He had no intention of going later on to Madeira Crescent, and that is why he asked her before they separated if he mightn’t see her again after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now and he feared them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element; it had visions for him that passed even before his closed eyes—sharp doubts and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of pain. He wanted company to light up his gloom, and this had driven him back to Millicent in a manner not altogether consistent with the respect which it was still his theory that he owed to his nobler part. He felt no longer free to drop in at the Crescent and tried to persuade himself, in case his mistrust should be overdone, that his reasons were reasons of magnanimity. If Paul were seriously occupied with the Princess, if they had work in hand for which their most earnest attention was required (and Sunday was all likely to be the day they would take: they had spent so much of the previous Sunday together) his absence would have the superior, the marked motive of his leaving his friend a clear field. There was something inexpressibly representative to him in the way that friend had abruptly decided to re-enter the house, after pausing outside with its mistress, at the moment he himself stood glaring through the fog with the Prince. The movementrepeated itself innumerable times to his inward sense, suggesting to him things he couldn’t bear to learn. Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous even after he had become so, and to prove to himself he was not he had gone to see the Princess one evening in the middle of the week. Hadn’t he wanted Paul to know her months and months before, and was he now to entertain a vile feeling at the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested, in each party to it, on aspirations that he respected? The Princess had not been at home, and he had turned away from the door without asking for Madame Grandoni: he had not forgotten that on the occasion of his previous visit she had excused herself from staying below. After the little maid in the Crescent had told him her mistress was out he walked away with a quick curiosity—a curiosity which, if he had listened to it, would have led him to mount the first omnibus that travelled in the direction of Camberwell. Was Paul Muniment, he such a rare one in general for stopping at home of an evening, was he also out, and would Rosy in this case be in the humour to mention—for of course she would know—where he had gone? Hyacinth let the omnibus pass, for he suddenly became aware with a rueful pang that he was in danger of playing the spy. He had not been near Muniment since, on purpose to leave his curiosity unsatisfied. He allowed himself, however, to notice that the Princess had now not written him a word of consolation, as she had been kind enough to do in the old days when he had knocked at her door without finding her. At present he had missed her twice in succession, and yet she had given no sign of regret—regret even on his own behalf. This determined him to stay away a bit longer; it was such a proof that she was absorbingly occupied. Hyacinth’s glimpse of her in earnest talk with her friend—orrather with his—as they returned from the excursion described by the Prince, his memory of Paul’s beguiled figure crossing the threshold once more, could leave him no doubt as to the degree of that absorption.
Milly meanwhile hung back a little when he proposed to her that they should finish the day together. She smiled indeed and her splendid eyes rested on his with an air of indulgent wonder; they seemed to ask if it were worth her pains, in face of his probable incredulity, to mention therealreason why she couldn’t have the pleasure of acceding to his delightful pressure. Since he would be sure to deride her explanation wouldn’t some trumped-up excuse do as well, something he could knock about without hurting her? We are not to know exactly in what sense Miss Henning decided; but she confessed at last that therewasan odious obstacle to their meeting again later—a promise she had made to go and see a young lady, the forewoman of her department, who was kept indoors with a bad face and nothing in life to help her pass the time. She was under a pledge to spend the evening with her, and it was not in her nature to fail of such a charity. Hyacinth made no comment on this speech; he received it in silence, looking at the girl gloomily.
“I know what’s passing in your mind!” Millicent suddenly broke out. “Why don’t you say it at once and give me a chance to contradict it? I oughtn’t to care, but I do care!”
“Stop, stop—don’t let us fight!” He spoke in a tone of pleading weariness; she had never heard just that accent before.
Millicent just considered: “I’ve a mind to play her false. She’s a real lady, highly connected, and the best friend I have—I don’t count men,” she sarcastically sniffed—“and there isn’t one in the world I’d do such a thing for but you.”
“No, keep your promise; don’t play any one false,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, youarea gentleman!” she returned with a sweetness her voice occasionally took.
“Especially——” Hyacinth began; but he suddenly stopped.
“Especially what? Something impudent, I’ll engage! Especially as you don’t believe me?”
“Oh no! Don’t let’s fight!” he repeated.
“Fight, my darling? I’d fightforyou!” Miss Henning declared.
He offered himself after tea the choice between a visit to Lady Aurora and a pilgrimage to Lisson Grove. He was a little in doubt about the former experiment, having an idea her ladyship’s family might be reinstalled in Belgrave Square. He reflected, however, that he couldn’t recognise this as a reason for not going to see her; his relations with her had nothing of the underhand, and she had given him the kindest general invitation. If her haughty parents were at home she was probably at dinner with them: he would take that risk. He had taken it before without disastrous results. He was determined not to spend the evening alone, and he would keep the Poupins as a more substantial alternative in case Lady Aurora shouldn’t be able to receive him.
