“And Madame Grandoni then?” he asked, all loth to turn away. He felt pretty sure he should never knock at that door again, and the desire was strong in him to see once more, for the last time, the ancient, afflicted, titular “companion” of the Princess, whom he had always liked. She had struck him as ever in the slightly ridiculous position of a confidant of tragedy in whom the heroine, stricken with reserves unfavourable to the dramatic progression, should have ceased to confide.
“È andata via, caro signorino,” said Assunta, smiling at him as she held the door open.
“She has gone away? Bless me! when did she go?”
“It’s now five days, dear young sir. She has returned toourfine country.”
“Is it possible?” He felt it somehow as a personal loss.
“È possibilissimo!” Then Assunta added: “There were many times when she almost went; but this time,capisce——!” And without finishing her sentence this most exiled of Romans and expertest of tire-women indulged in a subtle, suggestive, indefinable play of expression to which hands and shoulders contributed as well as lips and eyebrows.
Hyacinth looked at her long enough to catch any meaning she might have wished to convey, butgave no sign of apprehending it. He only remarked gravely: “In short she’s off!”
“Eh, and the worst is she’ll probably never come back. She didn’t move, as she kept threatening, for a long time; but when at last she decided——!” And Assunta’s flattened hand, sweeping the air sidewise, figured the straightness of the old lady’s course. “Peccato!” she ended with a sigh.
“I should have liked to see her again—I should have liked to bid her good-bye.” He lingered, suddenly helpless, though, informed of the Princess’s own more temporary absence, he had no reason for remaining save the possibility she might reappear before he turned away. This possibility, however, was small, since it was only nine o’clock, the middle of the evening—too early an hour for her return if, as Assunta said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up and down the Crescent, gently swinging his stick, and became aware in a moment of some tender interest on the part of his humbler friend.
“You should have come back sooner; then perhaps Madama wouldn’t have gone,povera vecchia,” she rejoined in a moment. “It’s too many days since you’ve been here. She liked you—I know that.”
“She liked me, but she didn’t like me to come,” said Hyacinth. “Wasn’t that why she went—because we keep coming?”
“Ah that other one—with the long legs—yes. But you’re better.”
“The Princess doesn’t think so, and she’s the right judge,” Hyacinth smiled.
“Eh, who knows what she thinks? It’s not for me to say. But you had better come in and wait. I daresay she won’t be long, and she’ll be content to find you.”
Hyacinth wondered. “I’m not sure of that.” Then he asked: “Did she go out alone?”
“Sola, sola.Oh don’t be afraid; you were the first!” And Assunta, delightfully, frankly insidious, flung open the door of the little drawing-room.
He sat there nearly an hour, in the chair the Princess habitually used, under her shaded lamp, with a dozen objects round him which seemed as much a part of herself as if they had been folds of her dress or even tones of her voice. His thoughts rattled like the broken ice of a drink he had once wistfully seen mixed at an “American Bar,” but he was too tired for unrest; he had not been to work and had walked about all day to fill the time; so that he simply lay back there with his head on one of the Princess’s cushions, his feet on one of her little stools—one of the ugly ones that belonged to the house—and his respiration coming as quick as that of a man in sharp suspense. He was agitated beneath his fatigue, yet not because he was waiting for the Princess; a deeper source of emotion had been opened to him and he had not on the present occasion more mere “nervous” intensity than he had known at other moments of the past twenty hours. He had not closed his eyes the night before, and the day had not made up for that torment. A fever of reflexion had descended on him and the range of his imagination been wide. It whirled him through circles of immeasurable compass; and this is the reason for which, thinking of many things while he sat in the Princess’s place, he wondered why, after all, he had come to Madeira Crescent and what interest he could have in seeing the lady of the house. Wasn’t everything over between them and the link snapped which had for its brief hour bound them so closely together? And this not simply because for a long time now he had received no sign nor communication from her, no invitation to come back, no inquiry as to why his visits had stopped; not even because he had seen hergo in and out with Paul Muniment and it had suited Prince Casamassima to point to him the moral of her doing so; nor still because, quite independently of the Prince, he believed her to be more deeply absorbed in her acquaintance with that superior young man than she had ever been in her relations with himself. The ground of his approach, so far as he became conscious of it in his fitful meditations, could only be a strange, detached curiosity—strange and detached because everything else of his past had been engulfed in the abyss that opened before him when, after his separation from Mr. Vetch, he stood under the lamp in the paltry Westminster street. That had swallowed up all familiar feelings, and yet out of the ruin had sprung the impulse of which this vigil was the result.
