He had been warned by Mr. Vetch as to what brilliant women might do with him—it was only a word on the old fiddler’s lips, but the word had had a point; he had been warned by Paul Muniment, and now he was admonished by a person supremely well placed for knowing: a fact that couldn’t fail to deepen the emotion which, any time these three days, had made him draw his breath more quickly. That emotion, nevertheless, didn’t actually make him fear remote consequences; as he looked over the Princess Casamassima’s drawing-room and inhaled an air that seemed to him inexpressibly delicate and sweet he hoped his adventure would throw him on his mettle only half as much as the old lady had wished to intimate. He considered, one after the other, the different chairs, couches and ottomans the room contained—he wished to treat himself to the most sumptuous—and then for reasons he knew best sank into a seat covered with rose-coloured brocade and of which the legs and frame appeared of pure gold. Here he sat perfectly still, only with his heart beating very sensibly and his eyes coursing again and again from one object to another. The splendours and suggestions of Captain Sholto’s apartment were thrown completely into the shade by the scene before him, and as the Princess didn’t scruple to keep him waiting twenty minutes (during which thebutler came in and set out on a small table a glittering tea-service) Hyacinth had time to count over the innumerablebibelots(most of which he had never dreamed of) involved in the character of a woman of high fashion and to feel that their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind and—almost—terrible depths of temperament.
When at last the door opened and the servant, reappearing, threw it far back as to make a wide passage for a person of the importance of his mistress, Hyacinth’s suspense became very acute; it was much the same feeling with which, at the theatre, he had sometimes awaited the entrance of a celebrated actress. In this case the actress was to perform for him alone. There was still a moment before she came on, and when she arrived she was so simply dressed—besides his seeing her now on her feet—that she looked quite a different figure. She approached him rapidly and a little stiffly and shyly, but in the prompt manner in which she shook hands was an evident desire to be very direct and perfectly easy. She might have been another person, but that person had a beauty even more radiant; the fairness of her face shone forth at our young man as if to dissipate any doubts assailing and bewildering him as to the reality of the vision bequeathed to him by his former interview. And in this peculiar high grace of her presence he couldn’t have told you if she struck him as more proud or more kind.
“I’ve kept you a long time, but it’s supposed not usually to be a bad place, my salon; there are various things to look at and perhaps you’ve noticed some of them. Over on that side for instance is rather a curious collection of miniatures.” She spoke abruptly, quickly, as if conscious that their communionmight be awkward and she were trying to strike instantly (to conjure that element away) the sort of note that would make them both most comfortable. Quickly too she sat down before her tea-tray and poured him out a cup, which she handed him without asking if he would have it. He accepted it with a trembling hand, though he had no desire for it; he was too nervous to swallow the tea, but it wouldn’t have appeared to him possible to decline. When he had murmured that he had indeed looked at all her things, but that it would take hours to do justice to such treasures, she asked if he were fond of works of art; immediately adding, however, that she was afraid he had not many opportunities of seeing them, though of course there were the public collections, open to all. He replied with perfect veracity that some of the happiest moments of his life had been spent at the British Museum and the National Gallery, and this fact appeared to interest her greatly, so that she straightway begged him to tell her what he thought of certain pictures and antiques. In this way it was that in an incredibly short time, as appeared to him, he found himself discussing the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin Marbles with one of the most remarkable women in Europe. It was true that she herself talked most, passing precipitately from one point to another, putting questions and not waiting for answers, describing and qualifying things, expressing feelings, by the aid of phrases that he had never heard before but which seemed to him illuminating and happy—as when for instance she asked what art was, after all, but a synthesis made in the interest of pleasure, or said that she didn’t like England in the least, but absurdly loved it. It didn’t occur to him to think these discriminations pedantic. Suddenly she threw off, “Madame Grandoni told me you saw my husband.”
“Ah, was the gentleman your husband?”
“Unfortunately! What do you think of him?”
“Oh, I can’t think—!” Hyacinth decently pleaded.
“I wish I couldn’t either! I haven’t seen him for nearly three years. He wanted to see me to-day, but I refused.”
“Ah!”—and the young man stared, not knowing how he ought to receive so unexpected a confidence. Then as the suggestions of inexperience are sometimes the happiest of all he spoke simply what was in his mind and said gently: “It has made you—naturally—nervous.” Later on, when he had left the house, he wondered how at that stage he could have ventured on such a familiar remark.
But she had taken it with a quick, surprised laugh. “How do you know that?” Before he had time to tell she added: “Your saying that—that way—shows me how right I was to ask you to come to see me. You know I hesitated. It shows me you’ve perceptions; I guessed as much the other night at the theatre. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have asked you. I may be wrong, but I like people who understand what one says to them, and also what one doesn’t say.”
“Don’t think I understand too much. You might easily exaggerate that,” Hyacinth declared conscientiously.
“You confirm completely my first impression,” the Princess returned, smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. “We shall discover the limits of your comprehension! I am atrociously nervous. But it will pass. How’s your cousin the dressmaker?” she inquired abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor Pinnie—described her as tolerably well for her, but old and tired and sad and not very successful—sheexclaimed impatiently, “Ah, well, she’s not the only one!” and came back with irrelevance to the former question. “It’s not only my husband’s visit—absolutely unexpected!—that has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you’ve been so kind as to come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it, and even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely insufficient.”
“I don’t want any explanation,” said Hyacinth with a sense of great presence of mind.
“It’s charming of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word. Explanations usually make things worse. All the same I don’t want you to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening) that I wish only to treat you as a curious animal.”
“I don’t care how you treat me!” he smiled.
There was a considerable silence, after which she pursued: “All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my indifference.”
