’s exactly why I shall do the books and then take no
money.”

“Your princess is rather clever!” the fiddler coldly laughed.

“Well, she can’t force me to take it if I won’t,” said Hyacinth.

“No; you must only let _me_ do that.”

“You’ve curious ideas about me,” the young man declared.

Mr. Vetch turned about to the window again, remarking that he had
curious ideas about everything. Then he added after an interval: “And
have you been making love to your great lady?”

He had expected a flash of impatience in reply to this appeal and was
rather surprised at the manner in which Hyacinth began: “How shall I
explain? It’s not a question of that sort.”

“Has she been making love to you then?”

“If you should ever see her you’d understand how absurd that
supposition is.”

“How shall I ever see her?” returned Mr. Vetch. “In the absence of that
privilege I think there’s something in my idea.”

“She looks quite over my head,” said Hyacinth simply. “It’s by no means
impossible you may see her. She wants to know my friends, to know the
people who live in the Place. And she would take a particular interest
in you on account of your opinions.”

“Ah I’ve no opinions now—none any more!” the old man broke out sadly.
“I only had them to frighten Pinnie.”

“She was easily frightened,” said Hyacinth.

“Yes, and easily reassured. Well, I like to know about your life,” his
neighbour sighed irrelevantly. “But take care the great lady doesn’t
lead you too far.”

“How do you mean, too far?”

“Isn’t she a conspiring socialist, a dabbler in plots and treasons?
Doesn’t she go in for a general rectification, as Eustache calls it?”

Hyacinth had a pause. “You should see the place—you should see what she
wears, what she eats and drinks.”

“Ah you mean that she’s inconsistent with her theories? My dear boy,
she’d be a droll woman if she weren’t. At any rate I’m glad of it.”

“Glad of it?” Hyacinth repeated.

“For you, I mean, when you stay with her; it’s more luxurious!” Mr.
Vetch exclaimed, turning round and smiling. At this moment a little rap
on the floor above, given by Lady Aurora, announced that Hyacinth might
at last come up and see Pinnie. Mr. Vetch listened and recognised it,
and it led him to say with considerable force: “_There’s_ a woman whose
theories and conduct do square!”

Hyacinth, on the threshold, leaving the room, stopped long enough to
meet it. “Well, when the day comes for my friend to give up—you’ll
see.”

“Yes, I’ve no doubt there are things she’ll bring herself to
sacrifice,” the old man retorted. But Hyacinth was already out of
hearing.




XXVIII


Mr. Vetch waited below till Lady Aurora should come down and give him
the news he was in suspense for. His mind was pretty well made up about
Pinnie. It had seemed to him the night before that death was written
in her face, and he judged it on the whole a very good moment for her
to lay down her earthly burden. He had reasons for believing that the
future couldn’t be sweet to her. As regards Hyacinth his mind was far
from being at ease; for though aware in a general way that he had taken
up with strange company, and though having flattered himself of old
that he should be pleased to see the boy act out his life and solve
the problem of his queer inheritance, he was worried by the absence of
full knowledge. He put out his pipe in anticipation of Lady Aurora’s
reappearance and without this consoler was more accessible still to
certain fears that had come to him in consequence of a recent talk, or
rather an attempt at a talk, with Eustache Poupin. It was through the
Frenchman that he had gathered the little he knew about the occasion
of Hyacinth’s strange and high “social” adventure. His vision of the
matter had been wholly inferential; for Hyacinth had made a mystery of
his absence to Pinnie, merely letting her know that there was a lady
in the case and that the best luggage he could muster and the best way
his shirts could be done up would still be far from good enough. Poupin
had seen Godfrey Sholto at the “Sun and Moon,” and it had come to him,
through Hyacinth, that a remarkable feminine influence in the Captain’s
life was conducive in some way to his presence in Bloomsbury—an
influence, moreover, by which Hyacinth himself, for good or for evil,
was in peril of being touched. Sholto was the young man’s visible
link with a society for which Lisson Grove could have no importance
in the scheme of the universe save as a short cut (too disagreeable
to be frequently used) out of Bayswater; therefore if Hyacinth left
town with a new hat and a pair of kid gloves it must have been to move
in the direction of that superior circle and in some degree at the
solicitation of the before-mentioned feminine influence. So much as
this the Frenchman suggested explicitly enough, as his manner was, to
the old fiddler; but his talk had a strain of other and rarer reference
which excited Mr. Vetch’s curiosity rather than satisfied it. They were
obscure, these deeper implications; they were evidently painful to the
speaker; they were confused and embarrassed and totally wanting in that
effect of high hand-polish which usually characterised the lightest
allusions of M. Poupin. It was the fiddler’s fancy that his friend had
something on his mind which he was not at liberty to impart, and that
it related to Hyacinth and might, for those who took an interest in the
singular lad, give ground for no small anxiety. Mr. Vetch, on his own
part, nursed this anxiety into a tolerably definite shape: he persuaded
himself that the Frenchman had been leading the boy too far in the
line of social criticism, had given him a push on some crooked path
where a slip would be a likely accident. When on a subsequent occasion,
with Poupin, he indulged in a hint of this suspicion, the bookbinder
flushed a good deal and declared that his conscience was pure. It was
one of his peculiarities that when his colour rose he looked angry,
and Mr. Vetch held that his displeasure was a proof that in spite of
his repudiations he had been unwise; though before they parted Eustache
gave this sign of softness that he shed tears of emotion of which the
source was not clear to the fiddler and which appeared in a general way
to be dedicated to Hyacinth. The interview had taken place in Lisson
Grove, where Madame Poupin, however, had not shown herself.

Altogether the old man was a prey to suppositions which led him to feel
how much he himself had outlived the democratic glow of his prime. He
had ended by accepting everything—though indeed he couldn’t swallow the
idea that a trick should be played upon Hyacinth; and even by taking
an interest in current politics, as to which of old he had held the
opinion—the opinion deep-based in the Poupins to-day—that they had
been invented on purpose to throw dust in the eyes of disinterested
reformers and to circumvent the social solution. He had renounced that
problem some time ago; there was no way to clear it up that didn’t seem
to make a bigger mess than the actual muddle of human affairs, which by
the time one had reached sixty-five might mostly cease to exasperate.
Mr. Vetch could still feel a certain sharpness on the subject of the
prayer-book and the bishops, and if at moments he was a little ashamed
of having accepted this world could reflect that at all events he
continued to repudiate every other. The idea of great changes, however,
took its place among the dreams of his youth; for what was any possible
change in the relations of men and women but a new combination of the
same elements? If the elements could be made different the thing would
be worth thinking of; but it was not only impossible to introduce any
new ones—no means had yet been discovered for getting rid of the old.
The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies
and superstitions and stupidities of man, and their position with
regard to each other at any given moment could be of interest only
to the grim, invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the
ages, bow-backed over the table. This laxity had come upon our fiddling
friend with the increase of his measurement round the waist and with
that of the little heap of half-crowns and half-sovereigns that had
accumulated in a tin box very stiffly padlocked which he kept under his
bed and the interwoven threads of sentiment and custom uniting him to
the dressmaker and her foster-son. If he was no longer pressing about
the demands he felt he should have a right to make of society, as he
had been in the days when his conversation scandalised Pinnie, so he
was now not pressing for Hyacinth either; reflecting that though indeed
the constituted powers might have to “count” with him it would be in
better taste for him not to be importunate about a settlement. What
he had come to fear for the interesting youth was that he should be
precipitated by crude agencies into depths where the deplorable might
not exclude the ridiculous. It may even be said that Mr. Vetch had a
secret project of settling a little on his behalf.

Lady Aurora peeped into the room, very noiselessly, nearly half an
hour after Hyacinth had left it, and let the fiddler know that she was
called to other duties but that the nurse had come back and the doctor
had promised to look in at five o’clock. She herself would return
in the evening, and meanwhile Hyacinth was with his aunt, who had
recognised him without a protest; indeed seemed intensely happy that
he should be near her again and lay there with closed eyes, very weak
and speechless, holding his hand. Her restlessness had passed and her
fever abated, but she had no pulse to speak of and Lady Aurora didn’t
disguise the fact that by any good judgement she was rapidly sinking.
Mr. Vetch had already accepted it and after her ladyship had quitted
him he lighted another philosophic pipe upon it, lingering on, till
the doctor came, in the dressmaker’s dismal, forsaken bower, where in
past years he had indulged in so many sociable droppings-in and hot
tumblers. The echo of all her little simple surprises and pointless
contradictions, her gasping reception of contemplative paradox,
seemed still to float in the air; but the place felt as relinquished
and bereft as if she were already beneath the sod. Pinnie had always
been a wonderful hand at “putting away”; the litter that testified
to her most elaborate efforts was often immense, but the reaction in
favour of an unspeckled carpet was greater still; and on the present
occasion, before taking to her bed, she had found strength to sweep and
set in order as tidily as if she had been sure the room would never
again know her care. Even to the old fiddler, who had not Hyacinth’s
sensibility to the scenery of life, it had the cold propriety of a
place arranged for interment. After the doctor had seen Pinnie that
afternoon there was no doubt left as to its soon being the stage of
dismal preliminaries.

Miss Pynsent, however, resisted her malady for nearly a fortnight more,
during which Hyacinth was constantly in her room. He never went back
to old Crook’s, with whose establishment, through violent causes, his
relations seemed indefinitely suspended; and in fact for the rest of
the time that Pinnie demanded his care absented himself but twice from
Lomax Place during more than a few minutes. On one of these occasions
he travelled over to Audley Court and spent an hour there; on the other
he met Millicent Henning by previous understanding and took a walk with
her on the Embankment. He tried to find an hour to go and thank Madame
Poupin for a sympathetic offering, many times repeated, of _tisane_
concocted after a receipt thought supreme by the couple in Lisson Grove
(though little appreciated in the neighbourhood generally); but he
was obliged to acknowledge her kindness only by a respectful letter,
which he composed with some trouble, though much elation, in the French
tongue, peculiarly favourable, as he believed, to little courtesies
of this kind. Lady Aurora came again and again to the darkened house,
where she diffused her beneficent influence in nightly watches, in
the most modern sanative suggestions, in conversations with Hyacinth
more ingeniously addressed than her fluttered embarrassments might
have betrayed to the purpose of diverting his mind, and in tea-makings
(there was a great deal of this liquid consumed on the premises during
Pinnie’s illness) after a system more enlightened than the usual
fashion of Pentonville. She was the bearer of several messages and of
a good deal of medical advice from Rose Muniment, whose interest in the
dressmaker’s case irritated Hyacinth by its fine courage, which even at
second-hand was still extravagant: she appeared very nearly as resigned
to the troubles of others as she was to her own.

Hyacinth had been seized the day after his return from Medley with
a sharp desire to do something enterprising and superior on Pinnie’s
behalf. He felt the pressure of an angry sense that she was dying of
her poor career, of her uneffaced remorse for the trick she had played
him in his boyhood—as if he hadn’t long ago and indeed at the time
forgiven it, judging it to have been the highest wisdom!—of something
basely helpless in the attitude of her acquaintance. He wanted to
do something that should prove to himself he had got the very best
opinion about the invalid it was possible to have: so he insisted
that Mr. Buffery should consult with a West End doctor if the West
End doctor would consent to meet Mr. Buffery. An oracle not averse to
this condescension was discovered through Lady Aurora’s agency—she
had not brought him of her own movement because on the one hand she
hesitated to impose on the little household in Lomax Place the expense
of such a visit, and on the other, with all her narrow personal
economies for the sake of her charities, had not the means to meet it
herself; and in prevision of the great man’s fee Hyacinth applied to
Mr. Vetch, as he had applied before, for a loan. The great man came
and was wonderfully civil to Mr. Buffery, whose conduct of the case
he pronounced judicious; he remained several minutes in the house,
gazing at Hyacinth over his spectacles—he seemed rather more concerned
about him than about the patient—and with almost the whole of the Place
turning out to stare at his chariot. After all he consented to accept
no fee. He put the question aside with a gesture full of urbanity—a
course disappointing and displeasing to Hyacinth, who felt in a manner
cheated of the full effect of the fine thing he had wished to do for
Pinnie; though when he said as much or something like it to Mr. Vetch
the caustic fiddler greeted the observation with a face of amusement
which, considering the situation, verged on the unseemly.

Hyacinth at any rate had done the best he could, and the fashionable
doctor had left directions which foreshadowed commerce with an
expensive chemist in Bond Street—a prospect by which our young man
was to some extent consoled. Poor Pinnie’s decline, however, was
not arrested, and one evening more than a week after his return from
Medley, as he sat with her alone, it struck him that her mild spirit
must already have passed. The respectable nurse had moved away to
supper, and by the aid of the staircase a perceptible odour of fizzling
bacon indicated that a more cheerful state of things prevailed in
the lower regions. Hyacinth couldn’t make out if his old friend were
asleep or awake; he believed she had not lost consciousness, yet for
more than an hour she had given no sign of life. At last she put out
her hand as if aware he was near her and wished to feel for him, and
murmured: “Why did she come? I didn’t want to see her.” In a moment,
as she went on, he perceived to whom she was alluding: her mind had
travelled back through all the years to the dreadful day—she had
described every incident of it to him—when Mrs. Bowerbank had invaded
her quiet life and startled her sensitive conscience with a message
from the prison. “She sat there so long—so long. She was so very large
and I was so frightened. She moaned and moaned and cried—too dreadful.
I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t help it!” Her thought wandered from Mrs.
Bowerbank in the discomposed show-room, enthroned on the yellow sofa,
to the tragic creature at Milbank, whose accents again, for the hour,
lived in her ears; and mixed with this mingled vision was still the
haunting sense that she herself might have acted differently. That
had been cleared up in the past, so far as Hyacinth’s intention was
concerned; but what was most alive in Pinnie at the present hour was
the passion of repentance, of still further expiation. It sickened
him that she should believe these things were still necessary, and he
leaned over her and talked tenderly, said everything he could think of
to soothe her. He told her not to think of that dismal far-off time,
which had ceased long ago to have any consequences for either of them;
to consider only the future, when she should be quite strong again and
he would look after her and keep her all to himself and take care of
her better, far better than he had ever done before. He had thought of
many things while he sat with Pinnie watching the shadows made by the
night-lamp—high, imposing shadows of objects low and mean—and among
them he had followed with an imagination that went further in that
direction than ever before the probable consequences of his not having
been adopted in his babyhood by the dressmaker. The workhouse and the
gutter, ignorance and cold, filth and tatters, nights of huddling under
bridges and in doorways, vermin, starvation and blows, possibly even
the vigorous efflorescence of an inherited disposition to crime—these
things, which he saw with unprecedented vividness, suggested themselves
as his natural portion. Intimacies with a princess, visits to fine old
country-houses, intelligent consideration, even, of the best means of
inflicting a scare on the classes of privilege, would in that case not
have been within his compass; and that Pinnie should have rescued him
from such a destiny and put these luxuries within his reach represented
almost a grand position as opposed to a foul, if he could only have the
magnanimity to take it so.

Her eyes were open and fixed on him, but the sharp ray the little
dressmaker used to direct into Lomax Place as she plied her needle
at the window had completely left them. “Not there—what should I do
there?” she inquired very softly. “Not with the great—the great—” and
her voice failed.

“The great what? What do you mean?”

“You know—you know,” she went on, making another effort. “Haven’t you
been with them? Haven’t they received you?”

“Ah they won’t separate us, Pinnie; they won’t come between us as much
as that,” said Hyacinth; and he sank to his knees by her bed.

“_You_ must be separate—that makes me happier. I knew they’d find you
at last.”

“Poor Pinnie, poor Pinnie,” murmured the young man.

“It was only for that—now I’m going,” she sighed.

“If you’ll stay with me you needn’t fear,” he smiled at her.

“Oh what would _they_ think?” she quavered.

“I like you best,” he insisted.

“You’ve had me always. Now it’s their turn; they’ve waited.”

“Yes indeed they’ve waited!” Hyacinth said.

“But they’ll make it up; they’ll make up everything!” the poor woman
panted. Then she added: “I couldn’t, couldn’t help it!”—which was the
last flicker of her strength. She gave no further sign of consciousness
and four days later ceased to breathe. Hyacinth was with her and Lady
Aurora, but neither could recognise the moment.

Hyacinth and Mr. Vetch carried her bier with the help of Eustache
Poupin and Paul Muniment. Lady Aurora was at the funeral and Madame
Poupin as well and twenty neighbours from Lomax Place; but the most
distinguished member—in appearance at least—of the group of mourners
was Millicent Henning, the grave yet brilliant beauty of whose
countenance, the high propriety of whose demeanour and the fine taste
and general style of whose rich black “costume” excited no little
attention. Mr. Vetch had his idea; he had been nursing it ever since
Hyacinth’s return from Medley, and three days after Pinnie had been
consigned to the earth he broached it to his young friend. The funeral
had been on a Friday and Hyacinth had mentioned that he should return
to old Crook’s on Monday morning. This was Sunday night and he had
been out for a walk neither with Millicent Henning nor with Paul
Muniment, but alone, after the manner of old days. When he came in he
found the fiddler waiting for him and snuffing a tallow candle in the
blighted show-room. He had three or four little papers in his hand,
which exhibited some jottings of his pencil, and Hyacinth guessed,
what was the truth but not all the truth, that he had come to speak
to him about business. Pinnie had left a little will, of which she had
appointed her old friend executor; this fact had already become known
to our hero, who thought such an arrangement highly natural. Mr. Vetch
informed him of the purport of this simple and judicious document and
mentioned that he had been looking into the dressmaker’s “affairs.”
They consisted, poor Pinnie’s affairs, of the furniture of the house
in Lomax Place, of the obligation to pay the remainder of a quarter’s
rent and of a sum of money in the savings bank. Hyacinth was surprised
to learn that Pinnie’s economies had produced fruit at this late day
(things had gone so ill with her in recent years, and there had been
often such a want of money in the house) until Mr. Vetch explained to
him with eager clearness that he himself had watched over the little
hoard, accumulated during the period of her comparative prosperity,
with the stiff determination that it should be sacrificed only in
case of desperate stress. Work had become scarce with her but she
could still do it when it came, and the money was to be kept for the
very possible event of her turning helpless. Mercifully enough she
had not lived to see that day, and the sum in the bank had survived
her, though diminished by more than half. She had left no debts but
the matter of the house and those incurred during her illness. Of
course the fiddler had known—he hastened to give his young friend this
assurance—that Pinnie, had she become infirm, would have been able to
count absolutely upon _him_ for the equivalent, in her old age, of the
protection she had given him in his youth. But what if an accident had
overtaken Hyacinth? What if he had incurred some horrid penalty for
his revolutionary dabblings, which, little dangerous as they might be
to society, were quite capable, in a country where authority, though
good-natured, liked occasionally making an example, to put him on
the wrong side of a prison-wall? At any rate, for better or worse, by
pinching and scraping, she had saved a little, and of that little after
everything was paid off a fraction would still be left. Everything was
bequeathed to Hyacinth—everything but a couple of plated candlesticks
and the old “cheffonier” which had been so handsome in its day; these
Pinnie begged Mr. Vetch to accept in recognition of services beyond
all price. The furniture, everything he didn’t want for his own use,
Hyacinth could sell in a lump, and with the proceeds he could wipe
out old scores. The sum of money would remain to him; it amounted in
its reduced condition to about thirty-seven pounds. In mentioning this
figure Mr. Vetch appeared to imply that Hyacinth would be master of a
very pretty little fortune. Even to the young man himself, in spite of
his recent initiations, such a windfall seemed far from contemptible;
it represented sudden possibilities of still not returning to old
Crook’s. It represented them, that is, till he presently remembered
the various advances made him by the fiddler, and till he reflected
that by the time these had been repaid there would hardly be twenty
pounds left. That, however, was a far larger sum than he had ever had
in his pocket at once. He thanked the old man for his information and
remarked—and there was no hypocrisy in the speech—that he was too sorry
Pinnie had not given herself the benefit of the whole of the little
fund in her lifetime. To this her executor replied that it had yielded
her an interest far beyond any other investment, for he was persuaded
she had believed she should never live to enjoy it, and that this
faith had been rich to her in pictures, visions of the effect, for her
brilliant boy, of his “coming into” something handsome.

“What effect did she mean—do you mean?” Hyacinth asked. As soon as he
had spoken he felt he knew what the old man would say—it would be a
reference to Pinnie’s belief in his reunion with his “relations” and
to the facilities thirty-seven pounds would afford him for cutting
a figure among them; and for a moment Mr. Vetch looked at him as if
exactly that response were on his lips. At the end of the moment,
however, he replied quite differently.

“She hoped you’d go abroad and see the world.” The fiddler watched his
young friend and then added: “She had a particular wish you should go
to Paris.”

Hyacinth had turned pale at this suggestion and for a moment said
nothing. “Ah Paris!” he almost wailed at last.

“She would have liked you even to take a little run down to Italy.”

“Doubtless that would be jolly. But there’s a limit to what one can do
with twenty pounds.”

“How do you mean, with twenty pounds?” the old man asked, lifting his
eyebrows while the wrinkles in his forehead made deep shadows in the
candlelight.

“That’s about what will remain after I have settled my account with
you.”

“How do you mean, your account with me? I shan’t take any of your
money.”

Hyacinth’s eyes wandered over his interlocutor’s suggestive shabbiness.
“I don’t want to be beastly ungracious, but suppose _you_ should lose
your powers.”

“My dear boy, I shall have one of the resources that was open to
Pinnie. I shall look to you to be the support of my old age.”

“You may do so with perfect safety, except for that danger you just
mentioned—of my being imprisoned or hanged.”

“It’s precisely because I think the danger will be less if you go
abroad that I urge you to take this chance. You’ll see the world and
you’ll like it better. You’ll think society, even as it is, has some
good points,” said Mr. Vetch.

“I’ve never liked it better than the last few months.”

“Ah well, wait till you see Paris!”

“Oh, Paris, Paris,” Hyacinth repeated vaguely—and he stared into the
turbid flame of the candle as if making out the most brilliant scenes
there: an attitude, accent and expression which the fiddler interpreted
both as the vibration of a latent hereditary chord and a symptom of the
acute sense of opportunity.




BOOK FOURTH




XXIX


The Boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, with the
variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of shops and cafés seen
through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant
porches of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the
far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure
and prosperity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening
in June. Hyacinth had been walking about all day—he had walked from
rising till bedtime every day of the week spent since his arrival—and
now an extraordinary fatigue, a tremendous lassitude had fallen upon
him, which, however, was not without its delight of sweet satiety,
and he settled himself in a chair beside a little table in front of
Tortoni’s not so much to rest from it as to enjoy it. He had seen so
much, felt so much, learnt so much, thrilled and throbbed and laughed
and sighed so much during the past several days that he was conscious
at last of the danger of becoming incoherent to himself and of the need
of balancing his accounts.

To-night he came to a full stop; he simply sat at the door of the
most dandified café in Paris and felt his pulse and took stock of
his impressions. He had been intending to visit the Variétés Theatre,
which blazed through intermediate lights and through the thin foliage
of trees not favoured by the asphalt, on the other side of the great
avenue. But the impression of Chaumont—he relinquished that for the
present; it added to the luxury of his situation to reflect that he
should still have plenty of time to see the _succès du jour_. The same
effect proceeded from his determination to order a _marquise_ when
the waiter, whose superior shirt-front and whisker emerged from the
long white cylinder of an apron, came to take his commands. He knew
the decoction was expensive—he had learnt as much at the moment he
happened to overhear for the first time a mention of it; which had
been the night before as he sat in his stall during an _entr’acte_
of the Comédie Française. A gentleman beside him, a young man in
evening-dress, conversing with an acquaintance in the row behind,
recommended the latter to refresh himself with the luxury in question
after the play: there was nothing like it, the speaker remarked, of a
hot evening in the open air when one was thirsty. The waiter brought
Hyacinth a tall glass of champagne in which a pineapple ice was in
solution, and our hero felt he had hoped for a sensation no less
intense in looking for an empty table on Tortoni’s terrace. Very few
tables were empty, and it was his belief that the others were occupied
by high celebrities; at any rate they were just the types he had had
a prevision of and had wanted most to meet when the extraordinary
opportunity to come abroad with his pockets full of money (it was
more extraordinary even than his original meeting with the Princess)
turned real to him in Lomax Place. He knew about Tortoni’s from his
study of the French novel, and as he sat there he had a vague sense
of fraternising with Balzac and Alfred de Musset: there were echoes
and reminiscences of their works in the air, all confounded with the
indefinable exhalations, the strange composite odour, half agreeable,
half impure, of the Boulevard. “Splendid Paris, charming Paris”—that
refrain, the fragment of an invocation, a beginning without an end,
hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth’s ears; the only articulate words
that got themselves uttered in the hymn of praise his imagination had
been addressing to the French capital from the first hour of his stay.
He recognised, he greeted with a thousand palpitations, the seat of
his maternal ancestors—was proud to be associated with so much of the
superb, so many proofs of a civilisation that had no visible rough
spots. He had his perplexities and even now and then a revulsion for
which he had made no allowance, as when it came over him that the most
brilliant city in the world was also the most blood-stained; but the
great sense that he understood and sympathised was preponderant, and
his comprehension gave him wings—appeared to transport him to still
wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations.

In other days, in London, he had thought again and again of his
mother’s father, the revolutionary watchmaker who had known the ecstasy
of the barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his reveries
had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to nothing
about him. He figured him in his mind, this mystic ancestor, had a
conviction that he was very short like himself and had curly hair, an
immense talent for his work and an extraordinary natural eloquence,
together with many of the most attractive qualities of the French
character. But he was reckless and a little cracked, also probably
immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions;
his life had been an incurable fever and its tragic termination was a
matter of course. None the less it would have been a charm to hear him
talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which even political madness
could never quench; for his grandson had a theory that he spoke the
French tongue of an earlier time, delightful and sociable in accent
and phrase, exempt from the baseness of modern slang. This vague yet
vivid personage became our young friend’s constant companion from
the day of his arrival; he roamed about with Florentine’s boy hand in
hand, sat opposite him at dinner, by the small table in the restaurant,
finished the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer—treating
him furthermore to innumerable revelations and counsels. He knew the
lad’s secret without being told and looked at him across the diminutive
tablecloth where the great cube of bread, pushed aside a little, left
room for his elbows—it puzzled Hyacinth that the people of Paris should
ever have had the fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so big;
gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with
lips which seemed to murmur that when one was to die to-morrow one must
eat and drink, one must gratify all one’s poor senses all one could
to-day. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or
disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man
considered that Hyacinth Vivier was of his own time of life and could
enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. Wondering repeatedly
where the barricade on which his grandfather must have fallen had
been erected he at last satisfied himself—though I am unable to
trace the course of the induction—that it had bristled across the
Rue Saint-Honoré very near to the Church of Saint-Roch. The pair
had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through
the principal churches—the republican martyr was very good-natured
about this; through the passages and arcades, up and down the great
avenues, across all the bridges and above all again and again along
the river, where the quays were an endless entertainment to Hyacinth,
who lingered by the half-hour beside the boxes of old books on the
parapets, stuffing his pockets with fivepenny volumes while the bright
industries of the Seine flashed and glittered beneath him and on the
other bank the glorious Louvre stretched either way for a league. Our
young man took the same satisfaction in the Louvre as if he had been
invited there, as he had been to poor obliterated Medley; he haunted
the museum during all the first days, couldn’t look enough at certain
pictures nor sufficiently admire the high polish of the great floors
in which the golden frescoed ceilings repeated themselves. All Paris
struck him as tremendously artistic and decorative; he felt as if
hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy, Philistine world, a world
in which the taste was the taste of Little Peddlington and the idea
of beautiful arrangement had never had an influence. In his ancestral
city it had been active from the first, and that was why his quick
sensibility responded and why he murmured his constant refrain whenever
the fairness of the great monuments arrested him in the pearly silvery
light or he saw them take grey-blue, delicate tones at the end of
stately vistas. It seemed to him the place expressed herself, and
did it in the grand style, while London remained vague and blurred,
inarticulate, blunt and dim. Splendid Paris, charming Paris indeed!

Eustache Poupin had given him letters to three or four democratic
friends, ardent votaries of the social question, who had by a miracle
either escaped the cruelty of exile or suffered the outrage of pardon
and, in spite of republican _mouchards_ no less infamous than the
imperial and the periodical swoops of a despotism which had only
changed its buttons and postage-stamps, kept alive the sacred spark
which would some day become a consuming flame. Hyacinth, however, had
not had the thought of delivering these introductions; he had accepted
them because Poupin had had such a solemn glee in writing them, and
also because he had not the courage to let the couple in Lisson Grove
know how since that terrible night at Hoffendahl’s a change had come
over the spirit of his dream. He had not grown more concentrated,
he had grown more relaxed, and it was inconsistent with relaxation
that he should rummage out Poupin’s friends—one of whom lived in the
Batignolles and the others in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—and make
believe he cared for what they cared for in the same way as they cared
for it. What was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of how
the society that surrounded him should be destroyed; it was much more
the sense of the wonderful, precious things it had produced, of the
fabric of beauty and power it had raised. That destruction was waiting
for it there was forcible evidence, known to himself and others, to
show; but since this truth had risen before him in its magnitude he
had become conscious of a transfer, partial if not complete, of his
sympathies; the same revulsion of which he had given a sign to the
Princess in saying that now he pitied the rich, those who were regarded
as happy. While the evening passed therefore, as he kept his place at
Tortoni’s, the emotion that was last to visit him was compunction for
not having put himself in relation with poor Poupin’s friends, for
having neglected to make the acquaintances of earnest people.

Who in the world, if one should come to that, was as earnest as he
himself or had given such signal even though secret proofs of it?
He could lay that unction to his soul in spite of his having amused
himself cynically, spent all his time in theatres, galleries, walks of
pleasure. The feeling had not failed him with which he accepted Mr.
Vetch’s furtherance—the sense that since he was destined to perish
in his flower he was right to make a dash at the beautiful, horrible
world. That reflexion had been natural enough, but what was strange was
the fiddler’s own impulse, his desire to do something pleasant for him,
to beguile him and ship him off. What had been most odd in this was
the way Mr. Vetch appeared to overlook the fact that his young friend
had already had that year such a turn of dissipation as was surely rare
in the experience of London artisans. This was one of the many things
Hyacinth thought of; he thought of the others in turn and out of turn;
it was almost the first time he had sat still long enough to collect
himself. A hundred confused reverberations of the recent past crowded
on him and he saw that he had lived more intensely in the previous
six months than in all the rest of his time. The succession of events
finally straightened itself and he tasted over some of those rarest,
strangest moments. His last week at Medley in especial had already
become a far-off fable, the echo of a song; he could read it over as
a romance bound in vellum and gold, gaze at it as he would have gazed
at some exquisite picture. His visit there had been perfect to the
end, and even the three days compromised by Sholto’s sojourn had not
broken the spell, for the three more that had elapsed before his own
departure—when the Princess herself had given him the signal—were the
most important of all. It was then she had made it clear to him that
she was in earnest, was prepared for the last sacrifice. He felt her
his standard of comparison, his authority, his measure, his perpetual
reference; and in taking possession of his mind to this extent she had
completely renewed it. She was altogether a new term, and now that he
was in a foreign country he observed how much her conversation, itself
so foreign, had prepared him to understand it. In Paris he saw of
course a great many women and noticed almost all of them, especially
the actresses; inwardly confronting their movement, their speech, their
manner of dressing, with that of his extraordinary friend. He judged
her to be beyond them in every respect, though there were one or two
actresses who had the air of trying to copy her.

The recollection of the last days he had spent with her affected
him now like the touch of a tear-washed cheek. She had in the last
intimacy, strangest and richest of revelations, shed tears for him,
and it was his suspicion that her secret idea was to frustrate the
redemption of his vow to Hoffendahl, to the immeasurable body that
Hoffendahl represented. She pretended to have accepted it, and what
she said was simply that when he should have played his part she would
engage to save him—to fling a cloud about him as the goddess-mother of
the Trojan hero used in Virgil’s poem to _escamoter_ Æneas. What she
meant was in his view to prevent him from playing his part at all. She
was in earnest for herself, not for him. The main result of his closest
commerce with her, in which somehow, all without herself stooping,
she had only raised him higher and higher and absolutely highest,
had been to make him feel that he was good enough for anything. When
he had asked her the last day if he might write to her she said Yes,
after two or three weeks. He had written about Pinnie’s death, and
again just before coming abroad, and in doing so had taken account of
something else she had said in regard to their correspondence—that
she didn’t wish vague phrases, protestations or compliments; she
wanted the realities of his life, the smallest, the “dearest,” the
most personal details. Therefore he had treated her to the whole
business of the break-up in Lomax Place, including the sale of the
rickety furniture and similar sordid items. He had told her what that
transaction brought—a beggarly sum, but sufficient to help a little to
pay debts, and had informed her further that one of the ways Mr. Vetch
had taken to hurry him off to Paris was to press upon him thirty pounds
out of his quaint little hoard, crowning the sum already inherited
from Pinnie—which, in a manner that none of Hyacinth’s friends of
course could possibly regard as frugal or even as respectable, was now
consecrated to a mere excursion. He even mentioned that he had ended
by accepting the thirty pounds, adding that he feared his peculiar
situation—she would know what he meant by that—made for a failure of
proper dignity: it disposed one to grab all one could get, kept one at
least very tolerant of whims that took the form of offered comforts.

What he didn’t mention to his shining friend was the manner in which
he had been received by Paul Muniment and by Millicent Henning on his
return from Medley. Millicent’s reception had been of the queerest;
it had been quite unexpectedly mild. She had made him no scene of
violence and appeared to have given up the line of throwing a blur of
recrimination over her own equivocal doings. She treated him as if she
liked him for having got in with the swells; she had an appreciation
of success which would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that
he was really successful. She tried to make him describe the style
of life that was led in a house where people were invited to stay
like that without having to pay, and she surprised almost as much as
she gratified him by not indulging in any of her former digs at the
Princess. She was lavish of ejaculations when he answered certain of
her questions—ejaculations that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh I say!” and
“Oh my stars!”—and he was more than ever struck with her detestable
habit of saying “Aye, that’s where it is” when he had made some remark
to which she wished to give an intelligent and sympathetic assent.
But she didn’t jeer at the Princess’s private character; she stayed
her satire in a case where there was such an opening for it. Hyacinth
reflected that this was lucky for her: he couldn’t have stood it
(nervous and anxious as he was about Pinnie) if she had had at such a
time the bad taste to be low and abusive. Under that stress he would
have broken with her completely—would have been too disgusted. She
displeased him enough as it was by her vulgar tricks of speech. There
were two or three little, recurrent thumb-marks of the common that
smutched her more blackly for him than their size warranted—as when she
said “full up” for full, “sold out” for sold, or remarked to him that
she supposed he was now going to “chuck up” his work at old Crook’s.
It was as if he were fairly requiring of her to speak _better_ than
women of fashion. These phrases at any rate had fallen upon his ear
many a time before, but now they seemed almost unpardonable enough to
quarrel about. Not that he had any wish to quarrel, for if the question
had been pushed he would have admitted that to-day his intimacy with
the Princess had caused any claims he might have had upon Millicent to
lapse. Millicent was all discretion, however; she only, it was evident,
wished to convey to him that it was better for both parties they should
respect each other’s liberty. A genial understanding on this subject
was what Miss Henning desired, and Hyacinth forbade himself to inquire
what use she proposed to make of her freedom. During the month that
elapsed between Pinnie’s death and his visit to Paris he had seen her
several times, since the respect for each other’s freedom had somehow
not implied cessation of intercourse and it was only natural she should
have been soft to him in his bereaved condition. Hyacinth’s sentiment
about Pinnie was deep, and Millicent was clever enough to guess it;
the consequence of which was that on these occasions she was very soft
indeed. She talked to him almost as if she had been his mother and he
a convalescent child; called him her dearest dear and a precious young
rascal and her own old boy; moralised a good deal, abstained from beer
(till she learnt he had inherited a fortune), and when he remarked
once (moralising a little too) that after the death of a person we
have loved we are haunted by the memory of our failures of kindness,
of generosity, rejoined with a dignity that made the words almost a
contribution to the philosophic view, “Yes, that’s where it is!”

Something in her behaviour at this period had even made Hyacinth wonder
if there were not some mystical sign in his appearance, some fine
betrayal in the very expression of his face, of the predicament in
which he had been placed by Diedrich Hoffendahl; he began to suspect
anew the operation of that “beastly _attendrissement_” he had detected
of old in people who had the benefit of Miss Pynsent’s innuendoes. The
compassion Millicent felt for him had never been one of the reasons why
he liked her; it had fortunately been corrected, moreover, by his power
to make her furious. This evening, on the Boulevard, as he watched the
endless facial successions, one of the ideas that came to him was that
it was odd he should like her even yet; for heaven knew he liked the
Princess better, and he had hitherto supposed that when a sentiment of
this kind had the energy of a possession it made a clean sweep of all
minor predilections. But it was clear to him that she still existed for
him as a loud-breathing feminine fact, that he couldn’t feel he had
quite done with her or she with him, and that in spite of his having
now so many other things to admire there was still a comfort in the
recollection of her robust beauty and her primitive passions. Hyacinth
thought of her as some clever young barbarian who in ancient days
should have made a pilgrimage to Rome might have thought of a Dacian or
Iberian mistress awaiting his return on the rough provincial shore. If
Millicent judged his visit at a “hall” a proof of the sort of success
that was to attend him—how he reconciled this with the supposition
that she perceived as a ghostly crown intermingled with his curly hair
the lurid light of destiny, the aureola of martyrdom, he would have
had some difficulty in explaining—if Miss Henning considered, on his
return from Medley, that he had taken his place on the winning side
it was only consistent of her to borrow a grandeur from the fact of
his course of travel; and indeed by the time he was ready to start
she spoke of his participation in this privilege of the upper classes
as if she had invented it herself and had even contributed materially
to the funds required. It had been her theory from the first that she
only liked people of spirit; and Hyacinth certainly had never had so
much spirit as when he went “abroad,” after the fashion of Mr. Vetch of
old, with a hat-box. He could say to himself quite without bitterness
that of course she would profit by his absence to put her relations
with Sholto on a comfortable footing; yet somehow, after all, at this
moment, as her distant English face out-blossomed the nearer, the livid
Parisian, it had not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It
was the general brightness of Paris perhaps that made him see things
sharp; at any rate he remembered with kindness something she had said
to him the last time he saw her and that it touched him exceedingly at
the moment. He had happened to observe to her in a friendly way that
now Miss Pynsent had gone she was, with the exception of Mr. Vetch, the
person in his whole circle who had known him longest. To this Millicent
had replied that Mr. Vetch wouldn’t live for ever and that she should
then have the satisfaction of being his very oldest friend. “Oh well,
I shan’t live for ever either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to ask if
by chance he had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I
might get smashed in a row”; and when she broke out into scorn of his
silly notion of turning everything up—as if any one wanted to know what
a costermonger would like, or any of that low sort at the East End!—he
amused himself with inquiring if she were satisfied with the condition
of society and thought nothing ought to be done for people who at
the end of a lifetime of starvation wages had only the reward of the
hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave.

“I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything if ever _you_ was to slip up,”
she had answered simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness.
Then she had added: “There’s one thing I can tell you, Mr. Robinson:
that if ever any one was to do you a turn——!” And she had paused again,
tossing back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by the
plumes of a chieftainess, while Hyacinth asked what would occur in that
contingency. “Well, there’d be _one_ left behind who would take it up!”
she had announced; and in the tone of the declaration there had been
something clear and brave. It struck Hyacinth as a strange fate—though
not stranger after all than his native circumstances—that one’s memory
should come to be represented by a shop-girl overladen with bracelets
of imitation silver; but he was reminded that Millicent was a fine
specimen of a woman of a type opposed to the whining, and that in her
large, free temperament many disparities were reconciled.




XXX


On the other hand the intensity of Paris had not much power to
transfigure the impression made upon him by such intercourse with
Paul Muniment as he had enjoyed during the weeks that followed
Pinnie’s death—an impression considerably more severe than any idea of
renunciation or oblivion that could connect itself with Millicent. Why
it should have had the taste of sadness was not altogether clear, for
Muniment’s voice was as distinct as any in the chorus of approbation
excited by the news that the youth was about to cultivate the most
characteristic of the pleasures of gentility—an applausive unanimity
the effect of which was to place his journey to Paris in a light almost
ridiculous. What had got into them all—did they think he was good for
nothing but to amuse himself? Mr. Vetch had been the most zealous, but
the others clapped him on the back almost exactly in the same manner
he had seen his mates in Soho bring their palms down on one of their
number when it was disclosed to them that his “missus” had made him
yet once again a father. That had been Poupin’s tone, and his wife’s
as well; and even poor Schinkel, with his everlasting bandage, whom he
had met in Lisson Grove, appeared to feel it necessary to remark that
a little run across the Rhine while he was about it would open his
eyes to a great many wonders. The Poupins shed tears of joy, and the
letters which have already been mentioned and which lay day after day
on the mantel-shelf of the little room our hero occupied at an _hôtel
garni_ tremendously tall and somewhat lopsided in the Rue Jacob (that
recommendation proceeded also from Lisson Grove, the garni being kept
by a second cousin of Madame Eustache) these valuable documents had
been prepared by the obliging exile many days before his young friend
was ready to start. It was almost refreshing to Hyacinth when old
Crook, the sole outspoken dissentient, told him he was a blockhead to
waste his money on the bloody French. This worthy employer of labour
was evidently disgusted at such an innovation; if he wanted a little
recreation why couldn’t he take it as it had been taken in Soho from
the beginning of time, in the shape of a trip to Brighton or two or
three days of alcoholic torpor? Old Crook was right. Hyacinth conceded
freely that he was a blockhead, and was only a little uncomfortable
that he couldn’t explain why he didn’t pretend not to be and had a kind
of right to that compensatory ease.

Paul guessed why, of course, and smiled approval with a candour which
gave Hyacinth a strange inexpressible heartache. He already knew his
friend’s view of him as mainly ornamental, as adapted only to the
softer forms of the subversive energy, as constituted in short to
show that the revolution was not necessarily brutal and illiterate;
but in the light of the cheerful stoicism with which Muniment faced
the sacrifice our hero was committed to, the latter had found it
necessary to remodel a good deal his original conception of his
sturdy friend’s character. The result of this process was not that
he admired it less but that he felt almost awe-stricken in presence
of it. There had been an element of that sort in his appreciation
of Muniment from the first, but the weight now to carry was the
sense of such a sublime consistency. Hyacinth felt that he himself
could never have risen so high. He was competent to take the stiff
engagement to Hoffendahl and was equally competent to keep it; but
he couldn’t have had the same fortitude for another, couldn’t have
detached himself from personal prejudice so effectually as to put
forward in that manner for the terrible “job” a little chap he to all
appearance really liked. That Muniment did like him it never occurred
to the little chap to doubt. He had quite all the air of it to-day;
he had never been more good-humoured, more placidly talkative; he
was like an elder brother who knew that the “youngster” was clever
and felt rather proud of it even when there was no one there to see.
That temporary look of suspending their partnership which had usually
marked him at the “Sun and Moon” was never visible in other places;
in Audley Court he only chaffed his young friend occasionally for
taking him too seriously. To-day that devotee hardly knew just how
to take him; the episode of which Hoffendahl was the central figure
had, as far as one could see, made so little change in his attitude.
For a loyal servant, an effective agent, he was so extraordinarily
candid—bitterness and denunciation so rarely sat on his lips. The
criticism of everything—since everything was wrong—took so little of
his time. It was as if he had been ashamed to complain; and indeed for
himself as the months went on he had nothing particular to complain
of. He had had a rise at the chemical works and a plan of getting a
bigger room for Rosy was under serious consideration. On behalf of
others he never sounded the pathetic note—he thought that sort of thing
unbusiness-like; and the most that he did in the way of expatiation on
the woes of humanity was occasionally to allude to certain statistics,
certain “returns,” in regard to the remuneration of industries,
applications for employment and the discharge of hands. In such matters
as these he was deeply versed, moving ever in a dry, statistical and
scientific air in which it cost Hyacinth an effort of respiration to
accompany him. Simple and kindly as he was, and thoughtful of the
sufferings of beasts, attentive and merciful to small insects and
addicted even to kissing dirty babies in Audley Court, he sometimes
emitted a short, satiric gleam which showed that his esteem for the
poor was small and that if he had no illusions about the people who
had got everything into their hands he had as few about those who had
egregiously failed to do so. He was tremendously reasonable, which was
largely why Hyacinth admired him, having a desire to be so himself but
finding it terribly difficult.

Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy,
exact knowledge, the way he kept himself clean (save for fine chemical
stains on his hands) in circumstances of foul contact, constituted a
group of qualities that had always appeared to his admirer singularly
enviable. Most enviable of all was the force that enabled him to sink
personal sentiment where a great public good was to be attempted and
yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest. It seemed to
our friend that if _he_ had introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for
his purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such a recommendation
and everything had been settled, he would have preferred never to look
at the young fellow again. That was his weakness and Paul carried it
off far otherwise. It must be added that he had never made an allusion
to their visit to the great taskmaster; so that Hyacinth also, out of
pride, held his tongue on the subject. If his friend didn’t propose
expressly to yearn over him he wasn’t going to beg for it (especially
as he didn’t want it) by restless references. It had originally been
a surprise to him that Muniment should be willing to countenance a
possible assassination; but after all none of his ideas were narrow
(one had such a sense that they ripened all the while) and if a
pistol-shot would do any good he was not the man to raise pedantic
objections. It is true that as regards his quiet acceptance of the
predicament in which Hyacinth might be placed by it our young man had
given him the benefit of a certain amount of doubt; it had occurred
to him that perhaps Muniment had his own good grounds for believing
that imperative sign would never really arrive, so that he might
only be treating himself to the entertainment of judging of a little
bookbinder’s nerve. But in this case why did he take an interest in
the little bookbinder’s going to Paris? That was a thing he wouldn’t
have cared for had he held that in fact there was nothing to fear. He
despised the sight of idleness, and in spite of the indulgence he had
more than once been good enough to express on the subject of his young
friend’s sneaking love of ease what he would have been most likely
to say at present was: “Go to Paris? Go to the dickens! Haven’t you
been out at grass long enough for one while, didn’t you lark enough
in the country there with the noble lady, and hadn’t you better take
up your tools again before you forget how to handle them?” Rosy had
said something of that sort in her free, familiar way—whatever her
intention she had been in effect only a little less caustic than old
Crook: that Mr. Robinson was going in for a life of leisure, a life of
luxury, like herself; she must congratulate him on having the means
and the time. Oh the time—that was the great thing! She could speak
with knowledge, having always enjoyed these advantages herself. And she
intimated—or was she mistaken?—that his good fortune emulated hers also
in the matter of his having a high-born and beneficent friend (such a
blessing now he had lost dear Miss Pynsent) who covered him with little
attentions. Rose Muniment in short had been more exasperating than
ever.

