“What do you mean by force that will shake the globe?” the young man inquired, leaning back in his chair with raised arms and his interlocked hands, behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had spoken French, which he always preferred to do, the insular tongue being an immense tribulation to him; but his visitor spoke English, and Hyacinth immediately took in that there was nothing French abouthim—M. Poupin could never tell him he hadla main parisienne.
“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.
“And in this country, I hope, in their coal-bins.La-la, we shall find them even there,” his wife remarked.
“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin.“I believe you would have thought so if you had been there.”
“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here ten years ago,” the young man returned. He saw Hyacinth was watching him and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that added to our hero’s interest.
“Pardon, pardon, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out laughing; whereupon his host declared with a dignity which even his recumbent position didn’t abate that it was really frivolous of him to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.
“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man good-naturedly, lowering his arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets while he stretched his long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”
“Oh the trial will be on a great scale—soyez tranquille! It will be one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”
Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with him, could see he was remarkable, and felt slightly aggrieved that he should be a stranger: that is that he should be apparently a familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought his young friend from Lomax Place worthy up to this time to be made acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other chair discovered these reflexions in Hyacinth’s face, but after a moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly diffidentway, a way our hero liked: “And do you know too?”
“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth in wonder.
“Oh, if you did you would!” the young man exclaimed and laughed again. Such a rejoinder from any one else would have irritated our sensitive hero, but it only made him more curious about his interlocutor, whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.
“Mon ami, you ought to presentces messieurs,” Madame Poupin remarked.
“Ah ça, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband cried without heeding her. Then he went on in a different tone: “M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child,un enfant très-doué, in whom I take a tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping big one! Isn’t it so,mon petit?”
This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly: “Oh, I only want them to let me alone!”
“He’s very young,” said Eustache Poupin.
“He’s the person we have seen in this country whom we like best,” his wife added.
“Perhaps you’re French,” suggested the strange young man.
The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it was as if a listening stillness had fallen. He found it a difficult pass, partly because there was something exciting and embarrassing in the attention of the other visitor, and partly because he had never yet had to decide that important question. He didn’t really know if he were French or were English, or which of the two he should prefer to be. His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumedher in a place and among a people she must have execrated—all this made him French; yet he was conscious at the same time of qualities that didn’t mix with it. He had spun to the last fineness, long ago, a legend about his mother, built it up slowly, adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and broodings, when his cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were times when it wavered and faded, when it ceased to console him and he ceased to trust it. He had had a father too, and his father had suffered as well, and had fallen under a blow, and had paid with his life; and him also he felt in his spirit and his senses, when the effort to think it out didn’t simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging still even while they baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any rate he seemed rooted in the place where his wretched parents had expiated, and he knew nothing of any other. Moreover when old Poupin said “M. Hyacinthe,” as he had often done before, he didn’t altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser. Our young friend was under a cloud and a stigma, but he was not yet prepared to admit he was ridiculous. “Oh, I daresay I ain’t anything,” he replied in a moment.
“En v’là des bêtises!” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say you’re not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”
“We all have an account to settle, don’t you know?” said the strange young man.
He evidently meant this to be encouraging to Hyacinth, whose quick desire to avert M. Poupin’s allusions had not been lost on him; but our hero could see that he himself would be sure to be one of the first to be paid. He would make society bankrupt, but he would be paid. He was tall and fair and good-natured looking, but you couldn’t tell—orat least Hyacinth couldn’t—if he were handsome or ugly, with his large head and square forehead, his thick, straight hair, his heavy mouth and rather vulgar nose, his admirably clear steady eyes, light-coloured and set very deep; for despite a want of fineness in some of its parts his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution, spoke somehow, as if it had showed you his soul drawing deep and even breaths, of a state of moral health. He was dressed as a workman in his Sunday toggery, having evidently put on his best to call in Lisson Grove, where he was to meet a lady, and wearing in particular a necktie which was both cheap and pretentious and of which Hyacinth, who noticed everything of that kind, observed the crude false blue. He had very big shoes—the shoes almost of a country labourer—and spoke with a provincial accent which Hyacinth believed to be that of Lancashire. This didn’t suggest cleverness, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from feeling sure he was the reverse of stupid, that he probably indeed had a large easy brain quite as some people had big strong fists. Our little hero had a great desire to know superior persons, and he interested himself on the spot in this quiet stranger whose gravity, by any fine balance, showed, like that of a precious metal, in the small piece as well as in the big. He had the complexion of a ploughboy and the glance of a commander-in-chief, and might have been a distinguished youngsavantin the disguise of an artisan. The disguise would have been very complete, for he had several brown stains on his fingers. Hyacinth’s curiosity on this occasion was both excited and gratified; for after two or three allusions, which he didn’t understand, had been made to a certain place where Poupin and their friend had met and expected to meet again, Madame Poupin exclaimed that it was a shame notto take in M. Hyacinthe, who, she would answer for it, had in him the making of one of the pure.
“All in good time, in good time,ma bonne,” the worthy invalid replied. “M. Hyacinthe knows I count on him, whether or no I make him aninterneto-day or only wait a little longer.”
“What do you mean by aninterne?” Hyacinth asked.
“Mon Dieu, what shall I say!”—and Eustache Poupin stared at him solemnly from his pillow. “You’re very sympathetic, but I’m afraid you’re too young.”