Hyacinth wondered what reply he ought to make to such an announcement as that, and it seemed to him the least civility demanded was that he should say—as he could with such conviction—“It can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.”
“Why not if I’m odious? Icanbe—oh there’s no doubt of that! However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I’ve been exceedingly reasonable and that most of the wrongs—the big ones, those that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of course that that’s the pretension of every woman who has made a mess of her marriage. But ask Madame Grandoni.”
“She’ll tell me it’s none of my business.”
“Very true—she might!” the Princess inconsequently laughed. “And I don’t know either why Ishould bore you with my domestic affairs; except that I’ve been wondering what I could do to show you confidence in return for your showing so much in me. As this matter of my separation from my husband happens to have been turned uppermost by his sudden descent on me I just mention it, though the subject’s tiresome enough. Moreover, I ought to let you know that I’ve very little respect for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so much of in this country. They’re doubtless convenient in some ways, but when one has a reason—a reason of feeling—for overstepping them, and one allows one’s self to be deterred by some dreary superstition about one’s place or some one else’s place, then I think it’s ignoble. It always belongs to one’s place not to be a poor creature. I take it that if you’re a socialist you think about this as I do; but lest by chance, as the sense of those differences is the English religion, it may have rubbed off even on you (though I’m more and more impressed with the fact that you’re scarcely more British than I am): lest you should in spite of your theoretic democracy be shocked at some of the applications that I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it, let me assure you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on together at all and had better part company before we go further.” She paused long enough for Hyacinth to declare with a great deal of emphasis that he wasn’t easily shocked; and then restlessly, eagerly, as if it relieved her to talk and made their queer conjunction less abnormal that she should talk most, she arrived at the point that she wanted to know thepeople, and know them intimately—the toilers and strugglers and sufferers—because she was convinced they were the most interesting portion of society, and at the question, “What could really be in worse taste than for me to carry into such an undertakinga pretension of greater delicacy and finer manners? If I must do that,” she continued, “it’s simpler to leave them alone. But I can’t leave them alone; they press on me, they haunt me, they fascinate me. There it is—after all it’s very simple: I want to know them and I want you to help me.”
“I’ll help you with pleasure to the best of my humble ability. But you’ll be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing through the aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the same accent of passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there had been in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his present interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that drove her struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious, anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the two women as much as the aspect and the address, and that perhaps made their curiosity the more significant.
“I haven’t the least doubt of it,” this investigator answered; “there’s nothing in life in which I’ve not been awfully disappointed. But disappointment for disappointment I shall like it better than some others. You’ll not persuade me either that among the people I speak of characters and passions and motives are not more natural, more complete, morenaïfs. The upper classes are so deadlybanals. My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to by my marriage. Oh, if you knew what I’ve been through you’d allow that intelligent mechanics (of course I don’t want to knowidiots) would be a pleasant change. I must begin with some one—mustn’t I?—so I began the other night with you!” As soon as she had uttered these words the Princess added a correction with the consciousness of her mistake in her face. It made that face, to Hyacinth, more nobly, tenderly beautiful. “The only objection to you individually is that you’ve nothing of the people about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes wandered over him from head to foot, and their recognitions made him ashamed. “I wish you had come in the clothes you wear at your work.”
“You see you do regard me as a curious animal,” he returned.
It was perhaps to contradict this that, after a moment, she began to tell him more about her domestic affairs. He ought to know who she was, unless Captain Sholto had told him; and she mentioned her parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and how she had led from her youngest years a wandering Bohemian life in a thousand different places (always in Europe, she had never been in America and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to cross the Atlantic) and largely at one period in Rome. She had been married by her people, in a mercenary way, for the sake of a fortune and a great name, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy could have wished. Her parents were dead, luckily for them, and she had no one near her of her own except Madame Grandoni, who belonged to her only in the sense that she had known her as a girl; was an association of her—what should she call them?—her uneasy but innocent years. Not that she had ever been very innocent; she had had a horrible education. However, she had known a few good people—people she respected then; but MadameGrandoni was the only one who had stuck to her. She too was liable to leave her any day; the Princess appeared to intimate that her destiny might require her to take some step which would test severely the old woman’s attachment. It would detain her too long to make him understand the stages by which she had arrived at her present state of mind: her disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility of the people who all over Europe had the upper hand. If he could have seen her life, themilieuin which she had for several years been condemned to move, the evolution of her opinions (Hyacinth was delighted to hear her use that term) would strike him as perfectly logical. She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she considered that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put on a tolerable footing only by a revolution. At any rate she had some self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover; the only way to arrive at which was to throw herself into some effort that would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles and efforts of others. Hyacinth listened to her with a wonderment which, as she went on, was transformed into willing submission; she seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By the time he had been with her half an hour she had made the situation itself easy and usual, and a third person who should have joined them at this moment would have noticed nothing to suggest that friendly social intercourse between little bookbinders and Neapolitan princesses was not in London a matter of daily occurrence.
Hyacinth had seen plenty of women who chattered about themselves and their affairs—a vulgar garrulity of confidence was indeed a leading characteristicof the sex as he had hitherto learned to know it—but he was quick to perceive that the great lady who now took the trouble to open herself to him was not of a gossiping habit; that she must be on the contrary, as a general thing, proudly, ironically reserved, even to the point of passing with many people for a model of the unsatisfactory. It was very possible she was capricious; yet the fact that her present sympathies and curiosities might be a caprice wore in her visitor’s eyes no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and interesting whim, and why mightn’t he stand for the hour at any rate in the silvery moonshine it cast on his path? It must be added that he was far from taking in everything she said, some of her allusions and implications being so difficult to seize that they mainly served to reveal to him the limits of his own acquaintance with life. Her words evoked all sorts of shadowy suggestions of things he was condemned not to know, touching him most when he had not the key to them. This was especially the case with her reference to her career in Italy, on her husband’s estates, and her relations with his family, who considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business) after they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it. The position made for her among such people and what she had had to suffer from their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might be remained vague to her listener) had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and hereticalà outrance—lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the revolutionary spirit. He surely needn’thave been so sensible of the weak spots in his comprehension of the Princess when he could already surmise that personal passion had counted for so much in the formation of her views. This induction, however, which had no harshness, didn’t make her affect him any the less as a creature compounded of the finest elements; brilliant, delicate, complicated, but complicated with something divine.