The solution of his difficulty—he flattered himself he had arrived at it—involved a winding-up of his affairs; and though, even had no solution been required, he would have felt clearly that he had been dropped, yet since even in that case it would have been sweet to him to bid her good-bye, so at present the desire for some last vision of her own hurrying fate could still appeal to him. If things had not gone well for him he was still capable of wondering if they looked better for her. There rose in his mind all perversely, yet all humanly, a yearning need to pity her. These were odd feelings enough, and by the time half an hour had elapsed they had throbbed themselves into the stupor of exhaustion. While it came to him in how different a frame he was waiting now from that of his first visit in South Street he closed his eyes and lost himself. His unconsciousness lasted, he afterwards supposed, nearly half an hour; it ended in his feeling the lady of the house stand there before him. Assunta was behind and as he opened his eyes took from her the bonnet and mantle of which she divestedherself. “It’s charming of you to have waited,” the Princess said, smiling down at him with all her old kindness. “You’re very tired—don’t get up; that’s the best chair and you must keep it.” She made him remain where he was; she placed herself near him on a smaller seat; she declared she wasn’t tired herself, that she didn’t know what was the matter with her—nothing tired her now; she exclaimed on the time that had elapsed since he had last called, as if she were reminded of it simply by seeing him again; and she insisted that he should have some tea—he looked so much as if he needed it. She considered him with deeper attention and wished to know where he ailed—what he had done to use himself up; adding that she must begin to look after him again, since while she had had the care of him that kind of thing didn’t happen. In response to this Hyacinth made a great confession: he admitted he had stayed away from work and simply amused himself—amused himself by loafing about London all day. This didn’t pay—he had arrived at that wisdom as he grew older; it was doubtless a sign of increasing years when one felt one’s self finding wanton pleasures hollow and that to stick to one’s tools was not only more profitable but more refreshing. However, he did stick to them as a general thing: that was no doubt partly why, from the absence of the habit of it, a day off turned out rather a sell. Meanwhile, when he hadn’t seen her for some time he always on meeting the Princess again had a renewed, formidable sense of her beauty, and he had it to-night in an extraordinary degree. Splendid as that beauty had ever been it shone on this occasion, like a trimmed lamp, clearer and further, so that—if what was already supremely fine could be capable of greater refinement—it might have worked itself free of all earthly grossness and been purified and consecrated by her newlife. Her gentleness, when she turned it on, was quite divine—it had always the irresistible charm that it was the humility of a high spirit—and on this occasion she gave herself up to it. Whether it was because he had the consciousness of resting his eyes on her for the last time, or because she wished to be particularly pleasant to him in order to make up for having amid other preoccupations rather dropped him of late—it was probable the effect sprang from both causes—at all events the sight of each great, easy, natural, yet all so coercive, fact of her seemed no poorer a privilege than when, the other year, he had gone into her box at the play. She affected him as raising and upholding the weight that rested on him very much after the form of some high, bland caryatid crowned with a crushing cornice. He suffered himself to be coddled and absently, even if radiantly, smiled at, and his state of mind was such that it could produce no alteration of his pain to see that these were on the Princess’s part inexpensive gifts. She had sent Assunta to bring them tea, and when the tray arrived she gave him cup after cup with every grace of hospitality; but he had not sat with her a quarter of an hour before he was sure she scarcely measured a word he said to her or a word she herself uttered. If she had the best intention of being “balmy” by way of making up, she was still rather vague about what she was to make upfor. Two points became perfectly clear: first that she was thinking of something quite other than her present, her past, or her future relations with Hyacinth Robinson; second that he was superseded indeed. This was so completely the case that it didn’t even occur to her, evidently, how cruel the sense of supersession might be to one who was sick and sore. If she was charming to such weakness wasn’t it because she was good-natured and he hadbeen hanging off, and not because she had done him an injury? Perhaps after all she hadn’t, for he got the impression it might be no great loss of comfort to any shuffler not to constitute part of her intimate life to-day. It was manifest from things in her face, from her every movement and tone, and indeed from all the irradiation of her beauty, that this life was involving intimacies and efforts arduous all round. If he had called from curiosity about her success it was sufficiently implied for him that her success was good: she was living more than ever on high hopes and bold plans and far-reaching combinations. These things, from his own point of view, were not now so quite the secret of joy, and to be mixed up with them was perhaps not so much greater a sign that one hadn’t lived for nothing than the grim understanding he had in the interest of peace just arrived at with himself. She asked why he hadn’t been to her for so long, much as if this failure were only a vulgar form of social neglect; and she scarce seemed to note it either as a good or as a poor excuse when he said he had stayed away because he knew her to be deep in business. But she didn’t deny the impeachment; she admitted she had been busier than ever in her life before. She looked at him as if he would know what that meant, and he said he was very sorry for her.
“Because you think it’s all a mistake? Yes, I know that. Perhaps it is, but if so it’s a magnificent one. If you were scared about me three or four months ago I don’t know what you’d think to-day—if you knew! I’ve risked,” she yet all portentously simply stated, “everything.”
“Fortunately I don’t know anything,” he said.
“No indeed. How should you?”
“And to tell the truth,” he went on, “that’s really the reason I haven’t been back here till to-night. Ihaven’t wanted to know—I’ve feared and hated to know.”
“Then why did you come at last?”
“Well, out of the most illogical of curiosities.”
“I suppose then you’d like me to tell you where I’ve been to-night, eh?” she asked.
“No, my curiosity’s satisfied. I’ve learnt something—what I mainly wanted to know—without your telling me.”
She stared an instant. “Ah you mean whether Madame Grandoni had gone? I suppose Assunta told you.”
“Yes, Assunta told me, and I was sorry to hear it.”
The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been indeed a very awkward affair. “You may imagine how I feel it! It leaves me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an immense difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes of the world. At any rate she couldn’t put up with me any more; it appears I’m more and more of a scandal—and it was written!” On Hyacinth’s asking what the old lady would do she said: “I suppose she’ll go and live with my husband. Funny, isn’t it? that it should have always to be with one of us and that it should matter so little which.” Five minutes later she inquired of him if the same reason he had mentioned just before was the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr. Muniment had told her he hadn’t been near him and the sister for more than a month.