The Boulevard became even more brilliant as the evening went on and
Hyacinth wondered whether he had a right to occupy the same table for
so many hours. The theatre on the other side discharged its multitude;
the crowd thickened on the wide asphalt, on the terrace of the
café; gentlemen accompanied by ladies of whom he knew already how to
characterise the type—_des femmes très-chic_—passed into the portals of
Tortoni. The nightly emanation of Paris seemed to rise more richly, to
float and hang in the air, to mingle with the universal light and the
many-voiced sound, to resolve itself into a thousand solicitations and
opportunities, addressed, however, mainly to those in whose pockets the
chink of a little loose gold might respond. Hyacinth’s retrospections
had not made him drowsy, but quite the reverse; he grew restless and
excited and a kind of pleasant terror of the place and hour entered
into his blood. But it was nearly midnight and he got up to walk
home, taking the line of the Boulevard toward the Madeleine. He passed
down the Rue Royale, where comparative stillness reigned; and when he
reached the Place de la Concorde, to cross the bridge which faces the
Corps Législatif, he found himself almost isolated. He had left the
human swarm and the obstructed pavements behind, and the wide spaces of
the splendid square lay quiet under the summer stars. The plash of the
great fountains was audible and he could almost hear the wind-stirred
murmur of the little wood of the Tuileries on one side and of the vague
expanse of the Champs Elysées on the other. The place itself—the Place
Louis Quinze, the Place de la Révolution—had given him a sensible
emotion from the day of his arrival; he had recognised so quickly
its tremendous historic character. He had seen in a rapid vision the
guillotine in the middle, on the site of the inscrutable obelisk, and
the tumbrils, with waiting victims, were stationed round the circle
now made majestic by the monuments of the cities of France. The great
legend of the French Revolution, a sunrise out of a sea of blood, was
more real to him here than anywhere else; and, strangely, what was
most present was not its turpitude and horror, but its magnificent
energy, the spirit of creation that had been in it, not the spirit of
destruction. That shadow was effaced by the modern fairness of fountain
and statue, the stately perspective and composition; and as he lingered
before crossing the Seine a sudden sense overtook him, making his heart
falter to anguish—a sense of everything that might hold one to the
world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great cities,
the charm of travel and discovery, the generosity of admiration. The
tears rose to his eyes as they had done more than once in the past six
months, and a question, low but poignant, broke from his lips, to end
in nothing. “How could he—how _could_ he——?” It may be explained that
“he” was a reference to Paul Muniment; for Hyacinth had dreamed of the
religion of friendship.

Three weeks after this he found himself in Venice, whence he addressed
to the Princess Casamassima a letter of which I reproduce the principal
passages.

“This is probably the last time I shall write you before I return
to London. Of course you’ve been in this place and you’ll easily
understand why here, especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear
Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable impressions, what a
revelation of the exquisite! I have a room in a little campo opposite
a small old church which has cracked marble slabs let into the front;
and in the cracks grow little, wild, delicate flowers of which I
don’t know the name. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered
leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress and with
buttons in it like a sofa; and it flops to and fro laboriously as women
and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little wooden
shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the middle
of the campo is a fountain that looks still older than the church;
it has a primitive, barbaric air, and I’ve an idea it was put there
by the first settlers—those who came to Venice from the mainland,
from Aquileia. Observe how much historical information I’ve already
absorbed; it won’t surprise you, however, for you never wondered at
anything after you discovered I knew something of Schopenhauer. I
assure you I don’t think of that musty misogynist in the least to-day,
for I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of as
they glide with a small clatter and with their old copper water-jars
to the fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the
effect is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look underfed)
is framed in the old faded shawl. They have also the most engaging
hair, which never has done curling, and they slip along together, in
couples or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s
eye—so that its geniality doesn’t matter—dressed in thin, cheap cotton
gowns whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything
else in Italy makes. The weather is splendid and I roast—but I like it;
apparently I was made to be spitted and ‘done,’ and I discover that
I’ve been cold all my life even when I thought I was warm. I’ve seen
none of the beautiful patricians who sat for the great painters—the
gorgeous beings whose golden hair was intertwined with pearls; but
I’m studying Italian in order to talk with the shuffling, clicking
maidens who work in the bead-factories—I’m determined to make one or
two of them look at me. When they’ve filled their old water-pots at the
fountain it’s jolly to see them perch them on their heads and patter
away over the polished Venetian stones. It’s a charm to be in a country
where the women don’t wear the hideous British bonnet. Even in my own
class—forgive the expression, I remember it used to offend you—I’ve
never known a young female in London to put her nose out of the door
without it; and if you had frequented such young females as much as I
have you would have learnt of what degradation that dreary imposition
is the source. The floor of my room is composed of little brick tiles,
and to freshen the air in this temperature one sprinkles it, as you no
doubt know, with water. Before long if I keep on sprinkling I shall be
able to swim about; the green shutters are closed and the place makes
a very good tank. Through the chinks the hot light of the campo comes
in. I smoke cigarettes and in the pauses of this composition recline
on a faded magenta divan in the corner. Convenient to my hand in that
attitude are the works of Leopardi and a second-hand dictionary. I’m
very happy—happier than I have ever been in my life save at Medley—and
I don’t care for anything but the present hour. It won’t last long,
for I’m spending all my money. When I’ve finished this I shall go forth
and wander about in the splendid Venetian afternoon; and I shall spend
the evening in that enchanted square of Saint Mark’s which resembles
an immense open-air drawing-room, listening to music and feeling
the sea-breeze blow in between those two strange old columns of the
piazzetta which seem to make a doorway for it. I can scarcely believe
that it’s of myself I’m telling you these fine things; I say to myself
a dozen times a day that Hyacinth Robinson isn’t in it—I pinch my leg
to see if I’m not dreaming. But a short time hence, when I’ve resumed
the exercise of my profession in sweet Soho, I shall have proof enough
that it has been my very self: I shall know this by the terrible grind
of the life and the penance to come.

“That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply demoralised. It won’t
be for you, however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my
demoralisation began from the moment I first approached you. Dear
Princess, I may have done you good, but you haven’t done me much.
I trust you’ll understand what I mean by that speech and not think
it flippant or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand and
enter into the misery of the people—though I protest I don’t know
much about it; but you’ve led my imagination into quite another train.
Nevertheless I’m not wholly pretending it’s all your fault if I’ve lost
sight of the sacred cause almost altogether in my recent adventures.
It’s not that it hasn’t been there to see, for that perhaps is the
clearest result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing as
we go, that want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the
immense majority of the human race. I’ve found them everywhere but
haven’t minded them. Forgive the cynical confession. What has struck
me is the great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of
them—the splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which doubtless
the miserable many have also in their degree contributed. The face
of Europe appears to be covered with them and they’ve had much the
greater part of my attention. They seem to me inestimably precious
and beautiful and I’ve become conscious more than ever before of how
little I understand what in the great rectification you and Poupin
propose to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things I shall be
too sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall
I tell you _le fond de ma pensée_, as you used to say?—I feel myself
capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a traitor, for you
know the obligation I supremely, I immutably recognise. The monuments
and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests
of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know
it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the
exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks
to which, all the same, the world is less of a ‘bloody sell’ and life
more of a lark—our friend Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too
cheap and to wish to substitute for them something in which I can’t
somehow believe as I do in things with which the yearnings and the
tears of generations have been mixed. You know how extraordinary I
think our Hoffendahl—to speak only of him; but if there’s one thing
that’s more clear about him than another, it’s that he wouldn’t have
the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He
would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every
one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little
piece of anything and I’ve a great horror of that kind of invidious
jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution. You’ll
say I talk of it all at my ease while in a delicious capital I smoke
cigarettes on a magenta divan; and I give you leave to scoff at me
if it turns out that when I come back to London without a penny in
my pocket I don’t hold the same language. I don’t know what it comes
from, but during the last three months there has crept over me a deep
mistrust of that same grudging attitude—the intolerance of positions
and fortunes that are higher and brighter than one’s own; a fear,
moreover, that I may in the past have been actuated by such motives,
and a devout hope that if I’m to pass away while I’m yet young it may
not be with that odious stain upon my soul.”




XXXI


He spent the first days after his return to London in a process
supposed by him to be the quest of a lodging; but in reality he was
pulling himself together for the business of his livelihood, an effort
he found by no means easy or agreeable. As he had told the Princess,
he was demoralised, and the perspective of old Crook’s dirty staircase
had never seemed so steep. He lingered on the brink before he plunged
again into Soho: he wished not to go back to the shop till he should be
settled and delayed to get settled in order not to go back to the shop.
He saw no one during this interval, not even Mr. Vetch; he waited to
call on the fiddler till he should have the appearance of not coming
as a beggar or a borrower—have recovered his employment and be able
to give an address, as he had heard Captain Sholto say. He went to
South Street—not meaning to go in at once but wishing to look at the
house—and there he had the surprise of seeing the advertisement of
an auctioneer in the window of the Princess’s late residence. He had
not expected to find her in town—having heard from her the last time
three weeks before, when she had said nothing about her prospects; but
he was puzzled by this indication that she had moved away altogether.
There was something in it all, however, that he felt he had at bottom
been expecting; it appeared to prove the justice of a suspicion
attached to all the steps of any intercourse with the Princess—a vague
apprehension that one might suddenly stretch out one’s hand and miss
her altogether from one’s side. He decided to ring at the door and
ask for news of her; but there was no response to his summons: the
stillness of an August afternoon—the year had come round again from his
first visit—hung over the place, the blinds were down and the caretaker
appeared to be absent. Before these facts he was much at a loss;
unless indeed he should address a letter to his wonderful friend at
Medley. It would doubtless be forwarded, though her short lease of the
country-house had terminated, as he knew, several weeks before. Captain
Sholto was of course a possible agent, a probable source of light; but
nothing would have induced Hyacinth to ask such a service of him.

He turned away from South Street with a strange sinking of the heart;
his state of ignorance struck inward, as it were—had the force of a
deeply disquieting portent. He went to old Crook’s only when he had
arrived at his last penny. This, however, was very promptly the case.
He had disembarked at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in his
pocket and had lived on that sum for three days. The old fiddler in
Lomax Place was having a chop before he went to the theatre, and he
invited Hyacinth to share his repast, sending out at the same time for
another pot of beer. He took the youth with him to the play, where, as
at that season there were very few spectators, he had no difficulty in
finding him a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of him and peered
strangely over his spectacles—Mr. Vetch wore the homely double glass in
these latter years—when he learned that Hyacinth had found a retreat
not in their old familiar quarter but in the unexplored purlieus of
Westminster. What had determined our young man was the fact that from
this part of the town the journey was comparatively a short one to
Camberwell; he had suffered so much, before Pinnie’s death, from being
separated by such a distance from his best friends. There was a pang
in his heart connected with the image of Paul Muniment, but none the
less the prospect of an evening hour from time to time in Audley Court
struck him as one of the few nameable beguilements of his odd future.
He could have gone straight to Camberwell to live, but that would carry
him too far from the scene of his profession, and in Westminster he was
nearer to old Crook’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He said to Mr.
Vetch that if it would give _him_ pleasure he would abandon his lodging
and take another in Pentonville. But the old man replied after a moment
that he should be sorry to put that constraint upon him; if he were to
make such an exaction Hyacinth would think he wanted to watch him.

“How do you mean, to watch me?”

Mr. Vetch had begun to tune his fiddle and he scraped it a little
before answering. “I mean it as I’ve always meant it. Surely you know
that in Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched you as a child on
the edge of a pond watches the little boat he has constructed and set
afloat.”

“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after all, very little of me,”
Hyacinth said.

“I made what I could of that little. It was better than nothing.”

Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s arm; he had never felt
so acute a kindness for him, not even when accepting his thirty pounds
before going abroad. “Certainly I’ll come to see you.”

“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr. Vetch observed
without heeding these words but continuing to scrape. He had always,
even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English
good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements) that there
was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner
of expressing gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory
tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity.

Hyacinth took little interest in the piece, which was an inanimate
revival; he had been at the Théâtre Français and the tradition of that
house was still sufficiently present to him to make any other style
of interpretation of comedy appear at the best but a confident form of
horseplay. He sat in one of the front stalls, close to the orchestra;
and while the thing went forward—or backward, ever backward, as it
seemed to him—his thoughts wandered far from the shabby scene and the
dusty boards, revolving round a question which had come up immensely
during the last few hours. The Princess was a _capricciosa_—this at
least had been Madame Grandoni’s account of her; and was that blank,
expressionless house in South Street a sign that an end had come to
the particular caprice in which he had happened to be involved? On his
return to London the desire to be with her again on the same terms as
at Medley had begun to ache in him like a sorrow or a dreaded wrong—so
sharp was his sense that if he mightn’t absolutely count upon her she
had been all cruelly, all abominably dishonest. Yet the wonder of the
other time remained, in the great silence that had come, altogether
a wonder. Circumstances had favoured in an extraordinary degree his
visit to her, and it was by no means clear that they would again be
so accommodating or that what had been possible for a few days should
be possible with continuity and in the midst of the ceremonies and
complications of London. Hyacinth felt poorer than he had ever felt
before, inasmuch as he had had money and spent it, whereas in previous
times he had never had it to spend. He never for an instant regretted
his squandered wealth, for he said to himself that he had made a good
bargain and become master of a precious equivalent. The equivalent
was a rich experience—an experience that would grow richer still as
he should talk it over, in the right conditions that _she_ would find
again, with the one person in the world to whom he was now interesting.
His poverty would be no obstacle to their friendship so long as he
should have a pair of legs to carry him to her door; for she liked
him better shabby than furbished up, and she had given him too many
pledges, they had taken together too many appointments, worked out too
many ideas, to be disconcerted on either side by obstacles that were
merely a part of the general conventionality. He was to go with her
into the slums, to introduce her to the worst that London contained—he
should have precisely to make acquaintance with it first—to show her
the reality of the horrors of which she dreamed the world might be
purged. He had ceased himself to care for the slums and had reasons
for not wishing to spend his remnant in the study of foul things;
but he would go through with his part of the engagement. He might be
detached and mechanical, but any dreariness would have a gilding that
should involve an association with her. What indeed if she should have
changed, have availed herself of that great right of unapologetic
inconsequence which he believed to be, at least in their relation
with nobodies, the highest luxury of the happy? What if, from a high
insolence which he thought of as lurking somewhere in the side-scenes
of her nature, though he had really not once seen it step to the front,
she should toss back her perfect head with a movement signifying
that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no more? His
imagination represented her this evening in places where a barrier
of dazzling light shut her out from access or even from any appeal.
He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms where “the dukes” had
possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded, covered with jewels.
When this vision grew intense he found a reassurance in reflecting that
after all she would be unlikely to throw him personally over so long as
she should remain as deeply compromised, subterraneously speaking, as
she had—successfully it seemed—tried to become, and that it would not
be easy for her to liberate herself from that entanglement. She had of
course told him more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already
committed herself, and he remembered with a strange perverse elation
that she had gone very far indeed.

In the intervals of the foolish play Mr. Vetch, who lingered in his
place in the orchestra while his mates descended into the little hole
under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend
occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time about the
dingy house at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished galleries he had
been staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters
and said: “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me
immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she
could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.”

“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured while his friend went on:

“I was in Paris in 1846; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue Mogador.
I judge from your letters that everything’s changed. Does the Rue
Mogador still exist? Yes, everything’s changed. I daresay it’s all much
finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events I’m right
in supposing—am I not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made you
really happy.”

“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth
replied.

The fiddler projected his old, white, conscious face; it had the stale
smoothness that betrays a sedentary occupation, thirty years spent in
a close crowd, amid the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint. “I
thought you were sad about Pinnie.”

“When I jumped with that avidity at your proposing I should take a
tour? Poor old Pinnie!” Hyacinth added.

“Well, I hope you think a little better of the world. We mustn’t make
up our minds too early in life.”

“Oh I’ve made up mine: the world’s an awfully jolly place.”

“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old pair of shoes—I like
so much less the idea of putting on the new ones.”

“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked. “What have I known but
kindness? People have done such a lot for me.”

“Oh well, of course they’ve liked you. But that’s all right,” murmured
Mr. Vetch, beginning to scrape again. What remained in Hyacinth’s mind
from their colloquy was the fact that this veteran, whom he regarded
distinctly as cultivated, had thought his letters clever. He only
wished he had made them cleverer still; he had no doubt of his ability
to have done so.

It may be imagined whether the first hours he spent at old Crook’s
after he took up work again were altogether to his taste, and what was
the nature of the reception given him by his former comrades, whom he
found exactly in the same attitudes and the same clothes (he knew and
hated every article they wore) and with the same primitive pleasantries
on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were mingled; the place and the
people affected him as loathsome, but there was something delightful in
handling his tools. He gave a little private groan of relief when he
discovered that he still liked his work and that the shining swarm of
his ideas in the matter of sides and backs returned to him. They came
in still brighter, more suggestive form, and he had the satisfaction
of feeling that his taste had improved, that it had been purified by
experience, and that the covers of a book might be made to express an
astonishing number of high conceptions. Strange enough it was, and
a proof surely of our little hero’s being a true artist, that the
impressions he had accumulated during the last few months appeared
to mingle and confound themselves with the very sources of his craft
and to lie open to technical “rendering.” He had quite determined by
this time to carry on his life as if nothing were hanging over him
and he had no intention of remaining a little bookbinder to the end of
his days; for that medium would after all translate only some of his
conceptions. Yet his trade was a resource, an undiminished resource,
for the present, and he had a particular as well as a general motive in
attempting new flights—the prevision of the exquisite work he was to do
during the coming year for the Princess, work it was so definite to him
he owed her. When that debt should have been paid and his other arrears
made up he proposed to himself to write something. He was far from
having decided as yet what it should be; the only point settled was
that it should be very remarkable and should not, at least on the face
of it, have anything to do with a fresh deal of the social pack. That
was to be his transition—into literature: to bind the book, charming as
the process might be, was after all much less fundamental than to write
it. It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once that it would be a fine
thing to produce a rare death-song.

It is not surprising that among such reveries as this he should have
been conscious of a narrow range in the tone of his old work-fellows.
They had only one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds and
had gone to spend them in France with a regular high one. He was aware
in advance of the diffusion of this legend and did his best to allow
for it, taking the simplest course, which was to gainsay nothing, but
to catch the ball as it came and toss it still further, enlarging and
embroidering humorously until Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the
rest, who struck him as not having washed since he left them, seemed
really to begin to understand how it was he could have spent such a
rare sum in so short a time. The impressiveness of this achievement
helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could see that, though
the treatment it received was superficially irreverent, the sense
that he was very sharp and that the springs of his sharpness were
somehow secret gained a good deal of strength from it. Hyacinth was not
incapable of being rather pleased that it _should_ be supposed, even by
Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand pounds
in less than five months, especially as to his own conscience the fact
had altogether yet to be proved. He got off on the whole easily enough
to feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men at old Crook’s
showed at any rate no symptoms of the social jealousy lying at the
bottom of the desire for a fresh deal. This was doubtless an accident
and not inherent in the fact that they were highly skilled workmen—old
Crook had no others—and therefore sure of constant employment; for it
was impossible to be more skilled in a special line than Paul Muniment,
who yet—though not out of jealousy of course—went in for the great
grim restitution. What struck him most, after he had got used again
to the sense of his apron and bent his back a while over his battered
table, was the simple, synthetic patience of the others who had bent
_their_ backs and felt the rub of that dirty drapery all the while he
was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling through boulevards and
museums and admiring the purity of the Venetian girl-face. With Poupin,
to be sure, his relations were all particular; but the explanations
he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such as could make him
very unhappy, once he had determined to resist as much as possible
the friction of a consciousness as galling at times as a misfitting
harness. There was, moreover, more sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face
when he learned that his young friend and pupil had failed to cultivate
in Paris the rich opportunities he had offered him. “You’re cooling
off, my child; there’s something about you! Have you the weakness to
flatter yourself that anything has been done or that humanity suffers
a particle less? _Enfin_ it’s between you and your conscience.”

“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth grimaced; this
expositor’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so, having
grown of late strangely hollow and rococo.

“You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is
absolute, except of course in those classes in which, from the very
nature of the infamies on which they’re founded, no conscience can
exist. Speak to me, however, of my City; _she_ is always divine,”
Poupin went on, though showing signs of irritation when Hyacinth
began to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend
of December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible
dilemma—gratified as a Parisian and a patriot but all disconcerted as
a lover of liberty: it cost him a pang to admit that anything amid
the _seuils sacrés_ was defective, yet he saw still less his way to
concede that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the
Second Empire or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of
the régime before which the inspired Commune had gone down in blood and
fire. “Ah yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it
will be finer still when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth
to turn back to his work with a feeling of sickness. Everywhere,
everywhere he saw the ulcer of envy—the greed of a party hanging
together only that it might despoil another to its advantage. In old
Eustache, one of the “pure,” this was especially disenchanting.




XXXII


The landing at the top of the stairs in Audley Court was always dark;
but it seemed darker than ever to Hyacinth while he fumbled for the
door-latch after he had heard Rose Muniment’s penetrating voice bid
him come in. During that instant his ear caught the sound, if it could
trust itself, of another voice, which prepared him a little for the
spectacle fully presented as soon as the door—his attempt to reach
the handle in his sudden agitation proving fruitless—was opened to him
by Paul. His friend stood there tall and hospitable, saying something
loud and jovial that he didn’t distinguish. His eyes had crossed the
threshold in a flash, but his step faltered a moment, only to obey,
however, the vigour of Muniment’s outstretched hand. Hyacinth’s glance
had gone straight, and though with four persons in it Rosy’s little
apartment looked crowded he saw no one but the object of his quick
preconception—no one but the Princess Casamassima seated beside the
low sofa, the grand feature introduced during his absence from London,
on which, arrayed in the famous pink dressing-gown, Miss Muniment now
received her visitors. He wondered afterwards why he should have been
so startled; for he had said often enough both to himself and to his
wonderful lady that so far as she was concerned he was proof against
astonishment: it was so evident that the note of her conduct would
always be a sort of splendour of freedom. In fact now that he perceived
she had made her way to Camberwell without his assistance the feeling
in possession of him was a refined embarrassment; he blushed a little
as he entered the circle, the fourth member of which was inevitably
Lady Aurora Langrish. Was it that his intimacy with the Princess gave
him a certain sense of responsibility for her course in respect to
people who knew her as yet so scantly, and that there was something
too little explained in the confidence with which she had practised a
descent upon them? It indeed came over our young man that by this time
perhaps they knew her a good deal; and moreover a woman’s behaviour
spoke for itself when she could sit looking in that fashion like a
radiant angel dressed in a simple bonnet and mantle and immensely
interested in an appealing corner of the earth. It took Hyacinth
but an instant to infer that her character was in a different phase
from any yet exhibited to him. There had been a glory of gentleness
about her the night he made her acquaintance, and she had never
ceased at any moment since to strike him as full of the imagination
of sympathy and pity, unless perforce in relation to her husband,
against whom—for reasons after all doubtless very sufficient—her heart
appeared absolutely steeled. Now at any rate this high mildness had
deepened to a rapture of active, ministering charity. She had put off
her splendour, but her beauty was unquenchably bright; she had made
herself humble for her pious excursion; she had, beside Rosy (who in
the pink dressing-gown looked much the more luxurious of the two),
almost the attitude of an hospital nurse; and it was easy to see from
the meagre line of her garments that she was tremendously in earnest.
If Hyacinth was flurried her own countenance expressed no confusion;
for her evidently this queer little bower of poverty and pain was
a place in which it was perfectly natural that _he_ should turn up.
The sweet, still greeting her eyes offered him might exquisitely have
conveyed that she had been waiting for him, that she knew he would come
and that there had been a tacit appointment for that very moment. They
said other things besides in their beautiful friendliness; they said:
“Don’t notice me too much or make any kind of scene. I’ve an immense
deal to say to you, but remember that I’ve the rest of our life before
me to say it in. Consider only what will be easiest and kindest to
these people, these delightful people, whom I find enchanting (why
didn’t you ever tell me more—I mean really more—about them?). It won’t
be particularly complimentary to them if you’ve the air of seeing
a miracle in my presence here. I’m very glad of your return. The
quavering, fidgety ‘ladyship’ is as striking as the others.”

Hyacinth’s reception at the hands of his old friends was cordial enough
quite to obliterate the element of irony that had lurked, fifteen
weeks before, in their godspeed; their welcome was not boisterous,
but it seemed to express the idea that the occasion, already so rare
and agreeable, needed but his arrival to make it perfect. By the
time he had been three minutes in the room he was able to measure
the impression produced by the Princess, who, it was clear, had cast
the charm of the worshipful over the little company. This was in the
air, in the face of each, in their smiling, their excited eyes and
heightened colour; even Rosy’s wan grimace, at all times screwed up to
ecstasy, had the supreme glitter of great occasions. Lady Aurora looked
more than ever dishevelled with interest and wonder; the long strands
of her silky hair floated like gossamer while, in her extraordinary,
religious attention, with her hands raised and clasped to her bosom as
if she were praying, her respiration rose and fell. She had never seen
any one like the Princess; but Hyacinth’s apprehension of some months
before had been groundless—she evidently didn’t think her “flashy.”
She thought her divine and a revelation of beauty and benignity; and
the illuminated, amplified room could contain no dissentient opinion.
It was her beauty primarily that “fetched” them, Hyacinth could easily
see, and it was not hidden from him that the impression had been made
as much on Paul Muniment as on his companions. It was not in Paul’s
nature to be jerkily demonstrative and he had not lost his head on
the present occasion; but he had already appreciated the difference
between a plain, suspicious man’s preconception of a meretricious,
factitious, fine lady and the actual influence of such a personage.
She was gentler, fairer, wiser than even a chemical expert could have
guessed in advance. In short she held the trio in her hand, having
reduced Lady Aurora to exactly the same simplicity as the others, and
she performed admirably and artistically for their benefit. Almost
before Hyacinth had had time to wonder how she had found the Muniments
out—he had no recollection of giving her specific directions—she
mentioned that Captain Sholto had been so good as to introduce her;
doing so as if she owed him that explanation and were a woman who would
be scrupulous in such a case. It was rather a blow to him to learn she
had been accepting the Captain’s mediation, and this was not softened
by her saying she was too impatient to wait for his own return: he
was apparently so pleased with the roving life that one couldn’t be
sure it would ever take place. The Princess might at least have been
sure that to see her again very soon was still more necessary to his
happiness than anything the roving life could offer. No adventure was
so prodigious as sticking as fast as possible to _her_.

It came out in the conversation he had with her, to which the others
listened with respectful curiosity, that Captain Sholto had brought
her a week before, but that she had then seen only Miss Muniment. “I
took the liberty of coming again by myself to-day, because I wanted to
see the whole family,” she developed, looking from Paul to Lady Aurora
with a bright blandness which purified the statement (as regarded her
ladyship) of impertinence. The Princess added frankly that she had
now been careful to arrive at an hour when she thought Mr. Muniment
might be at home. “When I come to see gentlemen I like at least to
find them,” she continued, and she was so great a lady that there
was no dowdy diffidence in her attitude: it was a simple matter for
her to call on a young man employed at large chemical works if she
had a reason. Hyacinth could see that the reason had already been
brought forward—her immense interest in problems that Mr. Muniment had
completely mastered and in particular their common acquaintance with
the extraordinary man whose mission it was to solve them. He learned
later that she had pronounced the name of the great, patient, powerful
Hoffendahl. A part of the lustre in Rosy’s eye came no doubt from the
declaration she had inevitably been moved to make in respect to any
sympathy with wicked theories that might be imputed to _her_; and of
course the effect of this intensely individual little protest—such was
always its effect—emanating from the sofa and the pink dressing-gown
was to render the home of the Muniments still more quaint and original.
In that spot Paul always gave the pleasantest go-by to any attempt to
draw out his views; so you would have thought, to hear him, that he
allowed himself the reputation of having them only in order to get a
“rise” out of his sister and let their visitors see with what wit and
spirit she could repudiate them. This, however, would only be a reason
the more for the Princess’s following up her scent. She would doubtless
not expect to get at the bottom of his ideas in Audley Court: the
opportunity would occur rather in case of his having the civility—on
which surely she might count—to come and talk them over with her in her
own house.

Hyacinth mentioned to her the disappointment he had had in South
Street and she replied: “Oh, I’ve given up that house and taken quite
a different one.” But she didn’t say where it was, and in spite of her
having given him so much the right to expect she would communicate to
him a matter so nearly touching them both as a change of address he
felt a great shyness about asking.

Their companions watched them as if they considered that something
rather witty and showy now would be likely to come off between them;
but Hyacinth was too full of regard for his beautiful friend’s tacit
notification to him that they must not appear too thick, which was
after all more flattering than the most pressing inquiries or the most
liberal announcements about herself could have been. She never asked
him when he had come back; and indeed it was not long before Rose
Muniment took that business on herself. Hyacinth, however, ventured to
assure himself if Madame Grandoni were still at her post and even to
remark—when his fellow-visitor had replied, “Oh yes, still, still. The
great refusal, as Dante calls it, has not yet come off”—“You ought to
bring her to see Miss Rosy. She’s a person Miss Rosy would particularly
appreciate.”

“I’m sure I should be most happy to receive any friend of the Princess
Casamassima,” said this young lady from the sofa; and when the Princess
answered that she certainly would not fail to produce Madame Grandoni
some day, Hyacinth—though he doubted if the presentation would really
take place—guessed how much she wished her old friend might have heard
the strange, bedizened little invalid make that speech.

There were only three other seats, for the introduction of the sofa—the
question profoundly studied in advance—had rendered necessary the
elimination of certain articles; so that Muniment, on his feet, hovered
round the little circle with his hands in his pockets, laughing freely
and sociably but not looking at the Princess; even if, as Hyacinth was
sure, none the less agitated by her presence.

“You ought to tell us about foreign parts and the grand things you’ve
seen; except that our distinguished visitor must know all about them,”
Muniment threw out to him. Then he added: “Surely, at any rate, you’ve
seen nothing more worthy of your respect than Camberwell.”

“Is this the worst part?” the Princess asked, looking up with her
noble, interested face.

“The worst, madam? What grand ideas you must have! We admire Camberwell
immensely.”

“It’s my brother’s ideas that are grand!” cried Rose Muniment,
betraying him conscientiously. “He does want everything changed, no
less than you, Princess; though he’s more cunning than you and won’t
give one a handle where one can take him up. He thinks all this part
most objectionable—as if dirty people won’t always make everything
dirty where they live! I daresay he thinks there ought to be no dirty
people, and it may be so; only if every one was clean where would be
the merit? You’d get no credit for keeping yourself tidy. If it’s
a question of soap and water, at any rate, every one can begin by
himself. My brother thinks the whole place ought to be as handsome as
Brompton.”

“Ah yes, that’s where the artists and literary people live, isn’t it?”
the Princess asked attentively.

“I’ve never seen it, but it’s very well laid out,” Rosy returned with
her competent manner.

“Oh I like Camberwell better than that,” Muniment said with due
amusement.

The Princess turned to Lady Aurora and, with the air of appealing to
her for her opinion, gave her a glance that travelled in a flash from
the topmost bow of her large misfitting hat to the crumpled points of
her substantial shoes. “I must get _you_ to tell me the truth,” she
breathed. “I want so much to know London—the real London. It seems so
difficult!”

Lady Aurora looked a little frightened, but at the same time gratified,
and after a moment responded: “I believe a great many artists live in
Saint John’s Wood.”

“I don’t care about the artists!” said the Princess, shaking her
head slowly and with the sad smile that sometimes made her beauty so
inexpressibly touching.

“Not when they’ve painted you such beautiful pictures?” Rosy demanded.
“We know about your pictures—we’ve admired them so much. Mr. Hyacinth
has described to us your precious possessions.”

The Princess transferred her smile to Rosy and rested it on that young
lady’s shrunken countenance with the same ineffable head-shake. “You do
me too much honour. I’ve no possessions.”

“Gracious, was it all a make-believe?” Rosy cried, flashing at Hyacinth
an eye that was never so eloquent as when it demanded an explanation.

“I’ve nothing in the world—nothing but the clothes on my back!” the
Princess repeated very gravely and without looking at their indiscreet
friend.

The words struck Hyacinth as an admonition, so that, though
much puzzled, he made no attempt for the moment to reconcile the
contradiction. He only replied: “I meant the things in the house. Of
course I didn’t know to whom they belonged.”

“There are no things in my house now,” the Princess went on; and there
was a touch of pure, high resignation in the words.

“Laws, I shouldn’t like that!” Rose Muniment declared, glancing with
complacency over her own decorated walls. “Everything here belongs to
me.”

“I shall bring Madame Grandoni to see you,” said the Princess
irrelevantly but kindly.

“Do you think it’s not right to have a lot of things about?” Lady
Aurora, with sudden courage, inquired of her distinguished companion,
pointing a vague chin at her but looking into one of the upper angles
of the room.

“I suppose one must always settle that for one’s self. I don’t like to
be surrounded with objects I don’t care for, and I can care only for
one thing—that is for one class of things—at a time. Dear lady,” the
Princess pursued, “I fear I must confess to you that my heart’s not in
bibelots. When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put
in their mouths I can dispense with tapestry and old china.” And her
fair face, bent charmingly, conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to
argue that if she was narrow at least she was honest.

Hyacinth wondered, rather vulgarly, what strange turn she had taken
and whether this singular picture of her denuded personality were not
one of her famous caprices, a whimsical joke, a nervous perversity.
Meanwhile he heard Lady Aurora urge anxiously: “But don’t you think we
ought to make the world more beautiful?”

“Doesn’t the Princess make it so by the mere fact of her existence?”
Hyacinth interposed, his perplexity escaping in a harmless manner
through this graceful hyperbole. He had observed that though the lady
in question could dispense with old china and tapestry she couldn’t
dispense with a pair of immaculate gloves which fitted her to a charm.

“My people have a mass of things, you know, but I’ve really nothing
myself,” said Lady Aurora, as if she owed this assurance to such a
representative of suffering humanity.

“The world will be beautiful enough when it becomes good enough,” the
Princess resumed. “Is there anything so ugly as unjust distinctions, as
the privileges of the few contrasted with the degradation of the many?
When we want to beautify we must begin at the right end.”

“Surely there are none of us but what have our privileges!” Rose
Muniment exclaimed with eagerness. “What do you say to mine, lying here
between two members of the aristocracy and with Mr. Hyacinth thrown
in?”

“You’re certainly lucky—with Lady Aurora Langrish. I wish she would
come and see _me_,” the Princess genially sighed as she rose.

“Do go, my lady, and tell me if it’s so poor!” Rosy went on gaily.

“I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of
art,” Hyacinth broke out. “The more the better, whether people are
hungry or not. In the way of ameliorating influences are not those the
most definite?”

“A piece of bread and butter’s more to the purpose if your stomach’s
empty,” the Princess declared.

“Robinson has been corrupted by foreign influences,” Paul Muniment
suggested. “He doesn’t care for bread and butter now; he likes French
cookery.”

“Yes, but I don’t get it. And have you sent away the little man, the
Italian, with the white cap and apron?” Hyacinth asked of the Princess.

She hesitated a moment but presently replied laughing and not in the
least offended at his question, though it was an attempt to put her
in the wrong from which Hyacinth had not been able to refrain in his
astonishment at these ascetic pretensions: “I’ve sent him away many
times!”

Lady Aurora had also got up; she stood there gazing at her beautiful
fellow-visitor with a timidity that made her wonder only more apparent.
“Your servants must be awfully fond of you.”

“Oh my servants!” said the Princess as if it were only by a stretch
of the meaning of the word that she could be said to enjoy the
ministrations of menials. Her manner seemed to imply that she had a
charwoman for an hour a day. Hyacinth caught the tone and determined
that since she was going, as it appeared, he would break off his own
visit and accompany her. He had flattered himself at the end of three
weeks of Medley that he knew her in every phase, but here was a field
of freshness. She turned to Paul Muniment and put out her hand to
him, and while he took it in his own his face was visited by the most
beautiful eyes that had ever rested there. “Will you come and see me
one of these days?” she asked with a voice as pure as her glance.

Hyacinth waited for Paul’s answer with an emotion that could only be
accounted for by his affectionate sympathy, the manner in which he had
spoken of him to the Princess and which he wished him to justify, the
interest he had in his appearing completely the fine fellow he believed
him. Muniment neither stammered nor blushed; he held himself straight
and looked back at his interlocutress with eyes at least as open as
her own to everything that concerned him. Then by way of answer: “Well
madam, pray what good will it do me?” And the tone of the words was
so humorous and kindly, and so instinct with a plain manly sense, that
though they were not gallant Hyacinth was not ashamed for him. At the
same moment he observed that Lady Aurora was watching their friend as
if she had at least an equal stake in what he might say.

“Ah none; only me perhaps a little.” With this rejoinder and with
a wonderful, sweet, indulgent dignity in which there was none of
the stiffness of pride or resentment the Princess quitted him and
approached Lady Aurora. She asked if _she_ wouldn’t do her the kindness
to come. She should like so much to know her and had an idea there was
a great deal they might talk about. Lady Aurora said she should be
delighted, and the Princess took one of her cards out of her pocket
and gave it to the noble spinster. After she had done so she stood a
moment holding her hand and brought out: “It has really been such a
happiness to me to meet you. Please don’t think it’s very clumsy if I
say I _do_ like you so!” Lady Aurora was evidently exceedingly moved
and impressed; but Rosy, when the Princess took leave of her and the
irrepressible invalid had assured her of the pleasure with which she
should receive her again, uttered the further truth that in spite of
this she herself could never conscientiously enter into such theories.

“If every one was equal,” Rosy asked, “where would be the gratification
I feel in getting a visit from a grandee? That’s what I have often
said to her ladyship, and I consider that I’ve kept her in her place a
little. No, no; no equality while _I_’m about the place!”

The company appeared to comprehend that there was a natural fitness
in Hyacinth’s seeing the great lady on her way, and accordingly no
effort was made to detain him. He guided her, with the help of an
attendant illumination from Muniment, down the dusky staircase, and
at the door of the house there was a renewed, brief leave-taking with
their host, who, however, showed no signs of relenting or recanting
in respect to the Princess’s invitation. The warm evening had by this
time grown thick and the population of Audley Court appeared to be
passing it for the most part in the open air. As Hyacinth assisted his
companion to thread her way through groups of sprawling, chattering
children, gossiping women with bare heads and babies at the breast and
heavily-planted men smoking very bad pipes, it seemed to him that their
project of exploring the slums was already in the way of execution.
He said nothing till they gained the outer street, but then, pausing
a moment, inquired how she would be conveyed. Had she a carriage
somewhere or should he try and get a cab?

“A carriage, my dear fellow? For what do you take me? I won’t trouble
you about a cab: I walk everywhere now.”

“But if I had not been here?”

“I should have gone alone”; and she smiled at him through the turbid
twilight of Camberwell.

“And where, please, gracious heaven? I may at least have the honour of
accompanying you.”

“Certainly, if you can walk so far.”

“So far as what, dear Princess?”

“As Madeira Crescent, Paddington.”

“Madeira Crescent, Paddington?” Hyacinth stared.

“That’s what I call it when I’m with people with whom I wish to be
fine, as with you. I’ve taken a small house there.”

“Then it’s really true that you’ve given up your beautiful things?”

“I’ve sold everything to give to the poor.”

“Ah, Princess——!” the young man almost moaned; for the memory of some
of her treasures was vivid to him.

She became very grave, even stern, and with an accent of reproach
that seemed to show she had been wounded where she was most sensitive
demanded: “When I said I was willing to make the last sacrifice did you
then believe I was lying?”

“Haven’t you kept _anything_?” he went on without heeding this
challenge.

She looked at him a moment. “I’ve kept _you_!” Then she passed her
hand into his arm and they moved forward. He saw what she had done;
she was living in a little ugly, bare, middle-class house and wearing
simple gowns; and the energy and good faith of her behaviour, with the
abruptness of the transformation, took away his breath. “I thought I
should please you so much,” she added after they had gone a few steps.
And before he had time to reply, as they came to a part of the street
where there were small shops, those of butchers, greengrocers and
pork-pie men, with open fronts, flaring lamps and humble purchasers,
she broke out joyously: “Ah, this is the way I like to see London!”




XXXIII


The house in Madeira Crescent was a low stucco-fronted edifice
in a shabby, shallow semicircle, and Hyacinth could see as they
approached it that the window-place in the parlour, on a level with
the street-door, was ornamented by a glass case containing stuffed
birds and surmounted by an alabaster Cupid. He was sufficiently
versed in his London to know that the descent in the scale of the
gentility was almost immeasurable for a person who should have moved
into that quarter from the neighbourhood of Park Lane. The street was
not squalid and was strictly residential; but it was mean and meagre
and fourth-rate and had in the highest degree that petty parochial
air, that absence of style and elevation, which is the stamp of whole
districts of London and which Hyacinth had already more than once
mentally compared with the high-piled, important look of the Parisian
perspective. It was marked by the union of every quality which should
have made it detestable to the Princess; it was almost as bad as Lomax
Place. As they stopped before the narrow ill-painted door, on which the
number of the house appeared on a piece of common porcelain cut in a
fanciful shape, it struck him that he had felt in their long walk the
touch of the passion persuading his companion to divest herself of her
superfluities, but that it would take the romantic out of one’s heroism
to settle one’s self in such a paltry Philistine row. However, if the
Princess had wished to mortify the flesh she had chosen an effective
means of doing so, and of mortifying the spirit as well. The long light
of the grey summer evening was still in the air and Madeira Crescent
wore a soiled, dusty expression. A hand-organ droned in front of a
neighbouring house and the cart of the local washerwoman, to which
a donkey was harnessed, was drawn up opposite. The local children as
well were dancing on the pavement to the music of the organ, and the
scene was surveyed from one of the windows by a gentleman in a dirty
dressing-gown, smoking a pipe, who made Hyacinth think of Mr. Micawber.
The young man gave the Princess a deep look before they went into
the house, and she smiled as if she guessed every comment he hadn’t
uttered.

The long, circuitous walk with her from the far-away south of London
had been strange and delightful; it reminded him more queerly
than he could have expressed of some of the rambles he had taken
on summer evenings with Millicent Henning. It was impossible to
resemble this young lady less than the Princess resembled her, but
in her enjoyment of her unwonted situation (she had never before,
on a summer’s evening—to the best of Hyacinth’s belief at least—lost
herself in the unfashionable districts on the arm of a seedy artisan)
the distinguished personage exhibited certain coincidences with
the shop-girl. She stopped as Millicent had done to look into the
windows of vulgar establishments and amused herself with picking out
the abominable objects she should like to possess; selecting them
from a new point of view, that of a reduced fortune and the domestic
arrangements of the “lower middle class,” and deriving extreme
diversion from the idea that she now belonged to that aggrieved
body. She was in a state of light, fresh, sociable exhilaration which
Hyacinth had hitherto not in the same degree seen in her, and before
they reached Madeira Crescent it had become clear to him that her
present phase was little more than a brilliant _tour de force_—which
he could yet not imagine her keeping up long, for the simple reason
that after the novelty and strangeness of the affair had passed away
she wouldn’t be able to endure the contact of so much that was common
and ugly. For the moment, none the less, her discoveries in this line
diverted her as all discoveries did, and she pretended to be sounding
in a scientific spirit—that of the social philosopher, the student and
critic of manners—the depths of the British Philistia. Hyacinth was
struck more than ever with the fund of life that was in her, the energy
of feeling, the high, free, reckless spirit. These things expressed
themselves, as the couple proceeded, in a hundred sallies and droll
proposals, kindling the young man’s pulses and making him conscious
of the joy with which, in any extravagance, he would bear her company
to the death. She affected him at this moment as playing with life so
audaciously and defiantly that the end of it all would inevitably be
some violent catastrophe.

She desired exceedingly that Hyacinth should take her to a music-hall
or a coffee-tavern; she even professed a curiosity to see the inside
of a public-house. Since she still had self-control enough to remember
that if she stayed out beyond a certain hour Madame Grandoni would
begin to worry about her they were obliged to content themselves with
the minor “lark,” as the Princess was careful to designate their peep
into an establishment, glittering with polished pewter and brass,
which bore the name of the “Happy Land.” He had feared she would turn
nervous after the narrow, befingered door had swung behind her, or
that at all events she would be disgusted at what she might see and
hear in such a place and would immediately wish to retreat. By good
luck, however, there were only two or three convivial spirits in
occupancy and the presence of the softer sex was apparently not so
rare as to excite surprise. The softer sex furthermore was embodied
in a big, hard, red woman, the publican’s wife, who looked as if she
were in the habit of dealing with all sorts and mainly interested in
seeing whether even the finest put down their money before they were
served. The Princess pretended to “have something” and to admire the
ornamentation of the bar; and when Hyacinth asked her in a low tone
what disposal they should make, when the great changes came, of such an
embarrassing type as that, replied off-hand, “Oh, drown her in a barrel
of beer!” She professed when they came out to have been immensely
interested in the “Happy Land” and was not content until Hyacinth had
fixed an evening on which they might visit a music-hall together. She
talked with him largely, by fits and starts, of his adventures abroad
and his impressions of France and Italy; breaking off suddenly with
some irrelevant but almost extravagantly appreciative allusion to
Rose Muniment and Lady Aurora and then returning with a question as
to what he had seen and done—the answer to which, however, in many
cases, she was not at pains to wait for. Yet it implied her having
paid considerable attention to what he told her that she should be
able to say toward the end, with that fraternising frankness which was
always touching because it appeared to place her at one’s mercy, to
show how she counted on one’s having an equal loyalty: “Well, my dear
friend, you’ve not wasted your time; you know everything, you’ve missed
nothing; there are lots of things you can tell me—so that we shall
have some famous talks in the winter evenings.” This last reference
was apparently to the coming season, and there was something in the
tone of quiet friendship with which it was uttered and which seemed to
involve so many delightful things, something that for Hyacinth bound
them still closer together. To live out of the world with her that way,
lost among the London millions in a queer little cockneyfied retreat,
was a refinement of intimacy—with revelations perhaps even beyond those
that had left him wonder-struck at Medley.