It was not till after he had left her that he became conscious she had forced him to talk in spite of talking so much herself. He drew a long breath as he reflected that he hadn’t made quite such an ass of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by the thrill of his interest and admiration, which had not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too in his improbable little way was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of anxious, conscious tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity, some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the grimmest subterranean circles. He had said indeed much more than he had warrant for when she questioned him on his “radical” affiliations; he had spoken as if the movement were vast and mature, whereas in fact, so far at least as he was as yet concerned with it and could answer for it from personal knowledge, it was circumscribed by the hideously-papered walls of the little club-room at the “Sun and Moon.” He reproached himself with this laxity, but it had not been engendered by pride. He was only afraid of disappointing his hostess too much, of making her say, “Why in the world then did you come to see me if you’ve nothing more remarkable to put before me?”—a question to which of course he would have had an answer ready but for its being so impossible to say he had never asked to come and that his coming was her own affair. He wanted toomuch to come a second time to have the courage to make that speech. Nevertheless when she exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, as she always did, from something else they had been talking about, “I wonder if I shall ever see you again!” he replied with perfect sincerity that it was scarce possible for him to believe anything so delightful could be repeated. There were some kinds of happiness that to many people never came at all, and to others could come only once. He added: “It’s very true I had just that feeling after I left you the other night at the theatre. And yet here I am!”
“Yes, there you are,” said the Princess thoughtfully—as if this might be a still graver and more embarrassing fact than she had yet supposed it. “I take it there’s nothing essentially inconceivable in my seeing you again; but it may very well be that you’ll never again find it so pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any rate, you know, I’m going away.”
“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town—!” Hyacinth rose to that occasion.
“Doyou, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess asked.
“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless it’s possible that this year I may get three or four days at the seaside. I should like to take my old lady. I’ve done it before.”
“And except for that shall you be always at work?”
“Yes; but you must understand that I love my work. You must understand that it’s a great blessing for a young fellow like me to have it.”
“And if you didn’t have it what would you do? Should you starve?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should starve,” our friend replied judicially.
She looked a little chagrined, but after a momentpursued: “I wonder whether you’d come to see me in the country somewhere.”
“Oh cracky!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You’re so kind I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t bebanal, please. That’s what other people are. What’s the use of my looking for something fresh in other walks of life if you’re going to bebanaltoo? I ask if you’d come.”
He couldn’t have said at this moment whether he were plunging or soaring. “Yes, I think I’d come. I don’t know at all how I should do it—there would be several obstacles; but wherever you should call for me I’d come.”
“You mean you can’t leave your work like that? You might lose it if you did, and then be in want of money and much embarrassed?”
“Yes, there would be little difficulties of that kind. You see that immediately, in practice, great obstacles and complications come up when it’s a question of a person like you making friends with a person like me.”
“That’s the way I like you to talk,” said the Princess with a pitying gentleness that struck her visitor as quite sacred. “After all I don’t know where I shall be. I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump. Every one here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there’s no doubt I am! I might be ever so much more so if you’d only help me a little. Why shouldn’t I have my bookbinder after all? In attendance, you know—it would be awfullychic. We might have immense fun, don’t you think so? No doubt it will come. At any rate I shall return to London when I’ve got through thatcorvée; I shall be here next year. In the meantime don’t forget me,” she went on as she rose to her feet.“Remember on the contrary that I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad places.” Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted up her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at Hyacinth—who even as he stood up was of slightly smaller stature—with all her strange high radiance. Then in a manner almost equally quaint she added a reference to what she had said a moment before. “I recognise perfectly the obstacles in practice as you call them; but though I’m not by nature persevering, and am really very easily put off, I don’t consider they’ll prove insurmountable. They exist on my side as well, and if you’ll help me to overcome mine I’ll do the same for you with yours.”
These words, repeating themselves again and again in his consciousness, appeared to give him wings, to help him to float and soar as he turned that afternoon out of South Street. He had at home a copy of Tennyson’s poems—a single comprehensive volume, with a double column on the page, in a tolerably neat condition despite much handling. He took it to pieces that same evening, and during the following week, in his hours of leisure, at home in his little room, with the tools he kept there for private use and a morsel of delicate, blue-tinted Russia leather of which he obtained possession at old Crook’s, he devoted himself to the task of binding the book as perfectly as he knew how. He worked with passion, with religion, and produced a masterpiece of firmness and finish, of which his own appreciation was as high as that of M. Poupin when at the end of the week he exhibited to him the fruit of his toil, and much more freely expressed than that of old Crook himself, who grunted approbation but was always too long-headed to create precedents. Hyacinth carried the volume to South Street as an offering to thePrincess, hoping she would not yet have left London; in which case he would ask the servant to deliver it to her along with a little note he had sat up all night to compose. But the majestic major-domo in charge of the house, opening the door yet looking down at him as if from a second-story window, took the life out of his vision and erected instead of it, by a touch, a high blank wall. The Princess had been absent for some days; her representative was so good as to inform the young man with the parcel that she was on a visit to a “Juke” in a distant part of the country. He offered, however, to receive and even to forward anything Hyacinth might wish to leave; but our hero felt a sudden indisposition to launch his humble tribute into the vast, the possibly cold unknown of a “jucal” circle. He decided to retain his little package for the present; he would offer it to her when he should see her again, and he retreated without giving it up. Later on it seemed to create a manner of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it had almost come to appear not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness, almost always, with our young man, in retrospect, became rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned to a virtual proof and gage—as if a ghost in vanishing from sight had left a palpable relic.