“No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy: because somehow, in the first place, it isn’t natural to feel uneasy about Paul, and because in the second, if it were, he never lets one see anything—of any effect or impression onhim. It’s simply the general sense of real divergence of view. When that divergence becomes sharp there are forms and lame pretences——”
“It’s best not to try to keep up? I see what you mean—when you’re grimly sincere. But you might go and see the sister.”
“I don’t like the sister,” Hyacinth frankly averred.
“Ah neither do I!” the Princess said; while her visitor remained conscious of the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with which she had named their common friend. But she was silent after this, and he judged he had stayed long enough and sufficiently taxed a preoccupied attention. He got up and was bidding her good-night when she suddenly brought out: “By the way, your not going to see so good a friend as Mr. Muniment because you disapprove to-day of his work suggests to me that you’ll be in an awkward fix, with your disapprovals, the hour you’re called upon to serve the cause according to your vow.”
“Oh of course I’ve thought of that,” Hyacinth smiled.
“And would it be indiscreet to ask what you’ve thought?”
“Ah so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.”
“I’ve never talked to you of this, because it seemed to me indelicate and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast for even so intimate a friend as I’ve been to have a right to meddle with it. But I’ve wondered much, seeing you take all the while less and less interest—in the real business, I mean, less and less—how you’d reconcile your change of heart with your meeting your engagement. I pity you, my poor friend,” she went on with a noble benignity, “for I can imagine nothing more terrible than to find yourself face to face with yourobligation and to feel at the same time the spirit originally prompting it dead within you.”
“Terrible, terrible, most terrible.” And he looked at her gravely.
“But I pray God it may never be your fate!” The Princess had a pause, after which she added: “I see you feel it. Heaven help us all! Why shouldn’t I tell you when I worry?” she went on. “A short time ago I had a visit from Mr. Vetch.”
“It was kind of you to see him,” Hyacinth said.
“He was delightful, I assure you. But do you know what he came for? To beg me on his knees to snatch you away.”
“Away from what?”
“From the danger that hangs over you. He was most touching.”
“Oh yes, he has talked to me about it,” our young man said. “He has picked up the idea, but is utterly at sea. And how did he expect you’d be able to snatch me?”
“He left that to me; he had only a general—and such a flattering—belief in my possible effect on you.”
“And he thought you’d set it in motion to make me back out? He does you injustice. You wouldn’t!” Hyacinth finely laughed. “In that case, taking one false position with another, yours would be no better than mine.”
“Oh, speaking seriously, I’m perfectly quiet about you and about myself. I know you won’t be called,” the Princess returned.
“May I be told how you know it?”
She waited but an instant. “Mr. Muniment keeps me informed.”
“And how doesheknow?”
“We’ve information. My poor dear friend,” the Princess went on, “you’re so much out of it now that if I were to tell you I fear you wouldn’t understand.”
“Yes, no doubt I’m out of it; but I still have a right to say, all the same, in contradiction to your charge of a moment ago, that I take interest in the ‘real business’ exactly as much as I ever did.”
“My poor Hyacinth, my dear, infatuated, little aristocrat, was that ever very much?” she asked.
“It was enough, and it’s still enough, to make me willing to lay down my life for anything that will clearly help.”
“Yes, and of course you must decide for yourself what that is—or rather what it’s not.”
“I didn’t decide when I gave my promise. I agreed to abide by the decision of others,” Hyacinth answered.
“Well, you said just now that in relation to this business of yours you had thought of many things,” his friend pursued. “Have you ever by chance thought of anything thatwilldo their work?”
“Their work?”
“The people’s.”
“Ah you call me fantastic names, but I’m one of them myself!” he cried.
“I know what you’re going to say,” the Princess broke in. “You’re going to say it will help them to do what you do—to do their work themselves and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what do you propose for the thousands and hundreds of thousands for whom no work—on the overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be found? There’s less and less work in the world, and there are more and more people to do the little there is. The old ferocious selfishnessmustcome down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must just be assisted.”
The tone in which she spoke made his heart beat fast, and there was something so inspiring in the great union of her beauty, her sincerity and her energy that the image of a heroism not less greatflashed up again before him in all the splendour it had lost—the idea of a tremendous risk and an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at such an hour, one who could shine like silver and ring like crystal, made every scruple a poor prudence and every compunction a cowardice. “I wish to God I could see it as you see it!” he wailed after he had looked at her some seconds in silent admiration.
“I see simply this: that what we’re doing is at least worth trying, and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means, will bethink themselves of anything else, ontheirhead be the responsibility, ontheirhead be the blood!”
“Princess,” said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he trembled, “dearest Princess, if anything should happen toyou——!” But his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings: they seemed to him worse than anything he had imagined for himself.
She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. “To me! And pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?”
“Simply because there’s no one in the world and has never been any one in the world like you.”
“Oh thank you!” said the Princess impatiently. And she turned from him as with a beat of great white wings that raised her straight out of the bad air of the personal. It took her up too high, it put an end to their talk; expressing an indifference to what it might interest him to think of her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to his eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent his head low over the hand he had taken to kiss; after which he left the room without looking at her.
“I’ve received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to her the next evening as soon as he came into the room. He announced this truth with an unadorned directness as well as with a freedom of manner that showed his visit to be one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn’t it have been by your old lady?” Muniment returned. “He must have met her in Paris. It’s from Paris he writes.”
“What an incorrigible cad!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t see that—for writing to me. I’ve his letter in my pocket and I’ll show it to you if you like.”
“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched.”