They found Madame Grandoni sitting alone in the twilight, very patient
and peaceful and having after all, it was clear, accepted the situation
too completely to fidget at such a trifle as her companion’s not coming
home at a ladylike hour. She had placed herself in the back part of the
tawdry little drawing-room, which looked into a small smutty garden
whence by the open front window the sound of the hurdy-gurdy and
the voices of the children romping to its music came to her through
the summer dusk. The influence of London was present in a mitigated
far-away hum, and for some reason or other at that moment the place
took on to our young friend the semblance of the home of an exile—a
spot and an hour to be remembered with a throb of fondness in some
danger or sorrow of after-years. The old lady never moved from her
chair as she saw the Princess come in with the little bookbinder, and
her observation rested on that member of their circle as familiarly
as if she had seen him go out with her in the afternoon. The Princess
stood smiling a moment before her mild monitress. “I’ve done a great
thing. What do you think I’ve done?” she asked as she drew off her
gloves.

“God knows! I’ve ceased to think!”—and Madame Grandoni stared up with
her fat, empty hands on the arms of her chair.

“I’ve come on foot from the far south of London—how many miles? four or
five—and I’m not a particle tired.”

“_Che forza, che forza!_” the old woman sighed. “She’ll knock you
up completely,” she added, turning to Hyacinth with her customary
compassion.

“Poor darling, _she_ misses the carriage,” Christina remarked, passing
out of the room.

Madame Grandoni’s eyes followed her and Hyacinth made out in them a
considerable lassitude, a plaintive bewilderment and surrender. “Don’t
you like to use cabs—I mean hansoms?” he asked, wishing to be of
comfort and suggestion.

“It’s not true I miss anything; my life’s only too full,” she replied.
“I lived worse than this—in my bad days.” In a moment she went on:
“It’s because you’re here—she doesn’t like Assunta to come.”

“Assunta—because I’m here?” Hyacinth didn’t immediately catch her
meaning.

“You must have seen her Italian maid at Medley. She has kept her and is
ashamed of it. When we’re alone Assunta comes for her hat and things.
But she likes you to think she waits on herself.”

“That’s a weakness—when she’s so strong! And what does Assunta think
of it?” Hyacinth asked, looking at the stuffed birds in the window,
the alabaster Cupid, the wax flowers on the chimney-piece, the florid
antimacassars on the chairs, the sentimental engravings on the walls—in
frames of papier-mâché and “composition,” some of them enveloped
in pink tissue paper—and the prismatic glass pendants attached to
everything.

“She says, ‘What on earth will it matter to-morrow?’”

“Does she mean that to-morrow the Princess will have her luxury back
again? Hasn’t she sold all her beautiful things?”

Madame Grandoni made up a face. “She has kept a few. They’re put away.”

“_A la bonne heure!_” Hyacinth cried with a laugh. He sat down with
the ironical old woman; he spent nearly half an hour in desultory
conversation with her before candles were brought in and while their
friend was in Assunta’s hands. He noticed how resolutely the Princess
had withheld herself from any attempt to sweeten the dose she had taken
it into her head to swallow, to mitigate the ugliness of her vulgar
little house. She had respected its horrible signs and tokens, had
left rigidly in their places the gimcracks finding favour in Madeira
Crescent. She had flung no draperies over the pretentious furniture and
disposed no rugs upon the staring carpet; and it was plainly her theory
that the right way to acquaint one’s self with the sensations of the
wretched was to suffer the anguish of exasperated taste. Presently a
female servant came in—not the sceptical Assunta, but a stunted young
woman of the maid-of-all-work type, the same who had opened the door to
the pair a short time before—and let him know of the Princess’s wishing
him to understand that he was expected to remain to tea. He learned
from Madame Grandoni that the custom of an early dinner followed in
the evening by the frugal repast of the lower orders was another of
Christina’s mortifications; and when shortly afterwards he saw the
table laid in the back parlour, which was also the dining-room, and
observed the nature of the crockery with which it was decorated, he
noted that whether or no her earnestness were durable it was at any
rate for the time intense. Madame Grandoni put before him definitely,
as the Princess had done only in scraps, the career of the two ladies
since his departure from Medley, their relinquishment of that fine
house and the sudden arrangements Christina had made to change her
mode of life after they had been only ten days in South Street. At
the climax of the London season, in a society which only desired
to treat her as one of its brightest ornaments, she had retired to
Madeira Crescent, concealing her address—with only partial success of
course—from every one, and inviting a celebrated curiosity-monger to
come and look at her bibelots and tell her what he would give for the
lot. In this manner she had parted with them at a fearful sacrifice.
She had wished to avoid the nine days’ wonder of a public sale; for,
to do her justice, though she liked to be original she didn’t like to
be notorious, an occasion of stupid chatter. What had precipitated
this violent step was a remonstrance received from her husband just
after she had left Medley on the subject of her excessive expenditure:
he had written her that it was past a joke—as she had appeared to
consider it—and that she must really pull up. Nothing could gall her
more than an interference on that head—since she maintained that she
knew the exact figure of the Prince’s income, of which her allowance
was an insignificant part—and she had pulled up with a vengeance, as
Hyacinth might perceive. The young man divined on this occasion one
of the eminent lady’s high anxieties, of which he had never thought
before—the danger of the Prince’s absolutely putting on the screw, of
his attempting to make her come back and live with him by withholding
supplies altogether. In this case she would find herself in a very
tight place, though she had a theory that if she should go to law
about the matter the courts would allow her a separate maintenance.
This course, however, it would scarce be in her character to adopt;
she would be more likely to waive her right and support herself by
lessons in music and the foreign tongues supplemented by the remnant of
property that had come to her from her mother. That she was capable of
returning to the Prince some day as an effect of her not daring to face
the loss of luxury was an idea that couldn’t occur to our youth in the
midst of her assurances, uttered at various times, that she positively
yearned for a sacrifice; and such an apprehension was less present
to him than ever while he listened to Madame Grandoni’s account of
the manner in which their friend’s rupture with the fashionable world
had been enacted. It must be added that the old lady devoted a deep
groan to her not knowing how it would all end, as some of Christina’s
economies were most expensive; and when Hyacinth pressed her a little
she proceeded to say that it was not at present the question of
complications arising from the Prince that troubled her most, but
the fear that his wife was seriously compromised by her reckless,
her wicked correspondences: letters arriving from foreign countries,
from God knew whom (Christina never told her, nor did she desire it),
all about uprisings and manifestations and liberations—of so much one
could be sure—and other matters that were no concern of honest folk.
Hyacinth but half knew what Madame Grandoni meant by this allusion,
which seemed to show that during the last few months their hostess had
considerably extended her revolutionary connexion: he only thought of
Hoffendahl, whose name, however, he was careful not to pronounce, and
wondered whether his friend had been writing to the Master to intercede
for _him_, to beg that he might be let off. His cheeks burned at the
thought, but he contented himself with remarking to his entertainer
that their extraordinary companion enjoyed the sense of danger. The old
lady wished to know how she would enjoy the hangman’s rope—with which,
_du train dont elle allait_, she might easily make acquaintance; and
when he expressed the hope that she didn’t regard him as a counsellor
of imprudence replied: “You, my poor child? Oh I saw into you at
Medley. You’re a simple _codino_!”

The Princess came back to tea in a very dull gown and with a bunch
of keys at her girdle; and nothing could have suggested the thrifty
housewife better than the manner in which she superintended the laying
of the cloth and the placing on it of a little austere refreshment—a
pile of bread and butter flanked by a pot of marmalade and a morsel
of bacon. She filled the teapot from a shiny tin canister locked up
in a cupboard, of which the key worked with difficulty, and made the
tea with her own superb hands; taking pains, however, to explain to
Hyacinth that she was far from imposing that régime on Madame Grandoni,
who understood that the grocer had a standing order to supply her,
for her private consumption, with any delicacy she might desire. For
herself she had never been so well as since following a homely diet. On
Sundays they had muffins and sometimes for a change a smoked haddock or
even a fried sole. Hyacinth lost himself in worship of the Princess’s
housewifely ways and of the exquisite figure she made as a small
bourgeoise; judging that if her attempt to combine plain living with
high thinking were all a burlesque it was at least the most finished
entertainment she had yet offered him. She talked to Madame Grandoni of
Lady Aurora; described her with much drollery, even to the details of
her dress; declared that she was a delightful creature and one of the
most interesting persons she had seen for an age; expressed to Hyacinth
the conviction that she should like her exceedingly if the poor dear
would only believe a little in _her_. “But I shall like her whether she
does or not,” the Princess all the same declared. “I always know when
that’s going to happen; it isn’t so common. She’ll begin very well with
me and be ‘fascinated’—isn’t that the way people begin with me?—but
she won’t understand me at all nor make out in the least what kind of
a queer fish I am, try as I may to show her. When she thinks she does
at last she’ll give me up in disgust and never know she has understood
me quite wrong. That has been the way with most of the people I’ve
liked; they’ve run away from me _à toutes jambes_. Oh I’ve inspired
aversions!” she mirthfully wailed as she handed Hyacinth his cup of
tea. He recognised it by the aroma as a mixture not inferior to that
of which he had partaken at Medley. “I’ve never succeeded in knowing
any one who would do me good, for by the time I began to improve under
their influence they could put up with me no longer.”

“You told me you were going to visit the poor. I don’t understand what
your Gräfin was doing there,” said Madame Grandoni.

“She had come out of charity—in the same way as I. She evidently goes
about immensely over there; I shall insist on her taking me with her.”

“I thought you had promised to let _me_ be your guide in those
explorations,” Hyacinth promptly pleaded.

The Princess looked at him a moment. “Dear Mr. Robinson, Lady Aurora
knows more than you.”

“There have been times surely when you’ve complimented me on my
knowledge.”

“Oh I mean more about the lower classes!” she returned; and oddly
enough there was a sense in which he was unable to deny the claim
made for her ladyship. He presently came back to something said by
his hostess a moment before, declaring that it had not been the way
with Madame Grandoni and him to take to their heels, and to this she
replied: “Oh you’ll run away yet! Don’t be afraid.”

“I think that if I had been capable of quitting you I should have
done it by this time: I’ve neglected such opportunities,” the old
woman sighed. Hyacinth now made out that her eye had quite lost or
intermitted its fine old pleasantry: she was troubled about many
things.

“It’s true that if you didn’t leave me when I was rich it wouldn’t
look well for you to leave me at present,” the Princess suggested; and
before Madame Grandoni could meet this speech she said to Hyacinth:
“I liked that odd man, your friend Muniment, so much for saying he
wouldn’t come to see me. ‘What good would it do him,’ poor fellow?
What good would it do him indeed? You were not so difficult: you held
off a little and pleaded obstacles, but one easily saw you’d come
down,” she continued while she covered her guest with her mystifying
smile. “Besides I was smarter then, more splendid; I had on gewgaws
and suggested worldly lures. I must have been more attractive. But
I liked him for refusing,” she repeated; and of the many words she
uttered that evening it was these that made most impression on our
hero. He remained an hour after tea, for on rising from the table she
had gone to the piano—not depriving herself of this resource she had a
humble instrument of the so-called “cottage” kind—and begun to play in
a manner that reminded him of her commemorative outburst, as he might
have fancied it, the day of his arrival at Medley. The night had grown
close and as the piano was in the front room he opened at her request
the window that looked into Madeira Crescent. Beneath it assembled the
youth of both sexes, the dingy loiterers, who had clustered an hour
before round the hurdy-gurdy. But on this occasion they didn’t caper
about; they leaned in silence against the area-rails and listened to
the wondrous music. When Hyacinth told the player of the spell she
had thrown on them she declared that it made her singularly happy; she
added that she was really glad, almost proud, of her day; she felt as
if she had begun to do something for the people. Just before he took
leave she encountered some occasion for saying that she was certain the
odd man in Audley Court wouldn’t come; and he forbore to contradict her
because he believed in fact he wouldn’t.




XXXIV


How right had been her prevision that Lady Aurora would be fascinated
at first was proved as soon as Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square—a visit
he was promptly led to pay by a deep sense of the obligations under
which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie’s death. The
conditions in which he found her were quite the same as those of his
visit the year before; she was spending the unfashionable season in
her father’s empty house and amid a desert of brown holland and the
dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen so much of her during
Pinnie’s illness that he felt—or had felt then—that he knew her almost
intimately, that they had become real friends, almost comrades, and
might meet henceforth without reserves or ceremonies. She was in spite
of this as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the other occasion:
not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and apparently
unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer. Hyacinth, however,
always liked extremely to be with her, for she was the person in the
world who quietly, delicately and as a matter of course treated him
most as a gentleman and appeared most naturally to take him for one.
She had never addressed him the handsome flattering freedoms that had
fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained at all her
view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptive manner, which took
all sorts of equalities and communities for granted, was a homage
to the idea of his fine essence. It was in this manner that she now
conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he found
himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian
theories of Venice in Belgravia after the fashion of the cosmopolites
bred by those wastes. It took him none the less but a few minutes
to be sure Lady Aurora’s heart was not in these considerations; the
deferential smile she bent upon him while she sat with her head thrust
forward and her long hands clasped in her lap was slightly mechanical,
her attitude all perfunctory. When he gave her his views of some of the
_arrière-pensées_ of M. Gambetta—for he had views not altogether, as he
thought, deficient in originality—she didn’t interrupt, for she never
interrupted; but she took advantage of his first pause to say quickly
and irrelevantly: “Will the Princess Casamassima come again to Audley
Court?”

“I’ve no doubt she’d come again if they’d particularly like her to.”

“I do hope she will. She’s very wonderful,” Lady Aurora richly breathed.

“Oh yes, she’s very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure.”

“Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to
have such an experience again. Don’t you think her quite different from
anybody one has ever seen?” But her ladyship added before waiting for
an answer to this: “I liked her quite extraordinarily.”

“She liked you just as much. I know it would give her great pleasure if
you could go to see her,” Hyacinth said.

“Fancy that!” his companion gasped; and she instantly obtained the
Princess’s address from him and made a note of it in a small shabby
pocket-book. She mentioned that the card the Princess had given her
in Camberwell exhibited in fact no address, and he recognised that
vagary—the Princess was so off-hand. Then she said, hesitating a
little: “Does she really care for the poor?”

“If she doesn’t,” the young man replied, “I can’t imagine what interest
she has in pretending to.”

“If she does she’s very remarkable—she deserves great honour.”

“You really care—so why is she more remarkable than you?” Hyacinth
demanded.

“Oh it’s very different—she’s so wonderfully attractive!” Lady Aurora
replied, making recklessly the one allusion to the oddity of her own
appearance in which he was destined to hear her indulge. She became
conscious of it the moment she had spoken, and said quickly, to turn
it off: “I should like to talk with her, but I’m rather afraid. She’s
tremendously clever.”

“Ah what she is—‘tremendously’—you’ll find out when you know her!” he
could but all portentously sigh.

His hostess looked at him a little and then vaguely returned: “How
very interesting!” The next moment she continued: “She might do so many
other things. She might charm the world.”

“She does that, whatever she does,” Hyacinth smiled. “It’s all by the
way; it needn’t interfere.”

“That’s what I mean, that most other people would be content—beautiful
as she is. There’s great merit when you give up something.”

“She has known a great many bad people and she wants to know some
good,” he explained. “Therefore be sure to go to her soon.”

“She looks as if she had known nothing bad since she was born,” said
Lady Aurora rapturously. “I can’t imagine her going into all the
dreadful places she’d have to.”

“You’ve gone into them, and it hasn’t hurt you,” he suggested.

“How do you know that? My family think it has.”

“You make me glad then that I haven’t a family,” said the young man.

“And the Princess—has she no one?”

“Ah yes, she has a husband. But she doesn’t live with him.”

“Is he one of the bad persons?” asked Lady Aurora as earnestly as a
child listening to a tale.

“Well, I don’t like to abuse him—he’s down.”

“If I were a man I should be in love with her,” said Lady Aurora. Then
she added: “I wonder if we might work together.”

“That’s exactly what she hopes.”

“I won’t show her the worst places,” her ladyship maliciously protested.

To which her visitor returned: “I expect you’ll do what every one else
has done—which is exactly what she wants!” Before he took leave he said
to her: “Do you know if Paul Muniment also liked the Princess?”

She meditated a moment, apparently with some intensity. “I think she
struck him as extraordinarily beautiful—as the most beautiful person he
had ever seen.”

“Does he still believe her a humbug?”

“Still?” asked Lady Aurora as if she didn’t understand.

“I mean that that was the impression apparently made upon him last
winter by my description of her.”

“Oh I’m sure he thinks her tremendously plucky!” Which was all the
satisfaction Hyacinth got just then as to Muniment’s estimate of the
Princess.

A few days later he returned to Madeira Crescent in the evening,
the only time he was free, the Princess having given him a general
invitation to take tea with her. He felt he ought to be discreet
in acting on it, though he was not without reasons that would have
warranted him in going early and often. He had a peculiar dread of her
growing used to him and tired of him—boring herself in his society; yet
at the same time he had rather a sharp vision of her boring herself
without him during the dull summer evenings when even Paddington was
out of town. He wondered what she did, what visitors dropped in, what
pastimes she cultivated, what saved her from the sudden vagary of
throwing up the whole of her present game. He remembered that there was
a complete side of her life with which he was almost unacquainted—Lady
Marchant and her daughters, at Medley, and three or four other persons
who had called while he was there being, in his experience, the only
illustrations of it—and didn’t know, by the same token, to what extent
she had in spite of her transformation preserved relations with her
old friends; but he made out as looming the day she would discover
that what she found in Madeira Crescent was less striking than what
she missed. Going thither a second time he noted, for all this, that
he had done her great injustice: she was full of resources, she had
never been so happy, she found time to read, to write, to commune
with her piano and above all to think—a delightful detachment from the
invasive, vulgar, gossiping, distracting world she had known hitherto.
The only interruption to her felicity was that she received quantities
of notes from her former acquaintance, endless appeals to give some
account of herself, to say what had become of her, to come and stay
with them in the country. With these survivals of her past she took
a very short way, she simply burned them without answering. She told
Hyacinth immediately that Lady Aurora had called two days before, at
an hour when she was not in, and that she had straightway addressed
her in return an invitation to come to tea any evening at eight
o’clock. That was the way the people in Madeira Crescent entertained
each other—the Princess knew everything about them now and was eager
to impart her knowledge; and the evening, she was sure, would be much
more convenient to Lady Aurora, whose days were filled with good works,
with peregrinations of charity. Her ladyship arrived ten minutes after
Hyacinth; she assured the Princess her invitation had been expressed
in a manner so flattering that she was unwilling to wait more than
a day to respond. She was introduced to Madame Grandoni and tea all
bustlingly served; Hyacinth being gratefully conscious the while of
the “considerate” way in which Lady Aurora forbore to appear bewildered
at meeting him in such society. She knew he frequented it, having been
witness of his encounter with their high personage in Audley Court; but
it might have startled her to have ocular evidence of the footing on
which he stood. Everything the Princess did or said at this time had
for effect, whatever its purpose, to make her seem more rare and fine;
and she had seldom given him greater pleasure than by the exquisite
art she put forth to win Lady Aurora’s confidence, to place herself
under the pure and elevating influence of the noble spinster. She made
herself small and simple; she spoke of her own little aspirations and
efforts; she appealed and persuaded; she laid her white hand on her
gentle guest’s, gazing at her with an interest all visibly sincere
but which yet derived half its effect from the contrast between the
quality of her beauty, the whole air of her person, and the hard,
dreary problems of misery and crime. It was touching and Lady Aurora
was touched; that was quite clear as they sat together on the sofa
after tea and the Princess protested that she only wanted to know
what her new friend was doing—what she had done for years—in order
that she might go and do likewise. She asked personal questions with a
directness that was sometimes embarrassing to the subject—he had seen
that habit in her from the first—and her yearning guest, though charmed
and excited, was not quite comfortable at being so publicly probed and
sounded. The public was formed of Madame Grandoni and Hyacinth; but the
old lady—whose intercourse with the visitor had consisted almost wholly
of watching her with a deep, speculative anxiety—presently shuffled
away and was heard, through the thin partitions that prevailed in
Madeira Crescent, to ascend to her own apartment. It seemed to Hyacinth
that he ought also in delicacy to retire, and this was his intention
from one moment to the other; to him certainly—and the very second time
she met him—Lady Aurora had made as much of her confession as he had a
right to look for. After that one little flash of egotism he had never
again heard her refer to her own feelings or conditions.

“Do you stay in town like this, at such a season, on purpose to attend
to your work?” the Princess asked; and there was something archly
rueful in the tone in which she made this inquiry—as if it cost her
just a pang to find that in taking such a line she herself had not
been so original as she hoped. “Mr. Robinson has told me about your
big house in Belgrave Square—you must let me come and see you there.
Nothing would make me so happy as that you should allow me to help you
a little—how little soever. Do you like to be helped or do you like to
go quite alone? Are you very independent or do you need to look up, to
cling, to lean on some one? Pardon me if I ask impertinent questions;
we speak that way—rather, you know—in Rome, where I’ve spent a large
part of my life. That idea of your being there by yourself, in your
great dull home, with all your charities and devotions, makes a kind
of picture in my mind; it’s quaint and touching, it’s like something
in some English novel. Englishwomen are so awfully accomplished, are
they not? I’m really a foreigner, you know, and though I’ve lived here
a while it takes one some time to find those things out _au juste_.
Is your work for the people therefore only one of your occupations
or is it everything, does it absorb your whole life? That’s what I
should like it to be for me. Do your family like you to throw yourself
into all this or have you had to brave a certain amount of ridicule?
I daresay you have; that’s where you English are strong, in braving
ridicule. They have to do it so often, haven’t they? I don’t know
whether I could do it. I never tried—but with you I think I would
brave anything. Are your family clever and sympathetic? No? the kind
of thing that one’s family generally is? Ah well, dear lady, we must
make a little family together. Are you encouraged or disgusted? Do
you go on doggedly or have you some faith, some great idea, that lifts
you up? Are you actively religious now, _par exemple_? Do you do your
work in connexion with any pious foundation or earnest movement, any
missions or priests or sisters? I’m a Catholic, you know—but so little
by my own doing! I shouldn’t mind in the least joining hands with
any one who’s really producing results. I express myself awkwardly,
but perhaps you know what I mean. Possibly you don’t know that I’m
one of those who believe that a great new deal is destined to take
place and that it can’t make things worse than they are already. I
believe, in a word, in the action of the people for themselves—the
others will never act for them; and I’m all ready to act _with_ them—in
any intelligent or intelligible way. If that shocks you I shall be
immensely disappointed, because there’s something in the impression you
make on me that seems to suggest you haven’t the usual prejudices, so
that if certain things were to happen you wouldn’t be afraid. You’re
beautifully shy, are you not?—but you’re not craven. I suppose that if
you thought the inequalities and oppressions and miseries now universal
were a necessary part of life and were going on for ever you wouldn’t
be interested in those people over the river (the bedridden girl and
her brother I mean); because Mr. Robinson tells me they’re advanced
socialists—or at least the brother is. Perhaps you’ll say you don’t
care for him—the sister, to your mind, being the remarkable one. She’s
indeed a perfect little _femme du monde_—she talks so much better than
most of the people in society. I hope you don’t mind my saying that,
because I’ve an idea you’re not in society. You can imagine whether I
am! Haven’t you judged it like me, condemned it and given it up? Aren’t
you sick of the egotism, the snobbery, the meanness, the frivolity,
the immorality, the hypocrisy? Isn’t there a great resemblance in our
situations? I don’t mean in our natures, for you’re far better than I
shall ever be. Aren’t you quite divinely good? When I see a woman of
your sort—not that I often do—I try to be a little less bad. You’ve
helped hundreds, thousands of people: you must help _me_!”

These remarks, which I have strung together, didn’t of course fall from
the Princess’s lips in an uninterrupted stream; they were arrested
and interspersed by frequent, inarticulate responses and embarrassed
protests. Lady Aurora shrank from them even while they gratified her,
blinking and fidgeting in the dazzling, direct light of her hostess’s
sympathy. I needn’t repeat her answers, the more so as they none of
them arrived at completion but passed away into nervous laughter and
averted looks, the latter directed at the ceiling, the floor, the
windows, and appearing to project a form of entreaty to some occult or
supernatural power that the conversation should become more impersonal.
In reply to the Princess’s allusion to the convictions prevailing
in the Muniment family she said that the brother and sister thought
differently about public questions but were of the same mind with
regard to the interest taken by persons of the upper class in the
working people, the attempt on the part of their so-called superiors
to enter into their life: they pronounced it a great mistake. At this
information the Princess looked much disappointed; she wished to know
if the Muniments deemed it so impossible to do them any good. “Oh I
mean a mistake from _our_ point of view,” said Lady Aurora. “They
wouldn’t do it in our place; they think we had much better occupy
ourselves with our own pleasures.” And as her new friend stared, not
comprehending, she went on: “Rosy thinks we’ve a right to our own
pleasures under all circumstances, no matter how badly off the poor may
be; and her brother takes the ground that we’re not likely to have them
much longer and that in view of what may happen we’re great fools not
to make the most of them.”

“I see, I see. That’s very strong,” the Princess murmured in a tone of
high appreciation.

“I daresay. But, all the same, whatever’s going to come one _must_ do
something.”

“You do think then that something’s going to come?” said the Princess.

“Oh immense changes, I daresay. But I don’t belong to anything, you
know.”

The Princess thought this over. “No more do I. But many people do. Mr.
Robinson for instance.” And she turned her golden light on Hyacinth.

“Oh if the changes depend on _me_——!” Mr. Robinson exclaimed with a
blush.

“They won’t set the Thames on fire—I quite agree to that!”

Lady Aurora had the manner of not considering she had a warrant for
going into the question of Hyacinth’s affiliations; so she stared
abstractedly at the piano and in a moment remarked to her hostess: “I’m
sure you play awfully well. I should like so much to hear you.”

Hyacinth could see their friend thought this _banal_. She had not asked
Lady Aurora to spend the evening with her simply that they should fall
back on the resources of the vulgar. Nevertheless she replied with
perfect good nature that she should be delighted to play; only there
was a thing she should like much better—which was that Lady Aurora
should narrate her life.

“Oh don’t talk about mine; yours, yours!” her ladyship cried, colouring
with eagerness and for the first time since her arrival indulging in
the free gesture of laying her hand on that of the Princess.

“With so many grand confidences in the air I certainly had better take
myself off,” said Hyacinth; and the Princess offered no opposition
to his departure. She and Lady Aurora were evidently on the point of
striking up a tremendous intimacy, and as he turned this idea over
walking away it made him sad for strange vague reasons that he couldn’t
have expressed.




XXXV


The Sunday following this occasion he spent almost entirely with the
Muniments, with whom, since his return to his work, he had been able
to have no long, fraternising talk of the kind that had marked their
earlier relations. The present, however, was a happy day; it added its
large measure to the esteem in which he now held the inscrutable Paul.
The warm, bright, September weather enriched even the dinginess of
Audley Court, and while in the morning Rosy’s brother and their visitor
sat beside her sofa the trio amused themselves with discussing a dozen
different plans for giving a festive turn to the day. There had been
moments in the last six months when Hyacinth had the conviction he
should never again be able to enter into such ideas as that, and these
moments had been connected with the strange conversion taking place in
his mental image of the man whose hardness—of course he was obliged to
be hard—he had never expected to see turned upon a passionate admirer.
At present, for the hour at least, the darkness had cleared away and
Paul’s company become a sustaining, inspiring influence. He had never
been kinder, jollier, safer, as it were; it had never appeared more
desirable to hold fast to him and trust him. Less than ever would an
observer have guessed at a good reason why the two young men might
have winced as they looked at each other. Rosy naturally took part in
the question debated between her companions—the question whether they
should limit their excursion to a walk in Hyde Park; should embark at
Lambeth Pier on the penny steamer which would convey them to Greenwich;
or should start presently for Waterloo Station and go thence by train
to Hampton Court. Miss Muniment had visited none of these scenes,
but she contributed largely to the discussion, for which she seemed
perfectly qualified; talked about the crowd on the steamer and the
inconvenience arising from drunken persons on the return quite as if
she had suffered from such drawbacks; reminded the others that the
view from the hill at Greenwich was terribly smoky and at that season
the fashionable world—half the attraction of course—altogether absent
from Hyde Park; and expressed strong views in favour of Wolsey’s old
palace, with whose history she appeared intimately acquainted. She
threw herself into her brother’s holiday with eagerness and glee, and
Hyacinth marvelled again at the stoicism of the hard, bright creature,
polished, as it were, by pain, whose imagination appeared never to
concern itself with her own privations, so that she could lie in her
close little room the whole golden afternoon without bursting into sobs
as she saw the western sunbeams slant upon the shabby, ugly, familiar
paper of her wall and thought of the far-off fields and gardens she
should never see. She talked immensely of the Princess, for whose
beauty, grace and benevolence she could find no sufficient praise;
declaring that of all the fair faces that had ever hung over her
couch—and Rosy spoke as from immense opportunities for comparison—she
had far the noblest and most refreshing. She seemed to make a kind
of light in the room and to leave it behind after she had gone. Rosy
could call up her image as she could hum a tune she had heard, and
she expressed in her quaint, particular way how, as she lay there in
the quiet hours, she repeated over to herself the beautiful air. The
Princess might be anything, she might be royal or imperial, and Rosy
was well aware how little _she_ should complain of the dulness of a
life in which such apparitions as that could pop in any day. She made
a difference in the place—it gave it a regular finish for her to have
come there; if it was good enough for a princess it was good enough
for the likes of _her_, and she hoped she shouldn’t hear again of
Paul’s wishing her to move out of a room with which she should have
henceforth such delightful associations. The Princess had found her
way to Audley Court and perhaps wouldn’t find it to another lodging,
for they couldn’t expect her to follow them about London at their
pleasure; and at any rate she had evidently been altogether struck
with the little room, so that if they were quiet and canny who could
say but the fancy would take her to send them a bit of carpet or a
picture, or even a mirror with a gilt frame, to make it a bit more
tasteful? Rosy’s transitions from pure enthusiasm to the imaginative
calculation of benefits were performed with a serenity peculiar to
herself. Her chatter had so much spirit and point that it always
commanded attention, but to-day Hyacinth was less tolerant of it than
usual, because so long as it lasted Muniment held his tongue, and
what he had been anxious about was much more Paul’s impression of the
Princess. Rosy made no remark to him on the monopoly he had so long
enjoyed of this wonderful lady: she had always had the manner of an
indulgent incredulity about Hyacinth’s social adventures, and he saw
the hour might easily come when she would begin to talk of their grand
acquaintance as if she herself had been the first to discover her. She
had much to say, however, about the nature of the connexion Lady Aurora
had formed with her, and she was mainly occupied with the glory she
had drawn upon herself by bringing two such exalted persons together.
She fancied them alluding, in the great world, to the occasion on which
“we first met—at Miss Muniment’s, you know”; and she related how Lady
Aurora, who had been in Audley Court the day before, had declared she
owed her a debt she could never repay. The two ladies had liked each
other more, almost, than they liked any one; and wasn’t it a rare
picture to think of them moving hand in hand, like great twin lilies,
through the bright upper air? Muniment inquired in rather a coarse,
unsympathetic way what the mischief she ever wanted of _her_; which led
Hyacinth to demand in return: “What do you mean? What does who want of
whom?”

“What does the beauty of beauties want of _our_ poor plain lady? She
has a totally different stamp. I don’t know much about women, but I can
see that.”

“Where do you see a different stamp? They both have the stamp of their
rank!” cried Rosy.

“Who can ever tell what women want, at any time?” Hyacinth asked with
the off-handedness of a man of the world.

“Well, my boy, if you don’t know any more than I you disappoint me!
Perhaps if we wait long enough she’ll tell us some day herself.”

“Tell you what she wants of Lady Aurora?”

“I don’t mind about Lady Aurora so much; but what in the name of long
journeys she wants with _us_!”

“Don’t you think you’re worth a long journey?” Rosy cried gaily. “If
you weren’t my brother, which is handy for seeing you, and I weren’t
confined to my sofa, I’d go from one end of England to the other to
make your acquaintance! He’s in love with the Princess,” she went on to
Hyacinth, “and he asks those senseless questions to cover it up. What
does any one want of anything?”

It was decided at last that the two young men should go down to
Greenwich, and after they had partaken of bread and cheese with Rosy
they embarked on a penny steamer. The boat was densely crowded, and
they leaned, rather squeezed together, in the fore part of it, against
the rail of the deck, and watched the big black fringe of the yellow
stream. The river had always for Hyacinth a deep beguilement. The
ambiguous appeal he had felt as a child in all the aspects of London
came back to him from the dark detail of its banks and the sordid
agitation of its bosom: the great arches and pillars of the bridges,
where the water rushed and the funnels tipped and sounds made an echo
and there seemed an overhanging of interminable processions; the miles
of ugly wharves and warehouses; the lean protrusions of chimney, mast
and crane; the painted signs of grimy industries staring from shore to
shore; the strange, flat, obstructive barges, straining and bumping
on some business as to which everything was vague but that it was
remarkably dirty; the clumsy coasters and colliers which thickened
as one went down; the small loafing boats whose occupants, somehow,
looking up from their oars at the steamer, as they rocked in the oily
undulations of its wake, appeared profane and sarcastic; in short all
the grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing activity of the turbid flood.
In the good-natured crowd, amid the fumes of vile tobacco, beneath
the shower of sooty particles and to the accompaniment of the bagpipe
of a dingy Highlander who sketched occasionally an unconvincing reel,
Hyacinth forbore to speak to his companion of what he had most at
heart; but later, as they lay in the brown, crushed grass on one of
the slopes of Greenwich Park and saw the river stretch away and shine
beyond the pompous colonnades of the Hospital, he asked him if there
were any truth in what Rosy had said about his being sweet on their
friend the Princess. He said “their friend” on purpose, speaking as
if, now that she had been twice to Audley Court, Muniment might be
regarded as knowing her almost as well as he himself did. He wished to
conjure away the idea that he was jealous of Paul, and if he desired
information on the point I have mentioned this was because it still
made him almost as uncomfortable as it had done at first that his
comrade should take the scoffing view. He didn’t easily see such a
fellow as Muniment wheel about from one day to the other, but he had
been present at the most exquisite exhibition he had ever observed
the Princess make of that divine power of conciliation which was not
perhaps in social intercourse the art she chiefly exercised but was
certainly the most wonderful of her secrets, and it would be remarkable
indeed that a sane young man shouldn’t have been affected by it. It
was familiar to Hyacinth that Muniment wasn’t easily reached or rubbed
up by women, but this might perfectly have been the case without
detriment to the Princess’s ability to work a miracle. The companions
had wandered through the great halls and courts of the Hospital; had
gazed up at the glories of the famous painted chamber and admired
the long and lurid series of the naval victories of England—Muniment
remarking to his friend that he supposed he had seen the match to all
that in foreign parts, offensive little travelled beggar that he was.
They had not ordered a fish-dinner either at the “Trafalgar” or the
“Ship”—having a frugal vision of tea and shrimps with Rosy on their
return—but they had laboured up and down the steep undulations of the
shabby, charming park; made advances to the tame deer and seen them
amble foolishly away; watched the young of both sexes, hilarious and
red in the face, roll in promiscuous accouplement over the slopes;
gazed at the little brick observatory, perched on one of the knolls,
which sets the time to English history and in which Hyacinth could see
that his companion took an expert, a technical interest; wandered out
of one of the upper gates and admired the trimness of the little villas
at Blackheath, where Muniment declared it his conception of supreme
social success to be able to live. He pointed out two or three small
semi-detached houses, faced with stucco and with “Mortimer Lodge” or
“The Sycamores” inscribed on the gate-posts, and Hyacinth guessed these
to be the sort of place where he would like to end his days—in high
pure air, with a genteel window for Rosy’s couch and a cheerful view
of suburban excursions. It was when they came back into the Park that,
being rather hot and a little sated, they stretched themselves under a
tree and Hyacinth yielded to his curiosity.

“Sweet on her—sweet on her, my boy!” said Muniment. “I might as well be
sweet on the dome of Saint Paul’s, which I just make out off there.”

“The dome of Saint Paul’s doesn’t come to see you and doesn’t ask you
to return the visit.”

“Oh I don’t return visits—I’ve got plenty of jobs of my own to attend
to. If I don’t put myself out for the Princess isn’t that a sufficient
answer to your question?”

“I’m by no means sure,” said Hyacinth. “If you went to see her, simply
and civilly, because she asked you, I shouldn’t regard it as a proof
you had taken a fancy to her. Your hanging off is more suspicious; it
may mean that you don’t trust yourself—that you’re in danger of falling
in love if you go in for a more intimate acquaintance.”

“It’s a rum go, your wanting me to make up to her. I shouldn’t think
it would suit your book,” Muniment returned while he stared at the sky
with his hands clasped under his head.

“Do you suppose I’m afraid of you?” his comrade asked. “Besides,”
Hyacinth added in a moment, “why the devil should I care now?”

Paul made for a little no rejoinder; he turned over on his side and,
with his arm resting on the ground, leaned his head on his hand.
Hyacinth felt his eyes on his own face, but he also felt himself
colouring and didn’t meet them. He had taken a private vow never to
indulge, to this companion, in certain inauspicious references, and the
words just spoken had slipped out of his mouth too easily. “What do you
mean by that?” Paul demanded at last; and when Hyacinth looked at him
he saw nothing but the strong, fresh, irresponsible, the all so manly
and sturdy face. Its owner had had time before speaking to prefigure a
meaning.

Suddenly an impulse he had never known before, or rather that he
had always resisted, took possession of our young man. There was a
mystery which it concerned his happiness to clear up, and he became
unconscious of his scruples, of his pride, of the strength he had
ever believed to be in him—the strength for going through his work and
passing away without a look behind. He sat forward on the grass with
his arms round his knees and offered his friend a presence quickened by
his difficulties. For a minute the two pairs of eyes met with extreme
clearness, and then Hyacinth brought out: “What an extraordinary chap
you are!”

“You’ve hit it there!” Paul smiled.

“I don’t want to make a scene or work on your feelings, but how will
you like it when I’m strung up on the gallows?”

“You mean for Hoffendahl’s job? That’s what you were alluding to just
now?” Muniment lay there in the same position, chewing a long blade of
dry grass which he held to his lips with his free hand.

“I didn’t mean to speak of it; but after all why shouldn’t it come up?
Naturally I’ve thought of it a good deal.”

“What good does that do?” Muniment returned. “I hoped you didn’t—I
noticed you never spoke of it. You don’t like it. You’d rather chuck it
up,” he added.

There was not in his voice the faintest note of irony or contempt, no
sign whatever that he passed judgement on such an attitude. He spoke
in a quiet, human, memorising manner, as if it had originally quite
entered into his thought to allow for weak regrets. Nevertheless the
complete reasonableness of his tone itself cast a chill on Hyacinth’s
spirit; it was like the touch of a hand at once very firm and very
soft, yet strangely cold. “I don’t want in the least to repudiate
business, but did you suppose I liked it?” our hero asked with rather
a forced laugh.

“My dear fellow, how could I tell? You like a lot of things I don’t.
You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable
sensations—whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”

“If you object, for yourself, to change, and are so fond of still
waters, why have you associated yourself with a revolutionary
movement?” Hyacinth demanded with a little air of making rather a good
point.

“Just for that reason!” Paul blandly said. “Isn’t our revolutionary
movement as quiet as the grave? Who knows, who suspects anything like
the full extent of it?”

“I see. You take only the quiet parts!”

In speaking these words Hyacinth had had no derisive intention, but a
moment later he flushed with the sense that they had a sufficiently low
sound. Paul, however, appeared to see no offence in them, and it was
in the gentlest, most suggestive way, as if he had been thinking over
what might comfort his little mate, that he replied: “There’s one thing
you ought to remember—that it’s quite on the cards the beastly call may
never be made.”

“I don’t desire that reminder,” Hyacinth said; “and moreover you must
let me tell you I somehow don’t easily fancy _you_ mixed up with things
that don’t come off. Anything you have to do with will come off, I
think.”

Muniment reflected a moment, as if his little mate were charmingly
ingenious. “Surely I’ve nothing to do with the particular job——!”

“With the execution, perhaps not; but how about the idea of it? You
seemed to me to have a great deal to do with it the night you took me
to see him.”

Paul changed his posture, raising himself, and in a moment was seated
Turk-fashion beside his friend. He put his arm over his shoulder and
drew him, studying his face; and then in the kindest manner in the
world he brought out: “There are three or four definite chances in your
favour.”

“I don’t want second-rate comfort, you know,” said Hyacinth with his
eyes on the distant atmospheric mixture that represented London.

“What the devil _do_ you want?” Paul asked, still holding him and with
perfect good humour.

“Well, to get inside of _you_ a little; to know how a chap feels when
he’s going to part with his particular pal.”

“To part with him?” this character repeated.

“I mean putting it at the worst.”

“I should think you’d know by yourself—if you’re going to part with
_me_.”

At this Hyacinth prostrated himself, tumbled over to the grass on
his face, which he buried in his hands. He remained in this attitude,
saying nothing, a long time; and while he lay there he thought, with
a sudden, quick flood of association, of many strange things. Most of
all he had the sense of the brilliant charming day; the warm stillness,
touched with cries of amusement; the sweetness of loafing there in an
interval of work with a chum who was a tremendously fine fellow even if
he didn’t understand the inexpressible. Paul also kept the peace, and
Hyacinth felt him all unaffectedly puzzled. He wanted now to relieve
him, so that he pulled himself together again and turned round, saying
the first thing he could think of, in relation to the general subject
of their talk, that would carry them away from the personal question.
“I’ve asked you before, and you’ve told me, but somehow I’ve never
quite grasped it—so I just touch on the matter again—exactly what good
you think it will do.”

“The stroke of work, eh? Well, you must remember that as yet we know
only very vaguely what it is. It’s difficult therefore to measure
closely the importance it may have, and I don’t think I’ve ever, in
talking with you, pretended to fix that importance. I don’t suppose
it will matter immensely whether your own engagement’s carried out or
not; but if it is it will have been a detail in a scheme of which the
general effect will be decidedly useful. I believe, and you pretend to
believe, though I’m not sure you do, in the advent of the democracy. It
will help the democracy to get possession that the classes that keep
them down shall be admonished from time to time that they’ve a very
definite and very determined intention of doing so. An immense deal
will depend upon that. Hoffendahl’s a jolly admonisher.”

Hyacinth listened to this explanation with an expression of interest
that was not feigned; and after a moment he returned: “When you say you
believe in the democracy I take for granted you mean you positively
wish for their coming into power, as I’ve always supposed. Now what
I really have never understood is this—why you should desire to put
forward a lot of people whom you regard almost without exception as
rather dismal donkeys.”

“Ah my dear lad,” Paul laughed, “when one undertakes to meddle in human
affairs one must deal with human material. The upper classes have the
longest ears.”

“I’ve heard you say you were working for an equality in human
conditions—to abolish the immemorial inequality. What you want then for
all mankind is the selfsame shade of asininity.”

“That’s very neat; did you pick it up in France? Damn the too-neat, you
know; it’s as bad as the too-rotten. The low tone of our fellow-mortals
is a result of bad conditions; it’s the conditions I want to alter.
When those who have no start to speak of have a good one it’s but fair
to infer they’ll go further. I want to try them, you know.”

“But why equality?” Hyacinth asked. “Somehow that word doesn’t say so
much to me as it used to. Inequality—inequality! I don’t know whether
it’s by dint of repeating it over to myself, but _that_ doesn’t shock
me as it used.”

“They didn’t put you up to that in France, I’m sure!” Paul exclaimed.
“Your point of view’s changed. You’ve risen in the world.”

“Risen? Good God, what have I risen to?”

“True enough; you were always a bloated little swell!” And the so
useful man at the great chemical works gave his young friend a sociable
slap on the back. There was a momentary bitterness in its being imputed
to such a one as Hyacinth, even in joke, that he had taken sides with
the lucky beggars as a class, and he had it on his tongue’s end to
ask his friend if he had never guessed what his proud titles were—the
bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter out of which he had been
picked by a poor sewing-girl. But his lifelong reserve on this point
was a habit not easily broken, and before such a challenge could burn
through it Paul had gone on: “If you’ve ceased to believe we can do
anything it will be rather awkward, you know.”

“I don’t know what I believe, God help me!” Hyacinth remarked in a tone
of an effect so lugubrious that his mate indulged in prompt hilarity of
attenuation. But our young man added: “I don’t want you to think I’ve
ceased to care for the people. What am I but one of the poorest and
meanest of them?”

“You, my boy? You’re a duke in disguise, and so I thought the first
time I ever saw you. That night I took you to our precious ‘exchange
of ideas’—I liked the beggar’s name for it—you had a little way with
you that made me forget it; I mean that your disguise happened to be
better than usual. As regards caring for the people there’s surely no
obligation at all,” Muniment continued. “I wouldn’t if I could help
it—you can bet your life on that. It all depends on what you see. The
way _I_’ve used my eyes in that sink of iniquity off there has led
to my seeing that present arrangements won’t do. They won’t do,” he
repeated placidly.

“Yes, I see that too,” said Hyacinth, with the same dolefulness that
had marked his tone a moment before—a dolefulness begotten of the
rather helpless sense that, whatever he saw, he saw—and this was always
the case—so many other things besides. He saw the immeasurable misery
of the people, and yet he saw all that had been, as it were, rescued
and redeemed from it: the treasures, the felicities, the splendours,
the successes of the world. This quantity took the form sometimes, to
his imagination, of a vast, vague, dazzling presence, an irradiation of
light from objects undefined, mixed with the atmosphere of Paris and of
Venice. He presently added that a hundred things Muniment had told him
about the foul horrors of the worst districts of London, pictures of
incredible shame and suffering that he had put before him, came back to
him now with the memory of the passion they had kindled at the time.