“One is never too young to contribute one’sobole,” said Madame Poupin.
“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other guest, but not as if he thought it probable.
“Is it a plot—a conspiracy?” Hyacinth broke out.
“He asks that as if he were asking if it’s a plum-pudding,” said M. Poupin. “It isn’t good to eat, and we don’t do it for our amusement. It’s terribly serious, my child.”
“It’s a group of workers to which he and I and a good many others belong. There’s no harm in telling him that,” the young man went on.
“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she’s quite in the old ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting hertisane.
Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you’ve some plan, something to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told me,” he remarked in a moment to Poupin.
The latter merely viewed him a little as if he were a pleasing object and then said to the strange young man: “He’s a little jealous of you. But there’s no harm in that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We’ll tell you his history someother day; it will make you feel that he belongs to us of necessity. It’s an accident that he hasn’t met you here before.”
“How couldces messieurshave met when M. Paul never comes? He doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.
“Well, you see I’ve my little sister at home to take care of when I ain’t at the works,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”
“A lady—a real lady?”
“Oh yes, every inch,” smiled M. Paul.
“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that because you’ve thedésagrémentof being poor? It seems to be the custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame Poupin continued. “I should like to see one ofces dames—the real ones—coming in to sit with me!”
“Oh, you’re not a cripple; you’ve got the use of your legs!”
“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.
“This lady looks after several others in our court and she reads to my sister.”
“Oh, well, you’re patient, you other English.”
“We shall never do anything without that,” said M. Paul with undisturbed good-humour.
“You’re perfectly right; you can’t say that too often. It will be a tremendous job and only the strong will prevail,” his host murmured a little wearily, turning his eyes to Madame Poupin, who approached slowly, holding thetisanein rather a full bowl and tasting it again and yet again as she came.
Hyacinth had been watching his fellow-visitor with deepening interest; a fact of which M. Paul apparently became aware, for he volunteered presently,giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we ought to know each other. I’m sure I’ve nothing against it. I like to know folk if they’re likely to be worth it.”
Hyacinth was too pleased with this even to take it up; it seemed to him for a moment that he couldn’t touch it gracefully enough. But he said with sufficient eagerness: “Will you tell me all about your plot?”
“Oh, it’s no plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.” And with his mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M. Paul certainly had not much the appearance of a conspirator.
“Isn’t it a new era?” asked Hyacinth, rather disappointed.
“Well, I don’t know; it’s just a taking of a stand on two or three points.”
“Ah bien, voilà du propre; between us we’ve thrown him into a fever!” cried Madame Poupin, who had put down her bowl on a table near her husband’s bed and was bending over him with her hand on his forehead. Her patient was flushed, he had closed his eyes, and it was evident there had been more than enough conversation. Madame Poupin announced as much, with the addition that if the young men wished to make acquaintance they must do it outside; their friend must be perfectly quiet. They accordingly withdrew with apologies and promises to return for further news on the morrow, and two minutes later Hyacinth found himself standing face to face with his companion on the pavement in front of M. Poupin’s residence, under a street-lamp which struggled ineffectually with the brown winter dusk.
“Is that your name, M. Paul?” he asked as he looked up at him.
“Oh bless you, no; that’s only her Frenchifiedway of putting it. My nameisPaul, though—Paul Muniment.”
“And what’s your trade?” Hyacinth demanded with a jump into familiarity; for his friend seemed to have told him a great deal more than was usually conveyed in that item of information.
Paul Muniment looked down at him from above broad shoulders. “I work for a firm of wholesale chemists at Lambeth.”
“And where do you live?”
“I live over the water too; in the far south of London.”
“And are you going home now?”
“Oh yes, I’m going to toddle.”
“And may I toddle with you?”
Mr. Muniment considered him further and then gave a laugh. “I’ll carry you if you like.”
“Thank you; I expect I can walk as far as you,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I admire your spirit and I daresay I shall like your company.”
There was something in his face, taken in connexion with the idea that he was concerned in the taking of a stand—it offered our quick youth the image of a rank of bristling bayonets—which made Hyacinth feel the desire to go with him till he dropped; and in a moment they started away together and took the direction Muniment had mentioned. They discoursed as they went, exchanging a great many opinions and anecdotes; but they reached the south-westerly court in which the young chemist lived with his infirm sister before he had told Hyacinth anything definite about the “points” of his reference or Hyacinth, on his side, had detailed the circumstances involved in his being, according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t wish to press, wouldn’t for the world haveappeared indiscreet, and moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to Muniment, was not quite prepared as yet to be pressed himself. Therefore it failed to become very clear how his companion had made Poupin’s acquaintance and how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless was to a certain extent communicative, especially on the question of his living in a very poor little corner. He had his sister to keep—she could do nothing for herself; and he paid a low rent because she had to have doctors and doses and all sorts of little comforts. He spent a bob a week for her on flowers. It was better too when you got upstairs, and from the back windows you could see the dome of Saint Paul’s. Audley Court, with its pretty name, which reminded Hyacinth of Tennyson, proved to be a still dingier nook than Lomax Place; and it had the further drawback that you had to penetrate a narrow alley, a passage between high black walls, to enter it. At the door of one of the houses the young men paused, lingering a little, and then Muniment said: “I say, why shouldn’t you come up? I like you well enough for that, and you can see my sister; her name’s Rosy.” He spoke as if this would be a great privilege and added, for the joke, that Rosy enjoyed a call from a gentleman of all things. Hyacinth needed no urging, and he groped his way at his companion’s heels up a dark staircase which appeared to him—for they stopped only when they could go no further—the longest and steepest he had ever ascended. At the top Paul Muniment pushed open a door, but exclaimed “Hullo, have you gone to roost?” on perceiving the room on the threshold of which they stood to be unlighted.