“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked with one of the easy sequences of a man who sees things as they are.
The Princess considered. “Yes, I make an exception for that, because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.”
“I should think on the contrary it would gratify him by showing you in a state of weakness and dependence.”
“Not when he knows I don’t use it for myself. What exasperates him is that it’s devoted to endswhich he hates almost as much as he hates me and yet which he can’t call selfish.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” said Muniment with the same pleasant reasonableness—that of a man who has mastered not two or three but all the possible aspects of a question. “His letter satisfies me of that.” The Princess stared at this and asked what he was coming to—if he were leading up to the hint that she should go back and live with her husband. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to advise it,” he replied; “when I’ve so much benefit from seeing you here on your present footing, that wouldn’t sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy you’ll go before very long.”
“And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?”
“On this plain fact—that you’ll have nothing to live upon. You decline to read the Prince’s letter, but if you were to look at it it would give you evidence of what I mean. He informs me that I need count on no more supplies from your hands, since you yourself will receive no more.”
“He addresses you in those plain terms?”
“I can’t call them very plain, because the letter’s in French and I naturally have had a certain difficulty in making it out, in spite of my persevering study of the tongue and the fine example set me by poor Robinson. But that appears to be the gist of the matter.”
“And you can repeat such an insult to me without the smallest apparent discomposure? You’re indeed the most extraordinary of men!” the Princess broke out.
“Why is it an insult? It’s the simple truth. I do take your money,” Muniment said.
“You take it for a sacred cause. You don’t take it for yourself.”
“The Prince isn’t obliged to look at that,” he answered amusedly.
His companion had a pause. “I didn’t know you were on his side.”
“Oh you know on what side I am!”
“What doesheknow? What business has he to address you so?”
“I suppose, as I tell you, that he knows from Madame Grandoni. She has told him I’ve great influence with you.”
“Ah she was welcome to tell him that!” the Princess tossed off.
“His reasoning, therefore, has been that when I find you’ve nothing more to give to the cause I’ll let you go.”
“Nothing more? And does he countmemyself, and every pulse of my being, every capacity of my nature, as nothing?” the Princess cried with shining eyes.
“Apparently he thinksIdo.”
“Oh as for that, after all, I’ve known you care far more for my money than for me. But it has made no difference to me,” she finely said.
“Then you see that by your own calculation the Prince is right.”
“My dear sir,” Muniment’s hostess replied, “my interest in you never depended on your interest in me. It depended wholly on a sense of your great destinies. I suppose that what you began to tell me,” she went on, “is that he stops my allowance.”
“From the first of next month. He has taken legal advice. It’s now clear—so he tells me—that you forfeit your settlements.”
“Can’t I take legal advice too?” she demanded. “I can fight that to the last inch of ground. I can forfeit my settlements only by an act of my own. The act that led to our separation washisact; he turned me out of his house by physical violence.”
“Certainly,” said her visitor, displaying even in this simple discussion his easy aptitude for argument; “but since then therehavebeen acts of your own——!” He stopped a moment, smiling; then went on: “Your whole connexion with a league working for as great ends as you like, but for ends and by courses necessarily averse to the eye of day and the observation of the police—this constitutes an act; and so does your exercise of the pleasure, which you appreciate so highly, of feeding it with money extorted from an old Catholic and princely family. You know how little it’s to be desired that these matters should come to light.”
“Why in the world need they come to light? Allegations in plenty of course he’d have, but not a particle of proof. Even if Madame Grandoni were to testify against me, which is inconceivable, she wouldn’t be able to produce a definite fact.”
“She’d be able to produce the fact that you had a little bookbinder staying for a month in your house.”
“What has that to do with it?” she promptly asked. “If you mean that that’s a circumstance which would put me in the wrong as against the Prince, is there not on the other side this marked detail that while our young friend was staying with me Madame Grandoni herself, a person of the highest and most conspicuous respectability, never saw fit to withdraw from me her countenance and protection? Besides, why shouldn’t I have my bookbinder just as I might have—and the Prince should surely appreciate my consideration in not having—my physician and my chaplain?”
“Am I not your chaplain?” Muniment again amusedly inquired. “And does the bookbinder usually dine at the Princess’s table?”
“Why not—when he’s an artist? In the oldtimes, I know, artists dined with the servants; but not to-day.”
“That would be for the court to appreciate,” he said. And in a moment he added: “Allow me to call your attention to the fact that Madame Grandonihasleft you—haswithdrawn her countenance and protection.”
“Ah but not for Hyacinth!” the Princess returned in a tone which would have made the fortune of an actress if an actress could have caught it.
“For the bookbinder or for the chaplain, it doesn’t matter. But that’s only a detail. In any case,” he noted, “I shouldn’t in the least care for your going to law.”
The Princess rested her eyes on him a while in silence and at last replied: “I was speaking just now of your great future, but every now and then you do something, you say something, that makes me really doubt you. It’s when you seem afraid. That’s terribly against your being a first-rate man.”
“Ah I know you’ve thought me little better than a smooth sneak from the first of your knowing me. But what does it matter? I haven’t the smallest pretension to being a first-rate man.”
“Oh you’re deep and you’re provoking!” she said with sombre eyes.
“Don’t you remember,” he went on without heeding this rich comment, “don’t you remember how the other day you accused me of being not only a coward but a traitor; of playing false, of wanting, as you said, to back out?”
“Most distinctly. How can I help its coming over me at times that you’ve incalculable ulterior views and are but consummately using me—but consummately using us all? Well, I don’t care!”