As soon as the great portal in Belgrave Square was drawn open before him he saw the house was occupied and animated—if animation might be talked about in a place which had hitherto mainly answered to his idea of a magnificent mausoleum. It was pervaded by subdued light and tall domestics; he found himself looking down a kind of colonnade of colossal footmen, an array more imposing even than the retinue of the Princess at Medley. His inquiry died away on his lips and he stood there struggling with dumbness. It was manifest to him that somehigh festival was taking place, a scene on which his presence could only be a blot; and when a large official, out of livery, bending over him for a voice that didn’t issue, suggested, not unencouragingly, that it might be Lady Aurora he wished to see, he replied with detachment and despair: “Yes, yes, but it can’t be possible!” The butler took no pains to controvert this proposition verbally; he merely turned round with a majestic air of leading the way, and as at the same moment two of the footmen closed the wings of the door behind the visitor Hyacinth judged it his cue to follow. In this manner, after crossing a passage where, in the perfect silence of the servants, he heard the shorter click of his plebeian shoes upon a marble floor, he found himself ushered into a small room, lighted by a veiled lamp, which, when he had been left there alone, without further remark on the part of his conductor, he recognised as the place—only now more amply decorated—of one of his former interviews. Lady Aurora kept him waiting a little, but finally fluttered in with an anxious, incoherent apology. The same transformation had taken place in her own aspect as in that of her parental halls: she had on a light-coloured, crumpled-looking, faintly-rustling dress; her head was adorned with a languid plume that flushed into little pink tips, and in her hand she carried a pair of white gloves. All her repressed eagerness was in her face, and she smiled as if wishing to anticipate any scruples or embarrassments on the part of her visitor; frankly admitting herself disguised and bedizened and the shock the fact might convey. Hyacinth said to her that, no doubt, on inferring the return of her family to town, he ought to have backed out; he knew this must make a difference in her life. But he had been marched in, for all his protest, and now it was clear he hadinterrupted her at dinner. She answered that no one who asked for her at any hour was ever turned away; she had managed to arrange that and was very happy in her success. She didn’t usually dine—there were so many of them and it took so long. Most of her friends couldn’t come at visiting-hours and it wouldn’t be right she shouldn’t ever receive them. On that occasion shehadbeen dining, but it was all over; she was only sitting there because she was going to a party. Her parents were dining out and she was just in the drawing-room with some of her sisters. When they were alone it wasn’t so long, though it was rather long afterwards, when they went up again. It wasn’t time yet: the carriage wouldn’t come for nearly half an hour. She hadn’t been to an evening thing for months and months, but—didn’t he know?—one sometimes had to do it. Lady Aurora expressed the idea that one ought to be fair all round and that one’s duties were not all of the same species; some of them would come up from time to time that were quite different from the others. Of course it wasn’t just unless one did all, and that was why she was in for something to-night. It was nothing of consequence; only the family meeting the family, as they might do of a Sunday, at one of their houses. It was there that papa and mamma were dining. Since they had given her that room for any hour she wanted—it was really tremendously convenient—she had resolved to do a party now and then, like a respectable young woman, because it pleased them: though why it should create even that thrill to seeherat a place was more than she could imagine. She supposed it was because it would perhaps keep some people, a little, from thinking she was mad and not safe to be at large—which was of course a sort of thing that people didn’t like to have thought of theirbelongings. Lady Aurora explained and expatiated with a kind of yearning superabundance; she talked more continuously than Hyacinth had ever heard her do before, and the young man made out that she was not, so to speak, in equilibrium. He thought it scarcely probable she was excited by the simple prospect of again dipping into the great world she had forsworn, and he soon became aware of his having himself in a manner upset her. His senses were fine enough to hint to him that there were associations and wounds he revived and quickened. She suddenly stopped talking and the two sat there looking at each other in an odd, an occult community of suffering. He made mechanical remarks, explaining insufficiently why he had come, and in the course of a very few moments, quite independently of these observations, it seemed to him there was a deeper, a measurelessly deep, confidence between them. A tacit confession passed and repassed, and each understood the situation of the other. They wouldn’t speak of it—it was very definite they would never do that; for there was something in their common consciousness that was inconsistent with the grossness of accusation. Besides, the grievance of each was an apprehension, an instinct of the soul—not a sharp, definite wrong supported by proof. It was in the air and in their restless pulses, and not in anything they could exhibit or complain of for comfort. Strange enough it seemed to him that the history of each should be the counterpart of that of the other. What had each done but lose that which he or she had never so much as had? Things had gone ill with them; but even if they had gone well, even if the Princess had not combined with his friend in that manner which made his heart sink and produced an effect exactly corresponding on Lady Aurora’s—even in this case what would felicity, whatwould success, have amounted to? They would have been very barren. He was sure the singular creature before him would never have had a chance to take the unprecedented social step for the sake of which she was ready to go forth from Belgrave Square for ever; Hyacinth had judged the smallness of Paul Muniment’s appetite for that complication sufficiently to have begun really to pity her ladyship long ago. And now, even when he most felt the sweetness of her sympathy, he might wonder what she could have imagined for him in the event of his not having been supplanted—what security, what completer promotion, what honourable, satisfying sequel. They were unhappy because they were unhappy, and they were right not to rail about that.
“Oh I like to see you—I like to talk with you,” she said simply. They talked for a quarter of an hour, and he made her such a visit as any clever gentleman might have made any gentle lady. They exchanged remarks about the lateness of the spring, about the loan-exhibition at Burlington House—which Hyacinth had paid his shilling to see—about the question of opening the museums on Sunday, about the danger of too much coddling legislation on behalf of the working classes. He declared that it gave him great pleasure to catch any sign of her amusing herself; it was unnatural never to do that, and he hoped that now she had taken a turn she would keep it up. At this she looked down, smiling, at her frugal finery and then she said: “I daresay I shall begin to go to balls—who knows?”
“That’s what our friends in Audley Court think, you know—that it’s the worst mistake you can make not to drink deep of the cup while you have it.”
“Oh I’ll do it then—I’ll do it forthem!” Lady Aurora exclaimed. “I daresay that, as regards allthat, I haven’t listened to them enough.” This was the only allusion that passed on the subject of the Muniments.
Hyacinth got up, he had stayed long enough, since she was going out; and as he put forth his hand to her she seemed to him a heroine. She would try to cultivate the pleasures of her class if the brother and sister in Camberwell thought it right—try even to be a woman of fashion in order to console herself. Paul Muniment didn’t care for her, but she was capable of considering that it might be her duty to regulate her life by the very advice that made an abyss between them. Hyacinth didn’t believe in the success of this attempt; there passed before his imagination a picture of the poor lady coming home and pulling off her feathers for evermore after an evening spent watching the agitation of a ball-room from the outer edge of the circle and with a white, irresponsive face. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” he said, laughing.
“Oh I don’t mind dying.”
“I think I do,” Hyacinth declared as he turned away. There had been no mention whatever of the Princess.
It was early enough in the evening for him to risk a visit to Lisson Grove; he calculated that the Poupins would still be sitting up. When he reached their house he found this calculation justified; the brilliancy of the light in the window appeared to announce that Madame was holding a salon. He ascended to this apartment without delay—it was free to a visitor to open the house-door himself—and, having knocked, he obeyed the hostess’s invitation to enter. Poupin and his wife were seated, with a third person, at a table in the middle of the room, round a staring kerosene lamp adorned with a globe of clear glass, of which the transparency was mitigatedonly by a circular pattern of bunches of grapes. The third person was his friend Schinkel, who had been a member of the little party that had waited that wet, black night upon Hoffendahl. No one said anything as he came in; but in their silence the three others got up, looking at him, he thought, as he had on occasion imagined his being looked at before, only never quite so unmistakably.