The matter touched him but indirectly, yet it may concern the reader more closely to know that before the visit to the Duke took place Madame Grandoni granted to Prince Casamassima the private interview she had promised him on that sad Sunday afternoon. She crept out of South Street after breakfast—a repast which under the Princess’s roof was served in the foreign fashion at twelve o’clock—crossed the sultry solitude into which at such a season that precinct resolves itself, and entered the Park, where the grass was already brown and a warm, smoky haze prevailed, a tepid and tastelessréchauffé, as it struck our old friend, of the typical London fog. The Prince met her by appointment at the gate and they went and sat down together under the trees beside the drive, amid a wilderness of empty chairs and with nothing to distract their attention from an equestrian or two left over from the cavalcades of a fortnight before and whose vain agitation in the saddle the desolate scene threw into high relief. They remained there nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning to friendly interpretations, couldn’t have told herself what comfort it was to her afflicted companion. She had nothing to say to him that could better his case as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect not after all perceptibly improved by its not being Sunday, andcould only feel that with her he must seem to himself to be nearer his wife—to be touching something she had touched. She wished he would resign himself more, but she was willing to minister to that thin illusion, little as she approved of the manner in which he had conducted himself at the time of the last sharp crisis in the remarkable history of his relations with Christina. He had conducted himself after the fashion of a spoiled child, a child with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been showy. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to ground where his wife was far too accomplished a combatant not to obtain the appearance of victory.
There was another reflexion for Madame Grandoni to make as her interview with her dejected friend prolonged itself. She could make it the more freely as, besides being naturally quick and appreciative, she had always, during her Roman career, in the dear old days (mixed with bitterness as they had been for her) lived with artists, archæologists, ingenious strangers, people who abounded in good talk, threw out ideas and played with them. It came over her that really, even if things had not reached that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have tolerated long the simple deadly dulness of the Prince’s company. The oldlady had begun on meeting him: “Of course what you want to know at once is whether she has sent you a message. No, my poor friend, I must tell you the truth. I asked her for one, but she assures me she has nothing whatever, of any kind, to say to you. She knew I was coming out to see you—I haven’t done soen cachette. She doesn’t like it, but she accepts the necessity for this once, since you’ve made the mistake, as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked of you last night after your note came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked in my independent way and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end she spoke briefly, with perfect calmness and the appearance of being the most reasonable woman in the world. She didn’t ask me to repeat it to you, but I do so because it’s the only substitute I can offer you for a message. ‘I try to occupy my life, my mind, to create interests, in the odious position in which I find myself; I endeavour to get out of myself, my small personal disappointments and troubles, by the aid of such poor faculties as I possess. There are things in the world more interesting after all, and I hope to succeed in giving my attention to them. It appears to me not too much to ask that the Prince on his side should make the same conscientious effort—and leave me contentedly alone!’ Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they’re all I have to give you.”
After she had given them Madame Grandoni felt a pang of regret; the Prince turned upon her a face so white, bewildered and wounded. It had seemed to her they might form a wholesome admonition, but she now saw that, as coming from his wife, they were cruel, and she herself felt almost cruel for having repeated them. What they amounted to was an exquisite taunt of his mediocrity—a mediocrity after all neither a crime nor a design nor a preference.How could the Prince occupy himself, what interests could he create and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as one of the dingy London sheep browsing before them, and as contracted as his hat-band. His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult, felt it more than saw it—felt he couldn’t plead incapacity without putting his wife largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry right out. But he said nothing—perhaps because he was afraid of that—so that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand on his own, remained his sole answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t that when Christina touched on this she was unanswerable. The old lady changed the subject: told him what a curious country England was in so many ways; offered information as to their possible movements during the summer and autumn, which within a day or two had taken more form. But at last, as if he had not heard her, he broke out on the identity of the young man who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.
Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”
“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”
“Prince, how can you dream she’ll ever live with you again?” the old lady asked in reply to this.
“Why then does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his books, his bindings? I shouldn’t say this toher,” he added as if the declaration justified him.
“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” She couldn’t help laughingout as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth elicited no echo.
“I’ve thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less I understand. Would it be your idea that she’s quite crazy? I must tell you I don’t care if she is!”
“We’re all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at present she’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”
“Santo Dio!” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when they see the bookbinder?”
“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”
The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean the young man you saw at the house—I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first time he had been there and that the Princess had only seen him once—if you mean the little bookbinder he isn’t dirty, especially whatweshould call. The people of that kind here are not like our dear Romans. Every one has a sponge as big as your head; you can see them in the shops.”
“They’re full of gin; their faces are awful, are purple,” said the Prince; after which he immediately asked: “If she had only seen him once how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?”
His friend looked at him a little sternly. “Believe at least whatIsay, my poor friend! Never forgetthat this was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She’ll speak the truth always.”
It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke. But he didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal to say for himself: “There are things it’s better to conceal.”
“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you’re here and I mayn’t see you again for a long time or perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!) I may as well give you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make her seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”
“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.
“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her having told you—how the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can’t for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”
“Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?”