“No, no; I’m genuine,” said Muniment simply, yet in a tone which might have implied that theirdiscussion was idle. And he made a transition doubtless too abrupt for perfect civility. “The best reason in the world for your not going to law with your husband is this: that when you haven’t a penny left you’ll be obliged to go back and live with him.”
“How do you mean, when I haven’t a penny left? Haven’t I my own property?” the Princess demanded.
“The Prince assures me you’ve drawn on your own property at such a rate that the income to be derived from it amounts, to his positive knowledge, to no more than a thousand francs—forty pounds—a year. Surely with your habits and tastes you can’t live on forty pounds. I should add that your husband implies that your property originally was rather a small affair.”
“You’ve the most extraordinary tone,” she answered gravely. “What you appear to wish to express is simply this: that from the moment I’ve no more money to give you I’m of no more value than the washed-out tea-leaves in that pot.”
Muniment looked down a while at his substantial boot. His companion’s words had brought a flush to his cheek; he appeared to admit to himself and to her that at the point their conversation had reached there was a natural difficulty in his delivering himself. But presently he raised his head, showing a face still slightly embarrassed, but more for her than for himself. “I’ve no intention whatever of saying anything harsh or offensive to you, but since you challenge me perhaps it’s well that I should let you know how inevitably Idoconsider that in giving your money—or rather your husband’s—to our business you gave the most valuable thing you had to contribute.”
“This is the day of plain truths!” she rang out with a high mildness. “You don’t count then anydevotion, any intelligence that I may have placed at your service—even rating my faculties modestly?”
“I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one’s nothing without the other. You’re not trusted—well, where it makes the difference.”
“Not trusted!” the Princess repeated with her splendid stare. “Why I thought I could be hanged to-morrow!”
“They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You’re liable to be weary of us,” he went on; “and indeed I think you’re weary even now.”
“Ah youmustbe a first-rate man—you’re such a brute!” she replied, noticing, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced “weary”weery.
“I didn’t say you were weary ofme,” he said with a certain awkwardness. “But you can never live poor—you don’t begin to know the meaning of it.”
“Oh no, I’m not tired of you,” she declared as if she wished she were. “In a moment you’ll make me cry with rage, and no man has done that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,” she added in a different manner. “You yourself recognised it just now in speaking of the insignificant character of my fortune.”
“It had to be a fortune to be insignificant,” Muniment smiled. “You’ll go back to your husband!”
To this she made no answer, only looking at him with a high, gradual clearance of her heat. “I don’t see after all why they trust you more than they trust me,” she said at last.
“I am not sure they do. I’ve heard something this evening that suggests that.”
“And may one know what it is?”
“A communication which I should have expected to be made through me has been made through another person.”
“A communication——?”
“To Hyacinth Robinson.”
“To Hyacinth——?” The Princess sprang up; she had turned pale in a moment.
“He has got his billet, but they didn’t send it through me.”
“Do you mean his ‘call’? He was here last night,” the Princess said.
“A fellow, a worker, named Schinkel, a German—whom you don’t know, I think, but who was originally a witness, with me and another, of his undertaking—came to see me this evening. It was through him the call came, and he put Hyacinth up to it on Sunday night.”
“On Sunday night?” The Princess stared. “Why he was here yesterday, and he talked of it and told me nothing.”
“That was quite right of him, bless his pluck!” Muniment returned.
She closed her eyes a moment and when she opened them again he had risen and was standing before her. “What do they want him to do?” she asked.
“I’m like Hyacinth; I think I had better not tell you—at least till it’s over.”
“And when will it be over?”
“They give him several days and, I believe, minute instructions—with, however,” Paul went on, “considerable discretion in respect to seizing his chance. The thing’s made remarkably easy for him. All this I know from Schinkel, who himself knew nothing on Sunday, being merely the fellow to see he got the thing, and who saw him in fact yesterday morning.”
“Schinkel trusts you then?” the Princess remarked.
Muniment looked at her steadily. “Yes, but hewon’t trust you. Hyacinth’s to receive a card of invitation to a certain big house,” he explained, “a card with the name left in blank, so that he may fill it out himself. It’s to be good for each of two grand parties which are to be given at a few days’ interval. That’s why they give him the job—because at a grand party he’ll look in his place.”
“He’ll like that,” she said musingly—“repaying hospitality with a pistol-shot.”
“If he doesn’t like it he needn’t do it.”
She made no return to this, but in a moment said: “I can easily find out the place you mean—the big house where two parties are to be given at a few days’ interval and where the master—or is it to be the principal guest?—is worth your powder.”
“Easily, no doubt. And do you want to warn him?”
“No, I want to do the business myself first, so that it won’t be left for another. If Hyacinth will look in his place at a grand party shall not I look still more in mine? And as I know the individual I should be able to approach him without exciting the smallest suspicion.”
Muniment appeared for a little to consider her suggestion as if it were practical and interesting; but presently he answered quietly enough: “To fall by your hand would be too good for him.”
“However he falls, will it be useful, valuable?” the Princess asked.
“It’s worth trying. He’s a very bad institution.”
“And don’t you mean to go near Hyacinth?”
“No, I wish to leave him free.”
“Ah, Paul Muniment,” she said, “youarea first-rate man!” She sank down on the sofa and sat looking up at him. “In God’s name, why have you told me this?”
“So that you shall not be able to throw it up at me later that I haven’t.”