“My child, you’re always welcome,” said Eustache Poupin, taking Hyacinth’s hand in both his own and holding it for some moments. An impression had come to our young man, immediately, that they were talking about him before he appeared and that they would rather have been left to talk at their ease. He even thought he saw in Poupin’s face the kind of consciousness that comes from detection, or at least interruption, in a nefarious act. With Poupin, however, it was difficult to tell; he always looked so heated and exalted, so like a conspirator defying the approach of justice. Hyacinth took in the others: they were standing as if they had shuffled something on the table out of sight, as if they had been engaged in the manufacture of counterfeit coin. Poupin kept hold of his hand; the Frenchman’s ardent eyes, fixed, unwinking, always expressive of the greatness of the occasion, whatever the occasion was, had never seemed to him to protrude so far from the head. “Ah my dear friend,nous causions justement de vous,” Eustache remarked as if this were a very extraordinary fact.
“Ohnous causions, nous causions——!” his wife exclaimed as if to deprecate a loose overstatement. “One may mention a friend, I suppose, in the way of conversation, without taking such a liberty.”
“A cat may look at a king, as your English proverb says,” added Schinkel jocosely. He smiled so hardat his own pleasantry that his eyes closed up and vanished—an effect which Hyacinth, who had observed it before, thought particularly unbecoming to him, appearing as it did to administer the last perfection to his ugliness. He would have consulted his facial interests by cultivating blankness.
“Oh a king, a king——!” Poupin demurred, shaking his head up and down. “That’s what it’s not good to be,au point où nous en sommes.”
“I just came in to wish you good-night,” said Hyacinth. “I’m afraid it’s rather late for a call, though Schinkel doesn’t seem to think so.”
“It’s always too late,mon très-cher, when you come,” the Frenchman returned. “You know if you’ve a place at our fireside.”
“I esteem it too much to disturb it,” said Hyacinth, smiling and looking round at the three.
“We can easily sit down again; we’re a comfortable party. Put yourself beside me.” And the Frenchman drew a chair close to the one, at the table, that he had just quitted.
“He has had a long walk, he’s tired—he’ll certainly accept a little glass,” Madame Poupin pronounced with decision as she moved toward the tray containing the small gilded service of liqueurs.
“We’ll each accept one,ma bonne; it’s a very good occasion for a drop offine,” her husband interposed while Hyacinth seated himself in the chair marked by his host. Schinkel resumed his place, which was opposite; he looked across at the new visitor without speaking, but his long face continued to flatten itself into a representation of mirth. He had on a green coat which Hyacinth had seen before; this was a garment of ceremony, such as our young man judged it would have been impossible to procure in London or in any modern time. It was eminently German and of high antiquity, and had atall, stiff, clumsy collar which came up to the wearer’s ears and almost concealed his perpetual bandage. When Hyacinth had sat down Eustache Poupin remained out of his own chair and stood beside him resting a hand on his head. At this touch something came over Hyacinth that brought his heart into his throat. The possibility that occurred to him, conveyed in Poupin’s whole manner as well as in the reassuring intention of his caress and in his wife’s instant, uneasy offer of refreshment, explained the confusion of the circle and reminded our hero of the engagement he had taken with himself to live up to a grand conception of the quiet when a certain crisis in his fate should have arrived. It struck him this crisis was in the air, very near—that he should touch it if he made another movement: the pressure of the Frenchman’s hand, which was meant as an attenuation, only worked as a warning. As he looked across at Schinkel he felt dizzy and a little sick; for a moment, to his senses, the room whirled round. His resolution to be quiet appeared only too easy to keep; he couldn’t break it even to the extent of speaking. He knew his voice would tremble, and this was why he made no answer to Schinkel’s rather honeyed words, uttered after an hesitation. “Also, my dear Robinson, have you passed your Sunday well—have you had an ’appy day?” Why was every one so treacherously mild? His eyes questioned the table, but encountered only its well-wiped surface, polished for so many years by the gustatory elbows of the Frenchman and his wife, and the lady’s dirty pack of cards for “patience”—she had apparently been engaged in this exercise when Schinkel came in—which indeed gave a little the impression of startled gamblers who might have shuffled away the stakes. Madam Poupin, diving into a cupboard, came back with a bottle of green chartreuse, anapparition which led the German to exclaim: “Lieber Gott, you Vrench, you Vrench, how well you always arrange! What on earth would you have more?”