“Oh I don’t want you to go by what I’ve told you; I want you to go by
what you’ve seen yourself. I remember there were things you told _me_
that weren’t bad in their way.” And at this Paul Muniment sprang to his
feet, as if their conversation had drawn to an end or they must at all
events be thinking of their homeward way. Hyacinth got up too while his
companion stood there. Paul was looking off toward London with a face
that expressed all the healthy singleness of his vision. Suddenly he
remarked, as if it occurred to him to complete, or at any rate confirm,
the declaration he had made a short time before: “Yes, I don’t believe
in the millennium, but I do believe in the democracy with a _chance_.”

He struck Hyacinth while he spoke these words as such a fine embodiment
of the spirit of the people; he stood there in his powerful, sturdy
newness with such an air of having learnt what he had learnt and of
good nature that had purposes in it, that our hero felt the simple
inrush of his old, frequent pride at having a person of that promise,
a nature of that capacity, for a friend. He passed his hand into the
arm that was so much stronger and longer than his own and said with
an imperceptible tremor of voice: “It’s no use your saying I’m not to
go by what you tell me. I’d go by what you tell me anywhere. There’s
no awkwardness to speak of. I don’t know that I believe exactly what
you believe, but I believe in _you_, and doesn’t that come to the same
thing?”

Paul evidently appreciated the cordiality and candour of this little
tribute, and the way he showed it was by a motion of his elbow, to
check his companion, before they started to leave the spot, and by
looking down at him with a certain anxiety of friendliness. “I should
never have taken you to that shop that night if I hadn’t thought you’d
jump at the job. It was that flaring little oration of yours, at the
club, when you floored Delancey for saying you were afraid, that put me
up to it.”

“I did jump at it—upon my word I did; and it was just what I was
looking for. That’s all correct!” said Hyacinth cheerfully as they
went forward. There was a strain of heroism in these words—of heroism
of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in
their interlocked arms. Hyacinth didn’t make the reflexion that he
was infernally literal; he dismissed the sentimental problem that had
worried him; he condoned, excused, admired—he merged himself, resting
happy for the time, in the consciousness that Paul was a grand person,
that friendship was a purer feeling than love, and that there was an
immense deal of affection between them. He didn’t even observe at that
moment that it was preponderantly on his own side.




XXXVI


A certain Sunday in November, more than three months after she had
gone to live in Madeira Crescent, was so important an occasion for the
Princess as to require reporting with a certain fulness. Early in the
afternoon a loud peal from her door-knocker came to her ear; it had a
sound of resolution, almost of defiance, which made her look up from
her book and listen. She was sitting alone by the fire, over a heavy
volume on Labour and Capital. It was not yet four o’clock, but she
had had candles this hour; a dense brown fog made the daylight impure
without suggesting an answer to the question of whether the scheme of
nature had been to veil or to deepen the sabbatical dreariness. She was
not tired of Madeira Crescent, such an idea she would indignantly have
repudiated; but the prospect of a visitor had a happy application—the
possibility even of his being an ambassador or a cabinet minister or
another of the eminent personages with whom she had conversed before
embracing the ascetic life. They had not knocked at her present door
hitherto in any great numbers, for more reasons than one; they were
out of town and she had taken pains to diffuse the belief that she
had left England. If the impression prevailed it was exactly the
impression she had desired; she forgot this fact whenever she felt a
certain surprise—even, it may be, a certain irritation—in perceiving
that people were not taking the way to Madeira Crescent. She was making
the discovery, in which she had had many predecessors, that to hide
in London is only too easy a game. It was very much in that fashion
that Godfrey Sholto was in the habit of announcing himself when he
reappeared after the intervals she explicitly imposed on him; there was
a witless grace, for so world-worn a personage, in the point he made
of showing that he knocked with confidence, that he had as good a right
as any other. This afternoon she would have accepted his visit: she was
perfectly detached from the shallow, frivolous world in which he lived,
but there was still a freshness in her renunciation which coveted
reminders and enjoyed comparisons—he would prove to her how right she
had been to do exactly what she was doing. It didn’t occur to her that
Hyacinth Robinson might be at her door, for it had been understood
between them that save by special appointment he was to come to her
only in the evening. She heard in the hall, when the servant arrived, a
voice she failed to recognise; but in a moment the door of the room was
thrown open and the name of Mr. Muniment pronounced. It may be noted
at once that she took pleasure in the sound, for she had both wished
to see more of Hyacinth’s extraordinary friend and had given him up—so
little likely had it begun to appear that he would put himself out for
her. She had been glad he wouldn’t come, as she had told Hyacinth three
months before; but now that he had come she was still more glad.

Presently he was sitting before her on the other side of the fire,
his big foot crossed over his big knee, his large, gloved hands
fumbling with each other, drawing and smoothing in places the gloves
of very red, new-looking dogskin that appeared to hurt him. So far
as the size of his extremities and even his attitude and movement
went he might have belonged to her former circle. With the details of
his dress remaining vague in the lamplight, which threw into relief
mainly his powerful, important head, he might have been one of the
most considerable men she had ever known. The first thing she said to
him was that she wondered extremely what had brought him at last to
present himself: the idea, when she proposed it, had clearly so little
attracted him. She had only seen him once since then—the day she met
him coming into Audley Court when she was leaving it after a visit to
his sister—and, as he probably remembered, she had not on that occasion
repeated her invitation.

“It wouldn’t have done any good, at the time, if you had,” Muniment
returned with his natural laugh.

“Oh I felt that; my silence wasn’t accidental!” the Princess declared
with due gaiety.

“I’ve only come now—since you’ve asked me the reason—because my sister
has hammered at me, week after week, dinning it into me that I ought
to. Oh I’ve been under the lash! If she had left me alone I wouldn’t
have come.”

The Princess blushed on hearing these words, but neither with shame
nor with pain; rather with the happy excitement of being spoken to
in a manner so fresh and original. She had never before had a visitor
who practised so racy a frankness or who indeed had so curious a story
to tell. She had never before so completely failed, and her failure
greatly interested her, especially as it seemed now to be turning a
little to success. She had succeeded promptly with every one, and the
sign of it was that every one had rendered her a monotony of homage.
Even poor little Hyacinth had tried, in the beginning, to say grand
things to her. This very different type of man appeared to have
his thoughts fixed on anything but flowers of speech; she felt the
liveliest hope that he would move further and further away from that
delusion. “I remember what you asked me—what good it would do you. I
couldn’t tell you then; and though I now have had a long time to turn
it over I haven’t thought of it yet.”

“Oh but I hope it will do me some,” the young man said. “A fellow wants
a reward when he has made a great effort.”

“It does _me_ some,” the Princess freely answered.

“Naturally the awkward things I say amuse you. But I don’t say them for
that, but just to give you an idea.”

“You give me a great many ideas. Besides, I know you already a good
deal.”

“From little Robinson, I suppose,” said Muniment.

She had a pause. “More particularly from Lady Aurora.”

“Oh she doesn’t know much about me!” he protested.

“It’s a pity you say that, because she likes you.”

“Yes, she likes me,” he serenely admitted.

Again his hostess hesitated. “And I hope you like her.”

“Aye, she’s a dear old girl!”

The Princess reflected that her visitor was not a gentleman, like
Hyacinth; but this made no difference in her present attitude. The
expectation that he would be a gentleman had had nothing to do with
her interest in him; that had in fact rested largely on his probably
finding felicity in a deep indifference to the character. “I don’t
know that there’s any one in the world I envy so much,” she observed;
a statement that her visitor received in silence. “Better than any one
I’ve ever met she has solved the problem—which if we are wise we all
try to solve, don’t we?—of getting out of herself. She has got out of
herself more perfectly than any one I’ve ever known. She has merged
herself in the passion of doing something for others. That’s why I envy
her,” she concluded with an explanatory smile, as if perhaps he didn’t
understand her.

“It’s an amusement like any other,” said Paul Muniment.

“Ah not like any other! It carries light into dark places; it makes a
great many wretched people considerably less wretched.”

“How many, eh?” asked the young man, not exactly as if he wished to
dispute but as if it were always in him to enjoy discussing.

The Princess wondered why he should wish to argue at Lady Aurora’s
expense. “Well, one who’s very near to you, to begin with.”

“Oh she’s kind, most kind; it’s altogether wonderful. But Rosy makes
_her_ considerably less wretched,” Muniment added.

“Very likely, of course; and so she does me.”

“May I inquire what you’re wretched about?” he went on.

“About nothing at all. That’s the worst of it. But I’m much happier now
than I’ve ever been.”

“Is that also about nothing?”

“No, about a sort of change that has taken place in my life. I’ve been
able to do some little things.”

“For the poor, I suppose you mean. Do you refer to the presents you’ve
made to Rosy?” the young man asked.

“The presents?” She appeared not to remember. “Oh those are trifles. It
isn’t anything one has been able to give. It’s some talks one has had,
some convictions one has arrived at.”

“Convictions are a source of very innocent pleasure,” said the young
man, smiling at his interlocutress with his bold, pleasant eyes, which
seemed to project their glance further and drive it harder than any she
had seen.

“Having them’s nothing. It’s the acting on them,” the Princess replied.

“Yes; that doubtless too is good.” He continued to look at her
patiently, as if he liked to consider that this might be what she had
asked him to come for. He said nothing more, and she went on:

“It’s far better of course when one’s a man.”

“I don’t know. Women do pretty well what they like. My sister and you
have managed, between you, to bring me to this.”

“It’s more your sister, I suspect, than I. But why, after all, should
you have disliked so much to come?”

“Well, since you ask me,” said Paul Muniment, “I’ll tell you frankly,
though I don’t mean it uncivilly, that I don’t know what to make of
you.”

“Most people don’t,” returned the Princess. “But they usually take the
risk.”

“Ah well, I’m the most prudent of men.”

“I was sure of it; that’s one of the reasons I wanted to know you. I
know what some of your ideas are—Hyacinth Robinson has told me; and the
source of my interest in them is partly the fact that you consider very
carefully what you attempt.”

“That I do—I do,” he agreed.

The tone in which he said this would have been almost ignoble, as
regards a kind of northern canniness latent in it, had it not been
corrected by the character of his face, his youth and strength, his
almost military eyes. The Princess recognised both the shrewdness and
the natural ease as she rejoined: “To do anything in association with
you would be very safe. It would be sure to succeed.”

“That’s what poor Hyacinth thinks,” he said.

She wondered a little that he could allude in that light tone to
the faith their young friend had placed in him, considering the
consequences such a trustfulness might yet have; but this curious
mixture of qualities could only make her visitor, as a tribune of
the people, more interesting to her. She abstained for the moment
from touching on the subject of Hyacinth’s peculiar position and
only pursued: “Hasn’t he told you about me? Hasn’t he explained me a
little?”

“Oh his explanations are grand!” Muniment laughed. “He’s fine sport
when he talks about you.”

“Don’t betray him,” she said gently.

“There’s nothing to betray. You’d be the first to admire it if you were
there. Besides, I don’t betray,” he added.

“I love him very much,” said the Princess; and it would have been
impossible for the most impudent cynic to smile at the manner in which
she made the declaration.

Her guest accepted it respectfully. “He’s a sweet little lad and,
putting her ladyship aside, quite the light of our humble home.”

There was a short pause after this exchange of amenities, which the
Princess terminated by inquiring: “Wouldn’t some one else do his work
quite as well?”

“His work? Why, I’m told he’s a master-hand.”

“Oh I don’t mean his bookbinding.” Then she added: “I don’t know if
you know it, but I’m in correspondence with a certain person. If you
understand me at all you’ll know whom I mean. I’m acquainted with many
of our most important men.”

“Yes, I know. Hyacinth has told me. Do you mention it as a guarantee,
so that I may know you’re sound?”

“Not exactly; that would be weak, wouldn’t it?” the Princess asked. “My
soundness must be in myself—a matter for you to appreciate as you know
me better; not in my references and vouchers.”

“I shall never know you better. What business is it of mine?”

“I want to help you,” she said; and as she made this earnest appeal her
face became transfigured: it wore an expression of the most passionate
yet the purest longing. “I want to do something for the cause you
represent; for the millions who are rotting under our feet—the millions
whose whole life is passed on the brink of starvation, so that the
smallest accident pushes them over. Try me, test me; ask me to put my
hand to something, to prove that I’m as deeply in earnest as those who
have already given proof. I know what I’m talking about—what one must
meet and face and count with, the nature and the immensity of your
organisation. I’m not trifling. No, I’m not trifling.”

Paul Muniment watched her with his steady smile until this sudden
outbreak had spent itself. “I was afraid you’d be like this—that you’d
turn on the fountains and let off the fireworks.”

“Permit me to believe you thought nothing about it. There’s no reason
my fireworks should disturb you.”

“I have always had a fear of clever women.”

“I see—that’s a part of your prudence,” said the Princess reflectively.
“But you’re the sort of man who ought to know how to use them.”

He made no immediate answer to this; the way he appeared to regard her
suggested that he was not following closely what she said so much as
losing himself in certain matters which were beside that question—her
beauty, for instance, her grace, her fragrance, the spectacle of a
manner and quality so new to him. After a little, however, he brought
out irrelevantly: “I’m afraid I’m awfully rude.”

“Of course you are, but it doesn’t signify. What I mainly object to is
that you don’t meet my questions. Wouldn’t some one else do Hyacinth
Robinson’s work quite as well? Is it necessary to take a nature so
delicate, so intellectual? Oughtn’t we to keep him for something
finer?”

“Finer than what?”

“Than what he’ll be called upon to do.”

“And pray what’s that?” the young man demanded. “You know nothing about
it; no more do I,” he added in a moment. “It will require whatever
it will. Besides, if some one else might have done it no one else
volunteered. It happened that Robinson did.”

“Yes, and you nipped him up!” the Princess returned.

This expression made Muniment laugh. “I’ve no doubt you can easily keep
him if you want him.”

“I should like to do it in his place—that’s what I should like,” said
the Princess.

“As I say, you don’t even know what it is.”

“It may be nothing,” she went on with her grave eyes fixed on her
visitor. “I daresay you think that what I wanted to see you for was to
beg you to let him off. But it wasn’t. Of course it’s his own affair
and you can do nothing. But oughtn’t it to make some difference if his
opinions have changed?”

“His opinions? He never had any opinions,” Muniment replied. “He’s not
like you and me.”

“Well then, his feelings, his attachments. He hasn’t the passion for
the popular triumph that he had when I first knew him. He’s much more
tepid.”

“Ah well, he’s quite right.”

The Princess stared. “Do you mean that _you_ are giving up——?”

“A fine, stiff conservative’s a thing I perfectly understand,” said
Paul Muniment. “If I were on the top I’d stick.”

“I see, you’re not narrow,” she breathed appreciatively.

“I beg your pardon, I am. I don’t call that wide. One must be narrow to
penetrate.”

“Whatever you are you’ll succeed,” said the Princess. “Hyacinth won’t,
but you will.”

“It depends upon what you call success!” the young man returned. And in
a moment, before she could take it up, he added as he looked about the
room: “You’ve got a lovely home.”

“Lovely? My dear sir, it’s hideous. That’s what I like it for,” she
hastened to explain.

“Well, I like it, but perhaps I don’t know the reason. I thought you
had given up everything—pitched your goods out of window for a grand
scramble.”

“It’s what I _have_ done. You should have seen me before.”

“I should have liked that,” he quite shamelessly smiled. “I like to see
solid wealth.”

“Ah you’re as bad as Hyacinth. I’m the only consistent one!” the
Princess sighed.

“You’ve a great deal left, for a person who has given everything away.”

“These are not mine—these abominations—or I would give them too!”
Paul’s hostess returned artlessly.

He got up from his chair, still looking over the scene. “I’d give my
nose for such a place as this. At any rate, you’re not yet reduced to
poverty.”

“I’ve a little left—to help you.”

“I’d lay a wager you’ve a great deal,” he declared with his
north-country accent.

“I could get money—I could get money,” she continued gravely. She had
also risen and was standing before him.

These two remarkable persons faced each other, their eyes met again,
and they exchanged a long, deep glance of mutual scrutiny. Each seemed
to drop a plummet into the other’s mind. Then a strange and, to the
Princess, unexpected expression passed over the countenance of her
guest; his lips compressed themselves as in the strain of a strong
effort, his colour rose and in a moment he stood there blushing like a
boy. He dropped his eyes and stared at the carpet while he repeated: “I
don’t trust women—I don’t trust clever women!”

“I’m sorry, but after all I can understand it,” she said; “therefore I
won’t insist on the question of your allowing me to work with you. But
this appeal I _will_ make: help me a little yourself—help me!”

“How do you mean, help you?” he asked as he raised his eyes, which had
a new, conscious look.

“Advise me; you’ll know how. I’m in trouble—I’ve gone very far.”

“I’ve no doubt of that!” Paul laughed.

“I mean with some of those people abroad. I’m not frightened, but I’m
worried. I want to know what to do.”

“No, you’re not frightened,” Muniment returned after a moment.

“I’m, however, in a sad entanglement. I think you can straighten
it out. I’ll give you the facts, but not now, for we shall be
interrupted—I hear my old lady on the stairs. For this you must come
back to me.”

As she spoke the door opened, and Madame Grandoni appeared cautiously,
creeping, as if she didn’t know what might be going on in the parlour.
“Yes, I’ll come back,” said Paul quietly but clearly enough; with
which he walked away, passing Madame Grandoni on the threshold and
overlooking the hand-shake of farewell. In the hall he paused an
instant, feeling his hostess behind him; whereby he learned that she
had not come to exact from him this omitted observance, but to say once
more, dropping her voice so that her companion, through the open door,
might not catch: “I _could_ get money—I could!”

He passed his hand through his hair and, as if he had not heard,
observed: “I’ve not after all given you half Rosy’s messages.”

“Oh that doesn’t matter!” she answered as she turned back into the
parlour.

Madame Grandoni was in the middle of the room, wrapped in her old
shawl, looking vaguely round her, and the two ladies heard the
house-door close. “And pray who may that be? Isn’t it a new face?” the
elder one inquired.

“He’s the brother of the little person I took you to see over the
river—the chattering cripple with the wonderful manners.”

“Ah she had a brother! That then was why you went?”

It was striking, the good humour with which the Princess received this
rather coarse thrust, which could have been drawn from Madame Grandoni
only by the petulance and weariness of increasing age and the antipathy
she now felt to Madeira Crescent and everything it produced. Christina
bent a calm, charitable smile on her ancient support and replied:
“There could have been no question of our seeing him. He was of course
at his work.”

“Ah how do I know, my dear? And is he a successor?”

“A successor?”

“To the little bookbinder.”

“_Mia cara_,” said the Princess, “you’ll see how absurd that question
is when I tell you he’s his greatest friend!”




XXXVII


Half an hour after the departure of the young chemical expert she heard
another rat-tat-tat at her door; but this was a briefer, discreeter
peal and was accompanied by a faint tintinnabulation. The person who
had produced it was presently ushered in, without, however, causing
Madame Grandoni to look round, or rather to look up, from an armchair
as low as a sitz-bath and of very much the shape of such a receptacle,
in which, near the fire, she had been immersed. She left this care to
the Princess, who rose on hearing the name of the visitor pronounced
inadequately by her maid. “Mr. Fetch,” Assunta called it; but that
functionary’s mistress recognised without difficulty the little fat
“reduced” fiddler of whom Hyacinth had talked to her, who, as Pinnie’s
most intimate friend, had been so mixed up with his existence, and
whom she herself had always had a curiosity to see. Hyacinth had not
told her he was coming, and the unexpectedness of the apparition added
to its interest. Much as she liked seeing queer types and exploring
out-of-the-way social corners, she never engaged in a fresh encounter
nor formed a new relation of this kind without a fit of nervousness, a
fear she might herself be wanting, might fail to hit the right tone.
She perceived in a moment, however, that Mr. Vetch would take her as
she was and require no special adjustments; he was a gentleman and a
man of experience and she should only have to leave the tone to him.
He stood there with his large polished hat in his two hands, a hat of
the fashion of ten years before, with a rusty sheen and an undulating
brim—stood there without a salutation or a speech, but with a small
fixed, acute, tentative smile which seemed half to interrogate and
half to explain. What he explained, at all events, was that he was
clever enough to be trusted and that if he had called this way, without
ceremony and without an invitation, he had a reason which she would be
sure to think good enough when she should hear it. There was even a
certain jauntiness in his confidence—an insinuation that he knew how
to present himself to a lady; and though it quickly appeared that he
really did, this was the only thing about him that was inferior. It
suggested a long experience of actresses at rehearsal, with whom he had
formed habits of advice and compliment.

“I know who you are—I know who you are,” said the Princess, though she
could easily see he knew she did.

“I wonder if you also know why I’ve come to see you,” Mr. Vetch
replied, presenting the top of his hat to her as if it were a
looking-glass.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m very glad. You might even have come
before.” Then she added with her characteristic honesty: “Aren’t you
aware of the great interest I’ve taken in your nephew?”

“In my nephew? Yes, my young friend Robinson. It’s for his sake I’ve
ventured to intrude on you.”

She had been on the point of pushing a chair toward him, but she
stopped in the act, staring with a smile. “Ah I hope you haven’t come
to ask me to give him up!”

“On the contrary—on the contrary!” the old man returned, lifting his
hand expressively and with his head on one side as if he were holding
his fiddle.

“How do you mean, on the contrary?” she asked after he had seated
himself and she had sunk into her former place. As if that might sound
contradictious she went on: “Surely he hasn’t any fear that I shall
cease to be a good friend to him?”

“I don’t know what he fears; I don’t know what he hopes,” said Mr.
Vetch, looking at her now with a face in which she could see there
was something more tonic than old-fashioned politeness. “It will be
difficult to tell you, but at least I must try. Properly speaking, I
suppose, it’s no business of mine, as I’m not a blood-relation to the
boy; but I’ve known him since he was a mite—he’s not much more even
now—and I can’t help saying that I thank you for your great kindness to
him.”

“All the same I don’t think you like it,” the Princess declared. “To me
it oughtn’t to be difficult to say anything.”

“He has told me very little about you; he doesn’t know I’ve taken this
step,” the fiddler said, turning his eyes about the room and letting
them rest on Madame Grandoni.

“Why do you speak of it as a ‘step’? That’s what people say when
they’ve to do something disagreeable.”

“I call very seldom on ladies. It’s a long time since I’ve been in the
house of a person like the Princess Casamassima. I remember the last
time,” said the old man. “It was to get my money from a lady at whose
party I had been playing—for a dance.”

“You must bring your fiddle some time and play to us. Of course I don’t
mean for money,” the Princess added.

“I’ll do it with pleasure, or anything else that will gratify you.
But my ability’s very small. I only know vulgar music—things that are
played at theatres.”

“I don’t believe that. There must be things you play for yourself—in
your room alone.”

Mr. Vetch had a pause. “Now that I see you, that I hear you, it helps
me to understand.”

“I don’t think you do see me!” his hostess freely laughed; on which he
desired to know if there were danger of Hyacinth’s coming in while he
was there. She replied that he only came, unless by prearrangement, in
the evening, and her visitor made a request that she wouldn’t let their
young friend imagine he himself had been with her. “It doesn’t matter;
he’ll guess it, he’ll know it by instinct, as soon as he comes in. He’s
terribly subtle,” she said; and she added that she had never been able
to hide anything from him. Perhaps this served her right—for attempting
to make a mystery of things not worth it.

“How well you know him!” the fiddler commented while his eyes wandered
again to Madame Grandoni, who paid no attention to him as she sat
staring at the fire. He delayed visibly to say what he had come for,
and his hesitation could only be connected with the presence of the
old lady. He considered that the Princess might have divined this
from his manner; he had an idea he could trust himself to convey
such an intimation with clearness and yet with delicacy. But the
most she appeared to apprehend was that he desired to be presented to
her companion. “You must know the most delightful of women. She also
takes a particular interest in Mr. Robinson: of a different kind from
mine—much more sentimental!” And then she explained to her friend,
who seemed absorbed in other ideas, that Mr. Vetch was a distinguished
musician, a person whom she, who had known so many in her day and was
so fond of that kind of thing, would like to talk with. The Princess
spoke of “that kind of thing” quite as if she herself had given it up,
though Madame Grandoni often heard her by the hour together improvising
at the piano revolutionary battle-songs and pæans.

“I think you’re laughing at me,” Mr. Vetch said to her while the other
figure twisted itself slowly round in its chair and regarded him. It
looked at him conveniently, up and down, and then sighed out:

“Strange people—strange people!”

“It’s indeed a strange world, madam,” the fiddler replied; after which
he inquired of the Princess if he might have a little conversation with
her in private.

She looked about her, embarrassed and smiling. “My dear sir, I’ve only
this one room to receive in. We live in a very small way.”

“Yes, your excellency is laughing at me. Your ideas are very large too.
However, I’d gladly come at any other time that might suit you.”

“You impute to me higher spirits than I possess. Why should I be so
gay?” the Princess asked. “I should be delighted to see you again. I’m
extremely curious as to what you may have to say to me. I’d even meet
you anywhere—in Kensington Gardens or the British Museum.”

He took her deeply in before replying, and then, his white old face
flushing a little, exclaimed: “Poor dear little Hyacinth!”

Madame Grandoni made an effort to rise from her chair, but she had
sunk so low that at first it was not successful. Mr. Vetch gave her a
hand of help, and she slowly erected herself, keeping hold of him for
a moment after she stood there. “What did she tell me? That you’re a
great musician? Isn’t that enough for any man? You ought to be content,
my dear gentleman. It has sufficed for people whom I don’t believe you
surpass.”

“I don’t surpass any one,” said poor Mr. Vetch. “I don’t know what you
take me for.”

“You’re not a wicked revolutionary then? You’re not a conspirator nor
an assassin? It surprises me, but so much the better. In this house
one can never know. It’s not a good house, and if you’re a respectable
person it’s a pity you should come here. Yes, she’s very gay and I’m
very sad. I don’t know how it will end. After me, I hope. The world’s
not good, certainly; but God alone can make it better.” And as the
fiddler expressed the hope that he was not the cause of her leaving the
room she went on: “_Doch, doch_, you’re the cause; but why not you as
well as another? I’m always leaving it for some one or for something,
and I’d sooner do so for an honest man, if you _are_ one—but, as I say,
who can tell?—than for a destroyer. I wander about. I’ve no rest. I
have, however, a very nice room, the best in the house. Me at least she
doesn’t treat ill. It looks to-day like the end of all things. If you’d
turn your climate the other side up the rest would do well enough.
Good-night to you, whoever you are.”

The old lady shuffled away in spite of Mr. Vetch’s renewed apologies,
and the subject of her criticism stood before the fire watching the
pair while he opened the door. “She goes away, she comes back; it
doesn’t matter. She thinks it a bad house, but she knows it would be
worse without her. I remember about you now,” the Princess added. “Mr.
Robinson told me you had been a great democrat in old days, but that at
present you’d ceased to care for the people.”

“The people—the people? That’s a silly term. Whom do you mean?”

She hesitated. “Those you used to care for, to plead for; those who are
underneath every one, underneath everything, and have the whole social
mass crushing them.”

“I see you think I’m a renegade. The way certain classes arrogate to
themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some
human beings the people, the people only, and others not? I’m of the
people myself, I’ve worked all my days like a knife-grinder and I’ve
really never changed.”

“You mustn’t let me make you angry,” she laughed as she sat down again.
“I’m sometimes very provoking, but you must stop me off. You wouldn’t
think it perhaps, but no one takes a snub better than I.”

Mr. Vetch dropped his eyes a minute; he appeared to wish to show that
he regarded such a speech as that as one of this great, perverse lady’s
characteristic humours and knew he should be wanting in respect to her
if he took it seriously or made a personal application of it. “What I
want is this,” he began after a moment: “that you’ll, that you’ll——”
But he stopped before he had got further. She was watching him,
listening to him; she waited while he paused. It was a long pause and
she said nothing. “Princess,” the old man broke out at last, “I’d give
my own life many times for that boy’s!”

“I always told him you must have been fond of him!” she cried with
bright exultation.

“Fond of him? Pray who can doubt it? I made him, I invented him!”

“He knows it, moreover,” the Princess smiled. “It’s an exquisite
organisation.” And as the old man gazed at her, not knowing apparently
what to make of her tone, she kept it up: “It’s a very interesting
opportunity for me to learn certain things. Speak to me of his early
years. How was he as a child? When I like people I like them altogether
and want to know everything about them.”

“I shouldn’t have supposed there was much left for you to learn about
our young friend. You’ve taken possession of his life,” Mr. Vetch added
gravely.

“Yes, but as I understand you, you don’t complain of it? Sometimes one
does so much more than one has intended. One must use one’s influence
for good,” she went on with the noble, gentle air of accessibility to
reason that sometimes lighted up her face. And then irrelevantly: “I
know the terrible story of his mother. He told it me himself when he
was staying with me. In the course of my life I think I’ve never been
more affected.”

“That was my fault—that he ever learnt it. I suppose he also told you
that.”

“Yes, but I think he understood your idea. If you had the question to
determine again would you judge differently?”

“I thought it would do him good,” said the old man simply and rather
wearily.

“Well, I daresay it has,” she returned with the manner of wishing to
encourage him.

“I don’t know what was in my head. I wanted him to quarrel with
society. Now I want him to be reconciled to it,” Mr. Vetch remarked
earnestly. He appeared to desire her to understand how great a point he
made of this.

“Ah, but he is!” she immediately said. “We often talk about that; he’s
not like me, who see all kinds of abominations. He’s a bloated little
aristocrat. What more would you have?”

“Those are not the opinions he expresses to _me_”—and Mr. Vetch shook
his head sadly. “I’m greatly distressed and I don’t make out——! I’ve
not come here with the presumptuous wish to cross-examine you, but
I should like very much to know if I _am_ wrong in believing that
he has gone about with you in the bad quarters—in Saint Giles’s and
Whitechapel.”

“We’ve certainly inquired and explored together,” the Princess
admitted, “and in the depths of this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful
city we’ve seen sights of unspeakable misery and horror. But we’ve been
not only in the slums; we’ve been to a music hall and a penny-reading.”

The fiddler received this information at first in silence, so that
his hostess went on to mention some of the phases of life they had
observed; describing with great vividness, but at the same time with
a kind of argumentative moderation, several scenes which did little
honour to “our boasted civilisation.” “What wonder is it then that he
should tell me things can’t go on any longer as they are?” he asked
when she had finished. “He said only the other day that he should
regard himself as one of the most contemptible of human beings if he
should do nothing to alter them, to better them.”

“What wonder indeed? But if he said that he was in one of his bad
days,” the Princess replied. “He changes constantly and his impressions
change. The misery of the people is by no means always on his heart.
You tell me what he has told you; well, he has told me that the people
may perish over and over rather than the conquests of civilisation
shall be sacrificed to them. He declares at such moments that they’ll
be sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the ignorant masses get the upper
hand.”

“He needn’t be afraid. That will never happen.”

“I don’t know. We can at least try,” she said.

“Try what you like, madam, but for God’s sake get the boy out of his
muddle!”

The Princess had suddenly grown excited in speaking of the cause she
believed in, and she gave for the moment no heed to this appeal, which
broke from Mr. Vetch’s lips with a sudden passion of anxiety. Her
beautiful head raised itself higher and the constant light of her fine
eyes became an extraordinary radiance. “Do you know what I say to Mr.
Robinson when he makes such remarks as that to me? I ask him what he
means by civilisation. Let civilisation come a little, first, and then
we’ll talk about it. For the present, face to face with those horrors,
I scorn it, I deny it!” And she laughed ineffable things, she might
have been some splendid siren of the Revolution.

“The world’s very sad and very hideous, and I’m happy to say that I
soon shall have done with it. But before I go I want to save Hyacinth,”
Mr. Vetch insisted. “If he’s a bloated little aristocrat, as you
say, there’s so much the less fitness in his being ground in your
mill. If he doesn’t even believe in what he pretends to do, that’s a
pretty situation! What’s he in for, madam? What devilish folly has he
undertaken?”

“He’s a strange mixture of contradictory impulses,” said the Princess
musingly. Then as if calling herself back to the old man’s question she
pursued: “How can I enter into his affairs with you? How can I tell you
his secrets? In the first place I don’t know them, and if I did—well,
fancy me!”

Her visitor gave a long, low sigh, almost a moan, of discouragement
and perplexity. He had told her that now he saw her he understood how
their young friend should have become her slave, but he wouldn’t have
been able to tell her that he understood her own motives and mysteries,
that he embraced the immense anomaly of her behaviour. It came over him
that she was fine and perverse, a more complicated form of the feminine
mixture than any he had hitherto dealt with, and he felt helpless and
baffled, foredoomed to failure. He had come prepared to flatter her
without scruple, thinking this would be the expert and effective way
of dealing with her; but he now recognised that these primitive arts
had, though it was strange, no application to such a nature, while
his embarrassment was increased rather than diminished by the fact
that the lady at least made the effort to be accommodating. He had put
down his hat on the floor beside him and his two hands were clasped on
the knob of an umbrella which had long since renounced pretensions to
compactness; he collapsed a little and his chin rested on his folded
hands. “Why do you take such a line? Why do you believe such things?”
he asked; and he was conscious that his tone was weak and his challenge
beside the question.

“My dear sir, how do you know what I believe? However, I have my
reasons, which it would take too long to tell you and which after all
would not particularly interest you. One must see life as one can; it
comes no doubt to each of us in different ways. You think me affected
of course and my behaviour a fearful _pose_; but I’m only trying to be
natural. Are you not yourself a little inconsequent?” she went on with
the bright, hard mildness which assured Mr. Vetch, while it chilled
him, that he should extract no pledge of relief from her. “You don’t
want our young friend to pry into the wretchedness of London, because
that excites his sense of justice. It’s a strange thing to wish, for
a person of whom one is fond and whom one esteems, that his sense of
justice shall not be excited.”

“I don’t care a fig for his sense of justice—I don’t care a fig for
the wretchedness of London; and if I were young and beautiful and
clever and brilliant and of a noble position, like you, I should care
still less. In that case I should have very little to say to a poor
mechanic—a youngster who earns his living with a glue-pot and scraps of
old leather.”

“Don’t misrepresent him; don’t make him out what you know he’s not!”
the Princess retorted with her baffling smile. “You know he’s one of
the most civilised of little men.”

The fiddler sat breathing unhappily. “I only want to keep him—to get
him free.” Then he added: “I don’t understand you very well. If you
like him because he’s one of the lower orders, how can you like him
because he’s a swell?”

She turned her eyes on the fire as if this little problem might be
worth considering, and presently she answered: “Dear Mr. Vetch, I’m
very sure you don’t mean to be impertinent, but some things you say
have that effect. Nothing’s more annoying than when one’s sincerity is
doubted. I’m not bound to explain myself to you. I ask of my friends
to trust me and of the others to leave me alone. Moreover, anything
not very nice you may have said to me—out of inevitable awkwardness—is
nothing to the insults I’m perfectly prepared to see showered upon
me before long. I shall do things which will produce a fine crop of
them—oh I shall do things, my dear sir! But I’m determined not to mind
them. Come therefore, pull yourself together. We both take such an
interest in young Robinson that I can’t see why in the world we should
quarrel about him.”

“My dear lady,” the old man pleaded, “I’ve indeed not the least
intention of failing in respect or patience, and you must excuse me
if I don’t look after my manners. How can I when I’m so worried, so
haunted? God knows I don’t want to quarrel. As I tell you, I only want
to get Hyacinth free.”

“Free from what?” the Princess asked.

“From some abominable secret brotherhood or international league that
he belongs to, the thought of which keeps me awake at night. He’s just
the sort of youngster to be made a catspaw.”

“Your fears seem very vague.”

“I hoped you would give me chapter and verse.”

“On what do your suspicions rest? What grounds have you?” she insisted.

“Well, a great many; none of them very definite, but all contributing
something—his appearance, his manner, the way he strikes me. Dear lady,
one feels those things, one guesses. Do you know that poor infatuated
phrasemonger Eustache Poupin, who works at the same place as Hyacinth?
He’s a very old friend of mine and he’s an honest man, as phrasemongers
go. But he’s always conspiring and corresponding and pulling strings
that make a tinkle which he takes for the death-knell of society. He
has nothing in life to complain of and drives a roaring trade. But he
wants folk to be equal, heaven help him; and when he has made them so
I suppose he’s going to start a society for making the stars in the
sky all of the same size. He isn’t serious, though he imagines he’s
the only human being who never trifles; and his machinations, which
I believe are for the most part very innocent, are a matter of habit
and tradition with him, like his theory that Christopher Columbus,
who discovered America, was a Frenchman, and his hot foot-bath on
Saturday nights. He has _not_ confessed to me that Hyacinth has taken
some intensely private engagement to do something for the cause which
may have nasty consequences, but the way he turns off the idea makes
me almost as uncomfortable as if he had. He and his wife are very
sweet on their young friend, but they can’t make up their minds to
interfere; perhaps for them indeed, as for me, there’s no way in
which interference can be effective. Only _I_ didn’t put him up to
those devil’s tricks—or rather I did originally! The finer the work,
I suppose, the higher the privilege of doing it; yet the Poupins heave
socialistic sighs over the boy, and their peace of mind evidently isn’t
all that it ought to be if they’ve given him a noble opportunity. I’ve
appealed to them in good round terms, and they’ve assured me every hair
of his head is as precious to them as if he were their own child. That
doesn’t comfort me much, however, for the simple reason that I believe
the old woman (whose grandmother, in Paris, in the Revolution, must
certainly have carried bloody heads on a pike) would be quite capable
of chopping up her own child if it would do any harm to proprietors.
Besides, they say, what influence have they on Hyacinth any more?
He’s a deplorable little backslider; he worships false gods. In short
they’ll give me no information, and I daresay they themselves are tied
up by some unholy vow. They may be afraid of a vengeance if they tell
tales. It’s all sad rubbish, but rubbish may be a strong motive.”

The Princess listened attentively, following her visitor with patience.
“Don’t speak to me of the French; I’ve never cared for them.”

“That’s awkward if you’re a socialist. You’re likely to meet them.”

“Why do you call me a socialist? I hate tenth-rate labels and flags,”
she declared. Then she added: “What is it you suppose on Mr. Robinson’s
part?—for you must suppose something.”

“Well, that he may have drawn some accursed lot to do some idiotic
thing—something in which even he himself doesn’t believe.”

“I haven’t an idea of what sort of thing you mean. But if he doesn’t
believe in it he can easily let it alone.”

“Do you think he’s a customer who will back out of a real vow?” the
fiddler asked.

The Princess freely wondered. “One can never judge of people in that
way till they’re tested.” And the next thing: “Haven’t you even taken
the trouble to question him?”

“What would be the use? He’d tell me nothing. It would be like a man
giving notice when he’s going to fight a duel.”

She sat for some seconds in thought; she looked up at Mr. Vetch with
a pitying, indulgent smile. “I’m sure you’re worrying about a mere
shadow; but that never prevents, does it? I still don’t see exactly how
I can help you.”

“Do you want him to commit some atrocity, some mad infamy?” the old man
appealed.

“My dear sir, I don’t want him to do anything in all the wide world.
I’ve not had the smallest connexion with any engagement of any kind
that he may have entered into. Do me the honour to trust me,” the
Princess went on with a certain high dryness of tone. “I don’t know
what I’ve done to deprive myself of your confidence. Trust the young
man a little too. He’s a gentleman and will behave as a gentleman.”

The fiddler rose from his chair, smoothing his hat silently with
the cuff of his coat. He stood there, whimsical and piteous, as if
the sense he had still something to urge mingled with that of his
having received his dismissal and as if indeed both were tinged with
the oddity of another idea. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” he
returned. Then he added, continuing to look at her: “But he _must_ be
very fond of life.”

The Princess took no notice of the insinuation contained in these
words. “Leave him to me—leave him to me. I’m sorry for your anxiety,
but it was very good of you to come to see me. That has been
interesting, because you’ve been one of our friend’s influences.”

“Unfortunately yes! If it hadn’t been for me he wouldn’t have known
Poupin, and if he hadn’t known Poupin he wouldn’t have known his
chemical friend—what’s his name?—Muniment.”

“And has that done him harm, do you think?” the Princess asked. She had
risen to her feet.

“Surely: that deep fellow has been the main source of his infection.”

“I lose patience with you!” she made answer, turning away.

And indeed her visitor’s persistence was irritating. He went on,
lingering, his head thrust forward and his short arms, out at his
sides, terminating in his hat and umbrella, which he held grotesquely
and as if intended for emphasis or illustration: “I’ve supposed for a
long time that it was either Muniment or you who had got him into his
scrape. It was you I suspected most—much most; but if it isn’t you it
must be he.”

“You had better go to him then!”

“Of course I’ll go to him. I scarcely know him—I’ve seen him but
once—but I’ll speak my mind.”

The Princess rang for her maid to usher Mr. Vetch out, but at the
moment he laid his hand on the door of the room she checked him with
a quick gesture. “Now that I think of it don’t go, please, to Mr.
Muniment. It will be better to leave him quiet. Leave him to me,” she
added with a softer smile.

“Why not, why not?” he pleaded. And as she couldn’t tell him on the
instant why not he asked: “Doesn’t he know?”

“No, he doesn’t know; he has nothing to do with it.” She suddenly
found herself desiring to protect Paul Muniment from the imputation
that was in Mr. Vetch’s mind—the imputation of an ugly responsibility;
and though she was not a person who took the trouble to tell fibs this
repudiation on his behalf issued from her lips before she could stay
it. It was a result of the same desire, though also an inconsequence,
that she added: “Don’t do that—you’ll spoil everything!” She went to
him suddenly eager, she herself opened the door for him. “Leave him to
me—leave him to me,” she continued persuasively, while the fiddler,
gazing at her, dazzled and submissive, allowed himself to be wafted
away. A thought that excited her had come to her with a bound, and
after she had heard the house-door close behind Mr. Vetch she walked up
and down the room half an hour, all restlessly, under possession of it.




BOOK FIFTH




XXXVIII


Hyacinth found, that winter, considerable occupation for his odd
hours, his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in
hand the books he had promised himself at Medley to enclose in covers
worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life—these
brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight—and of the
confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she should
receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in thinking
that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand as
specimens of rare work, connoisseurs bending charmed heads over them,
smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention stirred
itself and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he sat up
late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this time his
skill was of a very high order. Old Crook recognised it by raising the
rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among the traditions
of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to the end wore
the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches, our young man
learned accidentally that several books he had given him to do had been
carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the villa, where they
were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden circle who came to
tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself indeed was included in this company
on a great occasion—invited to a musical party where he made the
acquaintance of half-a-dozen Miss Crookendens, an acquaintance which
consisted in his standing in a corner behind several broad-backed old
ladies and watching the rotation, at the piano and the harp, of three
or four of his employer’s thick-fingered daughters. “You know it’s
a tremendously musical house,” said one of the old ladies to another
(she called it “’ouse”); but the principal impression made upon him
by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was that it was wonderfully
different from the Princess’s playing.

He knew he was the only young man from the shop who had been invited,
not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a wig
which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides being
accompanied by a little, frightened, furtive wife who closed her eyes,
as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs. Crookenden
spoke to her. The Poupins were not there; which, however, was not a
surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that—even if they had been asked, which
they were not—they had objections of principle to putting their feet
_chez les bourgeois_. They were not asked because, in spite of the
place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business,
it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife—though
she was certainly no one’s else; and the evidence of this irregularity
was conceived to reside vaguely in the fact that she had never been
seen save in the laxity of a camisole. There had doubtless been an
apprehension that if she had come to the villa she would not have come
with the proper number of hooks and eyes—albeit Hyacinth, on two or
three occasions, notably the night he took the pair to Mr. Vetch’s
theatre, had been witness of the proportions to which she could reduce
her figure when wishing to give the impression of a lawful tie.

It was not clear to him how the distinction conferred on him
became known in Soho, where, however, it excited no sharpness of
jealousy—Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin being hardly more likely to envy
a person condemned to spend a genteel evening than they were to envy
a monkey performing antics on a barrel-organ: both forms of effort
indicated an urbanity painfully acquired. But Roker took his young
comrade’s breath half away with his elbow while remarking that he
supposed he saw the old man had spotted him for one of the darlings at
home—and while inquiring furthermore what would become in that case
of the little thing he took to France, the one to whom he had stood
champagne and lobster. This was the first allusion Hyacinth had heard
made to the idea that he might some day marry his master’s daughter,
like the virtuous apprentice of tradition; but the suggestion somehow
was not inspiring even when he had thought of an incident or two which
gave colour to it. None of the Miss Crookendens spoke to him—they
all had large faces and short legs and a comical resemblance to that
elderly male with wide nostrils their father, and, unlike the Miss
Marchants at Medley, they knew who he was; but their mother, who had on
her head the plumage of a cockatoo mingled with a structure of glass
beads, looked at him with an almost awful fixedness of charity and
asked him three distinct times if he would have a glass of negus.

He had much difficulty in getting his books from the Princess; for when
he reminded her of the promise she had given at Medley to make over to
him as many volumes as he should require she answered that everything
was changed since then, that she was completely _dépouillée_, that
she had now no pretension to have a library, and that in fine he had
much better leave the matter alone. He was welcome to any books in the
house, but, as he could see for himself, these were cheap editions, on
which it would be foolish to expend such work as his. He asked Madame
Grandoni to help him—to tell him at least if there were not some good
volumes among the things the Princess had sent to be warehoused; it
being known to him, through casual admissions of her own, that she had
allowed her maid to save certain articles from the wreck and pack them
away at the Pantechnicon. This had all been Assunta’s work—the woman
had begged so hard for a few reservations, a loaf of bread for their
old days; but the Princess herself had washed her hands of the job.
“_Che, che_, there are boxes, I’m sure, in that place, with a little
of everything,” the old lady had said in answer to his inquiry; and
Hyacinth had conferred with Assunta, who took a sympathetic, talkative,
Italian interest in his undertaking and promised to fish out for him
any block of printed matter that should remain. She arrived at his
lodging one evening, in a cab, with an armful of pretty books, and
when he asked her where they had come from waved her forefinger in
front of her nose after a fashion at once evasive and expressive. He
brought each volume to the Princess as it was finished, but her manner
of receiving it was to shake her head over it with a kind, sad smile.
“It’s beautiful, I’m sure, but I’ve lost my sense for such things.
Besides, you must always remember what you once told me, that a woman,
even the most cultivated, is incapable of feeling the difference
between a bad binding and a good. I remember your once saying that fine
ladies had brought cobbled leather to your shop and wished it imitated.
Certainly those are not the differences I most feel. My dear fellow,
such things have ceased to speak to me; they’re doubtless charming,
but they leave me cold. What will you have? One can’t serve God and
Mammon.” Her thoughts were fixed on far other things than the delight
of dainty covers, and she evidently considered that in caring so much
for them Hyacinth resembled the mad emperor who fiddled in the flames
of Rome. European society, to her mind, was in flames, and no frivolous
occupation could give the measure of the emotion with which she watched
them. It produced occasionally demonstrations of hilarity, of joy and
hope, but these always took some form connected with the life of the
people. It was the people she had gone to see when she accompanied
Hyacinth to a music hall in the Edgeware Road, and all her excursions
and pastimes this winter were prompted by her interest in the classes
on whose behalf the fundamental change was to be wrought.