She flung herself over, burying her face in the cushions, and remained so for some minutes in silence. He watched her a while without speaking, then at last brought out: “I don’t want to aggravate you, but youwillgo back!” The words failed to cause her even to raise her head, and after a moment he—as for the best attenuation of any rudeness—stepped out of the room.
That she had done with him, done with him for ever, was to remain the most vivid impression Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira Crescent the night before. He went home and threw himself on his narrow bed, where the consolation of sleep again descended on him. But he woke up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day was a quick revival of pain. He was overpast, he had become vague, he was extinct. Things Sholto had said came back to him, and the compassion of foreknowledge Madame Grandoni had shown him from the first. Of Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder if this great fellow-worker knew. An insurmountable desire to do more than justice to him for the very reason that there might be a temptation to do less forbade him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely asked himself ifhewould ever be superseded; but this possibility faded away in a stronger light—a dazzling vision of some great tribuneship which swept before him now and again and in which the figure of the Princess herself seemed merged and blurred. When full morning came at last and he got up it brought with it in the restlessness making it impossible he should remain in his room a return of that beginning of an answerless question, “After all, after all——?” which the Princess had planted there the night before when she spoke sobravely in the name of the Revolution. “After all, after all, since nothing else was tried or would apparently ever be tried——!” He had a sense that his mind, made up as he believed, would fall to pieces again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was already familiar—the horror of the public reappearance, in his person, of the imbrued hands of his mother. This loathing of the idea of arepetitionhad not been sharp, strangely enough, till he felt the great, hard hand on his shoulder; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance to act for the “party of action” had not been the fear of a personal stain, but the simple growth of yearning observation. Yet now the idea of the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to make service impossible. It passed before him, or rather it stayed, like a blow dealt back at his mother, already so hideously disfigured; to suffer it to start out in the life of her son was in a manner to place her own forgotten, redeemed pollution again in the eye of the world. The thought that was most of all with him was that he had time, he had time; he was grateful for that and saw a delicacy, a mercy, in their having given him a margin, not condemned him to be pressed by the hours. He had another day, he had two days, he might take three, he might take several. He knew he should be terribly weary of them before they were over; but for that matter they would be over whenever he liked.
Anyhow he went forth again into the streets, into the squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to steep himself yet once again in the great, indifferent city he so knew and so loved and which had had so many of his smiles and tears and confidences. The day was grey and damp, though no rain fell, and London had never appeared to him to wear more proudly and publicly the stamp of herimperial history. He passed slowly to and fro over Westminster bridge and watched the black barges drift on the great brown river; looked up at the huge fretted palace that rose there as a fortress of the social order which he, like the young David, had been commissioned to attack with a sling and pebble. At last he made his way to Saint James’s Park and wandered and pointlessly sat. He watched the swans as from fascination and followed the thoroughfare that communicates with Pimlico. He stopped here presently and came back again; then, over the same pavement, he retraced his steps westward. He looked in the windows of shops—looked especially into the long, glazed expanse of that establishment in which at that hour of the day Millicent Henning discharged superior functions. Her image had descended on him after he came out, and now it moved before him as he went, it clung to him, it refused to quit him. He made in truth no effort to drive it away; he held fast to it in return, and it murmured strange things in his ear. She had been so jolly to him on Sunday; she was such a strong, obvious simple nature, with such a generous breast and such a freedom from the sophistries of civilisation. All he had ever liked in her came back to him now with a finer air, and there was a moment, during which he again made time on the bridge that spans the lake in the Park, seemingly absorbed in the pranks of a young ass in a boat, when he asked himself if at bottom he hadn’t liked her better almost than any one. He tried to think he had, he wanted to think he had, and he seemed to see the look her eyes would have if he should swear to her he had. Something of that sort had really passed between them on Sunday, only the business coming up since had brushed it away. Now the taste of the vague, primitive comfort his Sunday had given him revived,and he asked himself if he mightn’t have a second and even a deeper draught of it. After he had thought he couldn’t again wish for anything he found himself wishing he might believe there was something Millicent could do for him. Mightn’t she help him—mightn’t she even extricate him? He was looking into a window—not that of her own shop—when a vision rose before him of a quick flight with her, for an undefined purpose, to an undefined spot; and he was glad at that moment to have his back turned to the people in the street, because his face suddenly grew red to the tips of his ears. Again and again, all the same, he indulged in the reflexion that spontaneous, uncultivated minds often have inventions, inspirations. Moreover, whether Millicent should have any or not, he might at least feel the firm roundness of her arms about him. He didn’t exactly know what good this would do him or what door it would open, but he should like it. The sensation was not one he could afford to defer, but the nearest moment at which he should be able to enjoy it would be that evening. He had thrown over everything, but she herself would be busy all day; nevertheless it would be a gain, it would be a kind of foretaste, to see her earlier, to have three words with her. He wrestled with the temptation to go into her haberdasher’s, because he knew she didn’t like it—he had tried it once of old; as the visits of gentlemen even when ostensible purchasers (there were people watching about who could tell who was who) compromised her in the eyes of her employers. This was not an ordinary case, however; and though he hovered a long time, undecided, embarrassed, half-ashamed, at last he went in as by the force of the one, the last, sore personal need left him. He would just make an appointment with her, and a glance of the eye and a single word would suffice.