“Oh dear, no; we’re sitting in the dark,” a small bright voice instantly replied. “Lady Aurora’s so kind; she’s here still.”
The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker was indistinguishable. “Well now, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment rejoined. “You’ll have a party then, for I’ve brought some one else. We’re poor, you know, but honest, and not afraid of showing up, and I daresay we can manage a candle.”
At this, in the dim firelight, Hyacinth saw a tall figure erect itself—a figure angular and slim, crowned with a large vague hat and a flowing umbrageous veil. This unknown person gave a singular laugh and said: “Oh I brought some candles; we could have had a light if we had wished.” Both the tone and the purport of the words announced to Hyacinth that they proceeded from Lady Aurora.
Paul Muniment took a match out of his pocket and lighted it on the sole of his shoe; after which he applied it to a tallow candle which stood in a tin receptacle on the low mantel-shelf. This enabled Hyacinth to perceive a narrow bed in a corner and a small object stretched upon it—an object revealed to him mainly by the bright fixedness of a pair of large eyes, of which the whites were sharply contrasted with the dark pupil and which gazed at him across a counterpane of gaudy patchwork. The brown room seemed crowded with heterogeneous objects and presented moreover, thanks to a multitude of small prints, both plain and coloured, fastened all over the walls, a highly-decorated appearance. The little person in the corner had the air of having gone to bed in a picture-gallery, and as soon as Hyacinth became aware of this his impression deepened that Paul Muniment and his sister were very wonderful people. Lady Aurora hovered before him with an odd drooping, swaying erectness, and she laughed a good deal, vaguely and shyly, as for the awkwardness of her being found still on the premises. “Rosy, girl, I’ve brought you a visitor,” Hyacinth’s guide soon said. “This young man has walked all the way from Lisson Grove to make your acquaintance.” Rosy continued to look at the visitor from over her counterpane, and he felt slightly embarrassed,for he had never yet been presented to a young lady in her position. “You mustn’t mind her being in bed—she’s always in bed,” her brother went on. “She’s in bed just the same as a little slippery trout’s in the water.”
“Dear me, if I didn’t receive company because I was in bed, there wouldn’t be much use, would there, Lady Aurora?”
Rosy put this question in a light, gay tone, with a dart of shining eyes at her companion, who replied at once with still greater hilarity and in a voice which struck Hyacinth as strange and affected: “Oh mercy, no; it seems quite the natural place!” Then she added: “And it’s such a lovely bed, such a comfortable bed!”
“Indeed it is, when your ladyship makes it up,” said Rosy; while Hyacinth wondered at this strange phenomenon of a peer’s daughter (for he knew she must be that) performing the functions of a housemaid.
“I say now, you haven’t been doing that again to-day?” Muniment asked, punching the mattress of the invalid with a vigorous hand.
“Pray, who would if I didn’t?” Lady Aurora inquired. “It only takes a minute if one knows how.” Her manner was jocosely apologetic and she seemed to plead guilty to having been absurd; in the dim light Hyacinth thought he saw her blush as if she were much embarrassed. In spite of her blushing her appearance and manner suggested to him a personage in a comedy. She sounded the letterras aw.
“I can do it beautifully. I often do it, when Mrs. Major doesn’t come up,” Paul Muniment said, continuing to thump his sister’s couch in an appreciative but somewhat subversive manner.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt whatever!” Lady Auroraexclaimed quickly. “Mrs. Major must have so very much to do.”
“Not in the making-up of beds, I’m afraid; there are only two or three, down there, for so many,” the young man returned loudly and with a kind of inconsequent cheerfulness.
“Yes, I’ve thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be room for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time with all gravity.
“There’s not much room for a family of that sort anywhere—thirteen people of all ages and sizes,” her host observed. “The world’s pretty big, but there doesn’t seem room.”
“We’re also thirteen at home,” Lady Aurora hastened to mention. “We’re also rather crowded.”
“Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy demanded from her dusky nook.
“I don’t know about Inglefield. I’m so much in town.” Hyacinth could see that Inglefield was a subject she wished to turn off, and to do so she added: “We too are of all ages and sizes.”
“Well, it’s fortunate you’re not allyoursize!” Paul Muniment declared with a freedom at which Hyacinth was rather shocked and which led him to suspect that though his new friend was a very fine fellow a delicate tact was not his main characteristic. Later he explained this by the fact that he was rural and provincial and had not had, like himself, the benefit of the life of a capital; and later still he wished to know what, after all, such a character as that had to do with tact or with compliments, and why its work in the world was not most properly performed by the simple exercise of a rude manly strength.
At this familiar allusion to her stature Lady Aurora turned hither and thither a little confusedly; Hyacinth saw her high, lean figure almost rock inthe dim little room. Her commotion carried her to the door, and with ejaculations of which it was difficult to guess the meaning she was about to depart when Rosy detained her, having evidently much more social art than Paul. “Don’t you see it’s only because her ladyship’s standing up that she’s so, you gawk?We’renot thirteen, at any rate, and we’ve got all the furniture we want, so there’s a chair for every one. Do be seated again, Lady Aurora, and help me to entertain this gentleman. I don’t know your name, sir; perhaps my brother will mention it when he has collected his wits. I’m very glad to see you, though I don’t see you very well. Why shouldn’t we light one of her ladyship’s candles? It’s very different to that common thing.”
