He knew there was something out of the way as soon as he saw Lady Aurora’s face look forth at him in answer to his tap while she held the door ajar. What was she doing in Pinnie’s bedroom?—a very poor place, into which the dressmaker, with her reverence, would never have admitted a person of that quality unless things had got pretty bad. She was solemn too and without her usual incoherent laugh; she had removed her large hat, with its limp old-fashioned veil, and she raised her finger to her lips. Hyacinth’s first alarm had been immediately after he let himself into the house with his latch-key, as he always did, and found the little room on the right of the passage, in which Pinnie had lived ever since he remembered, fireless and untenanted. As soon as he had paid the cabman who put down his portmanteau for him in the hall—he was not used to paying cabmen and was conscious he gave too much, but was too impatient in his sudden anxiety to care—he had hurried up the vile staircase that seemed viler, even through his preoccupation, than ever, and given the knock, accompanied by a call the least bit tremulous, precipitately answered by Lady Aurora. She had drawn back into the room a moment while he stared in his dismay; then she emerged again, closing the door behind her—all with the air of enjoining him to be terribly quiet. He felt suddenly so sick at the ideaof having lingered at Medley while there was distress in the wretched little house to which he owed so much that he scarcely found strength for an articulate question and obeyed mechanically the mute, urgent gesture by which their noble visitor appealed to him to go downstairs with her. It was only when they stood together in the deserted parlour—where he noted as for the first time what an inelegant odour prevailed—that he asked: “Is she dying—is she dead?” That was the least the strained sadness looking out of Lady Aurora’s face appeared to announce.
“Dear Mr. Robinson, I’m so sorry for you. I wanted to write, but I promised her I wouldn’t. She’s very ill, poor dear—we’re very anxious. It began ten days ago and I suppose Imusttell you how much she has gone down.” Lady Aurora spoke with more than all her usual embarrassments and precautions—eagerly, yet as if it cost her much pain: pausing a little after everything to see how he would take it, then going on with a small propitiatory rush. He learned presently what was the matter, what doctor she had sent for, and that if he would wait a little before going into the room it would be so much better; the invalid having sunk within half an hour into a doze of a less agitated kind than she had had for some time, from which it would be an immense pity to run the risk of waking her. The doctor gave her the right things, as it seemed to her ladyship, but he admitted that she had very little power of resistance. He was of course not a very large practitioner, Mr. Buffery from round the corner, yet he seemed really clever; and she herself had taken the liberty (as she confessed to this she threw off one of her odd laughs and her colour rose) of sending an elderly, respectable person—a decent nursing body known to many doctors. She was out just then, she had togo once a day for the air—“only when I come of course” Lady Aurora hastened to note. Dear Miss Pynsent had had a cold hanging about her and had not taken care of it. Hyacinth would know how plucky she was about that sort of thing; she took so little interest in herself. “Of course a cold’s a cold, whoever has it; isn’t it?” his friend asked as if superior to the old discrimination against the power of the lowly to do justice to such visitations. Ten days previous she had taken an additional chill through falling asleep in her chair, at night, down there, and letting the fire go out. “It would have been nothing if she had been like you or me, you know,” his benefactress went on; “but as she was then it made the difference. The day was horribly damp—the chill had struck into the lungs and inflammation come on. Mr. Buffery says she was impoverished, you know—so weak and low she had nothing togoon.” The next morning she had bad pains and a good deal of fever, yet had got up. Poor Pinnie’s gracious ministrant didn’t make clear to Hyacinth what time had elapsed before she came to the rescue, nor by what means she had been notified, and he saw that she slurred this over, from the admirable motive of wishing him not to feel that their patient had suffered by his absence or called for him in vain. This indeed appeared not to have been the case if Pinnie had opposed successfully his being written to. “I came in very soon,” Lady Aurora only said—“it was such a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything—if it wasn’t so sad to see a personneedso little. She did want you to stay where you were: she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr. Robinson.”