The hostess distributed the liquor, but our youth could take none of it down, leaving it to the high appreciation of his friends. His indifference to this luxury excited discussion and conjecture, the others bandying theories and contradictions and even ineffectual jokes about him over his head—all with a volubility that seemed to him unnatural. For Poupin and Schinkel there was something all wrong with a man who couldn’t smack his lips over a drop of that tap; he must either be in love or have some still more insidious complaint. It was true Hyacinthwasalways in love—that was no secret to his friends; but it had never been observed to stop his thirst. The Frenchwoman poured scorn on this view of the case, declaring that the effect of the tender passion was to make one enjoy one’s victual—when everything went straight,bien entendu; and how could an ear be deaf to the wily words of a person so taking?—in proof of which she deposed that she had never eaten and drunk with such relish as at the time (oh far away now) when she had a soft spot in her heart for her rascal of a husband. For Madame Poupin to allude to the companion of her trials as a rascal indicated a high degree of conviviality. Hyacinth sat staring at the empty table with the feeling that he was somehow a detached, irresponsible witness of the evolution of his doom. Finally he looked up and said to his mates collectively: “What’s up and what the deuce is the matter with you all?” He followed this inquiry by a request they would tell him what it was they had been saying about him, since they admitted he had been the subject of their talk. Madame Poupin answered for them that they had simply been saying how much they loved him, but that theywouldn’t love him any more if he became suspicious andgrincheux. She had been telling Mr. Schinkel’s fortune on the cards and she would tell Hyacinth’s if he liked. There was nothing much for Mr. Schinkel, only that he would find something some day that he had lost, but would probably lose it again, and serve him right if he did! He had objected that he had never had anything to lose and never expected to have; but that was a vain remark, inasmuch as the time was fast coming when every one would have something—though indeed it was to be hoped Schinkel would keep it when he had got it. Eustache rebuked his wife for her levity, reminded her that their young friend cared nothing for old women’s tricks, and said he was sure Hyacinth had come to talk over a very different matter: the question—he was so good as to take an interest in it, as he had done in everything that related to them—of the terms which M. Poupin might owe it to himself, to his dignity, to a just though not exaggerated sentiment of his value, to make in accepting Mr. “Crook’s” offer of the foremanship of the establishment in Soho; an offer not yet formally enunciated but visibly in the air and destined—it would seem at least—to arrive within a day or two. The actual old titulary was going, late in the day, to set up for himself. The Frenchman intimated that before accepting any such proposal he must have the most substantial guarantees. “Il me faudrait des conditions très-particulières.” It was strange to Hyacinth to hear M. Poupin talk so comfortably about these high contingencies, the chasm by which he himself was divided from the future having suddenly doubled its width. His host and hostess sat down on either side of him, and Poupin gave a sketch, in somewhat sombre tints, of the situation in Soho, enumerating certain elements of decomposition which he perceivedto be at work there and which he would not undertake to deal with unless he should be given a completely free hand. Did Schinkel understand—and if so what was he grinning at? Did Schinkel understand that poor Eustache was the victim of an absurd hallucination and that there was not the smallest chance of his being invited to assume a lieutenancy? He had less capacity for tackling the British workman to-day than on originally beginning to rub shoulders with him, and old Crook had never in his life made a mistake, at least in the use of his tools. Hyacinth’s responses were few and mechanical, and he presently ceased to try and look as if he were entering into his host’s ideas.
“You’ve some news—you’ve some news about me,” he brought out abruptly to Schinkel. “You don’t like it, you don’t like to have to give it to me, and you came to ask our friends here if they wouldn’t help you out with it. But I don’t think they’ll assist you particularly, poor dears! Why do you mind? You oughtn’t to mind more than I do. That isn’t the way.”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit—qu’est-ce qu’il dit, le pauvre chéri?” Madame Poupin demanded eagerly; while Schinkel looked very hard at her husband and as to ask for wise direction.
“My dear child,vous vous faites des idées!” the latter exclaimed, again laying his hand on his young friend all soothingly.
But Hyacinth pushed away his chair and got up. “If you’ve anything to tell me it’s cruel of you to let me see it as you’ve done and yet not satisfy me.”
“Why should I have anything to tell you?” Schinkel almost whined.
“I don’t know that—yet I believe you have. I make out things, I guess things quickly. That’s my nature at all times, and I do it much more now.”
“You do it indeed; it’s very wonderful,” Schinkel feebly conceded.
“Mr. Schinkel, will you do me the pleasure to go away—I don’t care where: out of this house?” Madame Poupin broke out in French.
“Yes, that will be the best thing, and I’ll go with you,” said Hyacinth.
“If you’d retire, my child, I think it would be a service that you’d render us,” Poupin returned, appealing to him as with indulgence for his temper. “Won’t you do us the justice to believe you may leave your interests in our hands?”
Hyacinth earnestly debated; it was now perfectly clear to him that Schinkel had some sort of message for him, and his curiosity as to what it might be had become nearly intolerable. “I’m surprised at your weakness,” he observed as sternly as he could manage it to Poupin.
The Frenchman stared at him and then fell on his neck. “You’re sublime, my young friend—you’re truly sublime!”
“Will you be so good as to tell me what you’re going to do with that young man?” demanded Madame Poupin with a glare at Schinkel.
“It’s none of your business, my poor lady,” Hyacinth replied, disengaging himself from her husband. “Schinkel, I wish you’d just walk away with me.”
“Calmons-nous, entendons-nous, expliquons-nous!The situation’s very simple,” Poupin went on.
“I’ll go with you if it will give you pleasure,” said Schinkel very obligingly to Hyacinth.
“Then you’ll give me that letter, the sealed one, first!” Madame Poupin, erecting herself, declared to the German.
“My wife, you’rebien sotte!” Poupin groaned, lifting his hands and shoulders and turning away.
“I may be anything you like, but I won’t be a party—no, God help me, not to that!” the good woman protested, planted before Schinkel as to prevent his moving.
“If you’ve a letter for me you ought to give it to me, hang you!” said Hyacinth to Schinkel. “You’ve no right to give it to any one else.”
“I’ll bring it to you in your house, my good friend,” Schinkel replied with a vain, public wink which seemed to urge how Madame Poupin must be considered.
“Oh in his house—I’ll go to his house!” this lady cried. “I regard you, I’ve always regarded you, as my child,” she continued to Hyacinth, “and if this isn’t an occasion for a mother——!”
“It’s you who are making it an occasion. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hyacinth. He had been questioning Schinkel’s face and believed he found in it a queer, convulsed but honest appeal to depend on him. “I’ve disturbed you and I think I had better go away.”
Poupin had turned round again; he seized the young man’s arm eagerly, as to prevent his retiring without taking in his false position. “How can you care when you know everything’s changed?”
“What do you mean—everything’s changed?”
“Your opinions, your sympathies, your whole attitude. I don’t approve of it—je le constate. You’ve withdrawn your confidence from the people; you’ve said things on this spot, where you stand now, that have given pain to my wife and me.”
“If we didn’t love you we should say you had madly betrayed us!”—she quickly took her husband’s idea.
“Oh I shall never madly betray you,” Hyacinth rather languidly smiled.
“You’ll never hand us over—of course you thinkso. But you’ve no right to act for the people when you’ve ceased to believe in the people.Il faut être conséquent, nom de Dieu!” Poupin went on.
“You’ll give up all thoughts of acting for me—je ne permets pas ça!” grandly added his wife.
“The thing’s probably not of importance—only a little word of consideration,” Schinkel suggested soothingly.
“We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you!” shouted Poupin with magnificent heat.