Hyacinth thought Miss Muniment very charming; he had begun to make her out better by this time, and he watched her small wan, pointed face, framed on the pillow by thick black hair. She was a diminutive dark person, pale and wasted with a lifelong infirmity; Hyacinth thought her manner denoted high accomplishment—he judged it impossible to tell her age. Lady Aurora pleaded that she ought to have gone, long since; but she seated herself nevertheless on the chair that Paul pushed toward her.
“Here’s a go!” this young man exclaimed to the other guest. “You told me your name, but I’ve clean forgotten it.” Then when Hyacinth had pronounced it again he said to his sister: “That won’t tell you much; there are bushels of Robinsons in the north. But you’ll like him, he’s all right; I met him at the Poupins.” “Puppin” would represent the sound by which he designated the French bookbinder, and that was the name by which Hyacinth always heard him called at Crookenden’s.Hyacinth knew how much nearer to the right thing he himself came.
“Your name, like mine, represents a flower,” said the little woman in the bed. “Mine is Rose Muniment and her ladyship’s is Aurora Langrish. That means the morning or the dawn; it’s the most beautiful of all, don’t you think?” Rose Muniment addressed this question to Hyacinth while Lady Aurora gazed at her shyly and mutely and as if admiring her manner, her self-possession and flow of conversation. Her brother lighted one of the visitor’s candles and the girl went on without waiting for Hyacinth’s response. “Isn’t it right she should be called the dawn when she brings light where she goes? The Puppins are the charming foreigners I’ve told you about,” she explained to her friend.
“Oh, it’s so pleasant knowing a few foreigners!” Lady Aurora exclaimed with a spasm of expression. “They’re often so very fresh.”
“Mr. Robinson’s a sort of foreigner and he’s very fresh,” said Paul Muniment. “He meets Mr. Puppin quite on his own ground. If I had his gift of tongues it would bring me on.”
“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I feel the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked finely, becoming conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora toward him; so that he wondered what he could go on to say to keep at that level. This was the first time he had encountered socially a member of that aristocracy to which he had now for a good while known it was Miss Pynsent’s theory that he belonged; and the occasion was interesting in spite of the lady’s appearing to have so few of the qualities of her caste. She was about thirty years of age; her nose was large and, in spite of the sudden retreat of her chin, her face long and lean. She had themanner of extreme near-sightedness; her front teeth projected from her upper gums, which she revealed when she smiled, and her fair hair, in tangled silky skeins (Rose Muniment thought it too lovely), drooped over her pink cheeks. Her clothes looked as if she had worn them a good deal in the rain, and the note of a certain disrepair in her apparel was given by a hole in one of her black gloves, through which a white finger gleamed. She was plain and diffident and she might have been poor; but in the fine grain and sloping, shrinking slimness of her whole person, the delicacy of her curious features and a kind of cultivated quality in her sweet, vague, civil expression, there was a suggestion of race, of long transmission, of an organism that had resulted from fortunate touch after touch. She was not a common woman; she was one of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth didn’t define her in this manner to himself, but he received from her the impression that if she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was not) aristocracies were yet complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked that there were many delightful books in French, and he proclaimed it a torment to know that (as he did very well) when you saw no way to getting hold of them. This led Lady Aurora to say after a moment’s hesitation that she had a good lot of her own and that if he liked she should be most happy to lend them to him. Hyacinth thanked her—thanked her even too much, and felt both the kindness and the brilliant promise of the offer (he knew the exasperation of having volumes in his hands, for external treatment, which he couldn’t take home at night, having tried that method surreptitiously during his first weeks at old Crook’s and come very near being sacked in consequence) while he wondered how such a system could be put into practice; whether she would expect him to call ather house and wait in the hall till the books were sent out to him. Rose Muniment exclaimed that that was her ladyship all over—always wanting to make up to people for being less lucky than herself: she would take the shoes off her feet for any one that might take a fancy to them. At this the visitor declared that she would stop coming to see her if the girl caught her up that way for everything; and Rosy, without heeding the remonstrance, explained to Hyacinth that she thought it the least she could do to give what she had. She was so ashamed of being rich that she wondered the lower classes didn’t break into Inglefield and take possession of all the treasures in the Italian room. She was a tremendous socialist; she was worse than any one—she was worse even than Paul.
“I wonder if she’s worse than me,” Hyacinth returned at a venture, not understanding the allusions to Inglefield and the Italian room, which Miss Muniment made as if she knew all about these places. After learning more of the world he remembered this tone of Muniment’s sister—he was to have plenty of observation of it on other occasions—as that of a person in the habit of visiting the nobility at their country-seats; she talked about Inglefield as if she had stayed there.
“Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!” exclaimed the master of the scene, who had been sitting silent and sidewise in a chair that was too narrow for him, his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been entertaining an angel unawares?”
Hyacinth made out he was chaffing him, but he knew the way to face that sort of thing was to exaggerate one’s meaning. “You didn’t know I was advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about me. I think I go about as far as any one.”