“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” the old woman smiled. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern.’ That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”
“Yes, we’re not anything of that low sort, thank God!Dio mio, Dio mio!” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with Christina’s husband the current of conversation made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied for the moment with the minuteness he had been taught that in such a case courtesy demanded; but by the time that at her request they had returned to the gate nearest South Street (she wished him to come no further) he had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way. “And who and what then is this English captain? About him there’s a great deal said.”
“This English captain?”
“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.
They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple of predatory hansomsdashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought that was coming, and at bottom it’s he who has occupied you most!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”
“Why doesn’t he count?”
“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t even think he does.”
“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”
“Perhaps that’s just the reason. When people give her a chance to get tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate you needn’t be any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, afactotum, but he works without wages.”
“Isn’t he then in love with her?”
“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”
“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince lugubriously.
“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!”
“Oh the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events he sees her.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t seehim!” laughed Madame Grandoni as she turned away.
The pink dressing-gown that Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose Muniment became in Lomax Place a conspicuous object, supplying poor Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She detailed this episode minutely to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected. The grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital as something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons of which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when they’re out of town what can it be when they’re all there together and everything’s out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted herself to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the state of Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she hadn’t been afraid to appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who had visions of a needle that positively flashed in the disinterested service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship got alldragged out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might be in tatters for all they could do to help her, at the top of those dreadful stairs, with that strange sick creature (she was too unnatural) thinking only of her own finery and talking about her complexion. If she wanted pink she should have pink; but to Pinnie there was something almost unholy in it, like decking out a corpse or dressing up the cat. This was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t be other than difficult for her to enter into the importance her ladyship appeared to attach to those pushing people. The girl was unfortunate certainly, stuck up there like a puppy on a shelf, but in her ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more in keeping while they walked about under those tremendous gilded ceilings. Lady Aurora, seeing how she was struck, showed her all over the house, carrying the lamp herself and telling an old woman who was there—a “confidential” housekeeper, a person with ribbons in her cap who would have pushed Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do very well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive stages of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was terribly long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured presence as had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently because it was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was dedicated to her humble friend.
One day when Hyacinth came home Pinnie at once announced to him that her ladyship had been there to look at it—to pass judgement before the last touches were conferred. The dressmaker intimated that in such a case as that her judgement was rather wild and she seemed to have embarrassing ideas about pockets. Whatever could poor Miss Munimentwant of pockets and what had she to put in them? But Lady Aurora had evidently found the garment far beyond anything she expected, and she had been more affable than ever and had wanted to know about every one in the “Plice”: not in a meddling, prying way, either, like some of those condescending swells, but quite as if the poor people were the high ones and she was afraid her curiosity might be “presumptious.” It was in the same discreet spirit that she had invited Amanda to relate her whole history and had expressed an interest in the career of her young friend.
“She said you had charming manners,” Miss Pynsent hastened to remark; “but on my life, Hyacinth Robinson, I never mentioned a scrap that it could give you pain that any one should talk about.” There was an heroic explicitness in this, on Pinnie’s part, for she knew in advance just how Hyacinth would look at her—fixedly, silently, hopelessly, as if she were still capable of tattling horribly (with the idea that her revelations would increase her importance) and putting forward this hollow theory of her supreme discretion to cover it up. His eyes seemed to say it all: “How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you’re lying? I’m very helpless, for I can’t prove that without applying to the person to whom your incorrigible folly has probably led you to brag, to throw out mysterious and tantalising hints. You know of course that I’d never condescend to that.” Pinnie suffered acutely from this imputation, yet exposed herself to it often, because she could never deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting Hyacinth know he was appreciated, admired and, for those “charming manners” commended by Lady Aurora, even all but wondered at in so many words; and this kind of interest always appeared to imply a suspicion ofhis secret—something which, when he expressed to himself the sense of it, he called, resenting it at once and finding a certain softness in it, “a beastlyattendrissement.” When Pinnie went on to say to him that Lady Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet having come to Belgrave Square for the famous books he reflected that he must really wait upon her without more delay if he wished to keep up his reputation as a man of the world; and meanwhile he considered much the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life which had opened so suddenly from one day to the other: a phase in which his society should have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the obscurity of his condition only an attraction the more. They were taking him up then one after the other and were even taking up poor Pinnie as a means of getting at him; so that he wondered with gaiety and irony if it meant that his destiny was really seeking him out—that the aristocracy, recognising a mysterious affinity (with that fineness offlairfor which they were remarkable), were coming to him to save him the trouble of coming to them.
It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening) and Lady Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of “rising from dinner” having always been, in his imagination, for some reason or other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He was ignorant of the fact that Lady Aurora’s principal meal consisted of a scrap of fish and a cup of tea served on a little stand in the dismantled breakfast-parlour. The door was opened for Hyacinth by the invidious old lady whom Pinnie had described and who listened to his appeal, conducted him through the house and ushered him into her ladyship’s presence without the smallestrelaxation of a pair of tightly-closed lips. His good hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour by the light of a couple of candles and apparently immersed in a collection of crumpled papers and account-books. She was ciphering, consulting memoranda, taking notes; she had had her head in her hands and the silky entanglement of her hair resisted the rapid effort she made to smooth herself down as she saw the little bookbinder come in. The impression of her fingers remained in little rosy streaks on her pink skin. She exclaimed instantly, “Oh, you’ve come about the books—it’s so very kind of you”; and she hurried him off to another room, to which, as she explained, she had had them brought down for him to choose from. The effect of this precipitation was to make him suppose at first that she might wish him to execute his errand as quickly as possible and take himself off; but he presently noted that her nervousness and her shyness were of an order that would always give false ideas. She wanted him to stay, she wanted to talk with him and she had rushed with him at the books in order to gain time and composure for exercising some subtler art. Hyacinth, staying half an hour, became more and more convinced that her ladyship was, as he had ventured to pronounce her on the occasion of their last meeting, a regular saint. He was privately a little disappointed in the books, though he selected three or four, as many as he could carry, and promised to come back for others: they denoted on Lady Aurora’s part a limited acquaintance with French literature and even a certain puerility of taste. There were several volumes of Lamartine and a set of the spurious memoirs of the Marquise de Créqui; but for the rest the little library consisted mainly of Marmontel and Madame de Genlis,Le Récit d’une Sœurand the tales of M. J. T. de Saint-Germain. There werecertain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and consistent realists of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but evidently none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple of Balzac’s novels, which by ill luck happened to be just those our young man had read more than once.