“My poor friends, it’s you who have broken down, not I,” said Hyacinth. “I’m much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the inconsequence is yours. At all events good-night.”
He turned away from them and was leaving the room when Madame Poupin threw herself upon him as her husband had done a moment before, but in silence and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being stout and powerful she quickly got the better of him and pressed him to her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he said as soon as he could speak. “It’s for me to judge of my convictions.”
“We want you to do nothing, because weknowyou’ve changed,” Poupin insisted. “Doesn’t it stick out of you, in every glance of your eye and every breath of your lips? It’s only for that, because that alters everything.”
“Does it alter my sacred vow? There are some things in which one can’t change. I didn’t promise to believe; I promised to obey.”
“We want you to be sincere—that’s the great thing,” Poupin all edifyingly urged. “I’ll go to see them—I’ll make them understand.”
“Ah you should have done that before!” his poor wife flashed.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about, but I’ll allow no one to meddle in my affairs.” Hyacinth spoke now with vehemence; the scene was cruel to his nerves, which were not in a condition to bear it.
“When it’s a case of Hoffendahl it’s no good to meddle,” Schinkel gravely contributed.
“And pray who’s Hoffendahl and what authority hashegot?” demanded Madame Poupin, who had caught his meaning. “Who has put him over us all, and is there nothing to do but to lie down in the dust before him? Let him attend to his little affairs himself and not put them off on innocent children, no matter whether the poor dears are with us or against us.”
This protest went so far that Poupin clearly felt bound to recover a dignity. “He has no authority but what we give him; but you know how we respect him and that he’s one of the pure,ma bonne. Hyacinth can do exactly as he likes; he knows that as well as we do. He knows there’s not a feather’s weight of compulsion; he knows that for my part I long ago ceased to expect anything of him.”
“Certainly there’s no compulsion,” said Schinkel. “It’s to take or to leave. Onlytheykeep the books.”
Hyacinth stood there before the three with his eyes on the floor. “Of course I can do as I like, and what I like is what Ishalldo. Besides, what are we talking about with such sudden passion?” he asked, looking up. “I’ve no summons, I’ve no sign, I’ve no order. When the call reaches me it will be time to discuss it. Let it come or not come: it’s not my affair.”
“Ganz gewiss, it’s not your affair,” said Schinkel.
“I can’t think why M. Paul has never done anything, all this time, knowing that everything’s different now!” Madame Poupin threw in.
“Yes, my dear boy, I don’t understand our friend,”her husband remarked, watching Hyacinth with suspicious, contentious eyes.
“It’s none of his business any more than ours; it’s none of any one’s business!” Schinkel earnestly opined.
“Muniment walks straight; the best thing you can do is to imitate him,” said Hyacinth, trying to pass Poupin, who had placed himself before the door.
“Promise me only this—not to do anything till I’ve seen you first,” the Frenchman almost piteously begged.
“My poor old friend, you’re very weak.” And Hyacinth opened the door in spite of him and passed out.
“Ah well, if youarewith us that’s all I want to know!” the young man heard him call from the top of the stairs in a different voice, a tone of sudden, extravagant fortitude.
Hyacinth had hurried down and got out of the house, but without the least intention of losing sight of Schinkel. The odd behaviour of the Poupins was a surprise and annoyance, and he had wished to shake himself free from it. He was candidly astonished at the alarm they were so good as to feel for him, since he had never taken in their having really gone round to the faith that the note he had signed to Hoffendahl would fail to be presented. What had he said, what had he done, after all, to give them the right to fasten on him the charge of apostasy? He had always been a free critic of everything, and it was natural that on certain occasions in the little parlour at Lisson Grove he should have spoken in accordance with that freedom; but it was with the Princess alone that he had permitted himself really to rail at their grimy “inferiors” and give the full measure of his scepticism. He would have thought it indelicate to express contempt for the opinions of his old foreign friends, to whom associations that made them venerable were attached; and, moreover, for Hyacinth a change of heart was in the nature of things much more an occasion for a hush of publicity and a kind of retrospective reserve: it couldn’t prompt one to aggression or jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what could be said on the opposite side one didn’t want to boast of one’ssharpness—not even when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked like the ghosts of the old.
He lingered in the street a certain distance from the house, watching for Schinkel’s exit and prepared to remain there if necessary till the dawn of another day. He had said to the agitated trio just before that the manner in which the communication they looked so askance at should reach him was none of his business—it might reach him as it either smoothly or clumsily could. This was true enough in theory, but in fact his desire was overwhelming to know what Madame Poupin had meant by her allusion to a sealed letter, destined for him, in Schinkel’s possession—an allusion confirmed by Schinkel’s own virtual acknowledgment. It was indeed this eagerness that had driven him out of the house, for he had reason to believe the German wouldn’t fail him, and it galled his suspense to see the foolish Poupins try to interpose, to divert the missive from its course. He waited and waited in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow, categorical, Germanic way, and only reprehended him for having in the first place paltered with his sacred trust. Why hadn’t he come straight to him—whatever the mysterious document was—instead of talking it over with French featherheads? Passers were rare at this hour in Lisson Grove and lights mainly extinguished; there was nothing to look at but the vista of the low black houses, the dim interspaced street-lamps, the prowling cats who darted occasionally across the road and the terrible mysterious far-off stars, which appeared to him more than ever to see everything of our helplessness and tell nothing of help. A policeman creaked along on the opposite side of the way, looking across at him as he passed, and stood for some minutes on the corner as to keep an eye on him. Hyacinth had leisure to reflect that the day wasperhaps not far off when a policeman might have an eye on him for a very good reason—might walk up and down, pass and repass as he mounted guard on him.
It seemed horribly long before Schinkel came out of the house, but it was probably only half an hour. In the stillness of the street he heard Poupin let his visitor out, and at the sound he stepped back into the recess of a doorway on the same side, so that in looking out the Frenchman shouldn’t see him waiting. There was another delay, for the two stood talking together interminably and without seizable sounds on the doorstep. At last, however, Poupin went in again, and then Schinkel came down the street toward Hyacinth, who had felt sure he would proceed to that quarter, it being, as our young friend happened to know, that of his habitation. After he had heard Poupin go in he stopped and looked up and down; it was evidently his idea that Hyacinth would be awaiting him. Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in which he had flattened himself, and came straight to him, and the two men stood there face to face in the dusky, empty, sordid street.