“I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,” Paul Muniment said with an air of derision which showed him he wouldn’t put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same time that it revealed to him how he had come within an ace of posturing.
“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something that will take your head off if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so well in French.”
“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried Rosy in perfect good faith and clasping her hands for expectation.
The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration. “I should like so very much to know—it would be so interesting—if you don’t mind—how far exactly you do go.” She threw back her head very far and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more adapted to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.
This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for he was far from being ready with an impressive formula. He replied, however, with a candour in which he tried as far as possible to sink his vagueness: “Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I see my way to conclusions from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin would shrink. Poupin, at any rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.”
“I should like so much to know Madame,” Lady Aurora murmured as if politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.
“Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,” said Muniment; “you can easily look over his head! He has a sweet assortmentof phrases—they’re really pretty things to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All the same he warms one up; he has a spark of the sacred fire. The principal conclusion Mr. Robinson sees his way to,” he added to Lady Aurora, “is that your father ought to have his head chopped off and carried on a pike.”
“Ah yes, the French Revolution.”
“Lord, I don’t know anything about your father, my lady!” Hyacinth interposed.
“Didn’t you ever hear of the Earl of Inglefield?” cried Rose Muniment.
“He’s one of the best,” said Lady Aurora as if she were pleading for him.
“Very likely, but he’s a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and a park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we’re bundled together into this sort of kennel.” Hyacinth admired the young man’s consistency till he saw he was amusing himself; after which he still admired the way he could mix that up with the tremendous opinions it must have been certain he entertained. In his own imagination he associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young chemical expert, at the same time that he was planning far ahead, seemed capable of turning revolutionists themselves into ridicule even for the entertainment of the revolutionised.
“Well, I’ve told you often enough that I don’t go with you at all,” said Rose Muniment, whose recumbency appeared not in the least to interfere with her universal participation. “You’ll make a tremendous mistake if you try to turn everything round. There ought to be differences, and high and low, and there always will be, true as ever I lie here. I think it’s against everything, pulling down them that’s above.”
“Everything points to great changes in this country, but if once our Rosy’s against them how can you be sure? That’s the only thing that makes me doubt,” her brother went on, looking at her with a placidity which showed the habit of indulgence.
“Well, I may be ill, but I ain’t buried, and if I’m content with my position—such a position as it is—surely other folk might be with theirs. Her ladyship may think I’m as good as her if she takes that notion; but she’ll have a deal to do to make me believe it.”
“I think you’re much better than I, and I know very few people so good as you,” Lady Aurora brought out, blushing not for her opinions but for her timidity. It was easy to see that though she was original she would have liked to be even more original than she was. She was conscious, however, that such a declaration might appear rather gross to persons who didn’t see exactly how she meant it; so she added, as quickly as her hesitating manner permitted, to cover it up: “You know there’s one thing you ought to remember,à proposof revolutions and changes and all that sort of thing; I just mention it because we were talking of some of the dreadful things that were done in France. If there were to be a great disturbance in this country—and of course one hopes there won’t—it would be my impression that the people would behave in a different way altogether.”
“What people do you mean?” Hyacinth allowed himself to inquire.
“Oh, the upper class, the people who’ve got all the things.”
“We don’t call them thepeople,” observed Hyacinth, reflecting the next instant that his remark was a little primitive.
“I suppose you call them the wretches, thescoundrels!” Rose Muniment suggested, laughing merrily.
“All the things, but not all the brains,” her brother said.
“No indeed, aren’t they stupid?” exclaimed her ladyship. “All the same, I don’t think they’d all go abroad.”
“Go abroad?”
“I mean like the French nobles who emigrated so much. They’d stay at home and resist; they’d make more of a fight. I think they’d fight very hard.”
“I’m delighted to hear it, and I’m sure they’d win!” cried Rosy.
“They wouldn’t collapse, don’t you know,” Lady Aurora continued. “They’d struggle till they were beaten.”
“And you think they’d be beaten in the end?” Hyacinth asked.
“Oh dear, yes,” she replied with a familiar confidence at which he was greatly surprised. “But of course one hopes it won’t happen.”
“I infer from what you say that they talk it over a good deal among themselves, to settle the line they’ll take,” said Paul Muniment.
But Rosy intruded before Lady Aurora could answer. “I think it’s wicked to talk it over, and I’m sure we haven’t any business to talk it over here! When her ladyship says the aristocracy will make a fine stand I like to hear her say it and I think she speaks in a manner that becomes her own position. But there’s something else in her tone which, if I may be allowed to say so, I think a great mistake. If her ladyship expects, in case of the lower classes coming up in that odious manner, to be let off easily, for the sake of the concessions she may have made in advance, I’d just advise her to save herself thedisappointment and the trouble. They won’t be a bit the wiser and they won’t either know or care. If they’re going to trample over their betters it isn’t on account of her having seemed to give up everything to us here that they’ll letheroff. They’ll trample on her just the same as on the others, and they’ll say she has got to pay for her title and her grand relations and her fine appearance. Therefore I advise her not to waste her good-nature in trying to let herself down. When you’re up so high as that you’ve got to stay there; and if the powers above have made you a lady the best thing you can do is to hold up your head. I can promise your ladyshipIwould!”