To ask himself if she were in earnest was now an old story to him,
and indeed the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased
to have any high importance. It was just as she was, superficial or
profound, that she held him, and she was at any rate sufficiently
animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences actual
and possible. Some of these might be serious even if she herself
were shallow, and there were times when he was much visited by the
apprehension of them. On the Sundays when she had gone with him into
the darkest places, the most fetid holes in London, she had always
taken money with her in considerable quantities and had always left
it behind. She said very naturally that one couldn’t go and stare at
people for an impression without paying them, and she gave alms right
and left, indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgement, as simply as
the abbess of some beggar-haunted convent or a lady-bountiful of the
superstitious unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted
to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes
thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity
should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles
of economic science: partly because she wasn’t a woman to be directed
and regulated—she could take other people’s meanings but could never
take their forms. Besides, what did it matter? To himself what did it
matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or into wrong
ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The Princess
was an embodied passion—she was not a system: and her behaviour, after
all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to relieving others.
And then misery was sown so thick in her path that wherever her money
was dropped it fell into some clutching palm. He wondered she should
still have so much cash to dispose of till she explained that she came
by it through putting her personal expenditure on a rigid footing.
What she gave away was her savings, the margin she had succeeded in
creating; and now that she had tasted of the satisfaction of making
little hoards for such a purpose she regarded her other years, with
their idleness and waste, their merely personal motives, as a long,
stupid sleep of the conscience. To do something for others was not only
so much more human—it was so much more amusing!

She made strange acquaintances under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened
to extraordinary stories and formed theories about them, and about
the persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more
extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex,
attempted to establish social relations with them and was the cause of
infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent,
who was always smoking at the window and who reminded our hero of Mr.
Micawber. She received visits that were a scandal to the Crescent,
and Hyacinth neglected his affairs, whatever they were, to see what
tatterdemalion would next turn up at her door. This intercourse, it
is true, took a more fruitful form as her intimacy with Lady Aurora
deepened; her ladyship practised discriminations which she brought the
Princess to recognise, and before the winter was over Mr. Robinson’s
services in the slums were found unnecessary. He gave way with relief,
with delight, to Lady Aurora, for he had himself not in the least
grasped the principle of his behaviour for the previous four months
nor taken himself seriously as a _cicerone_. He had plunged into a sea
of barbarism without having any civilising energy to put forth. He was
aware the people were direfully wretched—more aware, it often seemed
to him, than they themselves were; so frequently was he struck with
their brutal insensibility, a grossness proof against the taste of
better things and against any desire for them. He knew it so well that
the repetition of contact could add no vividness to the conviction;
it rather smothered and befogged his impression, peopled it with
contradictions and difficulties, a violence of reaction, a sense of
the inevitable and insurmountable. In these hours the poverty and
ignorance of the multitude seemed so vast and preponderant, and so much
the law of life, that those who had managed to escape from the black
gulf were only the happy few, spirits of resource as well as children
of luck: they inspired in some degree the interest and sympathy that
one should feel for survivors and victors, those who have come safely
out of a shipwreck or a battle. What was most in Hyacinth’s mind was
the idea, of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was
a syllable, that the flood of democracy was rising over the world;
that it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; that,
whatever it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom
a magnificent energy; and that it might be trusted to look after its
own. When this high, healing, uplifting tide should cover the world
and float in the new era, it would be its own fault (whose else?) if
want and suffering and crime should continue to be ingredients of the
human lot. With his mixed, divided nature, his conflicting sympathies,
his eternal habit of swinging from one view to another, he regarded the
prospect in different moods with different intensities. In spite of the
example Eustache Poupin gave him of the reconcilement of disparities,
he was afraid the democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings or for
the finer sorts of conversation. The Princess gave up these things in
proportion as she advanced in the direction she had so audaciously
chosen; and if the Princess could give them up it would take very
transcendent natures to stick to them. At the same time there was joy
and exultation in the thought of surrendering one’s self to the wash
of the wave, of being carried higher on the sun-touched crests of wild
billows than one could ever be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own.
That vision could deepen to ecstasy; make it indifferent if one’s
ultimate fate, in such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to
be submerged in bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on immovable
rocks. Hyacinth felt that, whether his personal sympathy should rest
finally with the victors or the vanquished, the victorious force
was potentially infinite and would require no testimony from the
irresolute.

The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations,
and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach
importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either
cause, but they were important for himself—if only because they would
rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual, sore
shock of the rebound. There was no peace for him between the two
currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate,
plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, supercivilised sire.
They continued to toss him from one side to the other; they arrayed
him in intolerable defiances and revenges against himself. He had a
high ambition: he wanted neither more nor less than to get hold of
the truth and wear it in his heart. He believed with the candour of
youth that it is brilliant and clear-cut, like a royal diamond; but
to whatever quarter he turned in the effort to find it he seemed to
know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded
face. The thought of his mother had filled him with the vague, clumsy
fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but since
the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things in
the world as it was constituted were to grow intensely dear to him
he had tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human
countenance for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and
recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation.
To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea was the
source of shame, as an act of treachery would have been; for he could
almost hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct
of a gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of
fanatics and cads. He had quite got over holding that it would not have
become his father to talk of what was proper to gentlemen, got over
making the mental reflexion that from such a worthy’s son at least the
biggest cad in London could not have deserved less consideration. He
had worked himself round to allowances, to interpretations, to such
hypotheses as the evidence in the _Times_, read in the British Museum
on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, did not exclude. Though they
had been frequent enough, and too frequent, his hours of hot resentment
against the man who had attached to him the stigma he was to carry for
ever, he threw himself, in other conditions and with a certain success,
into the effort to find filial condonations and excuses. It was
comparatively easy for him to accept himself as the son of a terribly
light Frenchwoman; there seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his
having for his other parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness.
He was absolutely too poor to afford it. Sometimes, in imagination, he
sacrificed one of the authors of his being to the other, throwing over
Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when the theory failed that
his father would have done great things for him if he had lived, or the
assumption broke down that he had been Florentine Vivier’s only lover,
he cursed and disowned them alike; sometimes he arrived at conceptions
which presented them side by side, looking at him with eyes infinitely
sad but quite unashamed—eyes that seemed to tell him they had been
surpassingly unfortunate but had not been base. Of course his worst
moments now, as they had always been the worst, were those in which
his grounds for holding that Lord Frederick had really been his father
viciously fell away from him. It must be added that they always passed
off, since the mixture in his tormenting, his incorrigible pulses could
be accounted for by no other dream.

I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial
degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the
Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were
a constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in
any view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and
December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster
and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamplight and
tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his
heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London
had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered
away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which
was most his own lay round him under her pall like an immeasurable
breathing monster he felt with a vague excitement, as he had felt
before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest
expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened,
but it was filled again by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams
and strange, blurred reflexions and emanations into a sky without
stars. He suspended, so to say, his small sensibility in the midst of
it, to quiver there with joy and hope and ambition as well as with
the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed
with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the
dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and
his relations with its mistress were more organised than they had
been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the
cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present
simplicity, it was better at least for poor Mr. Robinson. It made
her more near and him more free; and if there had been a danger of
her nature’s seeming really to take the tone of the vulgar things
about her he would only have had to remember her as she was at Medley
to restore the perspective. Her beauty always appeared in truth to
have the setting that best became it; her fairness made the element
in which she lived and, among the meanest accessories, constituted
a kind of splendour. Nature had emphasised the difficult, the
deterrent, for her establishing properties in common with the horrible
populace of London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his
night-walks to Paddington or homeward; the populace of London were
scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they
could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when
every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth and he found
himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and
girls in particular were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice,
brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what
alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he
wondered what fate there could be in the great scheme of things for a
planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled
against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich,
as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich who allowed such
abominations to flourish, that made no difference and only shifted the
shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the
cause as well as the effect.

It didn’t occur to our young man that the Princess had withdrawn
her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still
further the condition of the poor, she had placed herself in the hands
of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he
had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her
knowledge and her capacity to answer any question it could come into
the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness
of his own desultory and superficial view of the great question. It was
enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot
round which his thoughts could revolve and toward which his steps could
direct themselves with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege.
The picture of it hung before him half the time in colours to which
the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless didn’t literally
characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since
ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as
natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by
this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable
part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for
there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that
the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. The
quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights
was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends whom
long pauses, during which they merely looked at each other with kind,
acquainted eyes, couldn’t make uncomfortable. Not that the element of
silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed
only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side
of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess,
so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse
of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn
curtains and shaded lamplight, interfused with domestic embarrassments
and confidences that all turned to the jocular, the Princess was
incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was
picnicking, but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents.
There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way
she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat
or looked after the fire or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl;
above all in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home,
never dining out nor going to parties, ignorant of the dissipations of
the town. There was something in the isolation of the room when the
kettle was on the hob and he had given his wet umbrella to the maid
and his friend had made him sit in a certain place near the fire, the
better to dry his shoes—there was something that evoked the idea of
the _vie de province_ he had read about in French fiction. The French
term came to him because it represented more the especial note of
the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the facility, of talk. She
expressed herself often in the French tongue itself; she could borrow
that convenience for certain shades of meaning, though she had told
Hyacinth she had her own intenser Latin view of the people to whom it
was native. Certainly the strain of her discourse was not provincial;
her talk was singularly free and unabashed; there was nothing one
mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say herself. She
had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional danger-posts.
Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see it—with which in
any direction, intellectually, she could fling open her windows. There
was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility—in
seeing a creature capable socially of immeasurable flights sit
dove-like and with folded wings.

The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent—her
days, like his own, were filled with work, so that she came in the
evening—and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived
at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous
interest to each other, each rejoicing that the other was not a bit
different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would
give her up—all nice people did very soon; but to the acuteness of
our hero’s observation the end of her ladyship’s almost breathless
enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was bewildered but was fascinated;
she thought her foreign friend not only the most distinguished, the
most startling, the most edifying and the most original person in the
world, but the most amusing and the most delightful to have tea with.
As for that personage herself her sentiment about Lady Aurora was the
same Hyacinth’s had been: she held her a saint, the first she had ever
seen, and the purest specimen conceivable; as good in her way as Saint
Francis of Assisi, as tender and quaint and transparent, of a spirit of
charity as sublime. She felt that when one met a human flower as fresh
as that in the dusty ways of the world one should pluck it and wear it;
and she was always inhaling Lady Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her
and holding her hand. The spinster was frightened at her generosity, at
the way her imagination embroidered; she wanted to convince her—as the
Princess did on her own side—that such exaggerations destroyed their
unfortunate subject. The Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way
she put them on and wore them, in the economies she practised in order
to have money for charity and the ingenuity with which these slender
resources were made to go far—in the very manner in which she spoke,
a kind of startled simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these
particulars; to learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her
bonnets at the same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves,
to ask in the same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has
got a ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a
French milliner and that if there was anything in the world she loathed
it was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected
by the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as
she was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her
friend.

One night, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual,
Hyacinth met the pilgrim from Belgrave Square just leaving the house.
She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared
flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece
of bad news. She said, “Oh how do you do?” with her customary quick,
vague laugh, but she went her way without stopping to talk. Three
minutes later he mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her,
and this lady replied: “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner.
You’d have assisted at a scene.”

“At a scene?” he repeated, not understanding what violence could have
taken place between mutual adorers.

“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well
meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I’m going too far.”

“I imagine you tell her things you don’t tell me,” Hyacinth said.

“Oh you, my dear fellow!” his hostess murmured. She spoke
absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady
Aurora and as if the futility of telling things to Mr. Robinson had
become a commonplace.

There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace
with her “views” being quite extinct. The tone they now for the most
part took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging
commiseration for lunacy on the one hand and pusillanimity on the
other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went
fantastic lengths in the way of reaction, a point where it was their
habit and their amusement to hurl all manner of denunciation at each
other’s head. They had given up serious discussion altogether and when
not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities
I have mentioned, talked for a compromise of matters as to which it
couldn’t occur to them to differ. There were evenings when she did
nothing but relate her life and all she had seen of humanity, from
her earliest years, in a variety of countries. If evil appearances
seemed mainly to have been presented to her view this didn’t diminish
the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her power, the
greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light mimetic, dramatic
evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him hang on
her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign courts—he
delighted to know how monarchs lived and conversed—there was often
for hours together nothing to indicate that she would have liked
to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of one.
Nevertheless his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to what
she was really doing in such holes and in what queer penalties she
might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to know
by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He did so
but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the validity of
his warrant; but on an occasion when she had challenged him he replied,
smiling and hesitating: “Well, I must say it seems to me that from what
I’ve told you it ought to strike you I’ve rather a title.”

“You mean your famous pledge to ‘act’ on demand? Oh that will never
come to anything.”

“Why won’t it come to anything?”

“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a
novel.”

“_Vous me rendez la vie!_” Hyacinth said theatrically.

“You won’t have to do it,” she went on.

“I think you mean I won’t do it. I’ve offered at least. Isn’t that a
title?”

“Well then you won’t do it,” said the Princess; after which they looked
at each other a couple of minutes in silence.

“You will, I think, at the pace you’re going,” the young man resumed.

“What do you know about the pace? You’re not worthy to know!”

He did know, however; that is he knew her to be in communication with
strange birds of passage, to have, or to believe she had, irons on the
fire, to hold in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in great
movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch her
askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and had
only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now dismally
acute, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame
Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the
police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising
papers; of being dragged herself, as an accomplice in direful plots,
into a court of justice, possibly into a prison. “If she would only
burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she
groaned to Hyacinth in her helpless gloom. He could only guess what
it might be she kept; asking himself if she were seriously entangled,
were being really exploited by plausible outlaws, predatory adventurers
who counted on her getting frightened at a given moment and offering
hush-money to be allowed to slip out—out of a complicity which they
themselves of course would never have taken seriously; or were merely
coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap sensations,
discussing preliminaries that could have no second stage. It would
have been easy for him to smile at her impression that she was “in
it,” and to conclude that even the cleverest women fail to know
when they are futile, had not the vibration remained which had been
imparted to his nerves two years before and of which he had spoken to
his hostess at Medley—the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched,
that the forces secretly arrayed against the present social order were
pervasive and universal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one
trod, in the hand of an acquaintance that one might touch or the eye
of a stranger that might rest a moment on one’s own. They were above,
below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life; and
it was no disproof of them to say it was too odd they should lurk in a
particular, improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely
their strength, and they would doubtless have still queerer features to
show than this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when
she most flattered herself she was.

“You do go too far,” he none the less said to her the evening Lady
Aurora had passed him at the door.

To which she answered: “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How
else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman’s an
angel, yet isn’t in the least in it,” she added in a moment. She would
give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when he pressed her
she asked if he had brought the copy of Browning he had promised the
last time. If he had he was to sit down and read it to her. In such a
case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to insist; he was glad enough
not to talk about the everlasting nightmare. He took _Men and Women_
from his pocket and read aloud for twenty minutes; but on his making
some remark on one of the poems at the end of this time he noted that
his companion had paid no attention. When he charged her with this
levity she only replied, looking at him musingly: “How _can_ one, after
all, go too far? That’s the word of cowards.”

“Do you mean her ladyship’s a coward?”

“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions.
The way the English can go half-way to a thing and then stick in the
middle!” the Princess exclaimed impatiently.

“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me
Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”

“We’re all afraid of some things and brave about others,” his friend
pursued.

“The thing Lady Aurora’s most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,”
Hyacinth returned.

His companion looked at him but wouldn’t take this up. “There’s
one particular in which she would be very brave. She’d marry her
friend—your friend—Mr. Muniment.”

“Marry him, do you think?”

“What else pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks
on.”

“And what would Belgrave Square and Inglefield and all the rest of it
say?”

“What do they say already and how much does it make her swerve?
She’d do it in a moment, and it would be fine to see it, it would be
magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle at
the idea of any great, free stroke.

“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the
middle,” Hyacinth declared.

“Ah it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion.
When it’s a question of that the English, to do them justice, don’t
stick!”

This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth,
and he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung
associate should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her
name, and the few habits of gentility that survived in her life,
of making herself a scandal, a fable and a nine days’ wonder, for
Muniment’s sake: the young chemical expert being, to his mind, as we
know, exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures
and renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what opinions
Muniment himself might hold on the subject of a union with a young
woman who should have come out of her class for him. He would marry
some day, evidently, because he would do all the natural, human,
productive things; but for the present he had business on hand which
would be likely to pass first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give
evidence of this—he didn’t think people could really come out of their
class; he believed the stamp of one’s origin ineffaceable and that the
best thing one can do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could
easily imagine how it would put him out to be mixed up closely with
a person who, like Lady Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She
can’t marry him unless he asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he
reflected.

“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess thoughtfully.




XXXIX


On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at
four o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his
visit to Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy’s room at about five,
carefully dressed and brushed and ruddy with the freshness of an
abundant washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa with a conscious
smile, knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after
a moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the
strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over
his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him: “My dear
Mr. Muniment, you’re going to see the Princess.”

“Well, have you anything to say against it?” Mr. Muniment asked.

“Not a word; you know I like princesses. But _you_ have.”

“Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,” the young man returned.
“There’s something to be said against everything if you give yourself
trouble enough.”

“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against my big
brother.”

“The man’s a sneak who’s only and always praised,” Paul lucidly
remarked. “If you didn’t hope to be finely abused where would be the
encouragement?”

“Ay, but not with reason,” said Rosy, who always brightened to an
argument.

“The better the reason the greater the incentive to expose one’s self.
However, you won’t hear of it—if people do heave bricks at me.”

“I won’t hear of it? Pray don’t I hear of everything? I should like any
one to keep anything from _me_!” And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her
recumbent head.

“There’s a good deal I keep from you, my dear,” said Paul rather dryly.

“You mean there are things I don’t want, I don’t take any trouble, to
know. Indeed and indeed there are: things I wouldn’t hear of for the
world—that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you were
to go down on your knees. But if I did, if I did, I promise you that
just as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are
others,” the young woman went on, “there are special points on which
you’ll just be so good as to enlighten me. When the Princess asked you
to come and see her you refused and wanted to know what good it would
do. I hoped you’d go then; I should have liked you to go, because I
wanted to know how she lived and whether she really had things handsome
or only in the poor way she said. But I didn’t push you, because I
couldn’t have told you what good it would do you: that was only the
good it would have done me. At present I’ve heard everything from Lady
Aurora and that it’s all quite decent and tidy—though not really like a
princess a bit—and that she knows how to turn everything about and put
it best end foremost, just as I do, like, though I oughtn’t to say it,
no doubt. Well, you’ve been, and more than once, and I’ve had nothing
to do with it; of which I’m very glad now, for reasons you perfectly
know—you’re too honest a man to pretend you don’t. Therefore when I
see you going again I just inquire of you, as you inquired of her, what
good _does_ it do you?”

“I like it—I like it, my dear,” said Paul with his fresh, unembarrassed
smile.

“I daresay you do. So should I in your place. But it’s the first time
I have heard you express the idea that we ought to do everything we
like.”

“Why not, when it doesn’t hurt any one else?”

“Oh Mr. Muniment, Mr. Muniment!” Rosy exclaimed with exaggerated
solemnity, holding up at him a straight, attenuated forefinger. Then
she added: “No, she doesn’t do you good, that beautiful, brilliant
woman.”

“Give her time, my dear—give her time,” said Paul, looking at his watch.

“Of course you’re impatient, but you _must_ hear me. I’ve no doubt
she’ll wait for you—you won’t lose your turn. But what would you do,
please, if any one was to break down altogether?”

“My bonnie lassie,” the young man returned, “if _you_ only keep going
I don’t care who fails.”

“Oh I shall keep going, if it’s only to look after my friends and
get justice for them,” said Miss Muniment—“the delicate, sensitive
creatures who require support and protection. Have you really forgotten
that we’ve such a one as that?”

The young man walked to the window with his hands in his pockets and
looked out at the fading light. “Why does she go herself then, if she
doesn’t like her?”

Rose Muniment hesitated a moment. “Well, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she
broke out. “I think a woman on her back’s sharper than a man on his two
legs. And you such a wonderful one too!”

“You’re all too sharp for me, my dear. If she goes—and twenty times a
week too—why shouldn’t I go once in ever so long? Especially as I like
her and Lady Aurora doesn’t.”

“Lady Aurora doesn’t? Do you think she’d be guilty of hypocrisy? Lady
Aurora delights in her; she won’t let me say that she’s fit to dust the
Princess’s shoes. I needn’t tell _you_ how she goes down before them
she likes. And I don’t believe you care a button; you’ve something in
your head, some wicked game or other, that you think she can hatch for
you.”

At this he turned round and looked at her a moment, smiling still and
whistling just audibly. “Why shouldn’t I care? Ain’t I soft, ain’t I
susceptible?”

“I never thought I should hear you ask that—after what I’ve seen these
four years. For four years she has come, and it’s all for you—as well
it might be; yet with your never showing any more sense of what she’d
be willing to do for you than if you had been that woollen cat on the
hearthrug!”

“What would you like me to do? Would you like me to hang round her neck
and hold her hand the same as you do?” Muniment asked.

“Yes, it would do me good, I can tell you. It’s better than what I
see—the poor lady getting spotted and dim like a mirror that wants
rubbing.”

“How the devil am I to rub her?” Muniment quaintly asked. “You know a
good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,” he pursued with a face
that gave no sign of seeing a reason in what she said. “Your mind’s
too poetical—as full of sounding strings and silver chords as some old,
elegant harp. There’s nothing in the world I should care for that her
ladyship would be willing to do for me.”

“She’d marry you at a day’s notice—she’d do that for you.”

“I shouldn’t care a hang for that. Besides, if I was to lay it before
her she’d never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for
that—for you.”

“Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!” cried Rosy with high cheer.

“But what’s to be gained if I can have her for you without any risk?”

“You won’t have her for me or for any one when she’s dead of a broken
heart.”

“Dead of a broken tea-cup!” said the young man; “And pray what should
we live on when you had got us set up?—the three of us without counting
the kids.”

He evidently was arguing from pure good nature and not in the least
from curiosity; but his sister replied as eagerly as if he would be
floored by her answer: “Hasn’t she got a hundred a year of her own?
Don’t I know every penny of her affairs?”

Paul gave no sign of any inward judgement passed on Rosy’s conception
of the delicate course or of a superior policy; perhaps indeed, for
it is perfectly possible, her question didn’t strike him as having a
mixture of motives. He only said with a small, pleasant, patient sigh:
“I don’t want the dear old girl’s money.”

His sister, in spite of her eagerness, waited twenty seconds; then she
flashed at him: “Pray do you like the Princess’s better?”

“If I did there’d be much more of it,” he quietly returned.

“How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?” Rosy cried.

“Lord, how you give me away!” laughed her brother. “Daughters of earls,
wives of princes—I’ve only to pick.”

“I don’t speak of the Princess so long as there’s a Prince. But if you
haven’t seen that Lady Aurora’s a beautiful, wonderful exception and
quite unlike any one else in all the wide world—well, all I can say is
that _I_ have.”

“I thought it was your opinion,” Paul objected, “that the swells should
remain swells and the high ones keep their place.”

“And pray would she lose hers if she were to marry you?”

“Her place at Inglefield certainly,” he answered as lucidly as if his
sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.

“Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?”

“Surely you appear to think so from the way you always question her
about it.”

“Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any
madder,” Rosy continued. “They’ve given her up, and if she were to
marry you——”

“If she were to marry me they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,”
Paul broke in.

She flinched a moment, then said serenely: “Oh I don’t care for that!”

“You ought to, to be consistent, though possibly she shouldn’t,
admitting that she wouldn’t. You’ve more imagination than logic—which
of course for a woman is quite right. That’s what makes you say that
her ladyship’s in affliction because I go to a place she herself goes
to without the least compulsion.”

“She goes to keep you off,” said Rosy with decision.

“To keep me off?”

“To interpose with the Princess—and in a sense to interfere against
her. To be nice to her and conciliate her, so she mayn’t take you.”

“Has she told you any such rigmarole as that?” Paul inquired, this time
staring a little.

“Do I need to be told things to know them? I’m not a fine, strong,
superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” Rosy answered
with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might
indeed have made it appear she was capable of wizardry.

“You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the
young man returned. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing
for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a
little less poor.”

“Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as
one of them.”

“She knows I’m not helpless so long as you’re about the place, and that
my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.”

“She wants to assist me to assist you then!” the girl exclaimed with
the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused: it was
a spirit that seemed of a sudden, in argument, to mock at her own
contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring
about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you’re plotting and working and
waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.”

“My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She
couldn’t if she would.”

“And no more do I, I suppose you mean.”

“No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would you could.
However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for all
there happens to be of it. I’m not doing much, you know.”

Rosy lay there looking up at him. “It must be pretty thick when you
talk that way. However, I don’t care what you bring on, for I know I
shall be looked after.”

“Nothing’s going to happen—nothing’s going to happen,” Paul remarked
simply.

Her rejoinder to this was to say in a moment: “You’ve a different tone
since you’ve taken up the Princess.”

She spoke with a certain severity, but he broke out as if he hadn’t
heard her: “I like your idea of the female aristocracy quarrelling over
a dirty brute like me.”

“I don’t know how dirty you are, but I know you smell of soap,” said
his sister inexorably. “They won’t quarrel; that’s not the way they
do it. Yes, you’re taking a different tone for some purpose I can’t
discover just yet.”

“What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?” Paul demanded.

“Why then do you speak as if you weren’t remarkable, immensely
remarkable—more remarkable than anything any one, male or female, good
or bad, of the aristocracy or of the vulgar sort, can ever do for you?”

“What on earth have I ever done to show it?” he asked as with amusement.

“Oh I don’t know your secrets, and that’s one of them. But we’re out of
the common beyond any one, you and I, and between ourselves, with the
door fastened, we might as well admit it.”

“I admit it for you with all my heart!” the young man promptly laughed.

“Well then if I admit it for you that’s all that’s required.”

The pair considered themselves a while in silence, as if each were
tasting agreeably the distinction the other conferred; then Muniment
said: “If I’m such an awfully superior chap why shouldn’t I behave in
keeping?”

“Oh you do, you do!”

“For all that you don’t like it.”

“It isn’t so much what you do. It’s what _she_ does.”

“How do you mean, what she does?”

“She makes Lady Aurora suffer.”

“Oh I can’t go into that,” said Paul. “A man feels such a muff, talking
about the women who ‘suffer’ for him.”

“Well, if they do it I think a man might bear it!” Rosy retorted.
“That’s what a man _is_. When it comes to being sorry, oh that’s too
ridiculous!”

“There are plenty of things in the world I’m sorry for,” he patiently
conceded. “One of them is that you should keep me gossiping here when
I want to go out.”

“Oh I don’t care if I worry her a little. Does she do it on purpose?”
Rosy continued.

“You ladies must settle all that together”—and he rubbed his hat
with the cuff of his coat. It was a new one, the bravest he had ever
possessed, and in a moment he put it on his head as if to re-enforce
his reminder to his sister that it was time she should release him.

“Well, you do look genteel,” she said with high complacency. “No wonder
she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,” she explained. “You never
went to any such expense for her ladyship.”

“My dear, the Princess is worth it, she’s worth it.” Which appeared at
last on his part all seriously spoken.

“Will she help you very much?” Rosy demanded, as at the touch of it,
with a strange, sudden transition to eagerness.

“Well,” said Paul, “that’s rather what I look for.”

She threw herself forward on her sofa with a movement that was rare
with her and, shaking her clasped hands, exclaimed: “Then go off, go
off quickly!”

He came round and kissed her as if he were not more struck than usual
with her freakish inconsistency. “It’s not bad to have a little person
at home who wants a fellow to succeed.”

“Oh I know they’ll look after me.” And she sank back on her pillow with
an air of agreeable security.

He was aware that whenever she said “they,” without further
elucidation, she meant the populace surging up in his rear, and he met
it with his usual ease. “I don’t think we’ll leave it much to ‘them.’”

“No it’s not much you’ll leave to them, I’ll be bound.”

He gave a louder laugh at this and said: “You’re the deepest of the
lot, Miss Muniment.”

Her eyes kindled at his praise and as she rested them on his own she
brought out: “Ah I pity the poor Princess too, you know!”

“Well now, I’m not conceited, but I don’t,” Paul returned, passing in
front of the little mirror on the mantel-shelf.

“Yes, you’ll succeed, and so shall I—but _she_ won’t,” Rosy went on.

He stopped a moment with his hand on the latch of the door and said
gravely, almost sententiously: “She’s not only handsome, handsome as a
picture, but she’s uncommon sharp and has taking ways beyond anything
ever known.”

“I know her ways,” his sister replied. Then as he left the room she
called after him: “But I don’t care for anything so long as you become
prime minister of England!”

Three-quarters of an hour after this he knocked at the door in Madeira
Crescent, and was immediately ushered into the parlour, where the
Princess, in her bonnet and mantle, sat alone. She made no movement as
he came in; she only looked up at him with a smile.

“You’re braver than I gave you credit for,” she said in her rich voice.

“I shall learn to be brave if I associate a while longer with you.
But I shall never cease to be shy,” Muniment added, standing there
and looking tall in the middle of the small room. He cast his eyes
about him for a place to sit down, but she gave him no help to choose;
she only watched him in silence from her own place, her hands quietly
folded in her lap. At last, when without remonstrance from her he had
selected the most uncomfortable chair in the room, she replied:

“That’s only another name for desperate courage. I put on my things on
the chance, but I didn’t expect you.”

“Well, here I am—that’s the great thing,” he said good-humouredly.

“Yes, no doubt it’s a very great thing. But it will be a still greater
thing when you’re there.”

“I’m afraid you hope too much,” the young man observed. “Where is it?
I don’t think you told me.”

The Princess drew a small folded letter from her pocket and, without
saying anything, held it out to him. He got up to take it from her,
opened it and as he read it remained standing in front of her. Then he
went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it. At this act
she rose quickly, as to save the document, but the expression of his
face while he turned round to her made her stop. The smile that came
into her own was a little forced. “What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“I take it the house is known. If we go I suppose we may admit that we
go.”

Paul’s face showed he had been annoyed, but he answered quietly enough:
“No writing—no writing.”

“You’re terribly careful,” said the Princess.

“Careful of you—yes.”

She sank upon her sofa again, asking her companion to ring for tea;
they would do much better to have it before going out. When the order
had been given she went on: “I see I shall have much less keen emotion
than when I acted by myself.”

“Is that what you go in for—keen emotion?”

“Surely, Mr. Muniment. Don’t you?”

“God forbid! I hope to have as little of any sort as possible.”

“Of course one doesn’t want any vague rodomontade, one wants to do
something. But it would be hard if one couldn’t have a little pleasure
by the way.”

“My pleasure’s in keeping very cool,” Muniment said.

“So is mine. But it depends on how you understand it. I like quietness
in the midst of a tumult.”

“You’ve rare ideas about tumults. They’re not good in themselves.”

The Princess considered this a moment. “I wonder if you’re too prudent.
I shouldn’t like that. If it’s made an accusation against you that
you’ve been—where we’re going—shall you deny it?”

“With that prospect it would be simpler not to go at all, wouldn’t it?”
he lucidly asked.

“Which prospect do you mean? That of being found out or that of having
to lie?”

“I suppose that if you lie well enough you’re not found out.” And he
spoke again as for amusement.

“You won’t take me seriously,” said the Princess—and without
irritation, without resentment, with accepted, intelligent sadness.
Yet there was a fineness of reproach in the tone in which she added: “I
don’t believe you want to go at all.”

“Why else should I have come—especially if I don’t take you seriously?”

“That has never been a reason for a man’s not going to see a woman,”
said the Princess. “It’s usually a reason in favour of it.”

Paul turned his steady eyes over the room, looking from one article
of furniture to another: this was a way he had when engaged in a
discussion, and it suggested not so much his reflecting on what
his interlocutor said as that his thoughts were pursuing a bravely
independent course. Presently he took up her remark. “I don’t know that
I quite understand what you mean by that question of taking a woman
seriously.”

“Ah you’re very perfect!” she lightly wailed. “Don’t you consider that
the changes you look for will be also for our benefit?”

“I don’t think they’ll alter your position.”

“If I didn’t hope for that I wouldn’t do anything,” said the Princess.

“Oh I’ve no doubt you’ll do a great deal.”

The young man’s companion was silent for some minutes, during which
he also was content to say nothing. “I wonder you can find it in your
conscience to work with me,” she observed at last.

“It isn’t in my conscience I find it,” he laughed.

The maid-servant brought in the tea, and while his hostess made a place
for it on a table beside her she returned: “Well, I don’t care, for I
think I have you in my power.”

“You’ve every one in your power,” Paul declared.

“Every one’s no one,” she answered rather dryly; and a moment later she
said to him: “That extraordinary little sister of yours—surely you take
_her_ seriously?”

“I’m particularly fond of her, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t
think her position will ever be altered.”

“Are you alluding to her position in bed? If you consider that she’ll
never recover her health,” the Princess said, “I’m very sorry to hear
it.”

“Oh her health will do. I mean that she’ll continue to be, like all the
most amiable women, just a kind of ornament to life.”

She had already noted that he pronounced amiable “emiable”; but she had
accepted this peculiarity of her visitor in the spirit of imaginative
transfigurement in which she had accepted several others. “To _your_
life of course. She can hardly be said to be an ornament to her own.”

“Her life and mine are all one.”

“She’s a prodigious person”—the Princess dismissed her. But while he
drank his tea she remarked that for a revolutionist he was certainly
prodigious as well; and he wanted to know in answer if it weren’t
rather in keeping for revolutionists to be revolutionary. He drank
three cups, declaring his hostess’s decoction rare; it was better even
than Lady Aurora’s. This led him to observe as he put down his third
cup, looking round the room again lovingly, almost covetously: “You’ve
got everything so handy I don’t see what interest you can have.”

“How do you mean, what interest?”

“In getting in so uncommon deep.”

The light in her face flashed on the instant into pure passion. “Do you
consider that I’m in—really far?”

“Up to your neck, ma’am.”

“And do you think that _il y va_ of my neck—I mean that it’s in
danger?” she translated eagerly.

“Oh I understand your French. Well, I’ll look after you,” Muniment said.

“Remember then definitely that I expect not to lie.”

“Not even for me?” Then he added in the same familiar tone, which
was not rough nor wanting in respect, but only homely and direct,
suggestive of growing acquaintance: “If I was your husband I’d come and
take you away.”

“Please don’t speak of my husband,” she returned gravely. “You’ve no
qualification for doing so. You know nothing whatever about him.”

“I know what Hyacinth has told me.”

“Oh Hyacinth!” she sighed impatiently. There was another silence of
some minutes, not disconnected apparently from this reference to the
little bookbinder; but when Muniment spoke after the interval it was
not to carry on the allusion.

“Of course you think me very plain and coarse.”

“Certainly you’ve not such a nice address as Hyacinth”—the Princess
had no wish, on her side, to evade the topic. “But that’s given to very
few,” she added; “and I don’t know that pretty manners are exactly what
we’re working for.”

“Ay, it won’t be very endearing when we cut down a few allowances,” her
visitor concurred. “But I want to please you; I want to be as much as
possible like Hyacinth,” he went on.

“That’s not the way to please me. I don’t forgive him—he’s very
foolish.”

“Ah don’t say that; he’s a fine little flute!” Paul protested.

“He’s a delightful nature, with extraordinary qualities. But he’s
deplorably conventional.”

“Yes, if you talk about taking things seriously—_he_ takes them so,”
Muniment again agreed.

“Has he ever told you his life?” the Princess asked.

“He hasn’t required to tell me. I’ve seen a good bit of it.”

“Yes, but I mean before you knew him.”

Paul thought. “His birth and his poor mother? I think it was Rosy told
me all that.”

“And pray how did _she_ know?”

“Ah when you come to the way Rosy knows——!” He gave that up. “She
doesn’t like people in such a box at all. She thinks we ought all to be
grandly born.”

“Then they agree, for so does poor Hyacinth.” The Princess had a pause,
after which, as with a deep effort: “I want to ask you something. Have
you had a visit from Mr. Vetch?”

“The old gentleman who fiddles? No, he has never done me that honour.”

“It was because I prevented him then. I told him to leave it to me.”

“To leave what now?” And Paul looked out in placid perplexity.

“He’s in great distress about Hyacinth—about the danger he runs. You
know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Muniment answered slowly. “But where does
_he_ come in? I thought it was supposed to be a grand secret.”

“So it is. He doesn’t know anything; he only suspects.”

“How do _you_ know then?”

She had another wait. “Oh I’m like Rosy—I find out. Mr. Vetch, as I
suppose you’re aware, has been near Hyacinth all his life; he takes
a most affectionate interest in him. He believes there’s something
hanging over him and wants it to be made impossible.” She paused
afresh, but her visitor made no response and she continued: “He was
going to see you, to beg you to do something, to interfere; he seemed
to suppose your power in such a matter would be very great. But as I
tell you, I requested him—a particular favour to me—to let you alone.”

“What favour would it be to you?” Muniment asked.

“It would give me the satisfaction of feeling you not worried.”

He appeared struck with the curious inadequacy of this explanation,
considering what was at stake; so that he confessed to almost rude
amusement. “That was considerate of you beyond everything.”

“It was not meant as consideration for you; it was a piece of
calculation.” Having made this statement the Princess gathered up
her gloves and turned away, walking to the chimney-piece, where she
stood arranging her bonnet-ribbons in the mirror with which it was
decorated. Paul watched her with clear curiosity; in spite both of his
inaccessibility to nervous agitation and of the general scepticism
he had cultivated about her he was not proof against her faculty of
creating a feeling of suspense, a tension of interest, on the part of
those involved with her. He followed her movements, but plainly didn’t
follow her calculations, so that he could only listen more attentively
when she brought out suddenly: “Do you know why I asked you to come and
see me? Do you know why I went to see your sister? It was all a plan,”
said the Princess.

“We hoped it was just an ordinary, humane, social impulse,” the young
man returned.

“It was humane, it was even social, but it was not ordinary. I wanted
to save Hyacinth.”

“To save him?”

“I wanted to be able to talk with you just as I’m talking now.”

“That was a fine idea!” Paul candidly cried.

“I’ve an exceeding, a quite inexpressible regard for him. I’ve no
patience with some of his opinions, and that’s why I permitted myself
to say just now that he’s silly. But after all the opinions of our
friends are not what we love them for—so I don’t see why they should
be a ground of aversion. Robinson’s nature is singularly generous and
his intelligence very fine, though there _are_ things he muddles up.
You just now expressed strongly your own interest in him; therefore we
ought to be perfectly agreed. Agreed I mean about getting him out of
his scrape.”

Muniment had the air of a man feeling he must consider a little before
assenting to these successive propositions; it being a limitation of
his intellect that he couldn’t respond without understanding. After a
moment he answered, referring to his hostess’s last remark, in which
the others appeared to culminate, and at the same time shaking his head
with a rise of his strong eyebrows: “His scrape isn’t important.”

“You thought it was when you got him into it.”

“I thought it would give him pleasure.”

“That’s not a reason for letting people do what isn’t good for them.”

“I wasn’t thinking so much about what would be good for him as about
what would be bad for some others. He can do as he likes.”

“That’s easy to say. They must be persuaded not to call him.”

“Persuade them then, dear madam.”

“How can I persuade them?” she cried. “If I could do that I wouldn’t
have approached you. I’ve no influence, and even if I had it my motives
would be suspected. You’re the one to come in.”

“Shall I tell them he funks it?” Muniment asked.

“He doesn’t—he doesn’t!” she declared.

“On what ground then shall I put it?”

“Tell them he has changed his opinions.”

“Wouldn’t that be rather like denouncing him as a traitor—and doing it
hypocritically?”

“Tell them then it’s simply my wish.”

“That won’t do _you_ much good,” Paul said with his natural laugh.

“Will it put me in danger? That’s exactly what I want.”

“Yes; but as I understand you, you want to suffer _for_ the people,
not by them. You’re very fond of Robinson; it couldn’t be otherwise,”
the young man argued. “But you ought to remember that in the line
you’ve chosen our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our
shrinkings——” His voice had become low and grave, and he paused a
little while the Princess’s deep and lovely eyes, attaching themselves
to his face, showed how quickly she had been affected by this unwonted
adjuration. He spoke now as if he were taking her seriously. “All those
things are as nothing, they must never weigh a feather, beside our
service.”

She began to draw on her gloves. “You’re a most extraordinary man.”

“That’s what Rosy tells me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“Do Hyacinth’s job? Because it’s better to do my own.”

“And pray what _is_ your own?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul Muniment with perfect equanimity. “I expect
to be instructed.”

“Have you taken an oath like Hyacinth?”

“Ah madam, the oaths _I_ take I don’t tell,” he gravely returned.

“Oh _you_——!” she breathed with a deep ambiguous cadence. She appeared
to dismiss the question, but to suggest at the same time that he was
very abnormal. This imputation was further conveyed by the next words
she uttered. “And can you see a dear friend whirled away like that?”

At this, for the first time, her visitor showed impatience. “You had
better leave my dear friend to me.”

The Princess, her eyes still fixed on him, gave a long, soft sigh.
“Well then, shall we go?”

He took up his hat again, but made no movement toward the door. “If you
did me the honour to seek my acquaintance, to ask me to come and see
you, only in order to say what you’ve just said about Hyacinth, perhaps
we needn’t carry out the form of going to the place you proposed.
Wasn’t this only your pretext?”

“I believe you _are_ afraid!” she frankly returned; but in spite
of her exclamation the pair presently went out of the house. They
quitted the door together, after having stood on the step a little
to look up and down, apparently for a cab. So far as the darkness,
which was now complete, permitted the prospect to be scanned, there
was no such vehicle within hail. They turned to the left and after
a walk of several minutes, during which they were engaged in small
dull by-streets, emerged on a more populous way, where they found
lighted shops and omnibuses and the evident chance of a hansom. Here
they stayed afresh and very soon an empty hansom passed and, at a
sign, pulled up near them. Meanwhile, it should be recorded, they had
been followed, at an interval, by a cautious figure, a person who, in
Madeira Crescent, when they came out of the house, was stationed on
the other side of the street, at a considerable distance. On their
appearing he had retreated a little, still, however, keeping them
in sight. When they moved away he had moved in the same direction,
watching them but maintaining his distance. He had drawn nearer,
seemingly because he couldn’t control his eagerness, as they passed
into Westbourne Grove, and during the minute they stood there had
been exposed to recognition by the Princess should she have happened
to turn her head. In the event of her having felt such an impulse she
would have discovered, in the lamplight, that her noble husband was
hovering in her rear. But she was otherwise occupied; she failed to
see that at one moment he came so close as to suggest an intention of
breaking out on her from behind. The reader scarce need be informed,
nevertheless, that his design was but to satisfy himself as to the
kind of person his wife was walking with. The time allowed him for this
research was brief, especially as he had perceived, more rapidly than
he sometimes perceived things, that they were looking for a vehicle and
that with its assistance they would pass out of his range—a reflexion
which caused him to give half his attention to the business of hailing
any second cab that should come that way. There are parts of London
in which you may never see a cab at all, but there are none in which
you may see only one; in accordance with which fortunate truth Prince
Casamassima was able to wave his stick to good purpose as soon as the
two objects of his pursuit had rattled away. Behind them now, in the
gloom, he had no fear of being seen. In little more than an instant he
had jumped into another hansom, the driver of which accompanied the
usual exclamation of “All right, sir!” with a small, amused grunt,
regarded by the Prince as eminently British, after he had hissed at
him, over the hood, expressively and in a manner by no means indicative
of that nationality, the injunction, “Follow, follow, follow!”




XL


An hour after her companion had left the house with Paul Muniment
Madame Grandoni came down to supper, a meal for which she made use, in
gloomy solitude, of the little back parlour. She had pushed away her
plate and sat motionless, staring at the crumpled cloth with her hands
folded on the edge of the table, when she became aware that a gentleman
had been ushered into the drawing-room and was standing before the fire
in discreet suspense. At the same moment the maid-servant approached
the old lady, remarking with bated breath: “The Prince, the Prince,
mum! It’s you he ’ave asked for, mum!” Upon this Madame Grandoni called
out to the visitor from her place, addressed him as her poor, dear,
distinguished friend and bade him come and give her his arm. He obeyed
with solemn alacrity, conducting her to the front room and the fire. He
helped her to arrange herself in her chair and gather her shawl about
her; then he seated himself at hand and remained with his dismal eyes
bent on her. After a moment she said: “Tell me something about Rome.
The grass in Villa Borghese must already be thick with flowers.”

“I would have brought you some if I had thought,” he answered. Then he
turned his gaze about the room. “Yes, you may well ask in such a black
little hole as this. My wife shouldn’t live here,” he added.

“Ah my dear friend, for all she’s your wife——!” the old woman exclaimed.

The Prince sprang up in sudden, sharp agitation, and then she saw that
the stiff propriety with which he had come into the room and greeted
her was only an effort of his good manners. He was really trembling
with excitement. “It’s true—it’s true! She _has_ lovers—she _has_
lovers!” he broke out. “I’ve seen it with my eyes and I’ve come here to
know!”

“I don’t know what you’ve seen, but your coming here to know won’t have
helped you much. Besides, if you’ve seen you know for yourself. At any
rate I’ve ceased to be able to tell you.”

“You’re afraid—you’re afraid!” cried the visitor with a wild,
accusatory gesture.

The old woman looked up at him with slow speculation. “Sit down and be
quiet, very quiet. I’ve ceased to pay attention—I take no heed.”