He remembered his way through the labyrinth of the shop; he knew her department was on the upper floor. He walked through the place, which was crowded, as if he had as good a right as any one else; and as he had entertained himself on rising with putting on his holiday garments, in which he made such a tidy figure, he was not suspected of any purpose more nefarious than that of looking for some nice thing to give a lady. He ascended the stairs and found himself in a large room where made-up articles were ranged and where, though there were twenty people in it, a glance told him he shouldn’t find Millicent. She was perhaps in the next one, into which he passed by a wide opening. Here also were numerous purchasers, most of them ladies; the men were but three or four and the disposal of the wares all committed to neat young women attired in black dresses with long trains. It struck him at first that the young woman he sought was even here not within sight, and he was turning away to look elsewhere when he suddenly noted a tall gentleman who stood in the middle of the room and who was none other than Captain Sholto. It next became plain to him that the person standing upright before the Captain, as still as a lay-figure and with her back turned to himself, was the object of his own quest. In spite of her averted face he instantly “spotted” Millicent; he knew her shop-attitude, the dressing of her hair behind and the long grand lines of her figure draped in the last new thing. She was showing off this treasure to the Captain, who was lost in contemplation. He had been beforehand with Hyacinth as a false purchaser, but he imitated a real one better than our young man, as, with his eyes travelling up and down the front of their beautiful friend’s person, he frowned consideringly and rubbed his lower lip slowly with his walking-stick. Millicent stood admirably still—the backview of the garment she displayed was magnificent. Hyacinth stood for a minute as still as she. By the end of that minute he was convinced Sholto saw him, and for an instant he thought him about to make Milly do as much. But Sholto only looked at him very hard a few seconds, not telling her he was there; to enjoy that satisfaction he would wait till the interloper had gone. Hyacinth gazed back at him for the same length of time—what these two pairs of eyes said to each other requires perhaps no definite mention—and then turned away.
That evening about nine o’clock the Princess Casamassima drove in a hansom to Hyacinth’s lodgings in Westminster. The door of the house was a little open and a man stood on the step, smoking his big pipe and looking up and down. The Princess, seeing him while she was still at some distance, had hoped he was Hyacinth, but he proved a different figure indeed from her devoted young friend. He had not a forbidding countenance, but he faced her very directly as she descended from her hansom and approached the door. She was used to the last vulgarity of stare and didn’t mind it; she supposed him one of the lodgers in the house. He edged away to let her pass and watched her while she tried to twist life into the limp bell-pull beside the door. It gave no audible response, so that she said to him: “I wish to ask for Mr. Hyacinth Robinson. Perhaps you can tell me——”
“Yes, I too,” the man strangely smirked. “I’ve come also for that.”
She seemed to wonder about him. “I think you must be Mr. Schinkel. I’ve heard of you.”
“You know me by my bad English,” her interlocutor said with a shade of benevolent coquetry.
“Your English is remarkably good—I wish Ispoke German as well. Only just a hint of an accent, and evidently an excellent vocabulary.”
“I think I’ve heard also of you,” Schinkel returned with freedom.
“Yes, we know each other in our circle, don’t we? We’re all brothers and sisters.” The Princess was anxious, was in a fever; but she could still relish the romance of standing in a species of back slum and fraternising with a personage so like a very tame horse whose collar galled him. “Then he’s at home, I hope; he’s coming down to you?” she went on.
“That’s what I don’t know. I’m waiting.”
“Have they gone to call him?”
Schinkel looked at her while he puffed his pipe. “I’ve galled him myself, but he won’t zay.”
“How do you mean he won’t say?”
“His door’s locked. I’ve knocked many times.”
“I suppose he is out,” said the Princess.
“Yes, he may be out,” Schinkel remarked judicially.
They stood a moment face to face, after which she asked: “Have you any doubt of it?”
“Ohes kann sein. Only the woman of the house told me five minutes ago that he came in.”
“Well then he probably went out again.”
“Yes, but she didn’t hear him.”
The Princess reflected and was conscious she was flushing. She knew what Schinkel knew about their young friend’s actual situation and she wished to be very clear with him and to induce him to be the same with her. She was rather baffled, however, by the sense that he was cautious—justly cautious. He was polite and inscrutable, quite like some of the high personages—ambassadors and cabinet ministers—whom she used to meet in the great world. “Has the woman been here in the house ever since?” she asked in a moment.
“No, she went out for ten minutes half an hour ago.”
“Surely then he may have gone out again in that time,” the Princess argued.
“That’s what I’ve thought. It’s also why I’ve waited here,” said Schinkel. “I’ve nothing to do,” he added serenely.
“Neither have I,” she returned. “We can wait together.”
“It’s a pity you haven’t some nice room,” the German suggested with sympathy.
“No indeed; this will do very well. We shall see him the sooner when he comes back.”
“Yes, but perhaps it won’t be for long.”
“I don’t care for that; I’ll wait. I hope you don’t object to my company,” she smiled.
“It’s good, it’s good,” Schinkel responded through his smoke.
“Then I’ll send away my cab.” She returned to the vehicle and paid the driver, who said with expression “Thank you, my lady” and drove off.
“You gave him too much,” observed Schinkel when she came back.
“Oh he looked like a nice man. I’m sure he deserved it.”
“It’s very expensive,” Schinkel went on sociably.
“Yes, and I’ve no money—but it’s done. Was there no one else in the house while the woman was away?” the Princess resumed.