The close logic of this speech and the quaint self-possession with which the little bedridden speaker delivered it struck Hyacinth as amazing and confirmed his idea that the brother and sister were a most extraordinary pair. It had a terrible effect on poor Lady Aurora, by whom so stern a lesson from so humble a quarter had evidently not been expected and who sought refuge from her confusion in a series of pleading gasps, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density, which was deliberate, and acute too, not seeing, or at any rate not heeding, that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister, inflicted a fresh humiliation in saying: “Rosy’s right, my lady. It’s no use trying to buy yourself off. You can’t do enough; your sacrifices don’t count. You spoil your fun now and you don’t get it made up to you later. To all you people nothing will ever be made up. Eat your pudding while you have it; you mayn’t have it long.”
Lady Aurora listened to him with her eyes on his face, and as they rested there Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of her expression. Afterwards he thought he could attach a meaning to it. She got up quickly when Muniment had ceased speaking; themovement suggested she had taken offence and he would have liked to show her he thought she had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance, not glancing at him for a moment. Then he saw he was mistaken and that if she had flushed considerably it was only with the excitement of pleasure, the enjoyment of such original talk and of seeing her friends at last as free and familiar as she wished them to be. “You’re the most delightful people—I wish every one could know you!” she broke out. “But I must really be going.” She went to the bed and bent over Rosy and kissed her.
“Paul will see you as far as you like on your way home,” this young woman remarked.
Lady Aurora protested, but Paul, without protesting in return, only took up his hat and smiled at her as if he knew his duty. On this her ladyship said: “Well, you may see me downstairs; I forgot it was so dark.”
“You must take her ladyship’s own candle and you must call a cab,” Rosy directed.
“Oh, I don’t go in cabs. I walk.”
“Well, you may go on the top of a ’bus if you like; you can’t help being superb,” Miss Muniment declared, watching her sympathetically.
“Superb? Oh mercy!” cried the poor devoted, grotesque lady, leaving the room with Paul, who told Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She neglected to take leave of our young man, and he asked himself what was to be hoped from that sort of people when even the best of them—those that wished to be agreeable to thedemos—reverted inevitably to the supercilious. She had said no more about lending him her books.
“She lives in Belgrave Square; she has ever so many brothers and sisters; one of her sisters is married to Lord Warmington,” Rose Muniment instantly began, not apparently in the least discomposed at being left alone with a strange young man in a room which was now half dark again, thanks to her brother’s having carried off the second and more brilliant candle. She was so interested for the time in telling Hyacinth the history of Lady Aurora that she appeared not to remember how little she knew about himself. Her ladyship had dedicated her life and her pocket-money to the poor and sick; she cared nothing for parties and races and dances and picnics and cards and life in great houses, the usual amusements of the aristocracy: she was like one of the saints of old come to life again out of a legend. She had made their acquaintance, Paul’s and hers, about a year before, through a friend of theirs, such a fine brave young woman, who was in Saint Thomas’s Hospital for a surgical operation. She had been laid up there for weeks during which Lady Aurora, always looking out for those who couldn’t help themselves, used to come and talk to her and read to her, till the end of her time in the ward, when the poor girl, parting with her kind friend, told her how she knew of another unfortunate creature (for whom there was no place there, because she was incurable) who would be mighty thankful for anylittle attention of that sort. She had given Lady Aurora the address in Audley Court and the very next day her ladyship had knocked at their door. It wasn’t because she was poor—though in all conscience they were pinched enough—but because she had so little satisfaction in her limbs. Lady Aurora came very often, for several months, without meeting Paul, because he was always at his work; but one day he came home early on purpose to find her, to thank her for her goodness, and also to see (Miss Muniment rather shyly intimated) if she were really so good as his extravagant little sister made her out. Rosy had a triumph after that: Paul had to admit that her ladyship was beyond anything that any one in his waking senses would believe. She seemed to want to give up everything to those who were below her and never to expect any thanks at all. And she wasn’t always preaching and showing you your duty; she wanted to talk to you sociable-like, as if you were just her own sister. Andherown sisters were the highest in the land, and you might see her name in the newspapers the day they were presented to the Queen. Lady Aurora had been presented too, with feathers in her head and a long tail to her gown; but she had turned her back on it all with a kind of terror—a sort of shivering sinking state which she had often described to Miss Muniment. The day she had first seen Paul was the day they became so intimate, the three of them together—if she might apply such a word as that to such a peculiar connexion. The little woman, the little girl, as she lay there (Hyacinth scarce knew how to characterise her) told our young man a very great secret, in which he found himself too much interested to think of criticising so precipitate a confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had ever seen in the world, her ladyship thought Rosy’s Paulthe very cleverest. And she had seen the greatest, the most famous, the brightest of every kind, for they all came to stay at Inglefield, thirty and forty of them at once. She had talked with them all and heard them say their best (and you could fancy how they would try to give it out at such a place as that, where there was nearly a mile of conservatories and a hundred wax candles were lighted at a time) and at the end of it all she had made the remark to herself—and she had made it to Rosy too—that there was none of them had such a head on his shoulders as the young man in Audley Court. Rosy wouldn’t spread such a rumour as that in the court itself, but she wanted every friend of her brother’s (and she could see Hyacinth was a real one by the way he listened) to know what was thought of him by them that had an experience of intellect. She didn’t wish to give it out that her ladyship had lowered herself in any manner to a person that earned his bread in a dirty shop (clever as hemightbe), but it was easy to see she minded what he said as if he had been a bishop—or more indeed, for she didn’t think much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his work before she had gone, and to-night Hyacinth could see for himself how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling, high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished, of a poor north-country home, bedecked with penny ornaments and related in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed estates. Hespent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd, sharp, crippled, chattering sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far better than Pinnie or than Milly Henning) and who startled, puzzled and at the same time rather distressed him by the manner in which she referred herself to the most abject class—the class that prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter, in the presence of its betters. That was Pinnie’s attitude of course, but Hyacinth had long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian patience in her blood, and that though she had a tender soul she had not a truly high spirit. He was more entertained than afflicted, however, by Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered about; this was the first time he had heard it described with that degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually, almost morbidly conscious that the circle in which he lived was an infinitesimally small shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London, and his imagination plunged again and again into the flood that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter, happier vision—the vision of societies where, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked of art, literature and history. When Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject of Lady Aurora she became more quiet, asking as yet, however, no straight questions of her guest, whom she seemed to take very much for granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon again, and he added, to explain this wish: “You know you seem to me very curious people.”