“Well, I do then,” said the Prince, subsiding a little. “Don’t you know
she has gone out to a house in a horrible quarter with a man?”

“I think it highly probable, dear Prince.”

“And who is he? That’s what I want to discover.”

“How can I tell you? I haven’t seen him.”

He looked at her with eyes of anguish. “Dear lady, is that kind to me
when I’ve counted on you?”

“Oh I’m not kind any more; it’s not a question of that. I’m angry—as
angry almost as you.”

“Then why don’t you watch her, eh?”

“It’s not with her I’m angry. It’s with myself,” said Madame Grandoni,
all in thought.

“For becoming so indifferent, do you mean?”

“On the contrary, for staying in the house.”

“Thank God you’re still here, or I couldn’t have come. But what a
lodging for the Princess!” the visitor exclaimed. “She might at least
live in a manner befitting.”

“Eh, the last time you were in London you thought it too expensive!”
she cried.

He cast about him. “Whatever she does is wrong. Is it because it’s so
bad that you must go?” he went on.

“It’s foolish—foolish—foolish,” said his friend, slowly and
impressively.

“Foolish, _che, che_! He was in the house nearly an hour, this one.”

“In the house? In what house?”

“Here where you sit. I saw him go in, and when he came out it was after
a long time, and she with him.”

“And where were you meanwhile?”

Again the Prince faltered. “I was on the other side of the street. When
they came out I followed them. It was more than an hour ago.”

“Was it for that you came to London?”

“Ah what I came for——! To put myself in hell!”

“You had better go back to Rome,” said Madame Grandoni.

“Of course I’ll go back, but only if you’ll tell me who this one is!
How can you be ignorant, dear friend, when he comes freely in and out
of the place?—where I have to watch at the door for a moment I can
snatch. He wasn’t the same as the other.”

“As the other?”

“Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one I met in the house
that Sunday afternoon.”

“I sit in my room almost always now,” said the old woman. “I only come
down to eat.”

“Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,” the Prince
returned.

“Better for whom?”

“I mean that if you didn’t withdraw yourself you could at least answer
my questions.”

“Ah but I haven’t the slightest desire to answer them,” Madame Grandoni
replied. “You must remember that I’m not here as your spy.”

“No,” said the Prince in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. “If
you had given me more information I shouldn’t have been obliged to come
here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this evening
I spent two hours walking up and down opposite there, like a groom
waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a personal
impression. It was so I saw him come in. He’s not a gentleman—not even
one of the strange ones of this country.”

“I think he’s Scotch or Welsh,” Madame Grandoni explained.

“Ah then you _have_ seen him?”

“No, but I’ve heard him. He speaks straight out (the floors of this
house are not built as we build in Italy) and his voice is the same
I’ve noticed in the people of the wild parts, where they ‘shoot.’
Besides, she has told me—some few things. He’s a chemist’s assistant.”

“A chemist’s assistant? _Santo Dio!_ And the other one, a year ago—more
than a year ago—was a bookbinder.”

“Oh the bookbinder——!” the old woman wailed.

“And does she associate with no people of good? Has she no other
society?”

“For me to tell you more, Prince, you must wait till I’m free,” she
pleaded.

“How do you mean, free?”

“I must choose. I must either go away—and then I can tell you what I’ve
seen—or if I stay here I must hold my tongue.”

“But if you go away you’ll have seen nothing,” the Prince objected.

“Ah plenty as it is—more than I ever expected to!”

He clasped his hands as in strenuous suppliance but at the same time
smiled as to conciliate, to corrupt. “Dearest friend, you torment my
curiosity. If you’ll tell me this I’ll never ask you anything more.
Where did they go? For the love of God, what is that house?”

“I know nothing of their houses,” she returned with an impatient shrug.

“Then there are others? there are many?” She made no answer but to
sit intent, her chin in her bulging kerchief. Her visitor presently
continued with his pressure of pain and his beautiful Italian
distinctness, as if his lips cut and carved the sound, while his fine
fingers quivered into quick, emphasising gestures: “The street’s
small and black, but it’s like all the dreadful streets. It has no
importance; it’s at the end of a long imbroglio. They drove for twenty
minutes, then stopped their cab and got out. They went together on
foot some minutes more. There were many turns; they seemed to know
them well. For me it was very difficult—of course I also got out; I
had to stay so far behind—close against the houses. Chiffinch Street,
N.E.—that was the name,” the Prince continued, pronouncing the word
with difficulty; “and the house is number 32—I looked at that after
they went in. It’s a very bad house—worse than this; but it has no
sign of a chemist and there are no shops in the street. They rang the
bell—only once, though they waited a long time; it seemed to me at
least that they didn’t touch it again. It was several minutes before
the door was opened, and that was a bad time for me, because as they
stood there they looked up and down. Fortunately you know the air of
this place! I saw no light in the house—not even after they went in.
Who opened to them I couldn’t tell. I waited nearly half an hour, to
see how long they might stay and what they would do on coming out; then
at last my impatience brought me here, for to know she was absent made
me hope I might see you. While I was there two persons went in: two men
together, both smoking, who looked like _artisti_—I saw them badly—but
no one came out. I could see they took their cigars—and you can fancy
what tobacco!—into the presence of the Princess. Formerly,” pursued
Madame Grandoni’s visitor with a touching attempt at pleasantry on this
point, “she never tolerated smoking—never mine at least. The street’s
very quiet—very few people pass. Now what’s the house? Is it where that
man lives?” he almost panted.

He had been encouraged by her consenting, in spite of her first
protests, to listen to him—he could see she _was_ listening; and he was
still more encouraged when after a moment she answered his question by
a question of her own. “Did you cross the river to go there? I know he
lives over the water!”

“Ah no, it was not in that part. I tried to ask the cabman who brought
me back to explain to me what it’s called; but I couldn’t make him
understand. They’ve heavy minds,” the Prince declared. Then he pursued,
drawing a little closer to his hostess: “But what were they doing
there? Why did she go with him?”

“They think they’re conspiring. Ecco!” said Madame Grandoni.

“You mean they’ve joined a secret society, a band of revolutionists and
murderers? _Capisco bene_—that’s not new to me. But perhaps they only
pretend it’s for that,” added the Prince.

“Only pretend? Why should they pretend? That’s not Christina’s way.”

“There are other possibilities,” he portentously observed.

“Oh of course when your wife goes off with strange, low men in the
dark, goes off to _des maisons louches_, you can think anything
you like and I’ve nothing to say to your thoughts. I’ve my own, but
they’re my affair, and I shall not undertake to defend Christina, who’s
indefensible. When she commits these follies she provokes, she invites,
the worst construction; there let it rest save for this one remark
which I will content myself with making. That is that if she were a
real wretch, capable of _all_, she wouldn’t behave as she does now,
she wouldn’t expose herself to _the_ supposition; the appearance of
everything would be good and proper. I simply tell you what I believe.
If I believed that what she’s doing concerned you alone I should say
nothing about it—at least sitting here. But it concerns others, it
concerns every one, so I open my mouth at last. She has gone to that
house to break up society.”

“To break it up, yes, as she has wanted before?”

“Oh more than ever before! She’s very much entangled. She has relations
with people who are watched by the police. She hasn’t told me, but I’ve
grown sure of it by simply living with her.”

The poor Prince stared. “And is _she_ watched by the police?”

“I can’t tell you; it’s very possible—except that the police here isn’t
like that of other countries.”

“It’s more stupid.” He gazed at his cold comforter with a flush of
shame on his face. “Will she bring us to _that_ scandal? It would be
the worst of all.”

“There’s one chance—the chance she’ll get tired of it,” the old lady
remarked. “Only the scandal may come before that.”

“Dear friend, she’s the Devil in person,” said the Prince woefully.

“No, she’s not the Devil, because she wishes to do good.”

“What good did she ever wish to do to me?” he asked with glowing eyes.

She shook her head with a gloom that matched his own. “You can do
no good of any kind to each other. Each on your own side you must be
quiet.”

“How can I be quiet when I hear of such infamies?” He got up in his
violence and, after a fashion that caused his companion to burst into
a short, incongruous laugh as soon as she heard the words, pronounced:
“She shall _not_ break up society!”

“No, she’ll bore herself to death before the _coup_ is ripe. Make up
your mind to that.”

“That’s what I expected to find—that the caprice was over. She has
passed through so many madnesses.”

“Give her time—give her time,” replied Madame Grandoni.

“Time to drag my name into an assize-court? Those people are robbers,
incendiaries, murderers!”

“You can say nothing to me about them that I haven’t said to her.”

“And how does she defend herself?”

“Defend herself? Did you ever hear Christina do that?” the old woman
asked. “The only thing she says to me is: ‘Don’t be afraid; I promise
you by all that’s sacred you personally shan’t suffer.’ She speaks
as if she had it all in her hands. That’s very well. No doubt I’m a
selfish old pig, but after all one has a heart for others.”

“And so have I, I think I may pretend,” said the Prince. “You tell me
to give her time, and it’s certain she’ll take it whether I give it or
no. But I can at least stop giving her money. By heaven it’s my duty as
an honest man.”

“She tells me that as it is you don’t give her much.”

“Much, dear lady? It depends on what you call so. It’s enough to make
all these scoundrels flock round her.”

“They’re not all scoundrels any more than she’s all one. That’s the
tiresome part of it!” she wearily sighed.

“But this fellow, the chemist—to-night—what do you call _him_?”

“She has spoken to me of him as a fine young man.”

“But she thinks it fine to blow us all up,” the Prince returned.
“Doesn’t _he_ take her money?”

“I don’t know what he takes. But there are some things—heaven forbid
one should forget them! The misery of London’s fearful.”

“_Che vuole?_ There’s misery everywhere,” our personage opined. “It’s
the will of God. _Ci vuol pazienza!_ And in this country does no one
give alms?”

“Every one, I believe. But it appears that that’s not enough.”

He said nothing for a moment; this statement of Madame Grandoni’s
seemed to present difficulties. The solution, however, soon suggested
itself; it was expressed in the inquiry: “What will you have in a
country that hasn’t the true faith?”

“Ah the true faith’s a great thing, but there’s suffering even in
countries that have it.”

“_Evidentemente._ But it helps suffering to be borne and, later, makes
it up; whereas here——!” said the visitor with a sad if inconclusive
smile. “If I may speak of myself it’s to me, in my circumstances, a
support.”

“That’s good,” she returned a little curtly.

He stood before her, resting his eyes for a moment on the floor. “And
the famous Cholto—Godfrey Gerald—does he come no more?”

“I haven’t seen him for months. I know nothing about him.”

“He doesn’t like the chemists and the bookbinders, eh?” asked the
Prince.

“Ah it was he who first brought them—to gratify your wife.”

“If they’ve turned him out then that’s very well. Now if only some one
could turn _them_ out!”

“_Aspetta, aspetta!_” said the old woman.

“That’s very good advice, but to follow it isn’t amusing.” Then the
Prince added: “You alluded, just now, as to something particular, to
_quel giovane_, the young artisan whom I met in the other house. Is he
also still proposed to our admiration, or has he paid the penalty of
his crimes?”

“He has paid the penalty, but I don’t know of what. I’ve nothing bad to
tell you of him except that I think his star’s on the wane.”

“_Poverino!_” the Prince exclaimed.

“That’s exactly the manner in which I addressed him the first time I
saw him. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I felt it would happen
somehow. It has happened through his changing his opinions. He has now
the same idea as you—_ci vuol pazienza_.”

Her friend listened with the same expression of wounded eagerness, the
same parted lips and excited eyes, to every added fact that dropped
from Madame Grandoni’s lips. “That at least is more honest. Then _he_
doesn’t go to Chiffinch Street?”

“I don’t know about Chiffinch Street, though it would be my impression
that he doesn’t go to any place visited by Christina and the other one,
by the Scotchman, together. But these are delicate matters,” the old
woman pursued.

They seemed much to impress her interlocutor. “Do you mean that the
Scotchman is—what shall I call it?—his successor?”

For a time she made no reply. “I imagine this case different. But I
don’t understand; it was the other, the little one, who helped her to
know the Scotchman.”

“And now they’ve quarrelled—about my wife? It’s all tremendously
edifying!” the Prince wailed.

“I can’t tell you, and shouldn’t have attempted it, only that Assunta
talks to me.”

“I wish she would talk to me,” he said wistfully.

“Ah my friend, if Christina were to find you getting at her servants——!”

“How could it be worse for me than it is now? However, I don’t know why
I speak as if I cared, for I don’t care any more. I’ve given her up.
It’s finished.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Madame Grandoni gravely.

“You yourself made the distinction perfectly. So long as she
endeavoured only to injure _me_, and in my private capacity, I could
condone, I could wait, I could hope. But since she has so shamelessly
thrown herself into criminal undertakings, since she lifts her hand
with a determined purpose, as you tell me, against the most sacred
institutions—it’s too much; ah yes, it’s too much! She may go her
way; she’s no wife of mine. Not another penny of mine shall go into
her pocket and into that of the wretches who prey upon her, who have
corrupted her.”

“Dear Prince, I think you’re right. And yet I’m sorry!” sighed his
hostess, extending her hand for assistance to rise from her chair. “If
she becomes really poor it will be much more difficult for me to leave
her. _This_ is not poverty, and not even a good imitation of it, as she
would like it to be. But what will be said of me if, having remained
with her through so much of her splendour, I turn away from her the
moment she begins to want?”

“Dear lady, do you ask that to make me relent?” the Prince uneasily
quavered.

“Not in the least; for whatever’s said and whatever you do there’s
nothing for me in decency at present but to pack my trunk. Judge by the
way I’ve tattled.”

“If you’ll stay on she shall have everything.” He spoke in a very low
tone, with a manner that betrayed the shame he felt for his attempt at
bribery.

Madame Grandoni gave him an astonished glance and moved away from him.
“What does that mean? I thought you didn’t care.”

I know not what explanation of his inconsequence her guest would have
given her if at that moment the door of the room hadn’t been pushed
open to permit the entrance of Hyacinth Robinson. He stopped short on
finding a stranger in the field, but before he had time to say anything
the old lady addressed him rather shortly. “Ah you don’t fall well; the
Princess isn’t at home.”

“That was mentioned to me, but I ventured to come in to see you as I’ve
done before,” our young man replied. Then he added as to accommodate:
“I beg many pardons. I was not told you were not alone.”

“My visitor’s going, but I’m going too,” said Madame Grandoni. “I must
take myself to my room—I’m all falling to pieces. Therefore kindly
excuse me.”

Hyacinth had had time to recognise the Prince, and this nobleman paid
him the same compliment, as was proved by his asking of their companion
in a rapid Italian aside: “Isn’t it the bookbinder?”

“_Sicuro_,” said the old lady; while Hyacinth, murmuring a regret that
he should find her indisposed, turned back to the door.

“One moment—one moment, I pray!” the Prince interposed, raising his
hand persuasively and looking at Mr. Robinson with an unexpected,
exaggerated smile. “Please introduce me to the gentleman,” he added in
English to Madame Grandoni.

She manifested no surprise at the request—she had none left for
anything—but pronounced the name of Prince Casamassima and then added
for Hyacinth’s benefit: “He knows who you are.”

“Will you permit me to keep you a very little minute?” The Prince
appealed to his fellow-visitor, after which he remarked to Madame
Grandoni: “I’ll talk with him a little. It’s perhaps not necessary we
should incommode you if you don’t wish to stay.”

She had for an instant, as she tossed off a small satirical laugh, a
return of her ancient drollery. “Remember that if you talk long she may
come back! Yes, yes, I’ll go upstairs. _Felicissima notte, signori!_”
She took her way to the door, which Hyacinth, considerably bewildered,
held open for her.

The reasons for which Prince Casamassima wished to converse with him
were mysterious; nevertheless he was about to close the door behind
their friend as a sign that he was at the service of the greater
personage. At this moment the latter raised again a courteous,
remonstrant hand. “After all, as my visit is finished and as yours
comes to nothing, might we not go out?”

“Certainly I’ll go with you,” said Hyacinth. He spoke with an
instinctive stiffness in spite of the Prince’s queer affability, and
in spite also of the fact that he felt sorry for the nobleman to whose
countenance Madame Grandoni’s last injunction, uttered in English,
could bring a deep and painful blush. It is forbidden us to try the
question of what Hyacinth, face to face with an aggrieved husband, may
have had on his conscience, but he assumed, naturally enough, that the
situation might be grave, though indeed the Prince’s manner was for the
moment incongruously bland. He invited his new, his grand acquaintance
to pass, and in a minute they were in the street together.

“Do you go here—do you go there?” the Prince inquired as they stood a
moment before the house. “If you permit I’ll take the same direction.”
On Hyacinth’s answering that it was indifferent to him he said, turning
to the right: “Well then here, but _adagio_, if that pleases you, and
only a little way.” His English was far from perfect, but his errors
were like artificial flowers of accent: Hyacinth was struck with his
effort to express himself very distinctly, so that in intercourse
with a small untutored Briton his foreignness should not put him
at a disadvantage. Quick to perceive and appreciate, our hero noted
how the quality of breeding in him just enabled him to compass that
coolness, and he mentally applauded the success of a difficult feat.
Difficult he judged it because it seemed to him that the purpose for
which the Prince wished to speak to him was one requiring an immensity
of explanation, and it was a sign of training to explain adequately,
in a strange tongue, especially if one were agitated, to a person
in a social position very different from one’s own. Hyacinth knew
what the Prince’s estimate of _his_ importance must be—he could have
no illusions as to the character of the people his wife received;
but while he heard him carefully put one word after the other he
was able to smile to himself at his needless precautions. Our young
man reflected that at a pinch he could have encountered him in his
own tongue: during his stay at Venice he had picked up an Italian
vocabulary. “With Madame Grandoni I spoke of you,” the Prince announced
dispassionately as they walked along. “She told me a thing that
interested me,” he added; “that’s why I walk with you.” Hyacinth said
nothing, deeming that better by silence than in any other fashion he
held himself at the disposal of his interlocutor. “She told me you’ve
changed—you’ve no more the same opinions.”

“The same opinions?”

“About the arrangement of society. You desire no more the assassination
of the rich.”

“I never desired any such thing!” said Hyacinth indignantly.

“Oh if you’ve changed you can confess,” his friend declared in an
encouraging tone. “It’s very good for some people to be rich. It
wouldn’t be right for all to be poor.”

“It would be pleasant if all could be rich,” Hyacinth more mildly
suggested.

“Yes, but not by stealing and shooting.”

“No, not by stealing and shooting. I never desired that.”

“Ah no doubt she was mistaken. But to-day you think we must have
patience?” the Prince went on as if greatly hoping Hyacinth would
allow this valuable conviction to be attributed to him. “That’s also my
view.”

“Oh yes, we must have patience,” said his companion, who was now
smiling to himself in the dark.

They had by this time reached the end of the little Crescent, where
the Prince paused under the street-lamp. He considered the small
bookbinder’s countenance for a moment by its help and then pronounced:
“If I’m not mistaken you know very well the Princess.”

Hyacinth hung back: “She has been very kind to me.”

“She’s my wife—perhaps you know.”

Again Mr. Robinson faltered, but after a moment he replied: “She has
told me that she’s married.” As soon as he had spoken these words he
thought them idiotic.

“You mean you wouldn’t know if she hadn’t told you, I suppose.
Evidently there’s nothing to show it. You can think if that’s agreeable
to me.”

“Oh I can’t think, I can’t judge.”

“You’re right—that’s impossible.” The Prince stood before his
companion, and in the pale gaslight the latter saw more of his face. It
had an unnatural expression, a look of wasted anxiety; the eyes seemed
to glitter, and our fond observer conceived the unfortunate nobleman
to be feverish and ill. He pursued in a moment: “Of course you think it
strange—my conversation. I want you to tell me something.”

“I’m afraid you’re very unwell,” said Hyacinth.

“Yes, I’m very unwell; but I shall be better if you’ll tell me. It’s
because you’ve come back to good ideas—that’s why I ask you.”

A sense that the situation of the Princess’s husband was really
pitiful, that at any rate he suffered and was helpless, that he was a
gentleman and even a person who would never have done any great harm—a
perception of these appealing truths came into Hyacinth’s heart and
stirred there a desire to be kind to him, to render him any service
that in reason he might ask. It struck him he must be pretty sick to
ask any at all, but that was his own affair. “If you’d like me to see
you safely home I’ll do that,” our young friend brought out; and even
while he spoke he was struck with the oddity of his being already on
such friendly terms with a person whom he had hitherto supposed to
be the worst enemy of the rarest of women. He found himself unable to
consider the Prince with resentment.

This personage acknowledged the civility of the offer with a slight
inclination of his high slimness.

“I’m very much obliged to you, but I don’t go home. I don’t go home
till I know this—to what house she has gone. Will you tell me that?”

“To what house?” Hyacinth repeated.

“She has gone with a person whom you know. Madame Grandoni told me
that. He’s a Scotch chemist.”

“A Scotch chemist?” Hyacinth stared.

“I saw them myself—an hour, two hours, ago. Listen, listen; I’ll
be very clear,” said the Prince, laying his forefinger on the other
hand with a pleading emphasis. “He came to that house—this one, where
we’ve been, I mean—and stayed there a long time. I was here in the
street—I’ve passed my day in the street! They came out together and I
watched them—I followed them.”

Hyacinth had listened with wonder and even with suspense; the Prince’s
manner gave an air of such importance and such mystery to what he had
to relate. But at this he broke out: “This’s not my business—I can’t
hear it! _I_ don’t watch, _I_ don’t follow.”

His friend stared in surprise, but then rejoined, more quickly than he
had spoken yet: “Do you understand that they went to a house where they
conspire, where they prepare horrible acts? How can you like that?”

“How do you know it, sir?” Hyacinth gravely asked.

“It’s Madame Grandoni who has told me.”

“Why then do you question me?”

“Because I’m not sure, I don’t think she knows. I want to know more, to
be sure of what’s the truth. Does she go to such a place only for the
revolution, or does she go to be alone with him?”

“With _him_?” The Prince’s tone and his excited eyes had somehow made
the suggestion live.

“With the tall man—the chemist. They got into a hansom together; the
house is far away, in the lost quarters.”

Hyacinth drew himself together. “I know nothing about the matter and I
don’t care. If that’s all you wish to ask me we had better separate.”

The Prince’s high face grew long; it seemed to grow paler. “Then it’s
not true that you hate those abominations!”

Hyacinth frankly wondered. “How can you know about my opinions? How can
they interest you?”

The Prince looked at him with sick eyes; he raised his arms a certain
distance and then let them drop at his sides. “I hoped you’d help me.”

“When we’re in trouble we can’t help each other much!” our young man
exclaimed. But this austere reflexion was lost on the Prince, who at
the moment it was uttered had already turned to look in the direction
from which they had moved, the other end of the Crescent, his attention
suddenly jerked round by the sound of a rapid hansom. The place
was still and empty and the wheels of this vehicle reverberated. He
glowered at it through the darkness and in an instant cried, under his
breath, excitedly: “They’ve come back—they’ve come back! Now you can
see—yes, the two!” The hansom had slackened pace and pulled up; the
house before which it stopped was clearly the house the two men had
lately quitted. Hyacinth felt his arm seized by his strange confidant,
who hastily, with a strong effort, drew him forward several yards.
At this moment a part of the agitation that possessed the Princess’s
unhappy husband seemed to pass into his own blood; a wave of anxiety
rushed through him—anxiety as to the relations of the two persons who
had descended from the cab: he had in short for several instants a
very exact revelation of the state of feeling of those who love in the
rage of jealousy. If he had been told half an hour before that he was
capable of surreptitious peepings in the interest of that passion he
would have resented the insult; yet he allowed himself to be checked
by his companion just at the nearest point at which they might safely
consider the proceedings of the couple who alighted. It was in fact
the Princess accompanied by Paul Muniment. Hyacinth noticed that
the latter paid the cabman, who immediately drove away, from his own
pocket. He stood with the Princess for some minutes at the door of the
house—minutes during which Mr. Robinson felt his heart beat insanely,
ignobly. He couldn’t tell why.

“What does he say? what does _she_ say?” hissed the Prince; and when he
went on the next moment, “Will he go in again or will he go away?” our
stricken youth felt a voice given to his own sharpest thought. The pair
were talking together with rapid sequences, and as the door had not
yet been opened it was clear that, to prolong the conversation on the
steps, the Princess delayed to ring. “It will make three, four hours he
has been with her,” moaned the Prince.

“He may be with her fifty hours!” Hyacinth laughed as he turned away
ashamed of himself.

“He has gone in—_sangue di Dio_!” cried the Prince, catching his
companion again by the arm and making him look. All our friend saw was
the door just closing; Paul and the Princess were on the other side
of it. “Is _that_ for the revolution?” the trembling nobleman panted.
But Mr. Robinson made no answer; he only gazed at the closed door an
instant and then, disengaging himself, walked straight away, leaving
the victim of the wrong he could even then feel as deeper than his
own to shake, in the dark, a helpless, foolish, gold-headed stick at
the indifferent house where Madame Grandoni’s bedroom light glimmered
aloft.




XLI


Hyacinth waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the
door the splendour of her appearance did much to justify her delay.
He heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a
creaking of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward
into the narrow, dusky passage where he had been standing a quarter
of an hour. Highly flushed, she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume, and
she instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle,
at him to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large, vulgar
hands. He opened the door—it was so natural an assumption that they
shouldn’t be able to talk properly in the passage—and they came out to
the low steps, lingering there in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud
ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as
we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. Winter was not
over but spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled
vision, by way of a change, to pierce it almost through. The town could
refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain
the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the
low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its
folds; it lingered as a blur of mist interwoven with pretty sun-tints
and faint transparencies. There was warmth and iridescence and a view
of the shutters of shops, and the church-bells were ringing. Miss
Henning remarked that it was a “shime” she couldn’t have a place to
ask a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such
a grind for your living and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger
than a pill-box? She couldn’t herself abide waiting outside; she knew
something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose—the
time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!—and it always made
her feel quite wicked. It was something “croo’l.” If she could have
what she liked she knew what she’d have; and she hinted at a mystic
bower where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the morning
paper or a nice view out of the window or even a glass of sherry—so
that, close at hand but perfectly private, she could dress without
getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.

“I don’t know how I _’ave_ pitched on my things,” she remarked as she
offered her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware she had put a
small plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being so
fine, he had come to propose to her a walk in the manner of ancient
times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park and stroll beside
the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it if she liked; they might
watch the lambkins or feed the ducks if she would put a crust in her
pocket. The privilege of paddling Millicent entirely declined; she had
no idea of wetting her flounces and she left those rough pleasures,
especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young woman. But she didn’t
mind if she did go a turn, though he didn’t deserve any such favour
after the way he hadn’t been near her, not if she had died in her
garret. She wasn’t one that was to be dropped and taken up at any man’s
convenience—she didn’t keep one of those offices for servants out of
place. Her conviction was strong that if the day hadn’t been so grand
she would have sent her friend about his business; it was lucky for him
she was always forgiving—such was her sensitive, generous nature—when
the sun was out. Only there was one thing—she couldn’t abide making no
difference for Sunday; it was her personal habit to go to church and
she should have it on her conscience if she gave that up for a lark.
Hyacinth had already been impressed, more than once, by the manner in
which his old playmate stickled for the religious observance: of all
the queer disparities of her nature her devotional turn struck him
as perhaps the queerest. She held her head erect through the longest
and dullest sermon and quitted the sacred edifice with her fine face
embellished by the publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by
the general secularity of Hyacinth’s behaviour, especially taken in
conjunction with his general straightness, and was only consoled a
little by the fact that if he didn’t drink or fight or steal he at
least dabbled in unlimited wickedness of opinion—theories as bad as
anything people often got ten years for. He had not yet revealed to
her that his theories had somehow lately come to be held with less of
a clutch; an instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a
grievance doing so much for sociability. He had not reflected that she
would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if
her condemnation of his godlessness had missed corroborative signs.

On the present occasion she let him know he might have his pleasure
if he would first accompany her to church; and it was in vain he
represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their
morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine and in the
interval there would be no time left. She replied with a toss of
her head that she dined when she liked; besides, on Sundays she had
cold fare—it was left out for her: an argument to which Hyacinth had
to assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete,
thanks to the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and
explanation in which, despite great freedom of complaint, perpetual
announcements of intended change, of impending promotion and of high
bids for her services in other quarters, she had always enshrouded
her private affairs. He walked by her side to the place of worship
she preferred—her choice was made apparently from a large experience;
and as they went he observed that it was a good job he wasn’t married
to her. Lord, how she would bully him, how she would “squeeze” him,
in such a case! The worst of it would be that—such was his amiable,
peace-loving nature—he should obey like a showman’s poodle. And pray
who _was_ a man to obey, asked Millicent, if he wasn’t to obey his own
wife? She sat up in her pew with a majesty that carried out this idea;
she seemed to answer in her proper person for creeds and communions and
sacraments; she was more than devotional, she was individually almost
pontifical. Hyacinth had never felt himself under such distinguished
protection; the Princess Casamassima came back to him in comparison as
a loose Bohemian, a shabby adventuress. He had sought her out to-day
not for the sake of her austerity—he had had too gloomy a week for
that—but for that of her genial side; yet now that she treated him
to the severer spectacle it struck him for the moment as really grand
sport, a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She had her phases
and caprices like the Princess herself, and if they were not the same
as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent they proved at least that
she was as brave a woman. No one but a really big creature could give
herself such airs; she would have a consciousness of the large reserve
of pliancy required to make up for them. The Princess wanted to destroy
society and Millicent to uphold it; and as Hyacinth, by the side of his
childhood’s friend, listened to practised intonings and felt the brush
of a rich unction, he was obliged to recognise the liberality of a fate
that had sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the
best opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the original and
the beauty of the conventional.

On this particular Sunday there was by luck no sermon—by the luck,
I mean, of his heretical impatience—so that after the congregation
dispersed there was still plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our
friends traversed that barely-interrupted expanse of irrepressible
herbage which stretches from the Birdcage Walk to Hyde Park Corner
and took their way to Kensington Gardens beside the Serpentine. Once
her religious exercises were over for the day—she as rigidly forbore
to repeat them in the afternoon as she made a point of the first
service—once she had lifted her voice in prayer and praise Millicent
changed her carriage; moving to a different measure, uttering her
sentiments in a high, free manner and not minding if it was noticed
she had on her very best gown and was out if need be for the day.
She was mainly engaged at first in overhauling Hyacinth for his long
absence and demanding as usual some account of what he had been up to.
He listened at his ease, liking and enjoying her chaff, which seemed
to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and amusedly and
absolutely declining to satisfy her. He alleged, as he had had occasion
to do before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had
a right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily;
and even the indignation with which she received this plea didn’t make
him feel that a clearing-up between them could be a serious thing.
There was nothing to clear up and nothing to forgive; they were a pair
of very fallible creatures, united much more by their weaknesses than
by any consistency or fidelity they might pretend to practise toward
each other. It was an old acquaintance—the oldest thing to-day, except
Mr. Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and, oddly enough, it
inspired our young man with a positive indulgent piety. The probability
that the girl “kept company” with other men had quite ceased to torment
his imagination; it was no longer necessary to his happiness to be so
certain about it that he might dismiss her from his mind. He could be
as happy without it as with it, and he felt a new modesty over prying
into her affairs. He was so little in a position to be stern with her
that her assumption of his recognising a right in her to pull him to
pieces seemed but a part of her perpetual clumsiness—a clumsiness that
was not soothing, yet was nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of
the things he liked her for.

“If you’ve come to see me only to make low jokes at my expense you had
better have stayed away altogether,” she said with dignity as they came
out of the Green Park. “In the first place it’s rude, in the second
place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”

“My dear Milly, the motions you go through, the resentment you profess,
are all a kicking up of dust which I blow away with a breath,” her
companion replied. “But it doesn’t matter; go on—say anything you
like. I came to see you for recreation, to enjoy myself without effort
of my own. I scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you’d make me
laugh—I’ve been so dismal for a long time. In fact I’m dismal still. I
wish I had your disposition. My mirth, as you see, is a bit feverish.”

“The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect
me,” Miss Henning announced. “You lead a bad life. I know what to think
about that,” she continued irrelevantly.

“And is it through respect for _you_ that you wish me to lead a
better one? To-day then is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us
get on the grass,” Hyacinth pursued; “it’s innocent and pastoral to
feel it under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you. You understand
everything.”

“I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything
you hide,” the young woman returned as the great central expanse of
the Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before
them.

“Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean from this time
forth to cease to seek safety in concealment. You’ll know nothing about
me then—for it will be all under your nose.”

“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed at a
venture, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields
that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “What will you do
when you’re so bad you can’t go to the shop?” she added with a sudden
transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that
she said she could see he _was_ in a fever: she hadn’t noticed it at
first because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was
it something he had caught in some of those back slums where he went
prying about with his mad ideas? It served him right for taking as
little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine
friends—a precious lot _they_ were, that put it off on him to do all
the nasty part—would they find the doctor and the port wine and the
money and all the rest when he was laid up, perhaps for months, through
their putting such rot into his head and his putting it into others
that could carry it even less? She stopped on the grass in the watery
sunshine and bent on her companion a pair of eyes in which he noted
afresh a stirred curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a possibility of
ardour, a pledge of really closer comradeship. Suddenly she brought
out, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision she had employed a
moment before: “You precious little rascal, you’ve got something on
your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?”

“My poor girl, your talk’s a queer mixture,” he resignedly sighed. “But
it may well be. It’s not queerer than my life.”

“Well, I’m glad you admit that!” Milly cried as she walked on with a
flutter of ribbons.

“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth wailed. “Yes, you should see me
in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”

“You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t
believe you half the time know what you do mean yourself. I don’t
believe you even know with all your thinking what you do think. That’s
your disease.”

“It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,”
he now returned with interest. “I mean to think no more—I mean to
give it up. Avoid it yourself, dear friend—avoid it as you would a
baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of
irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.”

“I don’t care how I live nor where I live,” she cried, “so long as I
can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut it
fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend
should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the
concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which
had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember
that day I came back to the Plice, ever so long ago, and called on
poor dear Miss Pynsent—she couldn’t abide me, she never understood
my form—and waited till you came in, and then went a walk with you
and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you
weren’t satisfactory to me even that night, and that I consider myself
remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to
the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one
everything, and you never told one nothing at all.”

“What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth freely
fluted, putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything in life
you like.”

“I daresay you’ll tell me no end of rot. Certainly I tried kindness on
you,” Miss Henning declared.

“Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her friend while he moved with
her in close association.

She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well
then, _has_ she clean chucked you?”

Hyacinth’s eyes turned away; he looked at the green expanse, misty and
sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem larger; at
the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of the Gardens;
at a shining reach of the Serpentine on the one side and the far
façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege
of their view, on the other. “Well, you know, I rather fancy it,” he
replied in a moment.

“Ah the vile brute!” she rang out as they resumed their walk.

Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of
Kensington, those scattered, in the Gardens, over the slope which
rises gently from the side of the water most distant from the old red
palace. They had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed
there to the convenience of that superior part of the public for which
a penny is not prohibitive, and Millicent, of whom such speculations
were highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the
question of whether the functionary charged with collecting the penny
would omit to come and demand his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy
her pleasures _gratis_ as well as to see others do so, and even that
of sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion
as she might feel she was “doing” some vested interest by it. The man
came round, however, and after that her pleasure could only take the
form of sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This issue
had been met, and two or three others of a much weightier kind had
come up. At the moment we again participate in them she was leaning
forward, earnest and attentive, her hands clasped in her lap and her
multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled forward on her thick wrists.
Her face, with its parted lips and eyes clouded to gentleness, wore an
expression Hyacinth had never seen there before and which caused him to
say to her: “After all, dear Milly, you’re a sweet old boy!”

“Why did you never tell me before—years ago?” she asked.

“It’s always soon enough to make a fool of one’s self! I don’t know why
I’ve slobbered over to-day—sitting here in a charming place, in balmy
air, amid pleasing suggestions and without any reason or practical end.
The story’s hideous and I’ve kept it down so long! It would have been
an effort to me, an impossible effort at any time, to do otherwise.
Somehow, just now it hasn’t been an effort; and indeed I’ve spoken
just _because_ the air’s sweet and the place ornamental and the day
a holiday and your person so lovely and your presence so moving. All
this has had the effect an object has if you plunge it into a cup of
water—the water overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very
foul liquid indeed. Pardon the bad odour!”

There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she
listened to what had gone before; it lingered, and as a fine colour
still further refined by an access of sensibility is never unbecoming
to a handsome woman it enriched her unwonted expression. “I wouldn’t
have been so rough with you,” she presently remarked.

“My dear lass, _this_ isn’t rough!” Hyacinth protested.

“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own
as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.

“Very likely. I’m a nervous little beast,” he said.

“Any one would be nervous to think of anything so awful. And when it’s
yourself!” The girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a
contingency. “You require sympathy,” she added in a tone that made him
perversely grin; the words sounded like a medical prescription.

“A tablespoonful every half-hour.” And he kept her hand, which she was
about to draw away.

“You’d have been nicer too,” Millicent went on.

“How do you mean, I’d have been nicer?”

“Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away
her hand as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.

“It’s a pity I’ve always been so terribly under the influence of
women,” Hyacinth sighed again as he folded his arms.

He was surprised at the delicacy with which she replied. “You must
remember they’ve a great deal to make up to you.”

“Do you mean for my mother? Ah _she_’d have made it up if they had let
her! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he declared.
“It’s wonderful the kindness they’ve shown me and the amount of
pleasure I’ve derived from their society.”

It would perhaps be inquiring too closely to consider whether this
reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from
her own bosom had an irritating effect on Milly; she at all events
answered it by presently saying: “Does _she_ know—your trumpery
Princess?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t mind it.”

“That’s most uncommonly kind of her!” cried the girl with a scornful
laugh.

“It annoys me very much,” he interposed—though still with
detachment—“to hear you apply invidious epithets to her. You know
nothing about her.”

“How do you know what I know, please?” She asked this question with
the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she dropped
her voice as in remembrance of the appeal made by a great misfortune.
“Hasn’t she treated you most shamefully, and you such a regular dear?”

“Not in the least. It is I who, as you may say, have rounded on her.
She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as
herself. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some
reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent and I’ve been
beastly fickle.”

“Your interest in the Princess has declined?” Millicent questioned,
following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.

“Oh dear, no. I mean only in some opinions I used to hold.” And he
might have been speaking of “shaky” shares, to a considerable amount,
of which he had at a given moment shrewdly directed his broker to
relieve him.

“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good
job!”—and Miss Henning’s laugh suggested that, after all, Hyacinth’s
views and the changes in his views were not what was most important.
“And your grand lady still goes in for the costermongers?”

“She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery; she
wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her
means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to
be done, and of the courage and devotion of those who set themselves to
do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples I’m
a very poor creature.”

“You _are_ a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on
yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself
I promise I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t kicked you out why in the
name of common sense did you say just now she has? And why is your dear
old face as white as my stocking?”

Hyacinth looked at her a while without answering and as if he took a
placid pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”

She put out her own hand now and took possession of his; for a minute
she held it as wishing to check herself, as finding some influence in
his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the
ornamental water and the landscape-gardening reflected in it, till
Milly turned her eyes again and brought out: “Well, that’s the way I’d
have served him too!”

It took him a moment to perceive she was alluding to the vengeance
wrought on Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again
hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”

“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on with assurance.

“A queer variety, _cara mia_,” her companion rejoined—not very
candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this
point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s wild maunderings. They
used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s
time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking up.”

“Oh it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”

“Pray what did I ever say—in those days?”

“It wasn’t what you said,” she answered with refinement. “I guessed
the whole business—except of course what she got her time for and you
being taken to that death-bed—the very day I came back to the Plice.
Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at
you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is
no more than I thought then. It only makes you nicer.”

She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of pointless
exaggeration, for he himself honestly couldn’t understand how the
situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty
of affection that was in her rose to the surface it diffused a glow of
rest, almost of protection, deepening at any rate the luxury of their
small cheap pastoral, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so
that though neither of them had dined he would have been delighted to
sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something
harsh that was happening to him, making it all easier, pushing it off
to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of
which they themselves wearied, but they hung there now with an ache of
indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s
society appeared a compensation, yet he felt it at least a resource.
For her too, evidently, the time had a taste; she made no proposal to
retrace their steps. She questioned him about his father’s family and
as to their letting him go on like that without ever holding out so
much as a little finger; and she declared in a manner that was meant
to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness
of the turn made him smile, that if she had been one of such a bloated
crew she should never have been able to “abear” the thought of a
relation in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning
thought of his business at old Crook’s and of the feeble show of a
young man of his parts contented with a career that was after all a
mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books,
but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence
of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the
art he practised differed from that of a plumber or a saddler. He had
not forgotten the shock once administered to her by his letting her
know he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from her own
so much higher range, since _she_ wore mantles and jackets and shawls
and the long trains of robes exhibited behind plate glass on dummies
of wire and drawn forth to be transferred to her own undulating person,
and had moreover never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with
talking about them and showing them off and persuading people—people
too quite gaping with the impression—of their beauty and cheapness. It
had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution,
that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her
inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what “his
family” owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning
into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very
highly recommended to them. His question pulled her up a moment; after
which she returned with the finest spirit: “Well, if your position
was so low ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift?
Oh it’s something cruel!” she cried; and she added that in his place
she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. _She_
wouldn’t have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had the blood
of half the Peerage in her veins! “If they had noticed you they’d
have liked you,” she was so good as to observe; but she immediately
remembered also that in that case he would have been carried away quite
over her head. She wasn’t prepared to say that she would have given
him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would
have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the “real” by way
of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice wasted,
however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto
a tolerably detailed history of the Princess. Millicent was tender and
tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth
really made little impression on her: she accounted it an accident much
less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched
and moved, but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful
revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail,
with his later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These
things produced in her a generous agitation—something the same in kind
as the emotion she had occasionally owed to the perusal of the _Family
Herald_. What affected her most and what she came back to was the whole
element of Lord Frederick and the mystery of Hyacinth’s having got so
little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn’t get
over his friends’ not having done something, though her imagination
was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest
thing in the world to find her apparently assuming that if he hadn’t
been so inefficient he might have “worked” the whole dark episode as a
source of distinction, of glory, of profit. _She_ wouldn’t have been a
nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh the left hand was as good as the
right; her respectability, for the moment, made nothing of that! His
long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience,
and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having
bragged about his ancestry. The generations representing it were vivid
and concrete to her now in comparison with the timid shadows Pinnie had
set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in his hushed
past with the oddest mixture of enthusiasm and criticism, and with good
intentions which had the effect of profane voices bawling for sacred
echoes.

“Me only—me and her? Certainly I ought to be obliged, even though it’s
late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that
night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have worse to
tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the proper
truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in
the chemical line?”

“No, we’ve never talked about it.”

“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as
mentioned it?”

“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his
sister.”

“How do you know that if he never spoke?”

“Oh because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And
how did his sister know it?”

“Oh I don’t know. She guessed it.”

The girl stared, then fairly snorted. “It was none of her business.”
Then she added: “He _was_ jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?”
She asked this question in her loud free voice, which rang through the
bright stillness of the place.

Hyacinth delayed for a minute to meet it, and when at last he did so it
was without looking at her. “I don’t know. I can’t make it out.”

“Well, I can then!” And she jerked him round toward her and inspected
him with her big bright eyes. “You silly baby, has _he_ been serving
you?” She pressed her curiosity upon him; she asked if that was what
disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently after
an instant she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to her
Serene Highness—is that his game?” she broke out. “Do you mean to say
she’d look at the likes of him?”

“The likes of him? He’s as fine a man as stands!” said Hyacinth.
“They’ve the same views, they’re doing the same work.”

“Oh he hasn’t changed _his_ opinions then—not like you?”

“No, he knows what he wants; he knows what he thinks.”

“Very much the ‘same work,’ I’ll be bound!” cried Millicent in large
derision. “He knows what he wants, and I daresay he’ll get it.”

He was now on his feet, turning away from her; but she also rose and
passed her hand into his arm. “It’s their own business; they can do as
they please.”

“Oh don’t try to be a blamed saint; you put me out of patience!” the
girl responded with characteristic energy. “They’re a precious pair,
and it would do me good to hear you say so.”

“A man shouldn’t turn against his friends,” he went on with desperate
sententiousness.

“That’s for them to remember; there’s no danger of _your_ forgetting
it.” They had begun to walk but she stopped him; she was suddenly
smiling at him and her face was radiant. She went on with caressing
inconsequence: “All you’ve terribly told me—it _has_ made you nicer.”

“I don’t see that, but it has certainly made _you_ so. My dear girl,
you’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added as they moved further. Soon after
which, the protection offered by the bole of a great tree being
sufficiently convenient, he had, on a large look about them, passed his
arm round her and drawn her closer and closer—so close that as they
again paused together he felt her yield with a fine firmness, as it
were, and with the full mass of her interest.




XLII


He had no intention of going later on to Madeira Crescent, and that
is why he asked her before they separated if he mightn’t see her
again after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now and he feared
them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element; it had
visions for him that passed even before his closed eyes—sharp doubts
and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of pain. He
wanted company to light up his gloom, and this had driven him back to
Millicent in a manner not altogether consistent with the respect which
it was still his theory that he owed to his nobler part. He felt no
longer free to drop in at the Crescent and tried to persuade himself,
in case his mistrust should be overdone, that his reasons were reasons
of magnanimity. If Paul were seriously occupied with the Princess,
if they had work in hand for which their most earnest attention was
required (and Sunday was all likely to be the day they would take:
they had spent so much of the previous Sunday together) his absence
would have the superior, the marked motive of his leaving his friend
a clear field. There was something inexpressibly representative to
him in the way that friend had abruptly decided to re-enter the house,
after pausing outside with its mistress, at the moment he himself stood
glaring through the fog with the Prince. The movement repeated itself
innumerable times to his inward sense, suggesting to him things he
couldn’t bear to learn. Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous even after
he had become so, and to prove to himself he was not he had gone to see
the Princess one evening in the middle of the week. Hadn’t he wanted
Paul to know her months and months before, and was he now to entertain
a vile feeling at the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested,
in each party to it, on aspirations that he respected? The Princess had
not been at home, and he had turned away from the door without asking
for Madame Grandoni: he had not forgotten that on the occasion of his
previous visit she had excused herself from staying below. After the
little maid in the Crescent had told him her mistress was out he walked
away with a quick curiosity—a curiosity which, if he had listened to
it, would have led him to mount the first omnibus that travelled in
the direction of Camberwell. Was Paul Muniment, he such a rare one in
general for stopping at home of an evening, was he also out, and would
Rosy in this case be in the humour to mention—for of course she would
know—where he had gone? Hyacinth let the omnibus pass, for he suddenly
became aware with a rueful pang that he was in danger of playing the
spy. He had not been near Muniment since, on purpose to leave his
curiosity unsatisfied. He allowed himself, however, to notice that
the Princess had now not written him a word of consolation, as she had
been kind enough to do in the old days when he had knocked at her door
without finding her. At present he had missed her twice in succession,
and yet she had given no sign of regret—regret even on his own behalf.
This determined him to stay away a bit longer; it was such a proof that
she was absorbingly occupied. Hyacinth’s glimpse of her in earnest talk
with her friend—or rather with his—as they returned from the excursion
described by the Prince, his memory of Paul’s beguiled figure crossing
the threshold once more, could leave him no doubt as to the degree of
that absorption.