“I don’t know what to say to you—you’re so extraordinarily good, so angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and sickened by a strange, unexpectedshame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—this whole contrast cut him like a knife and made the ugly accident of his absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you when you’re so kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke out.
Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that your visit shouldnotbe cut short. When you should come of yourself it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you’ve been, but she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would do you so much good.”
Hyacinth felt his eyes fill with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying! How can she live when she’s like that?”
He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid touch of consolation. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said “we” just before, and he asked her whom she meant.
“Oh Mr. Vetch, don’t you know? I’ve made his charming acquaintance; it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then while for a space Hyacinth was silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden to the fiddler whilehewas masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora added: “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once at first to bring his violin; she thought it would soothe her.”
“I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble him,” said Hyacinth.
Apparently there had been a certain dryness in his tone, which was the cause of her ladyship’s venturing to reply after an hesitation: “Do let him come, Mr. Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder if you know that—that he has a great affection for you.”
“The more fool he; I’ve always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth declared, colouring.
The way Lady Aurora spoke proved to him later that she now definitely did know his secret, or one of those mysteries rather; for at the rate things had been going for the last few months he was making a regular collection. She knew the smaller secret—not of course the greater; she had decidedly been illuminated by Pinnie’s divagations. At the moment he made that reflexion, however, he was almost startled to perceive how completely he had ceased to resent such betrayals and how little it suddenly seemed to signify that the innocent source of them was about to be quenched. The sense of his larger treasure of experience swallowed up that particular anxiety, making him ask himself what it mattered, for the little time now left him, that people should exchange allusions, below their breath, to the hidden mark he now bore. The day came quickly when he believed, and yet didn’t care, that it had been in that manner immensely talked about.
After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale parlour sunk in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much of late in the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker, in taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious discipline. What was most vivid to him in the deserted field of her unsuccessful industry was the changed vision with which he had come back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the same, and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in the impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a dismalchiaroscuro—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of his own little life; yet the eyes with which he looked at it had new terms of comparison. He had known the scene for hideous and sordid, but its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he couldn’t believe that for years he had accepted and even a little revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service his experience of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have assimilated that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for himself; but with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement could one come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising? Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle and the room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from the muddy street where the shallow defensive areas were a narrow slit. No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, no wonder her small underfed organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a show-room wherethere was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a particularly lamentable, conscious squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes that didn’t match, though of an equal antiquity and intimately emulous in the facility with which they dropped off. He had not heard Mr. Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper; but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not to make the door creak, their neighbour came into the parlour. The fiddler said nothing to him at first; they only looked at each other for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he knew the worst about Pinnie: but what was further in his eyes, which had an expression considerably different from any hitherto seen in them, defined itself to our hero only little by little.
“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth at last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but he thought the question fair. None the less he expected a sarcastic answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr. Vetch replied—
“I assure you that no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever did more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you back, and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I balanced one thing against the other. It was very difficult.”
“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest are dying they’re usually sent for.”
The visitor gave a strange argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to Hyacinth it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr. Vetch’s old age was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy, this case was exceptional,” the fiddler returned. “Your visit had a character of importance.”
“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you anything.”
“No certainly, you’ve never told me much. But if, as is probable, you’ve seen that kind lady who’s now upstairs you’ll have learned that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed. She threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back. You know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As at this Hyacinth turned away with a gesture of irritation Mr. Vetch went on: “No doubt she’s absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t now cast any disrespect on it. I assure you that if she had been here alone, suffering, sinking, without a creature to tend her and nothing before her but to die in a corner like a starved cat, she would still have faced that fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel scenes.”
Hyacinth turned it miserably over. “Of course I know what you mean. But she spun her delusion—she always did all of them—out of nothing. I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of scenes. I told her when I went out of town very little more than I told you.”
“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been at any rate enough. She has made up her mind that you’ve formed a connexion by means of whichyou’ll come somehow or other into your own. She has done nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the aristocracy; and nothing’s simpler than that the person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you’ve been to stay should undertake your business with her friends.”
“Oh well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of that entertainment.”