Miss Muniment didn’t in the least repudiate theimputation. “Oh yes, I daresay we seem very curious. I think we’re generally thought so; especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.” And she laughed till her bed creaked again.
“Perhaps it’s lucky you’re ill; perhaps if you had your health you’d be all over the place,” Hyacinth suggested. And he went on candidly: “I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.”
“I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you had known my father and mother.”
“Were they such a rare lot?”
“I think you’d say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the mines, where the filthy coal’s dug out. That’s where my father came from—he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He never had a day’s schooling in his life, but he climbed up out of his black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of the pits and the awfulness too. My father had no great figure, butshewas magnificent—the finest woman in the country and the bravest and the best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was as black as the coal he worked in: I know I’m just his pattern, barring thathedid have his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. Yet between him and my mother, for grand high intelligence, there wasn’t much to choose. But what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father had even less of that than I, for with me it’s only the body that can’t stand up, and with him it was the very nature. He invented, for use in machine-shops, a mechanical improvement—a new kind of beam-fixing, whatever that is—and he sold it at Bradford for fifteen pounds: Imean the whole right and profit of it and every hope and comfort of his family. He was always straying and my mother was always bringing him back. She had plenty to do, with me a puny ailing brat from the moment I opened my eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came home, or only came a loose bloody bundle of clothes. He had fallen into a gravel-pit, he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my brother won’t ever touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and that I’ve only a drop once a week or so in the way of a strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more. If she could but have come to us before my mother went—that would have been a saving! I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept us decent—if such a useless little mess as me can be said to be decent. At any rate she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She went to the wash-tub, and she might have been a queen as she stood there with her bare arms in the foul linen and her long hair braided on her head. She was terrible handsome, but he’d have been a bold man that had taken on himself to tell her so. And it was from her we got our education—she was determined we should rise above the common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go into such things, but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book. She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t, and her idea for us was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You can see for yourself that that’s what has come of it. How he got it’s more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s head wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t had a head himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy thatwould learn more from a yellow poster on a wall or a time-table at a railway station than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad—picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing—only that I’d have made a poor feast—and just lay that really grand character on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rose Muniment in conclusion; “but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had jolly good brains at least to give us.”
Hyacinth listened to this eloquence—the clearest statement of anything he had ever heard made by a woman—with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment talked of brains made him feel this; she pronounced the word as if she were distributing prizes for intellectual eminence from off a platform. No doubt the weak inventor and the strong worker had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence on her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the chord of melancholy aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made for his life to have had some rich warm presence like that in it.
“Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired after a little.
The eyes of his hostess glittered at him. “If youever quarrel with him you’ll see whose side I shall take.”
“Ah, before that I shall make you likeme.”
“That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I shall fling you over!”
“Why then do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the people are to come up?”
“Because I think he’ll get over them.”
“Never—never!” cried Hyacinth. “I’ve only known him an hour or two, but I deny that with all my strength.”
“Is that the way you’re going to make me like you—contradicting me so?” Miss Muniment asked with familiar archness.
“What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.”
“I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you’re not if you want all the great people pulled down and the most dreadful scenes enacted.”
“Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for the groaning, toiling millions—those who have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time?”
Hyacinth asked this question with considerable heat, but the effect of it was to send his companion off into a new ring of laughter. “You say that just like a man my brother described to me three days ago, a little man at some club whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way he raved and stamped. I don’t mean that you do either, but you use almost the same words as him.” Hyacinth scarce knew what to make of this allusion or of the picture offered him of Paul Muniment casting ridicule on those who spoke in the name of the down-trodden. But Rosy went on before he had time to do more than reflect that there would evidently be great things to learnabout her brother: “I haven’t the least objection to seeing the people improved, but I don’t want to see the aristocracy lowered an inch. I like so much to look at it up there.”
“You ought to know my Aunt Pinnie—she’s just such another benighted idolater!” Hyacinth returned.
“Oh, you’re making me like you very fast! And pray who’s your Aunt Pinnie?”
“She’s a dressmaker and a charming little woman. I should like her to come and see you.”
“I’m afraid I’m not in her line—I never had on a dress in my life. But, as a charming woman, I should be delighted to see her,” Miss Muniment hastened to add.
“I’ll bring her some day,” he said; and then he went on rather incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it a shame her sharpness should be enlisted on the wrong side. “Don’t you want, for yourself, a better place to live in?”