Milly meanwhile hung back a little when he proposed to her that they
should finish the day together. She smiled indeed and her splendid eyes
rested on his with an air of indulgent wonder; they seemed to ask if it
were worth her pains, in face of his probable incredulity, to mention
the _real_ reason why she couldn’t have the pleasure of acceding to his
delightful pressure. Since he would be sure to deride her explanation
wouldn’t some trumped-up excuse do as well, something he could knock
about without hurting her? We are not to know exactly in what sense
Miss Henning decided; but she confessed at last that there _was_ an
odious obstacle to their meeting again later—a promise she had made to
go and see a young lady, the forewoman of her department, who was kept
indoors with a bad face and nothing in life to help her pass the time.
She was under a pledge to spend the evening with her, and it was not in
her nature to fail of such a charity. Hyacinth made no comment on this
speech; he received it in silence, looking at the girl gloomily.

“I know what’s passing in your mind!” Millicent suddenly broke out.
“Why don’t you say it at once and give me a chance to contradict it? I
oughtn’t to care, but I do care!”

“Stop, stop—don’t let us fight!” He spoke in a tone of pleading
weariness; she had never heard just that accent before.

Millicent just considered: “I’ve a mind to play her false. She’s a real
lady, highly connected, and the best friend I have—I don’t count men,”
she sarcastically sniffed—“and there isn’t one in the world I’d do such
a thing for but you.”

“No, keep your promise; don’t play any one false,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, you _are_ a gentleman!” she returned with a sweetness her voice
occasionally took.

“Especially——” Hyacinth began; but he suddenly stopped.

“Especially what? Something impudent, I’ll engage! Especially as you
don’t believe me?”

“Oh no! Don’t let’s fight!” he repeated.

“Fight, my darling? I’d fight _for_ you!” Miss Henning declared.

He offered himself after tea the choice between a visit to Lady Aurora
and a pilgrimage to Lisson Grove. He was a little in doubt about
the former experiment, having an idea her ladyship’s family might be
reinstalled in Belgrave Square. He reflected, however, that he couldn’t
recognise this as a reason for not going to see her; his relations
with her had nothing of the underhand, and she had given him the
kindest general invitation. If her haughty parents were at home she was
probably at dinner with them: he would take that risk. He had taken
it before without disastrous results. He was determined not to spend
the evening alone, and he would keep the Poupins as a more substantial
alternative in case Lady Aurora shouldn’t be able to receive him.

As soon as the great portal in Belgrave Square was drawn open before
him he saw the house was occupied and animated—if animation might
be talked about in a place which had hitherto mainly answered to his
idea of a magnificent mausoleum. It was pervaded by subdued light and
tall domestics; he found himself looking down a kind of colonnade of
colossal footmen, an array more imposing even than the retinue of the
Princess at Medley. His inquiry died away on his lips and he stood
there struggling with dumbness. It was manifest to him that some high
festival was taking place, a scene on which his presence could only
be a blot; and when a large official, out of livery, bending over him
for a voice that didn’t issue, suggested, not unencouragingly, that
it might be Lady Aurora he wished to see, he replied with detachment
and despair: “Yes, yes, but it can’t be possible!” The butler took no
pains to controvert this proposition verbally; he merely turned round
with a majestic air of leading the way, and as at the same moment two
of the footmen closed the wings of the door behind the visitor Hyacinth
judged it his cue to follow. In this manner, after crossing a passage
where, in the perfect silence of the servants, he heard the shorter
click of his plebeian shoes upon a marble floor, he found himself
ushered into a small room, lighted by a veiled lamp, which, when he
had been left there alone, without further remark on the part of his
conductor, he recognised as the place—only now more amply decorated—of
one of his former interviews. Lady Aurora kept him waiting a little,
but finally fluttered in with an anxious, incoherent apology. The
same transformation had taken place in her own aspect as in that of
her parental halls: she had on a light-coloured, crumpled-looking,
faintly-rustling dress; her head was adorned with a languid plume that
flushed into little pink tips, and in her hand she carried a pair of
white gloves. All her repressed eagerness was in her face, and she
smiled as if wishing to anticipate any scruples or embarrassments
on the part of her visitor; frankly admitting herself disguised and
bedizened and the shock the fact might convey. Hyacinth said to her
that, no doubt, on inferring the return of her family to town, he ought
to have backed out; he knew this must make a difference in her life.
But he had been marched in, for all his protest, and now it was clear
he had interrupted her at dinner. She answered that no one who asked
for her at any hour was ever turned away; she had managed to arrange
that and was very happy in her success. She didn’t usually dine—there
were so many of them and it took so long. Most of her friends couldn’t
come at visiting-hours and it wouldn’t be right she shouldn’t ever
receive them. On that occasion she _had_ been dining, but it was all
over; she was only sitting there because she was going to a party. Her
parents were dining out and she was just in the drawing-room with some
of her sisters. When they were alone it wasn’t so long, though it was
rather long afterwards, when they went up again. It wasn’t time yet:
the carriage wouldn’t come for nearly half an hour. She hadn’t been
to an evening thing for months and months, but—didn’t he know?—one
sometimes had to do it. Lady Aurora expressed the idea that one ought
to be fair all round and that one’s duties were not all of the same
species; some of them would come up from time to time that were quite
different from the others. Of course it wasn’t just unless one did all,
and that was why she was in for something to-night. It was nothing of
consequence; only the family meeting the family, as they might do of a
Sunday, at one of their houses. It was there that papa and mamma were
dining. Since they had given her that room for any hour she wanted—it
was really tremendously convenient—she had resolved to do a party now
and then, like a respectable young woman, because it pleased them:
though why it should create even that thrill to see _her_ at a place
was more than she could imagine. She supposed it was because it would
perhaps keep some people, a little, from thinking she was mad and not
safe to be at large—which was of course a sort of thing that people
didn’t like to have thought of their belongings. Lady Aurora explained
and expatiated with a kind of yearning superabundance; she talked
more continuously than Hyacinth had ever heard her do before, and the
young man made out that she was not, so to speak, in equilibrium. He
thought it scarcely probable she was excited by the simple prospect
of again dipping into the great world she had forsworn, and he soon
became aware of his having himself in a manner upset her. His senses
were fine enough to hint to him that there were associations and
wounds he revived and quickened. She suddenly stopped talking and the
two sat there looking at each other in an odd, an occult community of
suffering. He made mechanical remarks, explaining insufficiently why he
had come, and in the course of a very few moments, quite independently
of these observations, it seemed to him there was a deeper, a
measurelessly deep, confidence between them. A tacit confession passed
and repassed, and each understood the situation of the other. They
wouldn’t speak of it—it was very definite they would never do that; for
there was something in their common consciousness that was inconsistent
with the grossness of accusation. Besides, the grievance of each was
an apprehension, an instinct of the soul—not a sharp, definite wrong
supported by proof. It was in the air and in their restless pulses,
and not in anything they could exhibit or complain of for comfort.
Strange enough it seemed to him that the history of each should be the
counterpart of that of the other. What had each done but lose that
which he or she had never so much as had? Things had gone ill with
them; but even if they had gone well, even if the Princess had not
combined with his friend in that manner which made his heart sink and
produced an effect exactly corresponding on Lady Aurora’s—even in this
case what would felicity, what would success, have amounted to? They
would have been very barren. He was sure the singular creature before
him would never have had a chance to take the unprecedented social step
for the sake of which she was ready to go forth from Belgrave Square
for ever; Hyacinth had judged the smallness of Paul Muniment’s appetite
for that complication sufficiently to have begun really to pity her
ladyship long ago. And now, even when he most felt the sweetness of her
sympathy, he might wonder what she could have imagined for him in the
event of his not having been supplanted—what security, what completer
promotion, what honourable, satisfying sequel. They were unhappy
because they were unhappy, and they were right not to rail about that.

“Oh I like to see you—I like to talk with you,” she said simply.
They talked for a quarter of an hour, and he made her such a visit as
any clever gentleman might have made any gentle lady. They exchanged
remarks about the lateness of the spring, about the loan-exhibition at
Burlington House—which Hyacinth had paid his shilling to see—about the
question of opening the museums on Sunday, about the danger of too much
coddling legislation on behalf of the working classes. He declared that
it gave him great pleasure to catch any sign of her amusing herself;
it was unnatural never to do that, and he hoped that now she had taken
a turn she would keep it up. At this she looked down, smiling, at her
frugal finery and then she said: “I daresay I shall begin to go to
balls—who knows?”

“That’s what our friends in Audley Court think, you know—that it’s the
worst mistake you can make not to drink deep of the cup while you have
it.”

“Oh I’ll do it then—I’ll do it for _them_!” Lady Aurora exclaimed. “I
daresay that, as regards all that, I haven’t listened to them enough.”
This was the only allusion that passed on the subject of the Muniments.

Hyacinth got up, he had stayed long enough, since she was going out;
and as he put forth his hand to her she seemed to him a heroine. She
would try to cultivate the pleasures of her class if the brother and
sister in Camberwell thought it right—try even to be a woman of fashion
in order to console herself. Paul Muniment didn’t care for her, but
she was capable of considering that it might be her duty to regulate
her life by the very advice that made an abyss between them. Hyacinth
didn’t believe in the success of this attempt; there passed before his
imagination a picture of the poor lady coming home and pulling off her
feathers for evermore after an evening spent watching the agitation
of a ball-room from the outer edge of the circle and with a white,
irresponsive face. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” he
said, laughing.

“Oh I don’t mind dying.”

“I think I do,” Hyacinth declared as he turned away. There had been no
mention whatever of the Princess.

It was early enough in the evening for him to risk a visit to Lisson
Grove; he calculated that the Poupins would still be sitting up.
When he reached their house he found this calculation justified; the
brilliancy of the light in the window appeared to announce that Madame
was holding a salon. He ascended to this apartment without delay—it was
free to a visitor to open the house-door himself—and, having knocked,
he obeyed the hostess’s invitation to enter. Poupin and his wife were
seated, with a third person, at a table in the middle of the room,
round a staring kerosene lamp adorned with a globe of clear glass,
of which the transparency was mitigated only by a circular pattern
of bunches of grapes. The third person was his friend Schinkel, who
had been a member of the little party that had waited that wet, black
night upon Hoffendahl. No one said anything as he came in; but in their
silence the three others got up, looking at him, he thought, as he had
on occasion imagined his being looked at before, only never quite so
unmistakably.




BOOK SIXTH




XLIII


“My child, you’re always welcome,” said Eustache Poupin, taking
Hyacinth’s hand in both his own and holding it for some moments. An
impression had come to our young man, immediately, that they were
talking about him before he appeared and that they would rather have
been left to talk at their ease. He even thought he saw in Poupin’s
face the kind of consciousness that comes from detection, or at
least interruption, in a nefarious act. With Poupin, however, it was
difficult to tell; he always looked so heated and exalted, so like
a conspirator defying the approach of justice. Hyacinth took in the
others: they were standing as if they had shuffled something on the
table out of sight, as if they had been engaged in the manufacture
of counterfeit coin. Poupin kept hold of his hand; the Frenchman’s
ardent eyes, fixed, unwinking, always expressive of the greatness of
the occasion, whatever the occasion was, had never seemed to him to
protrude so far from the head. “Ah my dear friend, _nous causions
justement de vous_,” Eustache remarked as if this were a very
extraordinary fact.

“Oh _nous causions, nous causions_——!” his wife exclaimed as if to
deprecate a loose overstatement. “One may mention a friend, I suppose,
in the way of conversation, without taking such a liberty.”

“A cat may look at a king, as your English proverb says,” added
Schinkel jocosely. He smiled so hard at his own pleasantry that his
eyes closed up and vanished—an effect which Hyacinth, who had observed
it before, thought particularly unbecoming to him, appearing as it
did to administer the last perfection to his ugliness. He would have
consulted his facial interests by cultivating blankness.

“Oh a king, a king——!” Poupin demurred, shaking his head up and down.
“That’s what it’s not good to be, _au point où nous en sommes_.”

“I just came in to wish you good-night,” said Hyacinth. “I’m afraid
it’s rather late for a call, though Schinkel doesn’t seem to think so.”

“It’s always too late, _mon très-cher_, when you come,” the Frenchman
returned. “You know if you’ve a place at our fireside.”

“I esteem it too much to disturb it,” said Hyacinth, smiling and
looking round at the three.

“We can easily sit down again; we’re a comfortable party. Put yourself
beside me.” And the Frenchman drew a chair close to the one, at the
table, that he had just quitted.

“He has had a long walk, he’s tired—he’ll certainly accept a little
glass,” Madame Poupin pronounced with decision as she moved toward the
tray containing the small gilded service of liqueurs.

“We’ll each accept one, _ma bonne_; it’s a very good occasion for a
drop of _fine_,” her husband interposed while Hyacinth seated himself
in the chair marked by his host. Schinkel resumed his place, which
was opposite; he looked across at the new visitor without speaking,
but his long face continued to flatten itself into a representation
of mirth. He had on a green coat which Hyacinth had seen before; this
was a garment of ceremony, such as our young man judged it would have
been impossible to procure in London or in any modern time. It was
eminently German and of high antiquity, and had a tall, stiff, clumsy
collar which came up to the wearer’s ears and almost concealed his
perpetual bandage. When Hyacinth had sat down Eustache Poupin remained
out of his own chair and stood beside him resting a hand on his head.
At this touch something came over Hyacinth that brought his heart into
his throat. The possibility that occurred to him, conveyed in Poupin’s
whole manner as well as in the reassuring intention of his caress
and in his wife’s instant, uneasy offer of refreshment, explained the
confusion of the circle and reminded our hero of the engagement he had
taken with himself to live up to a grand conception of the quiet when
a certain crisis in his fate should have arrived. It struck him this
crisis was in the air, very near—that he should touch it if he made
another movement: the pressure of the Frenchman’s hand, which was meant
as an attenuation, only worked as a warning. As he looked across at
Schinkel he felt dizzy and a little sick; for a moment, to his senses,
the room whirled round. His resolution to be quiet appeared only too
easy to keep; he couldn’t break it even to the extent of speaking.
He knew his voice would tremble, and this was why he made no answer
to Schinkel’s rather honeyed words, uttered after an hesitation.
“_Also_, my dear Robinson, have you passed your Sunday well—have you
had an ’appy day?” Why was every one so treacherously mild? His eyes
questioned the table, but encountered only its well-wiped surface,
polished for so many years by the gustatory elbows of the Frenchman and
his wife, and the lady’s dirty pack of cards for “patience”—she had
apparently been engaged in this exercise when Schinkel came in—which
indeed gave a little the impression of startled gamblers who might have
shuffled away the stakes. Madam Poupin, diving into a cupboard, came
back with a bottle of green chartreuse, an apparition which led the
German to exclaim: “_Lieber Gott_, you Vrench, you Vrench, how well you
always arrange! What on earth would you have more?”

The hostess distributed the liquor, but our youth could take none
of it down, leaving it to the high appreciation of his friends. His
indifference to this luxury excited discussion and conjecture, the
others bandying theories and contradictions and even ineffectual
jokes about him over his head—all with a volubility that seemed to him
unnatural. For Poupin and Schinkel there was something all wrong with
a man who couldn’t smack his lips over a drop of that tap; he must
either be in love or have some still more insidious complaint. It was
true Hyacinth _was_ always in love—that was no secret to his friends;
but it had never been observed to stop his thirst. The Frenchwoman
poured scorn on this view of the case, declaring that the effect of
the tender passion was to make one enjoy one’s victual—when everything
went straight, _bien entendu_; and how could an ear be deaf to the
wily words of a person so taking?—in proof of which she deposed that
she had never eaten and drunk with such relish as at the time (oh far
away now) when she had a soft spot in her heart for her rascal of a
husband. For Madame Poupin to allude to the companion of her trials as
a rascal indicated a high degree of conviviality. Hyacinth sat staring
at the empty table with the feeling that he was somehow a detached,
irresponsible witness of the evolution of his doom. Finally he looked
up and said to his mates collectively: “What’s up and what the deuce
is the matter with you all?” He followed this inquiry by a request
they would tell him what it was they had been saying about him, since
they admitted he had been the subject of their talk. Madame Poupin
answered for them that they had simply been saying how much they loved
him, but that they wouldn’t love him any more if he became suspicious
and _grincheux_. She had been telling Mr. Schinkel’s fortune on the
cards and she would tell Hyacinth’s if he liked. There was nothing much
for Mr. Schinkel, only that he would find something some day that he
had lost, but would probably lose it again, and serve him right if he
did! He had objected that he had never had anything to lose and never
expected to have; but that was a vain remark, inasmuch as the time was
fast coming when every one would have something—though indeed it was to
be hoped Schinkel would keep it when he had got it. Eustache rebuked
his wife for her levity, reminded her that their young friend cared
nothing for old women’s tricks, and said he was sure Hyacinth had come
to talk over a very different matter: the question—he was so good as
to take an interest in it, as he had done in everything that related
to them—of the terms which M. Poupin might owe it to himself, to his
dignity, to a just though not exaggerated sentiment of his value,
to make in accepting Mr. “Crook’s” offer of the foremanship of the
establishment in Soho; an offer not yet formally enunciated but visibly
in the air and destined—it would seem at least—to arrive within a day
or two. The actual old titulary was going, late in the day, to set up
for himself. The Frenchman intimated that before accepting any such
proposal he must have the most substantial guarantees. “_Il me faudrait
des conditions très-particulières._” It was strange to Hyacinth to
hear M. Poupin talk so comfortably about these high contingencies, the
chasm by which he himself was divided from the future having suddenly
doubled its width. His host and hostess sat down on either side of him,
and Poupin gave a sketch, in somewhat sombre tints, of the situation
in Soho, enumerating certain elements of decomposition which he
perceived to be at work there and which he would not undertake to deal
with unless he should be given a completely free hand. Did Schinkel
understand—and if so what was he grinning at? Did Schinkel understand
that poor Eustache was the victim of an absurd hallucination and that
there was not the smallest chance of his being invited to assume a
lieutenancy? He had less capacity for tackling the British workman
to-day than on originally beginning to rub shoulders with him, and old
Crook had never in his life made a mistake, at least in the use of his
tools. Hyacinth’s responses were few and mechanical, and he presently
ceased to try and look as if he were entering into his host’s ideas.

“You’ve some news—you’ve some news about me,” he brought out abruptly
to Schinkel. “You don’t like it, you don’t like to have to give it to
me, and you came to ask our friends here if they wouldn’t help you out
with it. But I don’t think they’ll assist you particularly, poor dears!
Why do you mind? You oughtn’t to mind more than I do. That isn’t the
way.”

“_Qu’est-ce qu’il dit—qu’est-ce qu’il dit, le pauvre chéri?_” Madame
Poupin demanded eagerly; while Schinkel looked very hard at her husband
and as to ask for wise direction.

“My dear child, _vous vous faites des idées_!” the latter exclaimed,
again laying his hand on his young friend all soothingly.

But Hyacinth pushed away his chair and got up. “If you’ve anything to
tell me it’s cruel of you to let me see it as you’ve done and yet not
satisfy me.”

“Why should I have anything to tell you?” Schinkel almost whined.

“I don’t know that—yet I believe you have. I make out things, I guess
things quickly. That’s my nature at all times, and I do it much more
now.”

“You do it indeed; it’s very wonderful,” Schinkel feebly conceded.

“Mr. Schinkel, will you do me the pleasure to go away—I don’t care
where: out of this house?” Madame Poupin broke out in French.

“Yes, that will be the best thing, and I’ll go with you,” said Hyacinth.

“If you’d retire, my child, I think it would be a service that you’d
render us,” Poupin returned, appealing to him as with indulgence for
his temper. “Won’t you do us the justice to believe you may leave your
interests in our hands?”

Hyacinth earnestly debated; it was now perfectly clear to him that
Schinkel had some sort of message for him, and his curiosity as to
what it might be had become nearly intolerable. “I’m surprised at your
weakness,” he observed as sternly as he could manage it to Poupin.

The Frenchman stared at him and then fell on his neck. “You’re sublime,
my young friend—you’re truly sublime!”

“Will you be so good as to tell me what you’re going to do with that
young man?” demanded Madame Poupin with a glare at Schinkel.

“It’s none of your business, my poor lady,” Hyacinth replied,
disengaging himself from her husband. “Schinkel, I wish you’d just walk
away with me.”

“_Calmons-nous, entendons-nous, expliquons-nous!_ The situation’s very
simple,” Poupin went on.

“I’ll go with you if it will give you pleasure,” said Schinkel very
obligingly to Hyacinth.

“Then you’ll give me that letter, the sealed one, first!” Madame
Poupin, erecting herself, declared to the German.

“My wife, you’re _bien sotte_!” Poupin groaned, lifting his hands and
shoulders and turning away.

“I may be anything you like, but I won’t be a party—no, God help me,
not to that!” the good woman protested, planted before Schinkel as to
prevent his moving.

“If you’ve a letter for me you ought to give it to me, hang you!” said
Hyacinth to Schinkel. “You’ve no right to give it to any one else.”

“I’ll bring it to you in your house, my good friend,” Schinkel replied
with a vain, public wink which seemed to urge how Madame Poupin must be
considered.

“Oh in his house—_I_’ll go to his house!” this lady cried. “I regard
you, I’ve always regarded you, as my child,” she continued to Hyacinth,
“and if this isn’t an occasion for a mother——!”

“It’s you who are making it an occasion. I don’t know what you’re
talking about,” said Hyacinth. He had been questioning Schinkel’s face
and believed he found in it a queer, convulsed but honest appeal to
depend on him. “I’ve disturbed you and I think I had better go away.”

Poupin had turned round again; he seized the young man’s arm eagerly,
as to prevent his retiring without taking in his false position. “How
can you care when you know everything’s changed?”

“What do you mean—everything’s changed?”

“Your opinions, your sympathies, your whole attitude. I don’t approve
of it—_je le constate_. You’ve withdrawn your confidence from the
people; you’ve said things on this spot, where you stand now, that have
given pain to my wife and me.”

“If we didn’t love you we should say you had madly betrayed us!”—she
quickly took her husband’s idea.

“Oh I shall never madly betray you,” Hyacinth rather languidly smiled.

“You’ll never hand us over—of course you think so. But you’ve no right
to act for the people when you’ve ceased to believe in the people. _Il
faut être conséquent, nom de Dieu!_” Poupin went on.

“You’ll give up all thoughts of acting for me—_je ne permets pas ça_!”
grandly added his wife.

“The thing’s probably not of importance—only a little word of
consideration,” Schinkel suggested soothingly.

“We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you!” shouted Poupin with
magnificent heat.

“My poor friends, it’s you who have broken down, not I,” said Hyacinth.
“I’m much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the inconsequence is
yours. At all events good-night.”

He turned away from them and was leaving the room when Madame Poupin
threw herself upon him as her husband had done a moment before, but in
silence and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being
stout and powerful she quickly got the better of him and pressed him to
her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he said as soon as he could
speak. “It’s for me to judge of my convictions.”

“We want you to do nothing, because we _know_ you’ve changed,” Poupin
insisted. “Doesn’t it stick out of you, in every glance of your eye
and every breath of your lips? It’s only for that, because that alters
everything.”

“Does it alter my sacred vow? There are some things in which one can’t
change. I didn’t promise to believe; I promised to obey.”

“We want you to be sincere—that’s the great thing,” Poupin all
edifyingly urged. “I’ll go to see them—I’ll make them understand.”

“Ah you should have done that before!” his poor wife flashed.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, but I’ll allow no one to meddle
in my affairs.” Hyacinth spoke now with vehemence; the scene was cruel
to his nerves, which were not in a condition to bear it.

“When it’s a case of Hoffendahl it’s no good to meddle,” Schinkel
gravely contributed.

“And pray who’s Hoffendahl and what authority has _he_ got?” demanded
Madame Poupin, who had caught his meaning. “Who has put him over us
all, and is there nothing to do but to lie down in the dust before
him? Let him attend to his little affairs himself and not put them off
on innocent children, no matter whether the poor dears are with us or
against us.”

This protest went so far that Poupin clearly felt bound to recover a
dignity. “He has no authority but what we give him; but you know how we
respect him and that he’s one of the pure, _ma bonne_. Hyacinth can do
exactly as he likes; he knows that as well as we do. He knows there’s
not a feather’s weight of compulsion; he knows that for my part I long
ago ceased to expect anything of him.”

“Certainly there’s no compulsion,” said Schinkel. “It’s to take or to
leave. Only _they_ keep the books.”

Hyacinth stood there before the three with his eyes on the floor.
“Of course I can do as I like, and what I like is what I _shall_ do.
Besides, what are we talking about with such sudden passion?” he asked,
looking up. “I’ve no summons, I’ve no sign, I’ve no order. When the
call reaches me it will be time to discuss it. Let it come or not come:
it’s not my affair.”

“_Ganz gewiss_, it’s not your affair,” said Schinkel.

“I can’t think why M. Paul has never done anything, all this time,
knowing that everything’s different now!” Madame Poupin threw in.

“Yes, my dear boy, I don’t understand our friend,” her husband
remarked, watching Hyacinth with suspicious, contentious eyes.

“It’s none of his business any more than ours; it’s none of any one’s
business!” Schinkel earnestly opined.

“Muniment walks straight; the best thing you can do is to imitate him,”
said Hyacinth, trying to pass Poupin, who had placed himself before the
door.

“Promise me only this—not to do anything till I’ve seen you first,” the
Frenchman almost piteously begged.

“My poor old friend, you’re very weak.” And Hyacinth opened the door in
spite of him and passed out.

“Ah well, if you _are_ with us that’s all I want to know!” the young
man heard him call from the top of the stairs in a different voice, a
tone of sudden, extravagant fortitude.




XLIV


Hyacinth had hurried down and got out of the house, but without the
least intention of losing sight of Schinkel. The odd behaviour of
the Poupins was a surprise and annoyance, and he had wished to shake
himself free from it. He was candidly astonished at the alarm they
were so good as to feel for him, since he had never taken in their
having really gone round to the faith that the note he had signed to
Hoffendahl would fail to be presented. What had he said, what had he
done, after all, to give them the right to fasten on him the charge
of apostasy? He had always been a free critic of everything, and it
was natural that on certain occasions in the little parlour at Lisson
Grove he should have spoken in accordance with that freedom; but
it was with the Princess alone that he had permitted himself really
to rail at their grimy “inferiors” and give the full measure of his
scepticism. He would have thought it indelicate to express contempt for
the opinions of his old foreign friends, to whom associations that made
them venerable were attached; and, moreover, for Hyacinth a change of
heart was in the nature of things much more an occasion for a hush of
publicity and a kind of retrospective reserve: it couldn’t prompt one
to aggression or jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what
could be said on the opposite side one didn’t want to boast of one’s
sharpness—not even when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked
like the ghosts of the old.

He lingered in the street a certain distance from the house, watching
for Schinkel’s exit and prepared to remain there if necessary till
the dawn of another day. He had said to the agitated trio just before
that the manner in which the communication they looked so askance at
should reach him was none of his business—it might reach him as it
either smoothly or clumsily could. This was true enough in theory,
but in fact his desire was overwhelming to know what Madame Poupin
had meant by her allusion to a sealed letter, destined for him, in
Schinkel’s possession—an allusion confirmed by Schinkel’s own virtual
acknowledgment. It was indeed this eagerness that had driven him
out of the house, for he had reason to believe the German wouldn’t
fail him, and it galled his suspense to see the foolish Poupins try
to interpose, to divert the missive from its course. He waited and
waited in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow,
categorical, Germanic way, and only reprehended him for having in the
first place paltered with his sacred trust. Why hadn’t he come straight
to him—whatever the mysterious document was—instead of talking it over
with French featherheads? Passers were rare at this hour in Lisson
Grove and lights mainly extinguished; there was nothing to look at but
the vista of the low black houses, the dim interspaced street-lamps,
the prowling cats who darted occasionally across the road and the
terrible mysterious far-off stars, which appeared to him more than
ever to see everything of our helplessness and tell nothing of help. A
policeman creaked along on the opposite side of the way, looking across
at him as he passed, and stood for some minutes on the corner as to
keep an eye on him. Hyacinth had leisure to reflect that the day was
perhaps not far off when a policeman might have an eye on him for a
very good reason—might walk up and down, pass and repass as he mounted
guard on him.

It seemed horribly long before Schinkel came out of the house, but
it was probably only half an hour. In the stillness of the street he
heard Poupin let his visitor out, and at the sound he stepped back into
the recess of a doorway on the same side, so that in looking out the
Frenchman shouldn’t see him waiting. There was another delay, for the
two stood talking together interminably and without seizable sounds
on the doorstep. At last, however, Poupin went in again, and then
Schinkel came down the street toward Hyacinth, who had felt sure he
would proceed to that quarter, it being, as our young friend happened
to know, that of his habitation. After he had heard Poupin go in he
stopped and looked up and down; it was evidently his idea that Hyacinth
would be awaiting him. Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in
which he had flattened himself, and came straight to him, and the two
men stood there face to face in the dusky, empty, sordid street.

“You didn’t let them have the letter?”

“Oh no, I retained it,” said Schinkel with his eyes more than ever like
invisible points.

“Then hadn’t you better give it to me?”

“We’ll talk of that—we’ll talk.” Schinkel made no motion to satisfy
him; having his hands in the pockets of his trousers and an appearance
marked by the exasperating assumption that they had the whole night
before them. As one of the “dangerous” he was too intolerably for
order.

“Why should we talk? Haven’t you talked enough with those people all
the evening? What have they to say about it? What right have you to
detain a letter that belongs to me?”

“_Erlauben Sie_: I’ll light my pipe,” the German simply returned. And
he proceeded to this business methodically, while Hyacinth’s pale,
excited face showed in the glow of the match that ignited on the
rusty railing beside them. “It isn’t yours unless I’ve given it you,”
Schinkel went on as they walked along. “Be patient and I’ll tell you,”
he added, passing his hand into his comrade’s arm. “Your way, not
so? We’ll go down toward the Park.” Hyacinth tried to be patient and
listened with interest when Schinkel added: “She tried to take it; she
attacked me with her hands. But that wasn’t what I went for, to give it
up.”

“Is she mad? I don’t recognise them”—and Hyacinth spoke as one
scandalised.

“No, but they lofe you.”

“Why then do they try to disgrace me?”

“They think it no disgrace if you’ve changed.”

“That’s very well for her; but it’s pitiful for him, and I declare it
surprises me.”

“Oh _he_ came round—he helped me to resist. He pulled his wife off. It
was the first shock,” said Schinkel.

“You oughtn’t to have shocked them, my dear fellow,” Hyacinth
pronounced.

“I was shocked myself—I couldn’t help it.”

“Lord, how shaky you all are!” He was more and more aware now of all
the superiority still left him to cling to.

“You take it well. I’m very sorry. But it is a fine chance,” Schinkel
went on, smoking away.

His pipe seemed for the moment to absorb him, so that after a silence
Hyacinth resumed:

“Be so good as to remember that all this while I don’t in the least
understand what you’re talking about.”

“Well, it was this morning, early,” said the German. “You know in my
country we don’t lie in bett late, and what they do in my country I
try to do everywhere. I think it’s good enough. In winter I get up
of course long before the sun, and in summer I get up almost at the
same time. I should see the fine picture of the sunrise if in London
you _could_ see. The first thing I do of a Sunday is to smoke a pipe
at my window, which is at the front, you remember, and looks into a
little dirty street. At that hour there’s nothing to see there—you
English are so slow to leave the bett. Not much, however, at any time;
it’s not important, my bad little street. But my first pipe’s the one
I enjoy most. I want nothing else when I have that pleasure. I look
out at the new fresh light—though in London it’s not very fresh—and I
think it’s the beginning of another day. I wonder what such a day will
bring—if it will bring anything good to us poor devils. But I’ve seen
a great many pass and nothing has come. This morning, _doch_, brought
something—something at least to you. On the other side of the way I
saw a young man who stood just opposite my house and looking up at my
window. He looked at me straight, without any ceremony, and I smoked my
pipe and looked at him. I wondered what he wanted, but he made no sign
and spoke no word. He was a very neat young man; he had an umbrella and
he wore spectacles. We remained that way, face to face, perhaps for a
quarter of an hour, and at last he took out his watch—he had a watch
too—and held it in his hand, just glancing at it every few minutes, as
if to let me know that he would rather not give me the whole day. Then
it came over me that he wanted to speak to me! You would have guessed
that before, but we good Germans are slow. When we understand, however,
we act; so I nodded at him to let him know I’d come down. I put on my
coat and my shoes, for I was only in my shirt and stockings—though of
course I had on my trousers—and I went down into the street. When he
saw me come he walked slowly away, but at the end of a little distance
he waited for me. When I came near him I saw him to be a very neat
young man indeed—very young and with a very nice friendly face. He
was also very clean and he had gloves, and his umbrella was of silk.
I liked him very much. He said I should come round the corner, so we
went round the corner together. I thought there would be some one
there waiting for us; but there was nothing—only the closed shops
and the early light and a little spring mist that told that the day
would be fine. I didn’t know what he wanted; perhaps it was some of
our business—that’s what I first thought—and perhaps it was only a
little game. So I was very careful; I didn’t ask him to come into the
house. Yet I told him that he must excuse me for not understanding more
quickly that he wished to speak with me; and when I said this he said
it was not of consequence—he would have waited there, for the chance to
see me, all day. I told him I was glad I had spared him that at least,
and we had some very polite conversation. He _was_ a very pleasant
young man. But what he wanted was simply to put a letter in my hand;
as he said himself he was only a good private postman. He gave me the
letter—it was not addressed; and when I had taken it I asked him how he
knew and if he wouldn’t be sorry if it should turn out that I was not
the man for whom the letter was meant. But I didn’t give him a start;
he told me he knew all it was necessary for him to know—he knew exactly
what to do and how to do it. I think he’s a valuable member. I asked
him if the letter required an answer, and he told me he had nothing to
do with that; he was only to put it in my hand. He recommended me to
wait till I had gone into the house again to read it. We had a little
more talk—always very polite; and he mentioned that he had come so
early because he thought I might go out if he delayed, and because also
he had a great deal to do and had to take his time when he could. It’s
true he looked as if he had plenty to do—as if he was in some very good
occupation. I should tell you he spoke to me always in English, but he
was not English; he sounded his words only as if he had learnt them
very well. I could see he has learnt everything very well. I suppose
he’s not German—so he’d have spoken to me in German. But there are
so many, of all countries! I said if he had so much to do I wouldn’t
keep him; I would go to my room and open my letter. He said it wasn’t
important; and then I asked him if he wouldn’t come into my room also
and rest. I told him it wasn’t very handsome, my room—because he looked
like a young man who would have for himself a very neat lodging. Then I
found he meant it wasn’t important that we should talk any more, and he
went away without even offering to shake hands. I don’t know if he had
other letters to give, but he went away, as I have said, like a good
postman on his rounds, without giving me any more information.”

It took Schinkel a long time to tell this story—his calm and
conscientious thoroughness made no allowance for any painful acuteness
of curiosity his auditor might feel. He went from step to step,
treating all his points with lucidity and as if each would have exactly
the same interest for his companion. The latter made no attempt to
hurry him, and indeed listened now with a rare intensity of patience;
for he _was_ interested and it was moreover clear to him that he was
safe with Schinkel, who would satisfy him in time—wouldn’t worry him
with attaching conditions to their business in spite of the mistake,
creditable after all to his conscience, he had made in going for
discussion to Lisson Grove. Hyacinth learned in due course that on
returning to his apartment and opening the little packet of which he
had been put into possession, Mr. Schinkel had found himself confronted
with two separate articles: one a sealed letter superscribed with our
young man’s name, the other a sheet of paper containing in three lines
a request that within two days of receiving it he would hand the letter
to the “young Robinson.” The three lines in question were signed D.
H., and the letter was addressed in the same hand. Schinkel professed
that he already knew the writing; it was the neat fist—neatest in its
very flourishes—of Diedrich Hoffendahl. “Good, good,” he said, bearing
as to soothe on Hyacinth’s arm. “I’ll walk with you to your door and
I’ll give it to you there; unless you like better I should keep it till
to-morrow morning, so that you may have a quiet sleep—I mean in case
it might contain anything that will be unpleasant to you. But it’s
probably nothing; it’s probably only a word to say you need think no
more about your undertaking.”

“Why should it be that?” Hyacinth asked.

“Probably he has heard that you’ve cooled off.”

“That I’ve cooled off?” Our hero stopped him short; they had just
reached the top of Park Lane. “To whom have I given a right to say
that?”

“Ah well, if you haven’t, so much the better. It may be then for some
other reason.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Schinkel,” Hyacinth returned as they walked along.
And in a moment he went on: “What the devil did you go and tattle to
the Poupins for?”

“Because I thought they’d like to know. Besides, I felt my
responsibility; I thought I should carry it better if they knew it. And
then I’m like them—I lofe you.”

Hyacinth made no answer to this profession; he only said the next
instant: “Why didn’t your young man bring the letter directly to me?”

“Ah I didn’t ask him that! The reason was probably not complicated, but
simple—that those who wrote it knew my address and didn’t know yours.
And wasn’t I one of your backers?”

“Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Paul Muniment.
Why wasn’t any communication made me through Paul Muniment?” And
this now struck him as a question that would reverberate the more one
thought of it.

“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend on it
there are always good reasons. I should have preferred—yes—it had been
Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him——!” With which Schinkel’s
lucidity dropped and lost itself in a thick cloud of smoke.

“Well, if they didn’t send to him——?” Hyacinth persisted.

“You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?”

At this Hyacinth looked up at him askance and caught an ambiguous,
an evasive roll in his companion’s small, mild eye. “If it’s anything
against him my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can
defend him.”

“Well, it’s a possibility they’re not satisfied.”

“How do you mean it—not satisfied?”

“How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.”

“Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!”

“Ah my boy, depend upon it there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and in
a moment he added: “They know everything—everything. They’re like the
great God of the believers: they’re searchers of hearts; and not only
of hearts, but of all a man’s life—his days, his nights, his spoken,
his unspoken words. Oh they go deep and they go straight!”

The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence,
Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his
companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin
had said when Schinkel, this evening, first told him what he had come
to see him about. “_Il vaut du galme—il vaut du galme_”: that was the
German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them
over to himself several times and almost with the same accent. They
had a certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was somehow
salutary altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at
the door of his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face
while Hyacinth waited—just waited. The sharpness of his impatience
had passed away and he watched without irritation the loving manner in
which his mate shook the ashes out of the big smoked-out—so vehemently
smoked-out—pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was only after he
had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail
of it that he said “_Also_, now for the letter” and, putting his hand
inside his old waistcoat, drew forth the portentous missive. It passed
instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to
his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw disappointment
in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face at this indication that he himself
should have no knowledge—present and relieving at least—of its
contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to attribute to
it again some silly comfortable sense. Schinkel had now the shrewdness
or the good taste not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed
against his heart Hyacinth felt it still more distinctly, not as a vain
balm to apprehension, but as the very penetration of a fatal knife.
What his friend did say in a moment was: “Now you’ve got it I’m very
glad. It’s easier for me.” And he effected a poor strained grin.

“I should think so!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “If you hadn’t done your job
you’d have paid for it.”

Schinkel mumbled as for accommodation while he lingered, and then as
Hyacinth turned away, putting in his door-key, brought out: “And if you
don’t do yours so will you.”

“Yes, as you say, they themselves go straight! Good-night.” And our
young man let himself in.

The passage and staircase were never lighted and the lodgers either
groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice or scraped
the wall with a casual match the effect of which, in the milder gloom
of day, was a rude immensity of laceration. Hyacinth’s room was a
second floor back, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a
light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of
which figured to him thus as quite squalid. He stopped and considered
this new note of his crisis, his first impulse being to connect it with
the case just presented by Schinkel—since what could anything that
touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was doubtless
all in order that some second portent should now await him there. Yet
it occurred to him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora after
tea he must simply have left a tallow candle burning, and that it
showed a cynical spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so
close-fisted for herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly
it came over him that he had had a visitor in his absence and that the
visitor had taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking
such poor sources of comfort as were perfectly just. When he opened the
door this last prevision proved the correct one, though the figure in
occupation was not one of the possible presences that had loomed. Mr.
Vetch sat beside the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing; he
showed a weary head on a supporting hand and eyes apparently closed.
But he looked up when his young man appeared. “Oh I didn’t hear you;
you’re very quiet.”

“I come in softly when I’m late, for the sake of the house—though I’m
bound to say I’m the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides,
you’ve been asleep,” Hyacinth said.

“No, I’ve not been asleep,” the old man returned. “I don’t sleep much
nowadays.”

“Then you’ve been plunged in meditation.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking.” With which Mr. Vetch explained that the
woman of the house had begun by refusing him admittance without proper
assurances that his intentions were pure and that he was moreover the
oldest friend Mr. Robinson had in the world. He had been there an hour;
he had thought he might find him by coming late.

Mr. Robinson was very glad he had waited and was delighted to see him
and expressed regret that he hadn’t known in advance of his visit, so
that he might have something to offer him. He sat down on the bed,
vaguely expectant; he wondered what special purpose had brought the
fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. Yet he spoke but the truth in
saying he was glad to see him. Hyacinth had come upstairs in such a
pain of desire to be alone with the revelation carried in his pocket
that the sight of a guest had given him positive relief by postponing
solitude. The place where he had put his letter seemed to throb
against his side, yet he was thankful to his old friend for forcing
him still to leave it so. “I’ve been looking at your books,” the
fiddler said; “you’ve two or three exquisite specimens of your own.
Oh yes, I recognise your work when I see it; there are always certain
little finer touches. You’ve a manner, as who should say, like one of
the masters. With such a hand and such feeling your future’s assured.
You’ll make a fortune and become famous.”

Mr. Vetch sat forward to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on
his knees and looked very hard at his young host, as if to challenge
him to dispute a statement so cheering and above all so authoritative.
The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to produce immediately
the idea that the fiddler knew something, though there was no guessing
how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to
communicate with him, even granting them capable of that baseness—all
inconceivable in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an
hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion
there rushed into his mind an intense determination to dissemble
before his visitor to the last: he might imagine what he liked, but he
should have no grain of satisfaction—or rather should have only that
of being led to believe if possible that his suspicions were “rot.”
Hyacinth glanced over the books he had taken down from the shelf and
admitted that they were pleasing efforts and that so long as one didn’t
become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was
a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued
simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity,
the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become
strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their
character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself our hero took the
aggressive and asked him boldly if it were simply to look at his work,
of which he had half-a-dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made
a nocturnal pilgrimage. “My dear old friend, you’ve something on your
mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous _idée fixe_. Why has
it taken you to-night in particular? Whatever it is it has brought you
here at an unnatural hour under some impulse you don’t or can’t name.
I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and
so I am in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it
makes _you_ miserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed
upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right—if
he isn’t uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr. Vetch, don’t,
don’t worry; the blanket’s up to my chin and I haven’t tumbled yet.”

He heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another
person; the impudence of them in the grim conditions seemed to him
somehow so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of a form
of action in which impudence evidently must play a considerable part,
and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way the
old man looked out might have indicated that he too was able to take
the measure of his perversity—judged him false to sit there declaring
there was nothing the matter while a brand-new revolutionary commission
burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr. Vetch said very mildly and
as if he had really been reassured: “It’s wonderful how you read my
thoughts. I don’t trust you; I think there are beastly possibilities.
It’s not true at any rate that I come to look at you every five
minutes. You don’t know how often I’ve resisted my fears—how I’ve
forced myself to let you alone.”

“You had better let me come and live with you as I proposed after
Pinnie’s death. Then you’ll have me always under your eyes,” Hyacinth
smiled.

The old man got up eagerly and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid firm
hands on his shoulders, holding him close. “Will you now really, my
boy? Will you come to-night?”

“To-night, Mr. Vetch?”

“To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After
my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I couldn’t keep quiet; I was
very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie—she seemed to be in the
room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed
in ghosts, in signs or messages from the dead, I should believe I had
seen her. She wasn’t there for nothing; she was there to add her fears
to mine—to talk to me about you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no
use—she drove me out of the house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and
stick and came down here. You may judge if I thought it important—I
took a cab.”

“Ah why do you spend your money so foolishly?” Hyacinth asked in a tone
of the most affectionate remonstrance.

“Will you come to-night?” said his companion for rejoinder, holding him
still.

“Surely it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly
you’re ill and nervous. You can take the bed and I’ll spend the night
in the chair.”

The fiddler thought a moment. “No, you’ll hate me if I subject you to
such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.”

“It won’t be a bit different in your room. There as here I shall have
to sleep in a chair.”

“I’ll get another room. We shall be close together,” the fiddler went
on.

“Do you mean you’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with
your little house stuffed full and your people all in bed? My poor
Anastasius, you’re very bad; your reason totters on its throne,” said
Hyacinth with excellent gaiety.

“Very good, we’ll get a room to-morrow. I’ll move into another house
where there are two side by side.” His “boy’s” tone was evidently
soothing to him.

“_Comme vous y allez!_” the young man continued. “Excuse me if I remind
you that in case of my leaving this place I’ve to give a fortnight’s
notice.”

“Ah you’re backing out!” Mr. Vetch lamented, dropping his hands.