“You didn’t let them have the letter?”
“Oh no, I retained it,” said Schinkel with his eyes more than ever like invisible points.
“Then hadn’t you better give it to me?”
“We’ll talk of that—we’ll talk.” Schinkel made no motion to satisfy him; having his hands in the pockets of his trousers and an appearance marked by the exasperating assumption that they had the whole night before them. As one of the “dangerous” he was too intolerably for order.
“Why should we talk? Haven’t you talked enough with those people all the evening? What have they to say about it? What right have you to detain a letter that belongs to me?”
“Erlauben Sie: I’ll light my pipe,” the German simply returned. And he proceeded to this business methodically, while Hyacinth’s pale, excited face showed in the glow of the match that ignited on the rusty railing beside them. “It isn’t yours unless I’ve given it you,” Schinkel went on as they walked along. “Be patient and I’ll tell you,” he added, passing his hand into his comrade’s arm. “Your way, not so? We’ll go down toward the Park.” Hyacinth tried to be patient and listened with interest when Schinkel added: “She tried to take it; she attacked me with her hands. But that wasn’t what I went for, to give it up.”
“Is she mad? I don’t recognise them”—and Hyacinth spoke as one scandalised.
“No, but they lofe you.”
“Why then do they try to disgrace me?”
“They think it no disgrace if you’ve changed.”
“That’s very well for her; but it’s pitiful for him, and I declare it surprises me.”
“Ohhecame round—he helped me to resist. He pulled his wife off. It was the first shock,” said Schinkel.
“You oughtn’t to have shocked them, my dear fellow,” Hyacinth pronounced.
“I was shocked myself—I couldn’t help it.”
“Lord, how shaky you all are!” He was more and more aware now of all the superiority still left him to cling to.
“You take it well. I’m very sorry. But it is a fine chance,” Schinkel went on, smoking away.
His pipe seemed for the moment to absorb him, so that after a silence Hyacinth resumed:
“Be so good as to remember that all this while I don’t in the least understand what you’re talking about.”
“Well, it was this morning, early,” said theGerman. “You know in my country we don’t lie in bett late, and what they do in my country I try to do everywhere. I think it’s good enough. In winter I get up of course long before the sun, and in summer I get up almost at the same time. I should see the fine picture of the sunrise if in London youcouldsee. The first thing I do of a Sunday is to smoke a pipe at my window, which is at the front, you remember, and looks into a little dirty street. At that hour there’s nothing to see there—you English are so slow to leave the bett. Not much, however, at any time; it’s not important, my bad little street. But my first pipe’s the one I enjoy most. I want nothing else when I have that pleasure. I look out at the new fresh light—though in London it’s not very fresh—and I think it’s the beginning of another day. I wonder what such a day will bring—if it will bring anything good to us poor devils. But I’ve seen a great many pass and nothing has come. This morning,doch, brought something—something at least to you. On the other side of the way I saw a young man who stood just opposite my house and looking up at my window. He looked at me straight, without any ceremony, and I smoked my pipe and looked at him. I wondered what he wanted, but he made no sign and spoke no word. He was a very neat young man; he had an umbrella and he wore spectacles. We remained that way, face to face, perhaps for a quarter of an hour, and at last he took out his watch—he had a watch too—and held it in his hand, just glancing at it every few minutes, as if to let me know that he would rather not give me the whole day. Then it came over me that he wanted to speak to me! You would have guessed that before, but we good Germans are slow. When we understand, however, we act; so I nodded at him to let him know I’dcome down. I put on my coat and my shoes, for I was only in my shirt and stockings—though of course I had on my trousers—and I went down into the street. When he saw me come he walked slowly away, but at the end of a little distance he waited for me. When I came near him I saw him to be a very neat young man indeed—very young and with a very nice friendly face. He was also very clean and he had gloves, and his umbrella was of silk. I liked him very much. He said I should come round the corner, so we went round the corner together. I thought there would be some one there waiting for us; but there was nothing—only the closed shops and the early light and a little spring mist that told that the day would be fine. I didn’t know what he wanted; perhaps it was some of our business—that’s what I first thought—and perhaps it was only a little game. So I was very careful; I didn’t ask him to come into the house. Yet I told him that he must excuse me for not understanding more quickly that he wished to speak with me; and when I said this he said it was not of consequence—he would have waited there, for the chance to see me, all day. I told him I was glad I had spared him that at least, and we had some very polite conversation. Hewasa very pleasant young man. But what he wanted was simply to put a letter in my hand; as he said himself he was only a good private postman. He gave me the letter—it was not addressed; and when I had taken it I asked him how he knew and if he wouldn’t be sorry if it should turn out that I was not the man for whom the letter was meant. But I didn’t give him a start; he told me he knew all it was necessary for him to know—he knew exactly what to do and how to do it. I think he’s a valuable member. I asked him if the letter required an answer, and hetold me he had nothing to do with that; he was only to put it in my hand. He recommended me to wait till I had gone into the house again to read it. We had a little more talk—always very polite; and he mentioned that he had come so early because he thought I might go out if he delayed, and because also he had a great deal to do and had to take his time when he could. It’s true he looked as if he had plenty to do—as if he was in some very good occupation. I should tell you he spoke to me always in English, but he was not English; he sounded his words only as if he had learnt them very well. I could see he has learnt everything very well. I suppose he’s not German—so he’d have spoken to me in German. But there are so many, of all countries! I said if he had so much to do I wouldn’t keep him; I would go to my room and open my letter. He said it wasn’t important; and then I asked him if he wouldn’t come into my room also and rest. I told him it wasn’t very handsome, my room—because he looked like a young man who would have for himself a very neat lodging. Then I found he meant it wasn’t important that we should talk any more, and he went away without even offering to shake hands. I don’t know if he had other letters to give, but he went away, as I have said, like a good postman on his rounds, without giving me any more information.”