There was nevertheless something very agreeable to him in the moments he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals, monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he had seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and Lady Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a sense of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of prohibitory presences. She spoke again of the poor people in the south of London and of the Muniments in particular; evidently the only fault she had to find with these latter was that they were not poor enough—not sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which she could step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished she would talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was that, like Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He didn’t mind, with the poor, going into questions of their state—it even gave him at times a strange savage satisfaction; but he saw that in discussing them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less: the rich couldn’t consider poverty in the light of experience. Their mistakes and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of want and dirt when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this deficient perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness it would be a queer enough business when he should come topretending to hold the candlestick for the Princess Casamassima.
His present hostess said no word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed she must have wished to place him on the footing on which people don’t express approbation or surprise at the decency or good-breeding of each other’s relatives. He saw how she would always treat him as a gentleman and that even if he should be basely ungrateful she would never call his attention to the fact that she had done so. He shouldn’t have occasion to say to her, as he had said to the Princess, that she regarded him as a curious animal; and it gave him at once the sense of learning more about life, a sense always delightful to him, to perceive there were such different ways (which implied still a good many more) of being a lady of rank. The manner in which Lady Aurora appeared to wish to confer with him on the great problems of pauperism and reform might have implied he was a benevolent nobleman (of the type of Lord Shaftesbury) who had endowed many charities and was noted, in philanthropic schemes, for the breadth of his views. It was not less present to him that Pinnie might have tattled, put forward his claims to high consanguinity, than it had been when the dressmaker herself descanted on her ladyship’s condescensions; but he remembered now that he too had only just escaped being asinine when, the other day, he flashed out an allusion to his accursed origin. At all events he was much touched by the delicacy with which the earl’s daughter comported herself, simply assuming that he was “one of themselves”; and he reflected that if she did know his history (he was sure he might pass twenty years in her society without discovering if she did) this shade of courtesy, this natural tact, coexisting even with extreme awkwardness, illustrated that “best breeding” which he hadseen alluded to in novels portraying the aristocracy. The only remark on Lady Aurora’s part that savoured in the least of looking down at him from a height was when she said cheerfully and encouragingly: “I suppose one of these days you’ll be setting up in business for yourself.” This was not so cruelly patronising that he couldn’t reply with a smile equally free from any sort of impertinence: “Oh dear, no, I shall never do that. I should make a great mess of any attempt to carry on a business. I’ve no turn at all for that sort of thing.”
Lady Aurora looked a little surprised. “Oh, I see; you don’t like—you don’t like—!” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say he didn’t like the idea of going in to that extent for a trade; but he stopped her in time from imputing to him a sentiment so foolish and declared what he meant to be simply that his one faculty was the faculty of doing his little piece of work, whatever it was, of liking to do it skilfully and prettily, and of liking still better to get his money for it when done. His conception of “business” or of rising in the world didn’t go beyond that. “Oh yes, I can fancy!” her ladyship exclaimed; but she looked at him a moment with eyes which showed that he puzzled her, that she didn’t quite understand his tone. Before he left her she asked him abruptly (nothing had led up to it) what he thought of Captain Sholto, whom she had seen that other evening in Audley Court. Didn’t he think him a very odd sort of person? Hyacinth confessed to this impression; whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider him decidedly vulgar?”
“How can I know?”
“You can know perfectly—as well as any one!” Then she added: “I think it’s a pity they should form relations with any one of that kind.”
“They” of course meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person who may be vulgar?”—Hyacinth regarded this solicitude as exquisite. “But think of the people they know—think of those they’re surrounded with—think of all Audley Court!”
“The poor, the unhappy, the labouring classes? Oh, I don’t callthemvulgar!” cried her ladyship with radiant eyes. The young man, lying awake a good deal that night, laughed to himself, on his pillow, not unkindly, at her fear that he and his friends would be contaminated by the familiar of a princess. He even wondered if she wouldn’t find the Princess herself a bit vulgar.