“Pinnie wouldn’t have said that,” Hyacinth returned. “If you’re acting,
if you’re speaking, at the behest of her pure spirit, you had better
act and speak exactly as she’d have done. She’d have believed me.”

“Believed you? Believed what? What’s there to believe? If you’ll make
me a promise I’ll believe that.”

“I’ll make you any promise you like,” said Hyacinth.

“Oh any promise I like—that isn’t what I want! I want just one
very particular little proof—and that’s really what I came here for
to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass all this time never
to have got it out of you before. Give it to me now and I’ll go home
quietly and leave you in peace.” Hyacinth, assenting in advance,
requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then Mr. Vetch
said: “Well, make me a promise—on your honour and as from the man
you are, God help you, to the man I am—that you’ll never, under any
circumstances whatever, ‘do’ anything.”

“‘Do’ anything——?”

“Anything those people expect of you.”

“Those people?” Hyacinth repeated.

“Ah don’t torment me—worried as I already am—with pretending not to
understand!” the old man wailed. “You know the people I mean. I can’t
call them by their names, because I don’t know their names. But you do,
and they know _you_.”

Hyacinth had no desire to torment him, but he was capable of reflecting
that to enter into his thought too easily would be tantamount to
betraying himself. “I suppose I know the people you’ve in mind,”
he said in a moment; “but I’m afraid I don’t grasp the need of such
solemnities.”

“Don’t they want to make use of you?”

“I see what you mean,” said Hyacinth. “You think they want me to touch
off some train for them. Well, if that’s what troubles you, you may
sleep sound. I shall never do any of their work.”

A radiant light came into the fiddler’s face; he stared as if this
assurance were too fair for nature. “Do you take your oath to that?
Never anything, anything, anything?”

“Never anything at all.”

“Will you swear it to me by the memory of that good woman of whom we’ve
been speaking and whom we both loved?”

“My dear old Pinnie’s memory? Willingly.”

Mr. Vetch sank down in his chair and buried his face in his hands; the
next moment his companion heard him sobbing. Ten minutes later he was
content to take his departure and Hyacinth went out with him to look
for another cab. They found an ancient four-wheeler stationed languidly
at a crossing of the ways, and before he got into it he asked his young
friend to kiss him. The young friend did so with a fine accolade and in
the frank foreign manner, on both cheeks, and then watched the vehicle
get itself into motion and rattle away. He saw it turn a neighbouring
corner and then approached the nearest gas-lamp to draw from his
breast-pocket the sealed letter Schinkel had given him.




XLV


“And Madame Grandoni then?” he asked, all loth to turn away. He felt
pretty sure he should never knock at that door again, and the desire
was strong in him to see once more, for the last time, the ancient,
afflicted, titular “companion” of the Princess, whom he had always
liked. She had struck him as ever in the slightly ridiculous position
of a confidant of tragedy in whom the heroine, stricken with reserves
unfavourable to the dramatic progression, should have ceased to
confide.

“_È andata via, caro signorino_,” said Assunta, smiling at him as she
held the door open.

“She has gone away? Bless me! when did she go?”

“It’s now five days, dear young sir. She has returned to _our_ fine
country.”

“Is it possible?” He felt it somehow as a personal loss.

“_È possibilissimo!_” Then Assunta added: “There were many times when
she almost went; but this time, _capisce_——!” And without finishing
her sentence this most exiled of Romans and expertest of tire-women
indulged in a subtle, suggestive, indefinable play of expression to
which hands and shoulders contributed as well as lips and eyebrows.

Hyacinth looked at her long enough to catch any meaning she might have
wished to convey, but gave no sign of apprehending it. He only remarked
gravely: “In short she’s off!”

“Eh, and the worst is she’ll probably never come back. She didn’t
move, as she kept threatening, for a long time; but when at last she
decided——!” And Assunta’s flattened hand, sweeping the air sidewise,
figured the straightness of the old lady’s course. “_Peccato!_” she
ended with a sigh.

“I should have liked to see her again—I should have liked to bid her
good-bye.” He lingered, suddenly helpless, though, informed of the
Princess’s own more temporary absence, he had no reason for remaining
save the possibility she might reappear before he turned away. This
possibility, however, was small, since it was only nine o’clock, the
middle of the evening—too early an hour for her return if, as Assunta
said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up and down the Crescent,
gently swinging his stick, and became aware in a moment of some tender
interest on the part of his humbler friend.

“You should have come back sooner; then perhaps Madama wouldn’t have
gone, _povera vecchia_,” she rejoined in a moment. “It’s too many days
since you’ve been here. She liked you—I know that.”

“She liked me, but she didn’t like me to come,” said Hyacinth. “Wasn’t
that why she went—because we keep coming?”

“Ah that other one—with the long legs—yes. But you’re better.”

“The Princess doesn’t think so, and she’s the right judge,” Hyacinth
smiled.

“Eh, who knows what she thinks? It’s not for me to say. But you had
better come in and wait. I daresay she won’t be long, and she’ll be
content to find you.”

Hyacinth wondered. “I’m not sure of that.” Then he asked: “Did she go
out alone?”

“_Sola, sola._ Oh don’t be afraid; you were the first!” And Assunta,
delightfully, frankly insidious, flung open the door of the little
drawing-room.

He sat there nearly an hour, in the chair the Princess habitually used,
under her shaded lamp, with a dozen objects round him which seemed as
much a part of herself as if they had been folds of her dress or even
tones of her voice. His thoughts rattled like the broken ice of a drink
he had once wistfully seen mixed at an “American Bar,” but he was too
tired for unrest; he had not been to work and had walked about all day
to fill the time; so that he simply lay back there with his head on one
of the Princess’s cushions, his feet on one of her little stools—one
of the ugly ones that belonged to the house—and his respiration coming
as quick as that of a man in sharp suspense. He was agitated beneath
his fatigue, yet not because he was waiting for the Princess; a
deeper source of emotion had been opened to him and he had not on the
present occasion more mere “nervous” intensity than he had known at
other moments of the past twenty hours. He had not closed his eyes the
night before, and the day had not made up for that torment. A fever
of reflexion had descended on him and the range of his imagination
been wide. It whirled him through circles of immeasurable compass; and
this is the reason for which, thinking of many things while he sat
in the Princess’s place, he wondered why, after all, he had come to
Madeira Crescent and what interest he could have in seeing the lady
of the house. Wasn’t everything over between them and the link snapped
which had for its brief hour bound them so closely together? And this
not simply because for a long time now he had received no sign nor
communication from her, no invitation to come back, no inquiry as to
why his visits had stopped; not even because he had seen her go in and
out with Paul Muniment and it had suited Prince Casamassima to point to
him the moral of her doing so; nor still because, quite independently
of the Prince, he believed her to be more deeply absorbed in her
acquaintance with that superior young man than she had ever been in her
relations with himself. The ground of his approach, so far as he became
conscious of it in his fitful meditations, could only be a strange,
detached curiosity—strange and detached because everything else of his
past had been engulfed in the abyss that opened before him when, after
his separation from Mr. Vetch, he stood under the lamp in the paltry
Westminster street. That had swallowed up all familiar feelings, and
yet out of the ruin had sprung the impulse of which this vigil was the
result.

The solution of his difficulty—he flattered himself he had arrived
at it—involved a winding-up of his affairs; and though, even had no
solution been required, he would have felt clearly that he had been
dropped, yet since even in that case it would have been sweet to him
to bid her good-bye, so at present the desire for some last vision of
her own hurrying fate could still appeal to him. If things had not gone
well for him he was still capable of wondering if they looked better
for her. There rose in his mind all perversely, yet all humanly, a
yearning need to pity her. These were odd feelings enough, and by the
time half an hour had elapsed they had throbbed themselves into the
stupor of exhaustion. While it came to him in how different a frame he
was waiting now from that of his first visit in South Street he closed
his eyes and lost himself. His unconsciousness lasted, he afterwards
supposed, nearly half an hour; it ended in his feeling the lady of the
house stand there before him. Assunta was behind and as he opened his
eyes took from her the bonnet and mantle of which she divested herself.
“It’s charming of you to have waited,” the Princess said, smiling down
at him with all her old kindness. “You’re very tired—don’t get up;
that’s the best chair and you must keep it.” She made him remain where
he was; she placed herself near him on a smaller seat; she declared
she wasn’t tired herself, that she didn’t know what was the matter
with her—nothing tired her now; she exclaimed on the time that had
elapsed since he had last called, as if she were reminded of it simply
by seeing him again; and she insisted that he should have some tea—he
looked so much as if he needed it. She considered him with deeper
attention and wished to know where he ailed—what he had done to use
himself up; adding that she must begin to look after him again, since
while she had had the care of him that kind of thing didn’t happen.
In response to this Hyacinth made a great confession: he admitted he
had stayed away from work and simply amused himself—amused himself by
loafing about London all day. This didn’t pay—he had arrived at that
wisdom as he grew older; it was doubtless a sign of increasing years
when one felt one’s self finding wanton pleasures hollow and that to
stick to one’s tools was not only more profitable but more refreshing.
However, he did stick to them as a general thing: that was no doubt
partly why, from the absence of the habit of it, a day off turned out
rather a sell. Meanwhile, when he hadn’t seen her for some time he
always on meeting the Princess again had a renewed, formidable sense of
her beauty, and he had it to-night in an extraordinary degree. Splendid
as that beauty had ever been it shone on this occasion, like a trimmed
lamp, clearer and further, so that—if what was already supremely fine
could be capable of greater refinement—it might have worked itself
free of all earthly grossness and been purified and consecrated by her
new life. Her gentleness, when she turned it on, was quite divine—it
had always the irresistible charm that it was the humility of a high
spirit—and on this occasion she gave herself up to it. Whether it was
because he had the consciousness of resting his eyes on her for the
last time, or because she wished to be particularly pleasant to him in
order to make up for having amid other preoccupations rather dropped
him of late—it was probable the effect sprang from both causes—at all
events the sight of each great, easy, natural, yet all so coercive,
fact of her seemed no poorer a privilege than when, the other year,
he had gone into her box at the play. She affected him as raising and
upholding the weight that rested on him very much after the form of
some high, bland caryatid crowned with a crushing cornice. He suffered
himself to be coddled and absently, even if radiantly, smiled at, and
his state of mind was such that it could produce no alteration of his
pain to see that these were on the Princess’s part inexpensive gifts.
She had sent Assunta to bring them tea, and when the tray arrived she
gave him cup after cup with every grace of hospitality; but he had
not sat with her a quarter of an hour before he was sure she scarcely
measured a word he said to her or a word she herself uttered. If she
had the best intention of being “balmy” by way of making up, she was
still rather vague about what she was to make up _for_. Two points
became perfectly clear: first that she was thinking of something quite
other than her present, her past, or her future relations with Hyacinth
Robinson; second that he was superseded indeed. This was so completely
the case that it didn’t even occur to her, evidently, how cruel the
sense of supersession might be to one who was sick and sore. If she was
charming to such weakness wasn’t it because she was good-natured and
he had been hanging off, and not because she had done him an injury?
Perhaps after all she hadn’t, for he got the impression it might be
no great loss of comfort to any shuffler not to constitute part of
her intimate life to-day. It was manifest from things in her face,
from her every movement and tone, and indeed from all the irradiation
of her beauty, that this life was involving intimacies and efforts
arduous all round. If he had called from curiosity about her success
it was sufficiently implied for him that her success was good: she was
living more than ever on high hopes and bold plans and far-reaching
combinations. These things, from his own point of view, were not now
so quite the secret of joy, and to be mixed up with them was perhaps
not so much greater a sign that one hadn’t lived for nothing than the
grim understanding he had in the interest of peace just arrived at with
himself. She asked why he hadn’t been to her for so long, much as if
this failure were only a vulgar form of social neglect; and she scarce
seemed to note it either as a good or as a poor excuse when he said
he had stayed away because he knew her to be deep in business. But she
didn’t deny the impeachment; she admitted she had been busier than ever
in her life before. She looked at him as if he would know what that
meant, and he said he was very sorry for her.

“Because you think it’s all a mistake? Yes, I know that. Perhaps it is,
but if so it’s a magnificent one. If you were scared about me three or
four months ago I don’t know what you’d think to-day—if you knew! I’ve
risked,” she yet all portentously simply stated, “everything.”

“Fortunately I don’t know anything,” he said.

“No indeed. How should you?”

“And to tell the truth,” he went on, “that’s really the reason I
haven’t been back here till to-night. I haven’t wanted to know—I’ve
feared and hated to know.”

“Then why did you come at last?”

“Well, out of the most illogical of curiosities.”

“I suppose then you’d like me to tell you where I’ve been to-night,
eh?” she asked.

“No, my curiosity’s satisfied. I’ve learnt something—what I mainly
wanted to know—without your telling me.”

She stared an instant. “Ah you mean whether Madame Grandoni had gone?
I suppose Assunta told you.”

“Yes, Assunta told me, and I was sorry to hear it.”

The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been
indeed a very awkward affair. “You may imagine how I feel it! It leaves
me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an immense
difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes of the
world. At any rate she couldn’t put up with me any more; it appears I’m
more and more of a scandal—and it was written!” On Hyacinth’s asking
what the old lady would do she said: “I suppose she’ll go and live with
my husband. Funny, isn’t it? that it should have always to be with one
of us and that it should matter so little which.” Five minutes later
she inquired of him if the same reason he had mentioned just before was
the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr. Muniment had told
her he hadn’t been near him and the sister for more than a month.

“No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy:
because somehow, in the first place, it isn’t natural to feel uneasy
about Paul, and because in the second, if it were, he never lets
one see anything—of any effect or impression on him. It’s simply the
general sense of real divergence of view. When that divergence becomes
sharp there are forms and lame pretences——”

“It’s best not to try to keep up? I see what you mean—when you’re
grimly sincere. But you might go and see the sister.”

“I don’t like the sister,” Hyacinth frankly averred.

“Ah neither do I!” the Princess said; while her visitor remained
conscious of the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with
which she had named their common friend. But she was silent after
this, and he judged he had stayed long enough and sufficiently taxed
a preoccupied attention. He got up and was bidding her good-night
when she suddenly brought out: “By the way, your not going to see
so good a friend as Mr. Muniment because you disapprove to-day of
his work suggests to me that you’ll be in an awkward fix, with your
disapprovals, the hour you’re called upon to serve the cause according
to your vow.”

“Oh of course I’ve thought of that,” Hyacinth smiled.

“And would it be indiscreet to ask what you’ve thought?”

“Ah so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.”

“I’ve never talked to you of this, because it seemed to me indelicate
and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast for even
so intimate a friend as I’ve been to have a right to meddle with
it. But I’ve wondered much, seeing you take all the while less and
less interest—in the real business, I mean, less and less—how you’d
reconcile your change of heart with your meeting your engagement. I
pity you, my poor friend,” she went on with a noble benignity, “for I
can imagine nothing more terrible than to find yourself face to face
with your obligation and to feel at the same time the spirit originally
prompting it dead within you.”

“Terrible, terrible, most terrible.” And he looked at her gravely.

“But I pray God it may never be your fate!” The Princess had a pause,
after which she added: “I see you feel it. Heaven help us all! Why
shouldn’t I tell you when I worry?” she went on. “A short time ago I
had a visit from Mr. Vetch.”

“It was kind of you to see him,” Hyacinth said.

“He was delightful, I assure you. But do you know what he came for? To
beg me on his knees to snatch you away.”

“Away from what?”

“From the danger that hangs over you. He was most touching.”

“Oh yes, he has talked to me about it,” our young man said. “He has
picked up the idea, but is utterly at sea. And how did he expect you’d
be able to snatch me?”

“He left that to me; he had only a general—and such a flattering—belief
in my possible effect on you.”

“And he thought you’d set it in motion to make me back out? He does
you injustice. You wouldn’t!” Hyacinth finely laughed. “In that case,
taking one false position with another, yours would be no better than
mine.”

“Oh, speaking seriously, I’m perfectly quiet about you and about
myself. I know you won’t be called,” the Princess returned.

“May I be told how you know it?”

She waited but an instant. “Mr. Muniment keeps me informed.”

“And how does _he_ know?”

“We’ve information. My poor dear friend,” the Princess went on, “you’re
so much out of it now that if I were to tell you I fear you wouldn’t
understand.”

“Yes, no doubt I’m out of it; but I still have a right to say, all
the same, in contradiction to your charge of a moment ago, that I take
interest in the ‘real business’ exactly as much as I ever did.”

“My poor Hyacinth, my dear, infatuated, little aristocrat, was that
ever very much?” she asked.

“It was enough, and it’s still enough, to make me willing to lay down
my life for anything that will clearly help.”

“Yes, and of course you must decide for yourself what that is—or rather
what it’s not.”

“I didn’t decide when I gave my promise. I agreed to abide by the
decision of others,” Hyacinth answered.

“Well, you said just now that in relation to this business of yours
you had thought of many things,” his friend pursued. “Have you ever by
chance thought of anything that _will_ do their work?”

“Their work?”

“The people’s.”

“Ah you call me fantastic names, but I’m one of them myself!” he cried.

“I know what you’re going to say,” the Princess broke in. “You’re going
to say it will help them to do what you do—to do their work themselves
and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what
do you propose for the thousands and hundreds of thousands for whom
no work—on the overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be
found? There’s less and less work in the world, and there are more and
more people to do the little there is. The old ferocious selfishness
_must_ come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must just be
assisted.”

The tone in which she spoke made his heart beat fast, and there was
something so inspiring in the great union of her beauty, her sincerity
and her energy that the image of a heroism not less great flashed
up again before him in all the splendour it had lost—the idea of a
tremendous risk and an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at
such an hour, one who could shine like silver and ring like crystal,
made every scruple a poor prudence and every compunction a cowardice.
“I wish to God I could see it as you see it!” he wailed after he had
looked at her some seconds in silent admiration.

“I see simply this: that what we’re doing is at least worth trying,
and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means,
will bethink themselves of anything else, on _their_ head be the
responsibility, on _their_ head be the blood!”

“Princess,” said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he
trembled, “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to _you_——!”
But his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her
possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him,
as he had already seen them in sinister musings: they seemed to him
worse than anything he had imagined for himself.

She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. “To me! And
pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more
than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?”

“Simply because there’s no one in the world and has never been any one
in the world like you.”

“Oh thank you!” said the Princess impatiently. And she turned from him
as with a beat of great white wings that raised her straight out of
the bad air of the personal. It took her up too high, it put an end to
their talk; expressing an indifference to what it might interest him to
think of her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to
his eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent
his head low over the hand he had taken to kiss; after which he left
the room without looking at her.




XLVI


“I’ve received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to her
the next evening as soon as he came into the room. He announced this
truth with an unadorned directness as well as with a freedom of manner
that showed his visit to be one of a closely-connected series. The
Princess was evidently not a little surprised and immediately asked how
in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn’t it have been
by your old lady?” Muniment returned. “He must have met her in Paris.
It’s from Paris he writes.”

“What an incorrigible cad!” she exclaimed.

“I don’t see that—for writing to me. I’ve his letter in my pocket and
I’ll show it to you if you like.”

“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched.”

“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked with one of the
easy sequences of a man who sees things as they are.

The Princess considered. “Yes, I make an exception for that, because it
hurts him, it makes him suffer.”

“I should think on the contrary it would gratify him by showing you in
a state of weakness and dependence.”

“Not when he knows I don’t use it for myself. What exasperates him is
that it’s devoted to ends which he hates almost as much as he hates me
and yet which he can’t call selfish.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” said Muniment with the same pleasant
reasonableness—that of a man who has mastered not two or three but all
the possible aspects of a question. “His letter satisfies me of that.”
The Princess stared at this and asked what he was coming to—if he
were leading up to the hint that she should go back and live with her
husband. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to advise it,” he replied;
“when I’ve so much benefit from seeing you here on your present
footing, that wouldn’t sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy
you’ll go before very long.”

“And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?”

“On this plain fact—that you’ll have nothing to live upon. You decline
to read the Prince’s letter, but if you were to look at it it would
give you evidence of what I mean. He informs me that I need count on
no more supplies from your hands, since you yourself will receive no
more.”

“He addresses you in those plain terms?”

“I can’t call them very plain, because the letter’s in French and I
naturally have had a certain difficulty in making it out, in spite of
my persevering study of the tongue and the fine example set me by poor
Robinson. But that appears to be the gist of the matter.”

“And you can repeat such an insult to me without the smallest apparent
discomposure? You’re indeed the most extraordinary of men!” the
Princess broke out.

“Why is it an insult? It’s the simple truth. I do take your money,”
Muniment said.

“You take it for a sacred cause. You don’t take it for yourself.”

“The Prince isn’t obliged to look at that,” he answered amusedly.

His companion had a pause. “I didn’t know you were on his side.”

“Oh you know on what side I am!”

“What does _he_ know? What business has he to address you so?”

“I suppose, as I tell you, that he knows from Madame Grandoni. She has
told him I’ve great influence with you.”

“Ah she was welcome to tell him that!” the Princess tossed off.

“His reasoning, therefore, has been that when I find you’ve nothing
more to give to the cause I’ll let you go.”

“Nothing more? And does he count _me_ myself, and every pulse of my
being, every capacity of my nature, as nothing?” the Princess cried
with shining eyes.

“Apparently he thinks _I_ do.”

“Oh as for that, after all, I’ve known you care far more for my money
than for me. But it has made no difference to me,” she finely said.

“Then you see that by your own calculation the Prince is right.”

“My dear sir,” Muniment’s hostess replied, “my interest in you never
depended on your interest in me. It depended wholly on a sense of your
great destinies. I suppose that what you began to tell me,” she went
on, “is that he stops my allowance.”

“From the first of next month. He has taken legal advice. It’s now
clear—so he tells me—that you forfeit your settlements.”

“Can’t I take legal advice too?” she demanded. “I can fight that to the
last inch of ground. I can forfeit my settlements only by an act of my
own. The act that led to our separation was _his_ act; he turned me out
of his house by physical violence.”

“Certainly,” said her visitor, displaying even in this simple
discussion his easy aptitude for argument; “but since then there _have_
been acts of your own——!” He stopped a moment, smiling; then went on:
“Your whole connexion with a league working for as great ends as you
like, but for ends and by courses necessarily averse to the eye of
day and the observation of the police—this constitutes an act; and so
does your exercise of the pleasure, which you appreciate so highly,
of feeding it with money extorted from an old Catholic and princely
family. You know how little it’s to be desired that these matters
should come to light.”

“Why in the world need they come to light? Allegations in plenty of
course he’d have, but not a particle of proof. Even if Madame Grandoni
were to testify against me, which is inconceivable, she wouldn’t be
able to produce a definite fact.”

“She’d be able to produce the fact that you had a little bookbinder
staying for a month in your house.”

“What has that to do with it?” she promptly asked. “If you mean that
that’s a circumstance which would put me in the wrong as against the
Prince, is there not on the other side this marked detail that while
our young friend was staying with me Madame Grandoni herself, a person
of the highest and most conspicuous respectability, never saw fit to
withdraw from me her countenance and protection? Besides, why shouldn’t
I have my bookbinder just as I might have—and the Prince should
surely appreciate my consideration in not having—my physician and my
chaplain?”

“Am I not your chaplain?” Muniment again amusedly inquired. “And does
the bookbinder usually dine at the Princess’s table?”

“Why not—when he’s an artist? In the old times, I know, artists dined
with the servants; but not to-day.”

“That would be for the court to appreciate,” he said. And in a
moment he added: “Allow me to call your attention to the fact that
Madame Grandoni _has_ left you—_has_ withdrawn her countenance and
protection.”

“Ah but not for Hyacinth!” the Princess returned in a tone which would
have made the fortune of an actress if an actress could have caught it.

“For the bookbinder or for the chaplain, it doesn’t matter. But that’s
only a detail. In any case,” he noted, “I shouldn’t in the least care
for your going to law.”

The Princess rested her eyes on him a while in silence and at last
replied: “I was speaking just now of your great future, but every now
and then you do something, you say something, that makes me really
doubt you. It’s when you seem afraid. That’s terribly against your
being a first-rate man.”

“Ah I know you’ve thought me little better than a smooth sneak from
the first of your knowing me. But what does it matter? I haven’t the
smallest pretension to being a first-rate man.”

“Oh you’re deep and you’re provoking!” she said with sombre eyes.

“Don’t you remember,” he went on without heeding this rich comment,
“don’t you remember how the other day you accused me of being not only
a coward but a traitor; of playing false, of wanting, as you said, to
back out?”

“Most distinctly. How can I help its coming over me at times that
you’ve incalculable ulterior views and are but consummately using
me—but consummately using us all? Well, I don’t care!”

“No, no; I’m genuine,” said Muniment simply, yet in a tone which might
have implied that their discussion was idle. And he made a transition
doubtless too abrupt for perfect civility. “The best reason in the
world for your not going to law with your husband is this: that when
you haven’t a penny left you’ll be obliged to go back and live with
him.”

“How do you mean, when I haven’t a penny left? Haven’t I my own
property?” the Princess demanded.

“The Prince assures me you’ve drawn on your own property at such a
rate that the income to be derived from it amounts, to his positive
knowledge, to no more than a thousand francs—forty pounds—a year.
Surely with your habits and tastes you can’t live on forty pounds. I
should add that your husband implies that your property originally was
rather a small affair.”

“You’ve the most extraordinary tone,” she answered gravely. “What you
appear to wish to express is simply this: that from the moment I’ve
no more money to give you I’m of no more value than the washed-out
tea-leaves in that pot.”

Muniment looked down a while at his substantial boot. His companion’s
words had brought a flush to his cheek; he appeared to admit to himself
and to her that at the point their conversation had reached there was a
natural difficulty in his delivering himself. But presently he raised
his head, showing a face still slightly embarrassed, but more for her
than for himself. “I’ve no intention whatever of saying anything harsh
or offensive to you, but since you challenge me perhaps it’s well that
I should let you know how inevitably I _do_ consider that in giving
your money—or rather your husband’s—to our business you gave the most
valuable thing you had to contribute.”

“This is the day of plain truths!” she rang out with a high mildness.
“You don’t count then any devotion, any intelligence that I may have
placed at your service—even rating my faculties modestly?”

“I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one’s
nothing without the other. You’re not trusted—well, where it makes the
difference.”

“Not trusted!” the Princess repeated with her splendid stare. “Why I
thought I could be hanged to-morrow!”

“They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You’re
liable to be weary of us,” he went on; “and indeed I think you’re weary
even now.”

“Ah you _must_ be a first-rate man—you’re such a brute!” she replied,
noticing, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced “weary”
_weery_.

“I didn’t say you were weary of _me_,” he said with a certain
awkwardness. “But you can never live poor—you don’t begin to know the
meaning of it.”

“Oh no, I’m not tired of you,” she declared as if she wished she
were. “In a moment you’ll make me cry with rage, and no man has done
that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,” she added in a
different manner. “You yourself recognised it just now in speaking of
the insignificant character of my fortune.”

“It had to be a fortune to be insignificant,” Muniment smiled. “You’ll
go back to your husband!”

To this she made no answer, only looking at him with a high, gradual
clearance of her heat. “I don’t see after all why they trust you more
than they trust me,” she said at last.

“I am not sure they do. I’ve heard something this evening that suggests
that.”

“And may one know what it is?”

“A communication which I should have expected to be made through me has
been made through another person.”

“A communication——?”

“To Hyacinth Robinson.”

“To Hyacinth——?” The Princess sprang up; she had turned pale in a
moment.

“He has got his billet, but they didn’t send it through me.”

“Do you mean his ‘call’? He was here last night,” the Princess said.

“A fellow, a worker, named Schinkel, a German—whom you don’t know, I
think, but who was originally a witness, with me and another, of his
undertaking—came to see me this evening. It was through him the call
came, and he put Hyacinth up to it on Sunday night.”

“On Sunday night?” The Princess stared. “Why he was here yesterday, and
he talked of it and told me nothing.”

“That was quite right of him, bless his pluck!” Muniment returned.

She closed her eyes a moment and when she opened them again he had
risen and was standing before her. “What do they want him to do?” she
asked.

“I’m like Hyacinth; I think I had better not tell you—at least till
it’s over.”

“And when will it be over?”

“They give him several days and, I believe, minute instructions—with,
however,” Paul went on, “considerable discretion in respect to seizing
his chance. The thing’s made remarkably easy for him. All this I know
from Schinkel, who himself knew nothing on Sunday, being merely the
fellow to see he got the thing, and who saw him in fact yesterday
morning.”

“Schinkel trusts you then?” the Princess remarked.

Muniment looked at her steadily. “Yes, but he won’t trust you.
Hyacinth’s to receive a card of invitation to a certain big house,” he
explained, “a card with the name left in blank, so that he may fill
it out himself. It’s to be good for each of two grand parties which
are to be given at a few days’ interval. That’s why they give him the
job—because at a grand party he’ll look in his place.”

“He’ll like that,” she said musingly—“repaying hospitality with a
pistol-shot.”

“If he doesn’t like it he needn’t do it.”

She made no return to this, but in a moment said: “I can easily find
out the place you mean—the big house where two parties are to be
given at a few days’ interval and where the master—or is it to be the
principal guest?—is worth your powder.”

“Easily, no doubt. And do you want to warn him?”

“No, I want to do the business myself first, so that it won’t be left
for another. If Hyacinth will look in his place at a grand party shall
not I look still more in mine? And as I know the individual I should be
able to approach him without exciting the smallest suspicion.”

Muniment appeared for a little to consider her suggestion as if it were
practical and interesting; but presently he answered quietly enough:
“To fall by your hand would be too good for him.”

“However he falls, will it be useful, valuable?” the Princess asked.

“It’s worth trying. He’s a very bad institution.”

“And don’t you mean to go near Hyacinth?”

“No, I wish to leave him free.”

“Ah, Paul Muniment,” she said, “you _are_ a first-rate man!” She sank
down on the sofa and sat looking up at him. “In God’s name, why have
you told me this?”

“So that you shall not be able to throw it up at me later that I
haven’t.”

She flung herself over, burying her face in the cushions, and remained
so for some minutes in silence. He watched her a while without
speaking, then at last brought out: “I don’t want to aggravate you,
but you _will_ go back!” The words failed to cause her even to raise
her head, and after a moment he—as for the best attenuation of any
rudeness—stepped out of the room.




XLVII


That she had done with him, done with him for ever, was to remain the
most vivid impression Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira Crescent
the night before. He went home and threw himself on his narrow bed,
where the consolation of sleep again descended on him. But he woke
up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day was a
quick revival of pain. He was overpast, he had become vague, he was
extinct. Things Sholto had said came back to him, and the compassion
of foreknowledge Madame Grandoni had shown him from the first. Of
Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder if this great fellow-worker
knew. An insurmountable desire to do more than justice to him for
the very reason that there might be a temptation to do less forbade
him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely asked
himself if _he_ would ever be superseded; but this possibility faded
away in a stronger light—a dazzling vision of some great tribuneship
which swept before him now and again and in which the figure of the
Princess herself seemed merged and blurred. When full morning came at
last and he got up it brought with it in the restlessness making it
impossible he should remain in his room a return of that beginning of
an answerless question, “After all, after all——?” which the Princess
had planted there the night before when she spoke so bravely in the
name of the Revolution. “After all, after all, since nothing else was
tried or would apparently ever be tried——!” He had a sense that his
mind, made up as he believed, would fall to pieces again; but that
sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was already familiar—the
horror of the public reappearance, in his person, of the imbrued hands
of his mother. This loathing of the idea of a _repetition_ had not
been sharp, strangely enough, till he felt the great, hard hand on his
shoulder; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance
to act for the “party of action” had not been the fear of a personal
stain, but the simple growth of yearning observation. Yet now the idea
of the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to
make service impossible. It passed before him, or rather it stayed,
like a blow dealt back at his mother, already so hideously disfigured;
to suffer it to start out in the life of her son was in a manner to
place her own forgotten, redeemed pollution again in the eye of the
world. The thought that was most of all with him was that he had time,
he had time; he was grateful for that and saw a delicacy, a mercy, in
their having given him a margin, not condemned him to be pressed by
the hours. He had another day, he had two days, he might take three, he
might take several. He knew he should be terribly weary of them before
they were over; but for that matter they would be over whenever he
liked.

Anyhow he went forth again into the streets, into the squares, into the
parks, solicited by an aimless desire to steep himself yet once again
in the great, indifferent city he so knew and so loved and which had
had so many of his smiles and tears and confidences. The day was grey
and damp, though no rain fell, and London had never appeared to him
to wear more proudly and publicly the stamp of her imperial history.
He passed slowly to and fro over Westminster bridge and watched the
black barges drift on the great brown river; looked up at the huge
fretted palace that rose there as a fortress of the social order which
he, like the young David, had been commissioned to attack with a sling
and pebble. At last he made his way to Saint James’s Park and wandered
and pointlessly sat. He watched the swans as from fascination and
followed the thoroughfare that communicates with Pimlico. He stopped
here presently and came back again; then, over the same pavement, he
retraced his steps westward. He looked in the windows of shops—looked
especially into the long, glazed expanse of that establishment in
which at that hour of the day Millicent Henning discharged superior
functions. Her image had descended on him after he came out, and now
it moved before him as he went, it clung to him, it refused to quit
him. He made in truth no effort to drive it away; he held fast to it
in return, and it murmured strange things in his ear. She had been so
jolly to him on Sunday; she was such a strong, obvious simple nature,
with such a generous breast and such a freedom from the sophistries of
civilisation. All he had ever liked in her came back to him now with a
finer air, and there was a moment, during which he again made time on
the bridge that spans the lake in the Park, seemingly absorbed in the
pranks of a young ass in a boat, when he asked himself if at bottom
he hadn’t liked her better almost than any one. He tried to think he
had, he wanted to think he had, and he seemed to see the look her eyes
would have if he should swear to her he had. Something of that sort
had really passed between them on Sunday, only the business coming
up since had brushed it away. Now the taste of the vague, primitive
comfort his Sunday had given him revived, and he asked himself if he
mightn’t have a second and even a deeper draught of it. After he had
thought he couldn’t again wish for anything he found himself wishing he
might believe there was something Millicent could do for him. Mightn’t
she help him—mightn’t she even extricate him? He was looking into a
window—not that of her own shop—when a vision rose before him of a
quick flight with her, for an undefined purpose, to an undefined spot;
and he was glad at that moment to have his back turned to the people
in the street, because his face suddenly grew red to the tips of his
ears. Again and again, all the same, he indulged in the reflexion that
spontaneous, uncultivated minds often have inventions, inspirations.
Moreover, whether Millicent should have any or not, he might at least
feel the firm roundness of her arms about him. He didn’t exactly
know what good this would do him or what door it would open, but he
should like it. The sensation was not one he could afford to defer,
but the nearest moment at which he should be able to enjoy it would
be that evening. He had thrown over everything, but she herself would
be busy all day; nevertheless it would be a gain, it would be a kind
of foretaste, to see her earlier, to have three words with her. He
wrestled with the temptation to go into her haberdasher’s, because he
knew she didn’t like it—he had tried it once of old; as the visits of
gentlemen even when ostensible purchasers (there were people watching
about who could tell who was who) compromised her in the eyes of
her employers. This was not an ordinary case, however; and though he
hovered a long time, undecided, embarrassed, half-ashamed, at last he
went in as by the force of the one, the last, sore personal need left
him. He would just make an appointment with her, and a glance of the
eye and a single word would suffice.

He remembered his way through the labyrinth of the shop; he knew her
department was on the upper floor. He walked through the place, which
was crowded, as if he had as good a right as any one else; and as he
had entertained himself on rising with putting on his holiday garments,
in which he made such a tidy figure, he was not suspected of any
purpose more nefarious than that of looking for some nice thing to give
a lady. He ascended the stairs and found himself in a large room where
made-up articles were ranged and where, though there were twenty people
in it, a glance told him he shouldn’t find Millicent. She was perhaps
in the next one, into which he passed by a wide opening. Here also were
numerous purchasers, most of them ladies; the men were but three or
four and the disposal of the wares all committed to neat young women
attired in black dresses with long trains. It struck him at first that
the young woman he sought was even here not within sight, and he was
turning away to look elsewhere when he suddenly noted a tall gentleman
who stood in the middle of the room and who was none other than Captain
Sholto. It next became plain to him that the person standing upright
before the Captain, as still as a lay-figure and with her back turned
to himself, was the object of his own quest. In spite of her averted
face he instantly “spotted” Millicent; he knew her shop-attitude, the
dressing of her hair behind and the long grand lines of her figure
draped in the last new thing. She was showing off this treasure to the
Captain, who was lost in contemplation. He had been beforehand with
Hyacinth as a false purchaser, but he imitated a real one better than
our young man, as, with his eyes travelling up and down the front of
their beautiful friend’s person, he frowned consideringly and rubbed
his lower lip slowly with his walking-stick. Millicent stood admirably
still—the back view of the garment she displayed was magnificent.
Hyacinth stood for a minute as still as she. By the end of that minute
he was convinced Sholto saw him, and for an instant he thought him
about to make Milly do as much. But Sholto only looked at him very hard
a few seconds, not telling her he was there; to enjoy that satisfaction
he would wait till the interloper had gone. Hyacinth gazed back at him
for the same length of time—what these two pairs of eyes said to each
other requires perhaps no definite mention—and then turned away.

That evening about nine o’clock the Princess Casamassima drove in a
hansom to Hyacinth’s lodgings in Westminster. The door of the house
was a little open and a man stood on the step, smoking his big pipe
and looking up and down. The Princess, seeing him while she was still
at some distance, had hoped he was Hyacinth, but he proved a different
figure indeed from her devoted young friend. He had not a forbidding
countenance, but he faced her very directly as she descended from her
hansom and approached the door. She was used to the last vulgarity of
stare and didn’t mind it; she supposed him one of the lodgers in the
house. He edged away to let her pass and watched her while she tried to
twist life into the limp bell-pull beside the door. It gave no audible
response, so that she said to him: “I wish to ask for Mr. Hyacinth
Robinson. Perhaps you can tell me——”

“Yes, I too,” the man strangely smirked. “I’ve come also for that.”

She seemed to wonder about him. “I think you must be Mr. Schinkel. I’ve
heard of you.”

“You know me by my bad English,” her interlocutor said with a shade of
benevolent coquetry.

“Your English is remarkably good—I wish I spoke German as well. Only
just a hint of an accent, and evidently an excellent vocabulary.”

“I think I’ve heard also of you,” Schinkel returned with freedom.

“Yes, we know each other in our circle, don’t we? We’re all brothers
and sisters.” The Princess was anxious, was in a fever; but she could
still relish the romance of standing in a species of back slum and
fraternising with a personage so like a very tame horse whose collar
galled him. “Then he’s at home, I hope; he’s coming down to you?” she
went on.

“That’s what I don’t know. I’m waiting.”

“Have they gone to call him?”

Schinkel looked at her while he puffed his pipe. “I’ve galled him
myself, but he won’t zay.”

“How do you mean he won’t say?”

“His door’s locked. I’ve knocked many times.”

“I suppose he is out,” said the Princess.

“Yes, he may be out,” Schinkel remarked judicially.

They stood a moment face to face, after which she asked: “Have you any
doubt of it?”

“Oh _es kann sein_. Only the woman of the house told me five minutes
ago that he came in.”

“Well then he probably went out again.”

“Yes, but she didn’t hear him.”

The Princess reflected and was conscious she was flushing. She knew
what Schinkel knew about their young friend’s actual situation and
she wished to be very clear with him and to induce him to be the same
with her. She was rather baffled, however, by the sense that he was
cautious—justly cautious. He was polite and inscrutable, quite like
some of the high personages—ambassadors and cabinet ministers—whom she
used to meet in the great world. “Has the woman been here in the house
ever since?” she asked in a moment.

“No, she went out for ten minutes half an hour ago.”

“Surely then he may have gone out again in that time,” the Princess
argued.

“That’s what I’ve thought. It’s also why I’ve waited here,” said
Schinkel. “I’ve nothing to do,” he added serenely.

“Neither have I,” she returned. “We can wait together.”

“It’s a pity you haven’t some nice room,” the German suggested with
sympathy.

“No indeed; this will do very well. We shall see him the sooner when he
comes back.”

“Yes, but perhaps it won’t be for long.”

“I don’t care for that; I’ll wait. I hope you don’t object to my
company,” she smiled.

“It’s good, it’s good,” Schinkel responded through his smoke.

“Then I’ll send away my cab.” She returned to the vehicle and paid the
driver, who said with expression “Thank you, my lady” and drove off.

“You gave him too much,” observed Schinkel when she came back.

“Oh he looked like a nice man. I’m sure he deserved it.”

“It’s very expensive,” Schinkel went on sociably.

“Yes, and I’ve no money—but it’s done. Was there no one else in the
house while the woman was away?” the Princess resumed.

“No, the people are out; she only has single men. I asked her that.
She has a daughter, but the daughter has gone to see her cousin. The
mother went only a hundred yards, round the corner there, to buy a
pennyworth of milk. She locked this door and put the key in her pocket;
she stayed at the grocer’s, where she got the milk, to have a little
conversation with a friend she met there. You know ladies always stop
like that—_nicht wahr?_ It was half an hour later that I came. She told
me he was at home, and I went up to his room. I got no sound, as I have
told you. I came down and spoke to her again, and she told me what I
say.”

“Then you determined to wait, as I’ve done,” said the Princess.

“Oh yes, I want to see him.”

“So do I, very much.” She said nothing more for a minute, but then
added: “I think we want to see him for the same reason.”

“_Das kann sein—das kann sein._”

The two continued to stand there in the brown evening, and they had
some further conversation of a desultory and irrelevant kind. At
the end of ten minutes the Princess broke out in a low tone, laying
her hand on her companion’s arm: “Mr. Schinkel, this won’t do. I’m
intolerably worried.”

“Yes, that’s the nature of ladies,” the German sagely answered.

“I want to go up to his room,” the Princess said. “You’ll be so good as
to show me where it is.”

“It will do you no good if he’s not there.”

“I’m not sure he’s not there.”

“Well, if he won’t speak it shows he likes better not to have visitors.”

“Oh he may like to have _me_ better than he does you!” she frankly
suggested.

“_Das kann sein—das kann sein._” But Schinkel made no movement to
introduce her into the house.

“There’s nothing to-night—you know what I mean,” she remarked with a
deep look at him.

“Nothing to-night?”

“At the Duke’s. The first party’s on Thursday, the other next Tuesday.”

“_Schön._ I never go to parties,” said Schinkel.

“Neither do I.”

“Except that _this_ is a kind of party—you and me,” he dreadfully
grinned.

“Yes, and the woman of the house doesn’t approve of it.” The footstep
of a jealous landlady had become audible in the passage, through
the open door, which was presently closed from within with a little
reprehensive bang. Something in this touch appeared to quicken
exceedingly the Princess’s impatience and fear; the danger of being
warned off made her wish still more uncontrollably to arrive at the
satisfaction she had come for. “For God’s sake, Mr. Schinkel, take me
up there. If you won’t I’ll go alone,” she pleaded.

Her face was white now and, it need hardly be added, all beautiful with
anxiety. The German took in this impression and then, with no further
word, turned and reopened the door and went forward, followed closely
by his companion.

There was a light in the lower region which tempered the gloom of the
staircase—as high, that is, as the first floor; the ascent the rest
of the way was so dark that the pair went slowly and Schinkel led his
companion by the hand. She gave a suppressed exclamation as she rounded
a sharp turn in the second flight. “Good God, is that his door—with the
light?”

“Yes, you can see under it. There was a light before,” he said without
confusion.

“And why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I thought it would worry you.”

“And doesn’t it worry _you_?”

“A little, but I don’t mind,” Schinkel professed. “Very likely he may
have left it.”

“He doesn’t leave candles!” she returned with vehemence. She hurried
up the few remaining steps to the door and paused there with her ear
against it. Her hand grasped the handle and turned it, but the door
resisted. Then she panted to her companion: “We must go in—we must go
in!”

“But what will you do when it’s locked?” he contended.

“You must break it down.”

“It’s very expensive,” said Schinkel.

“Don’t be abject!” cried the Princess. “In a house like this the
fastenings are worth nothing; they’ll easily yield.”

“And if he’s not there—if he comes back and finds what we’ve done?”

She looked at him a moment through the darkness, which was mitigated
only by the small glow proceeding from the chink. “He _is_ there!
Before God he’s there!”

“_Schön, schön_,” said her friend as if he felt the contagion of her
own dread but was deliberating and meant to remain calm. She assured
him that one or two vigorous thrusts with his shoulder would burst the
bolt—certain to be some wretched morsel of tin—and she made way for
him to come close. He did so, he even leaned against the door, but he
gave no violent push, and the Princess waited with her hand against
her heart. Schinkel apparently was still deliberating. At last he gave
a low sigh. “I know they find him the pistol, it’s only for that,” he
mumbled; and the next moment she saw him sway sharply to and fro in
the gloom. She heard a crack and saw the lock had yielded. The door
collapsed: they were in the light; they were in a small room which
looked full of things. The light was that of a single candle on the
mantel; it was so poor that for a moment she made out nothing definite.
Before that moment was over, however, her eyes had attached themselves
to the small bed. There was something on it—something black, something
ambiguous, something outstretched. Schinkel held her back, but only an
instant; she saw everything and with the very vision flung herself,
beside the bed, upon her knees. Hyacinth lay there as if asleep, but
there was a horrible thing, a mess of blood, on the counterpane, in
his side, in his heart. His arm hung limp beside him, downwards, off
the narrow couch; his face was white and his eyes were closed. So
much Schinkel saw, but only for an instant; a convulsive movement of
the Princess, bending over the body while a strange low cry came from
her lips, covered it up. He looked about him for the weapon, for the
pistol, but in her rush at the bed she had pushed it out of sight
with her knees. “It’s a pity they found it—if he hadn’t had it here!”
he wailed to her under his breath. He had determined to remain calm,
so that, on turning round at the quick advent of the little woman of
the house, who had hurried up, white, staring, scared by the sound of
the smashed door, he was able to say very quietly and gravely: “Mr.
Robinson has shot himself through the heart. He must have done it while
you were fetching the milk.” The Princess rose, hearing another person
in the room, and then Schinkel caught sight of the small revolver
lying just under the bed. He picked it up and carefully placed it on
the mantel-shelf—keeping all to himself, with an equal prudence, the
reflexion that it would certainly have served much better for the Duke.


THE END


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