It took Schinkel a long time to tell this story—his calm and conscientious thoroughness made no allowance for any painful acuteness of curiosity his auditor might feel. He went from step to step, treating all his points with lucidity and as if each would have exactly the same interest for his companion. The latter made no attempt to hurry him, and indeed listened now with a rare intensity of patience; for hewasinterested and it was moreoverclear to him that he was safe with Schinkel, who would satisfy him in time—wouldn’t worry him with attaching conditions to their business in spite of the mistake, creditable after all to his conscience, he had made in going for discussion to Lisson Grove. Hyacinth learned in due course that on returning to his apartment and opening the little packet of which he had been put into possession, Mr. Schinkel had found himself confronted with two separate articles: one a sealed letter superscribed with our young man’s name, the other a sheet of paper containing in three lines a request that within two days of receiving it he would hand the letter to the “young Robinson.” The three lines in question were signed D. H., and the letter was addressed in the same hand. Schinkel professed that he already knew the writing; it was the neat fist—neatest in its very flourishes—of Diedrich Hoffendahl. “Good, good,” he said, bearing as to soothe on Hyacinth’s arm. “I’ll walk with you to your door and I’ll give it to you there; unless you like better I should keep it till to-morrow morning, so that you may have a quiet sleep—I mean in case it might contain anything that will be unpleasant to you. But it’s probably nothing; it’s probably only a word to say you need think no more about your undertaking.”
“Why should it be that?” Hyacinth asked.
“Probably he has heard that you’ve cooled off.”
“That I’ve cooled off?” Our hero stopped him short; they had just reached the top of Park Lane. “To whom have I given a right to say that?”
“Ah well, if you haven’t, so much the better. It may be then for some other reason.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Schinkel,” Hyacinth returned as they walked along. And in a moment he went on: “What the devil did you go and tattle to the Poupins for?”
“Because I thought they’d like to know. Besides, I felt my responsibility; I thought I should carry it better if they knew it. And then I’m like them—I lofe you.”
Hyacinth made no answer to this profession; he only said the next instant: “Why didn’t your young man bring the letter directly to me?”
“Ah I didn’t ask him that! The reason was probably not complicated, but simple—that those who wrote it knew my address and didn’t know yours. And wasn’t I one of your backers?”
“Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Paul Muniment. Why wasn’t any communication made me through Paul Muniment?” And this now struck him as a question that would reverberate the more one thought of it.
“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend on it there are always good reasons. I should have preferred—yes—it had been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him——!” With which Schinkel’s lucidity dropped and lost itself in a thick cloud of smoke.
“Well, if they didn’t send to him——?” Hyacinth persisted.
“You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?”
At this Hyacinth looked up at him askance and caught an ambiguous, an evasive roll in his companion’s small, mild eye. “If it’s anything against him my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.”
“Well, it’s a possibility they’re not satisfied.”
“How do you mean it—not satisfied?”
“How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.”
“Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!”
“Ah my boy, depend upon it there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and in a moment he added: “Theyknow everything—everything. They’re like the great God of the believers: they’re searchers of hearts; and not only of hearts, but of all a man’s life—his days, his nights, his spoken, his unspoken words. Oh they go deep and they go straight!”
The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence, Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin had said when Schinkel, this evening, first told him what he had come to see him about. “Il vaut du galme—il vaut du galme”: that was the German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them over to himself several times and almost with the same accent. They had a certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was somehow salutary altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face while Hyacinth waited—just waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away and he watched without irritation the loving manner in which his mate shook the ashes out of the big smoked-out—so vehemently smoked-out—pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail of it that he said “Also, now for the letter” and, putting his hand inside his old waistcoat, drew forth the portentous missive. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face at this indication that he himself should have no knowledge—present and relieving at least—of its contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to attribute to it again some silly comfortable sense. Schinkel had now the shrewdness or the good taste not to repeatthat remark, and as the letter pressed against his heart Hyacinth felt it still more distinctly, not as a vain balm to apprehension, but as the very penetration of a fatal knife. What his friend did say in a moment was: “Now you’ve got it I’m very glad. It’s easier for me.” And he effected a poor strained grin.
“I should think so!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “If you hadn’t done your job you’d have paid for it.”
Schinkel mumbled as for accommodation while he lingered, and then as Hyacinth turned away, putting in his door-key, brought out: “And if you don’t do yours so will you.”
“Yes, as you say, they themselves go straight! Good-night.” And our young man let himself in.
The passage and staircase were never lighted and the lodgers either groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice or scraped the wall with a casual match the effect of which, in the milder gloom of day, was a rude immensity of laceration. Hyacinth’s room was a second floor back, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of which figured to him thus as quite squalid. He stopped and considered this new note of his crisis, his first impulse being to connect it with the case just presented by Schinkel—since what could anything that touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was doubtless all in order that some second portent should now await him there. Yet it occurred to him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora after tea he must simply have left a tallow candle burning, and that it showed a cynical spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so close-fisted for herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly it came over him that he had had a visitor in his absence and that the visitorhad taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking such poor sources of comfort as were perfectly just. When he opened the door this last prevision proved the correct one, though the figure in occupation was not one of the possible presences that had loomed. Mr. Vetch sat beside the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing; he showed a weary head on a supporting hand and eyes apparently closed. But he looked up when his young man appeared. “Oh I didn’t hear you; you’re very quiet.”
“I come in softly when I’m late, for the sake of the house—though I’m bound to say I’m the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides, you’ve been asleep,” Hyacinth said.
“No, I’ve not been asleep,” the old man returned. “I don’t sleep much nowadays.”
“Then you’ve been plunged in meditation.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking.” With which Mr. Vetch explained that the woman of the house had begun by refusing him admittance without proper assurances that his intentions were pure and that he was moreover the oldest friend Mr. Robinson had in the world. He had been there an hour; he had thought he might find him by coming late.