“No, the people are out; she only has single men. I asked her that. She has a daughter, but the daughter has gone to see her cousin. The mother went only a hundred yards, round the corner there, to buy a pennyworth of milk. She locked this door and put the key in her pocket; she stayed at the grocer’s, where she got the milk, to have a little conversation with a friend she met there. Youknow ladies always stop like that—nicht wahr?It was half an hour later that I came. She told me he was at home, and I went up to his room. I got no sound, as I have told you. I came down and spoke to her again, and she told me what I say.”
“Then you determined to wait, as I’ve done,” said the Princess.
“Oh yes, I want to see him.”
“So do I, very much.” She said nothing more for a minute, but then added: “I think we want to see him for the same reason.”
“Das kann sein—das kann sein.”
The two continued to stand there in the brown evening, and they had some further conversation of a desultory and irrelevant kind. At the end of ten minutes the Princess broke out in a low tone, laying her hand on her companion’s arm: “Mr. Schinkel, this won’t do. I’m intolerably worried.”
“Yes, that’s the nature of ladies,” the German sagely answered.
“I want to go up to his room,” the Princess said. “You’ll be so good as to show me where it is.”
“It will do you no good if he’s not there.”
“I’m not sure he’s not there.”
“Well, if he won’t speak it shows he likes better not to have visitors.”
“Oh he may like to havemebetter than he does you!” she frankly suggested.
“Das kann sein—das kann sein.” But Schinkel made no movement to introduce her into the house.
“There’s nothing to-night—you know what I mean,” she remarked with a deep look at him.
“Nothing to-night?”
“At the Duke’s. The first party’s on Thursday, the other next Tuesday.”
“Schön.I never go to parties,” said Schinkel.
“Neither do I.”
“Except thatthisis a kind of party—you and me,” he dreadfully grinned.
“Yes, and the woman of the house doesn’t approve of it.” The footstep of a jealous landlady had become audible in the passage, through the open door, which was presently closed from within with a little reprehensive bang. Something in this touch appeared to quicken exceedingly the Princess’s impatience and fear; the danger of being warned off made her wish still more uncontrollably to arrive at the satisfaction she had come for. “For God’s sake, Mr. Schinkel, take me up there. If you won’t I’ll go alone,” she pleaded.
Her face was white now and, it need hardly be added, all beautiful with anxiety. The German took in this impression and then, with no further word, turned and reopened the door and went forward, followed closely by his companion.
There was a light in the lower region which tempered the gloom of the staircase—as high, that is, as the first floor; the ascent the rest of the way was so dark that the pair went slowly and Schinkel led his companion by the hand. She gave a suppressed exclamation as she rounded a sharp turn in the second flight. “Good God, is that his door—with the light?”
“Yes, you can see under it. There was a light before,” he said without confusion.
“And why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I thought it would worry you.”
“And doesn’t it worryyou?”
“A little, but I don’t mind,” Schinkel professed. “Very likely he may have left it.”
“He doesn’t leave candles!” she returned with vehemence. She hurried up the few remaining steps to the door and paused there with her ear against it.Her hand grasped the handle and turned it, but the door resisted. Then she panted to her companion: “We must go in—we must go in!”
“But what will you do when it’s locked?” he contended.
“You must break it down.”
“It’s very expensive,” said Schinkel.
“Don’t be abject!” cried the Princess. “In a house like this the fastenings are worth nothing; they’ll easily yield.”
“And if he’s not there—if he comes back and finds what we’ve done?”
She looked at him a moment through the darkness, which was mitigated only by the small glow proceeding from the chink. “Heisthere! Before God he’s there!”
“Schön, schön,” said her friend as if he felt the contagion of her own dread but was deliberating and meant to remain calm. She assured him that one or two vigorous thrusts with his shoulder would burst the bolt—certain to be some wretched morsel of tin—and she made way for him to come close. He did so, he even leaned against the door, but he gave no violent push, and the Princess waited with her hand against her heart. Schinkel apparently was still deliberating. At last he gave a low sigh. “I know they find him the pistol, it’s only for that,” he mumbled; and the next moment she saw him sway sharply to and fro in the gloom. She heard a crack and saw the lock had yielded. The door collapsed: they were in the light; they were in a small room which looked full of things. The light was that of a single candle on the mantel; it was so poor that for a moment she made out nothing definite. Before that moment was over, however, her eyes had attached themselves to the small bed. There was something on it—something black, something ambiguous, somethingoutstretched. Schinkel held her back, but only an instant; she saw everything and with the very vision flung herself, beside the bed, upon her knees. Hyacinth lay there as if asleep, but there was a horrible thing, a mess of blood, on the counterpane, in his side, in his heart. His arm hung limp beside him, downwards, off the narrow couch; his face was white and his eyes were closed. So much Schinkel saw, but only for an instant; a convulsive movement of the Princess, bending over the body while a strange low cry came from her lips, covered it up. He looked about him for the weapon, for the pistol, but in her rush at the bed she had pushed it out of sight with her knees. “It’s a pity they found it—if he hadn’t had it here!” he wailed to her under his breath. He had determined to remain calm, so that, on turning round at the quick advent of the little woman of the house, who had hurried up, white, staring, scared by the sound of the smashed door, he was able to say very quietly and gravely: “Mr. Robinson has shot himself through the heart. He must have done it while you were fetching the milk.” The Princess rose, hearing another person in the room, and then Schinkel caught sight of the small revolver lying just under the bed. He picked it up and carefully placed it on the mantel-shelf—keeping all to himself, with an equal prudence, the reflexion that it would certainly have served much better for the Duke.
THE END
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