It must not be supposed that his relations with Millicent had remained unaffected by the remarkable incident that had brushed her with its wing at the theatre. The whole occurrence had made a great impression on the young lady from Pimlico; he never saw her, for weeks afterwards, that she had not an immense deal to say about it; and though it suited her to cultivate the shocked state at the crudity of such proceedings and to denounce the Princess for a bold-faced foreigner, of a kind to which any one who knew anything of what could go on in London would give a wide berth, it was easy to see she enjoyed having rubbed shoulders across the house with a person so splendid and having found her own critical estimate of her friend confirmed in such high quarters. She professed to draw her warrant for her low opinion of the lady in the box from information given her by Captain Sholto as he sat beside her—information of which at different moments she gave a different version; her notes of it having nothing in common save that they were alike unflattering to the Princess. Hyacinth had many doubts of the Captain’s having talked indiscreetly; it would be in such a case such a very unnatural thing for him to do. Hewasunnatural—that was true—and he might have told Millicent, who was capable of having plied him with questions,that his distinguished friend was separated from her husband; but, for the rest, it was more probable that the girl had given the rein to a fine faculty of free invention of which he had had frequent glimpses, under pressure of her primitive half-childish, half-plebeian impulse of destruction, the instinct of pulling down what was above her, the reckless energy that would, precisely, make her so effective in revolutionary scenes. Hyacinth (it has been mentioned) didn’t consider that Millicent was false, and it struck him as a proof of positive candour that she should make up absurd, abusive stories about a person as to whom she only knew that she disliked her and could hope for no esteem, and indeed for no recognition of any kind, in return. When people were fully false you didn’t know where you stood with them, and on such a point as this Miss Henning could never be accused of leaving you in obscurity. She said little else about the Captain and didn’t pretend to repeat the remainder of his conversation, taking on her air of grand indifference when Hyacinth amused himself with repaying her criticism of his new acquaintance by drawing a sufficiently derisive portrait of hers.
His line was that Sholto’s admiration for the high-coloured beauty in the second balcony had been at the bottom of the whole episode: he had persuaded the Princess to pretend she was a revolutionist and should like therefore to confer with the little firebrand above in order that he might slip into the seat of this too easily deluded youth. At the same time it never occurred to our young man to conceal the fact that the lady in the box had followed him up; he contented himself with saying that this had been no part of the original plot, but a simple result—not unnatural after all—of his showing so much more charm than might have been expected. He describedwith sportive variations his visit in South Street, conscious that he would never feel the need, with his childhood’s friend, of glossing over that sort of experience. She might make him a scene of jealousy and welcome—there were things that would have much more terror for him than that; her jealousy, with its violence, its energy, even a certain inconsequent, dare-devil humour that played through it, entertained him, emphasised the frankness, the passion and pluck he admired her for. He should never be on the footing of sparing Miss Henning’s susceptibilities; how fond she might really be of him he couldn’t take upon himself to say, but her affection would never assume the form of that sort of delicacy, and their intercourse was plainly foredoomed to be an exchange of thumps and concussions, of sarcastic shouts and mutualdéfis. He liked her, at bottom, strangely, absurdly; but after all it was only well enough to torment her—she could bear so much—not well enough to spare her. Of any actual ground for the girl’s jealousy of the Princess he never thought; it couldn’t occur to him to weigh against each other the sentiments he might excite in such opposed bosoms or those that the spectacle of either emotion might have kindled in his own. He had no doubt his share of fatuity, but he found himself unable to associate mentally a great lady and a bouncing shop-girl in a contest for a prize which should have anything ofhisfigure. How could they show the least common mark—even so small a one as a desire to possess themselves of Hyacinth Robinson? A fact he didn’t impart to Millicent and could have no wish to impart to her was the different matter of his pilgrimage to Belgrave Square. He might be in love with the Princess (how could he qualify as yet the bewildered emotion she had produced in him?) and he certainly neverwould conceive a passion for poor Lady Aurora; yet it would have given him pain much greater than any he felt in the other case to hear Milly make free with the ministering angel of Audley Court. The distinction was perhaps somehow in her appearing really not to touch or arrive at the Princess at all, whereas Lady Aurora was within her range and compass.
After paying him that visit at his rooms Hyacinth lost sight of Captain Sholto, who had not again reappeared at the “Sun and Moon,” the little tavern which presented so common and casual a face to the world, but offered in its unsuspected rear a security still unimpugned to machinations going down to the very bottom of things. Nothing was more natural than that the Captain should be engaged at this season in the recreations of his class; and our young man took for granted that if he were not hanging about the Princess on that queer footing as to which one had a secret hope one should some day command more light, he was probably buffeting breezy northern seas on a yacht or creeping after stags in the Highlands; our hero’s acquaintance with the light literature of his country being such as to assure him that in one or other of these occupations people of leisure, during the autumn, were necessarily immersed. If the Captain were giving his attention to neither he must have started for Albania, or at least for Paris. Happy Captain, Hyacinth mused, while his imagination followed him through vivid exotic episodes and his restless young feet continued to tread, through the stale flat weeks of September and October, the familiar pavements of Soho, Islington and Pentonville, and the shabby sinuous ways that unite these regions of labour. He had told the Princess he sometimes had a holiday at this period and that there was a chance of his escorting his respectable companionto the seaside; but as it turned out at present the spare cash for such an excursion was wanting. Hyacinth had indeed for the moment an exceptionally keen sense of the lack of this convenience and was forcibly reminded that the society of agreeable women was a direct and constant appeal to the pocket. He not only hadn’t a penny, but was much in debt, owed pence and shillings, as he would have largely put it, all over the place, and the explanation of his pinched feeling was in a vague half-remorseful, half-resigned reference to the numerous occasions when he had had not to fail of funds under penalty of disappointing a young lady whose needs were positive, and especially to a certain high crisis (as it might prove to be) in his destiny when it had come over him that one couldn’t call on a princess just as one was. So this year he didn’t ask old Crook for the week which some of the other men took—Eustache Poupin, who had never quitted London since his arrival, launched himself precisely that summer, supported by his brave wife, into the British unknown on the strength of a return ticket to Worthing—simply because he shouldn’t know what to do with it. The best way not to spend money, though no doubt not the best in the world to make it, was still to take one’s daily course to the old familiar shabby shop, where, as the days shortened and November thickened the air to a livid yellow, the uncovered flame of the gas, burning often from the morning on, lighted up the ugliness in which the hand of practice endeavoured to disengage a little beauty—the ugliness of a dingy belittered interior, of battered dispapered walls, of work-tables stained and hacked, of windows opening into a foul drizzling street, of the bared arms, the sordid waistcoat-backs, the smeared aprons, the personal odour, the patient obstinate irritatingshoulders and vulgar narrow inevitable faces of his fellow-labourers. Our young friend’s relations with his comrades would form a chapter by itself, but all that may be said of the matter here is that the clever little operator from Lomax Place had in a manner a double identity and that much as he lived in Mr. Crookenden’s establishment he lived out of it still more. In this busy, pasty, sticky, leathery little world, where wages and beer were the main objects of consideration, he played his part in a way that marked him as a queer lot, but capable of queerness in the line of equanimity too. He hadn’t made good his place there without discovering that the British workman, when animated by the spirit of mirth, has rather a heavy hand, and he tasted of the practical joke in every degree of violence. During his first year he dreamed, with secret passion and suppressed tears, of a day of bliss when at last they would let him alone—a day which arrived in time, for it is always an advantage to be clever if one be only clever enough. Hyacinth was sufficiently so to have invented amodus vivendiin respect to which M. Poupin said to him, “Enfin vous voilà ferme!” (the Frenchman himself, terriblyéprouvéat the beginning, had always bristled with firmness and opposed to insular grossness a refined dignity) and under the influence of which the scenery of Soho figured a daily dusky exhibition of projected shadows, confined to the passive part of life and giving no hostages to reality, or at least to ambition, save an insufficient number of shillings on Saturday night and stray spasmodic reminiscences of delicate work that might have been more delicate still, as well as of such applications of the tool as he flattered himself unsurpassed unless by the supreme Eustache.