Mr. Robinson was very glad he had waited and was delighted to see him and expressed regret that he hadn’t known in advance of his visit, so that he might have something to offer him. He sat down on the bed, vaguely expectant; he wondered what special purpose had brought the fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. Yet he spoke but the truth in saying he was glad to see him. Hyacinth had come upstairs in such a pain of desire to be alone with the revelation carried in his pocket that the sight of a guest had given him positive relief by postponing solitude. The place where he had put his letter seemed to throbagainst his side, yet he was thankful to his old friend for forcing him still to leave it so. “I’ve been looking at your books,” the fiddler said; “you’ve two or three exquisite specimens of your own. Oh yes, I recognise your work when I see it; there are always certain little finer touches. You’ve a manner, as who should say, like one of the masters. With such a hand and such feeling your future’s assured. You’ll make a fortune and become famous.”
Mr. Vetch sat forward to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on his knees and looked very hard at his young host, as if to challenge him to dispute a statement so cheering and above all so authoritative. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to produce immediately the idea that the fiddler knew something, though there was no guessing how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even granting them capable of that baseness—all inconceivable in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into his mind an intense determination to dissemble before his visitor to the last: he might imagine what he liked, but he should have no grain of satisfaction—or rather should have only that of being led to believe if possible that his suspicions were “rot.” Hyacinth glanced over the books he had taken down from the shelf and admitted that they were pleasing efforts and that so long as one didn’t become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself our herotook the aggressive and asked him boldly if it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half-a-dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. “My dear old friend, you’ve something on your mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneousidée fixe. Why has it taken you to-night in particular? Whatever it is it has brought you here at an unnatural hour under some impulse you don’t or can’t name. I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it makesyoumiserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right—if he isn’t uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr. Vetch, don’t, don’t worry; the blanket’s up to my chin and I haven’t tumbled yet.”
He heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another person; the impudence of them in the grim conditions seemed to him somehow so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of a form of action in which impudence evidently must play a considerable part, and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way the old man looked out might have indicated that he too was able to take the measure of his perversity—judged him false to sit there declaring there was nothing the matter while a brand-new revolutionary commission burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr. Vetch said very mildly and as if he had really been reassured: “It’s wonderful how you read my thoughts. I don’t trust you; I think there are beastly possibilities. It’s not true at any rate that I come to look at you every five minutes. You don’t know how often I’ve resisted my fears—how I’ve forced myself to let you alone.”
“You had better let me come and live with youas I proposed after Pinnie’s death. Then you’ll have me always under your eyes,” Hyacinth smiled.
The old man got up eagerly and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid firm hands on his shoulders, holding him close. “Will you now really, my boy? Will you come to-night?”
“To-night, Mr. Vetch?”
“To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I couldn’t keep quiet; I was very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie—she seemed to be in the room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed in ghosts, in signs or messages from the dead, I should believe I had seen her. She wasn’t there for nothing; she was there to add her fears to mine—to talk to me about you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no use—she drove me out of the house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and stick and came down here. You may judge if I thought it important—I took a cab.”
“Ah why do you spend your money so foolishly?” Hyacinth asked in a tone of the most affectionate remonstrance.
“Will you come to-night?” said his companion for rejoinder, holding him still.
“Surely it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly you’re ill and nervous. You can take the bed and I’ll spend the night in the chair.”
The fiddler thought a moment. “No, you’ll hate me if I subject you to such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.”
“It won’t be a bit different in your room. There as here I shall have to sleep in a chair.”
“I’ll get another room. We shall be close together,” the fiddler went on.
“Do you mean you’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with your little house stuffed fulland your people all in bed? My poor Anastasius, you’re very bad; your reason totters on its throne,” said Hyacinth with excellent gaiety.
“Very good, we’ll get a room to-morrow. I’ll move into another house where there are two side by side.” His “boy’s” tone was evidently soothing to him.
“Comme vous y allez!” the young man continued. “Excuse me if I remind you that in case of my leaving this place I’ve to give a fortnight’s notice.”
“Ah you’re backing out!” Mr. Vetch lamented, dropping his hands.
“Pinnie wouldn’t have said that,” Hyacinth returned. “If you’re acting, if you’re speaking, at the behest of her pure spirit, you had better act and speak exactly as she’d have done. She’d have believed me.”
“Believed you? Believed what? What’s there to believe? If you’ll make me a promise I’ll believe that.”
“I’ll make you any promise you like,” said Hyacinth.
“Oh any promise I like—that isn’t what I want! I want just one very particular little proof—and that’s really what I came here for to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass all this time never to have got it out of you before. Give it to me now and I’ll go home quietly and leave you in peace.” Hyacinth, assenting in advance, requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then Mr. Vetch said: “Well, make me a promise—on your honour and as from the man you are, God help you, to the man I am—that you’ll never, under any circumstances whatever, ‘do’ anything.”
“‘Do’ anything——?”
“Anything those people expect of you.”
“Those people?” Hyacinth repeated.
“Ah don’t torment me—worried as I already am—with pretending not to understand!” the oldman wailed. “You know the people I mean. I can’t call them by their names, because I don’t know their names. But you do, and they knowyou.”
Hyacinth had no desire to torment him, but he was capable of reflecting that to enter into his thought too easily would be tantamount to betraying himself. “I suppose I know the people you’ve in mind,” he said in a moment; “but I’m afraid I don’t grasp the need of such solemnities.”
“Don’t they want to make use of you?”
“I see what you mean,” said Hyacinth. “You think they want me to touch off some train for them. Well, if that’s what troubles you, you may sleep sound. I shall never do any of their work.”
A radiant light came into the fiddler’s face; he stared as if this assurance were too fair for nature. “Do you take your oath to that? Never anything, anything, anything?”
“Never anything at all.”
“Will you swear it to me by the memory of that good woman of whom we’ve been speaking and whom we both loved?”
“My dear old Pinnie’s memory? Willingly.”
Mr. Vetch sank down in his chair and buried his face in his hands; the next moment his companion heard him sobbing. Ten minutes later he was content to take his departure and Hyacinth went out with him to look for another cab. They found an ancient four-wheeler stationed languidly at a crossing of the ways, and before he got into it he asked his young friend to kiss him. The young friend did so with a fine accolade and in the frank foreign manner, on both cheeks, and then watched the vehicle get itself into motion and rattle away. He saw it turn a neighbouring corner and then approached the nearest gas-lamp to draw from his breast-pocket the sealed letter Schinkel had given him.