She jerked herself up and for a moment he thought she would jump out of her bed at him. “A better place than this? Pray how could there be a better place? Every one thinks it’s lovely; you should see our view by daylight—you should see everything I’ve got. Perhaps you’re used to something very fine, but Lady Aurora says that in all Belgrave Square there isn’t such a cosy little room. If you think I’m not perfectly content you’re very much mistaken!”
Such an attitude could only exasperate him, and his exasperation made him indifferent to the mistake of his having appeared to sniff at Miss Muniment’s quarters. Pinnie herself, submissive as she was, had spared him that sort of displeasure; she groaned over the dinginess of Lomax Place sufficiently to remind him that she had not been absolutely stultifiedby misery. “Don’t you sometimes make your brother very cross?” he asked, smiling, of his present entertainer.
“Cross? I don’t know what you take us for! I never saw him lose his temper in his life.”
“He must be a rum customer! Doesn’t he really care for—for what we were talking about?”
For a space Rosy was silent; then she replied: “What my brother really cares for—well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me.”
Hyacinth stared. “But isn’t he tremendously deep in—” What should he call the mystery?
“Deep in what?”
“Well, in what’s going on beneath the surface. Doesn’t he belong to important things?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to—you may ask him!” cried Rosy, who laughed gaily again as the opening door re-admitted the subject of their conversation. “You must have crossed the water with her ladyship,” she pursued. “I wonder who enjoyed their walk most.”
“She’s a handy old girl and she has a goodish stride,” said the young man.
“I think she’s in love with you simply, Mr. Muniment.”
“Really, my dear, for an admirer of the aristocracy you allow yourself a licence,” Paul scoffed, smiling at Hyacinth.
Hyacinth got up, feeling that really he had paid a long visit; his curiosity was far from satisfied, but there was a limit to the time one should spend in a young lady’s sleeping apartment. “Perhaps she is; why not?” he struck out.
“Perhaps she is then; she’s daft enough for anything.”
“There have been fine folks before who have patted the people on the back and pretended toenter into their life,” Hyacinth said. “Is she only playing with that idea or is she in earnest?”
“In earnest—in terrible deadly earnest, my dear fellow! I think she must be rather crowded out at home.”
“Crowded out of Inglefield? Why, there’s room for three hundred!” Rosy broke in.
“Well, if that’s the kind of mob that’s in possession, no wonder she prefers Camberwell. We must be kind to the poor lady,” Paul added in a tone that Hyacinth noticed. He attributed a remarkable meaning to it; it seemed to say that people such as he were now so sure of their game that they could afford to be magnanimous; or else it expressed a prevision of the doom that hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had got on together, and the girl replied that Mr. Robinson had made himself most agreeable. “Then you must tell me all about him after he goes, for you know I don’t know him much myself,” said her brother.
“Oh yes, I’ll tell you everything—you know how I like describing.”
Hyacinth found himself amused at the young lady’s account of his efforts to please her, the fact being that he had only listened to her own eager discourse without opening his mouth; but Paul, whether or no guessing the truth, said to him all pertinently: “It’s very wonderful—she can describe things she has never seen. And they’re just like the reality.”
“There’s nothing I’ve never seen,” Rosy declared. “That’s the advantage of my lying here in such a manner. I see everything in the world.”
“You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings—his secret societies and his revolutionary clubs. You put that aside when I asked you.”
“Oh, you mustn’t ask her that sort of thing,”said Paul, lowering at Hyacinth with a fierce frown—an expression he perceived in a moment to be facetiously assumed.
“What am I to do then, since you won’t tell me anything definite yourself?”
“It will be definite enough when you get hanged for it!” Rosy exclaimed mockingly.
“Why do you want to poke your head into ugly black holes?” Muniment asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder and shaking it gently.
“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” our young man gravely demanded.
“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!” Paul cried in not unkindly derision to his sister. “You must have got that precious phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that the party you want to belong to?” he went on with his clear eyes ranging over his diminutive friend.
“If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,” Hyacinth candidly pleaded, rejoicing all the while to feel himself in such a relation. It was his view of himself, and not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never sue for a favour; but now he felt that in any connexion with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This rare man he could go on his knees to without a sense of humiliation.
“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul pursued, refusing to be serious.
“Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure they are coming in to make a search for your papers,” Miss Muniment lucidly interposed.
“The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up and dance.”
“What did you ask me to come home with you for?” Hyacinth demanded as he twirled his hat. It was an effort for a moment to keep the tears from his eyes; he saw himself forced to put such a different construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy impression that Muniment had divined in him a possible associate of a high type in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of things, whereas it now came over him that the real use he had been put to was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service, every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man justified at the present juncture the high estimate Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question would have been he invented straight off a better one and said at random, smiling and not knowing exactly what his visitor had meant:
“What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you’d be afraid.”
What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally vague; but he answered quickly enough: “I think you’ve only to try me to see.”
“I’m sure that if you introduce him to some of your low wicked friends he’ll be quite satisfied after he has looked round a bit,” Miss Muniment remarked irrepressibly.
“Those are just the kind of people I want to know,” Hyacinth rang out.
His sincerity appeared to touch his friend. “Well, I see you’re a good ’un. Just meet me some night.”
“Where, where?” asked Hyacinth eagerly.
“Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away fromher.” And Muniment led him good-humouredly out.