One evening in November he had after discharging himself of a considerable indebtedness to Pinnie stilla sovereign in his pocket—a sovereign that seemed to spin there under the equal breath of a dozen different lively uses. He had come out for a walk with a vague intention of pushing as far as Audley Court; and lurking within this nebulous design, on which the damp breath of the streets, making objects seem that night particularly dim and places particularly far, had blown a certain chill, was a sense of how nice it would be to take something to Rose Muniment, who delighted in a sixpenny present and to whom he hadn’t for some time rendered any such homage. At last, after he had wandered a while, hesitating between the pilgrimage to Lambeth and the possibility of still associating the two or three hours with those perhaps in some lucky way or other at Millicent Henning’s disposal, he reflected that if a sovereign was to be pulled to pieces it was a simplification to get it changed. He had struck through the region of Mayfair, partly with the preoccupation of a short cut and partly from an instinct of self-defence; if one was in danger of spending one’s money with a rush it was so much gained to plunge into a quarter where, at that hour especially, there were no shops for little bookbinders. Hyacinth’s victory, however, was imperfect when it occurred to him to turn into a public-house in order to convert his gold into convenient silver. When it was a question of entering these establishments he selected in preference the most decent; he never knew what unpleasant people he might find on the other side of the swinging door. Those which glitter at intervals amid the residential gloom of the large district abutting on Grosvenor Square partake of the general gentility of the neighbourhood, so that our friend was not surprised (he had passed into the compartment marked “private bar”) to see but a single drinker leaning against the counter on which, withhis request very civilly enunciated, he put down his sovereign. He was surprised on the other hand when, glancing up again, he became aware that this lonely reveller was Captain Godfrey Sholto.
“Why, my dear boy, what a remarkable coincidence!” the Captain exclaimed. “For once in five years that I come into a place like this!”
“I don’t come in often myself. I thought you were in Madagascar,” Hyacinth said.
“Ah, because I’ve not been at the ‘Sun and Moon’? Well, I’ve been constantly out of town, you know. And then—don’t you see what I mean?—I want to be tremendously careful. That’s the way to get on, isn’t it? But I daresay you don’t believe in my discretion!” Sholto laughed. “What shall I do to make you understand? I say, have a brandy and soda,” he continued as if this might assist Hyacinth’s comprehension. He seemed a trifle flurried and, were it possible to imagine such a thing of so independent and whimsical a personage, the least bit abashed or uneasy at having been found in such a low place. Yet it was not any lower than the “Sun and Moon.” He was dressed on this occasion according to his station, without the pot-hat and the shabby jacket, and Hyacinth looked at him with the pang of the felt charm that a good tailor would add to life. Our hero was struck more than ever before with his being the type of man whom, as he strolled about observing people, he had so often regarded with wonder and envy—the sort of man of whom one said to one’s self that he was the “finest white,” feeling that he and his like had the world in their pocket. Sholto requested the barmaid to please not dawdle in preparing the brandy and soda Hyacinth had thought to ease off the situation by accepting: this indeed was perhaps what the finest white would naturally do. And when the young man had takenthe glass from the counter didn’t he appear to encourage him not to linger as he drank it and to smile down at him very kindly and amusedly, as if the combination of so small a bookbinder and so big a tumbler were sufficiently droll? The Captain took time, however, to ask how he had spent his autumn and what was the news in Bloomsbury; he further inquired about those jolly people across the river. “I can’t tell you what an impression they made on me—that evening you know.” After this he went on suddenly and irrelevantly: “And so you’re just going to stay on for the winter quietly?” Our hero stared: he wondered what other high course could be imputed to him; he couldn’t reflect immediately that this was the sort of thing the finest whites said to each other when they met after their fashionable dispersals, and that his friend had only been guilty of a momentary inadvertence. In point of fact the Captain recovered himself. “Oh, of course you’ve got your work, and that sort of thing”; and as Hyacinth didn’t succeed in swallowing at a gulp the contents of his big tumbler he asked him presently if he had heard anything from the Princess. Our youth replied that he could have no news except what the Captain might be good enough to give him; but he added that he had been to see her just before she left town.