“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added: “My dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”
“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth returned. “I’ll tell her my great relations have adopted me and that I’ve come back in the character of Lord Robinson.”
“She’ll need nothing more to die happy,” said Mr. Vetch.
Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition, this worthy explaining that he came over like that to see how she was half-a-dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended upon the pair while our youth awaited some sign from Lady Aurora that he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked out of the window as if the view were a chart of all the grey past; and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with his hands in his pockets. At last Mr. Vetch observed without taking his pipe out of his lips or looking round: “I think you might be a little more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”
Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment all sincerely what his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of an effortto conceal anything he could possibly tell—there were some things of course he couldn’t: on the contrary his life seemed to him particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious comment. It was at this moment he first noticed a certain difference; there was a tone in Mr. Vetch’s voice he seemed never to have felt before—an absence of that note which had made him say in other days that the impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It was as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate, in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part, his having grown older or more important, or even grown simply more surpassingly odd. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s old neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his being a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr. Vetch in a mind familiar now for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience in Hyacinth’s breast was soon corrected by one of the sudden reactions or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim. In the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than it said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had for years a small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of it, even his visible expression of ultimate parsimony and of having ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more for something else—these things became so many reasons for turning round, going over to him, touching marks of an invincible fidelity, the humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an art after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting withfidgeted from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the same place for three months together.
“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to know what I’ve been doing in the country? I should have first to know myself,” Hyacinth decently pleaded.
“Have you enjoyed it very much?”
“Yes certainly, very much—not knowing anything about Pinnie. I’ve been in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman.”
Mr. Vetch had turned round; he looked very impartial through the smoke of his pipe. “Is she really a princess?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really’: I suppose all titles are great rot. But every one seems agreed to call her so.”
“You know I’ve always liked to enter into your life, and to-day the wish is stronger than ever,” the old man presently said, while he fixed his eyes steadily on his companion’s.
Hyacinth returned his gaze a moment. “What makes you say that just now?”
The fiddler appeared to deliberate and at last replied: “Because you’re in danger of losing the best friend you’ve ever had.”
“Be sure I feel it. But if I’ve gotyou——!” his companion added.
“Oh me! I’m very old and very tired of life.”
“I suppose that that’s what one arrives at. Well, if I can help you in any way you must lean on me, you must make use of me.”
“That’s precisely what I was going to say to you,” said Mr. Vetch. “Should you like any money?”
“Of course I should! But why should you offer it to me?”
“Because in saving it up little by little I’ve had you in mind.”
“Dear Mr. Vetch,” our young man returned, “you have me too much in mind. I’m not worth it, please believe that; and for all sorts of reasons. I should make money enough for any uses I have for it, or have any right to have, if I stayed quietly in London and attended to my work. As you know, I can earn a decent living.”
“Yes, I can see that. But if you stayed quietly in London what would become of your princess?”
“Oh they can always manage, ladies in that position.”
“Hanged if I understand her position!” cried Mr. Vetch, but without laughing. “You’ve been for three weeks without work and yet you look uncommonly smart.”
“Well, my living, you see, has cost me nothing. When you stay with great people you don’t pay your score,” Hyacinth explained with great gentleness. “Moreover, the lady whose hospitality I’ve been enjoying has made me a very handsome offer of work.”
“What kind of work?”
“The only kind I know. She’s going to send me a lot of books to do up for her.”
“And to pay you fancy prices?”
“Oh no; I’m to fix the prices myself.”
“Are not transactions of that kind rather disagreeable—with a lady whose hospitality one has been enjoying?” Mr. Vetch inquired.
“Exceedingly! That’s exactly why I shall do the books and then take no money.”
“Your princess is rather clever!” the fiddler coldly laughed.
“Well, she can’t force me to take it if I won’t,” said Hyacinth.
“No; you must only letmedo that.”
“You’ve curious ideas about me,” the young man declared.
Mr. Vetch turned about to the window again, remarking that he had curious ideas about everything. Then he added after an interval: “And have you been making love to your great lady?”
He had expected a flash of impatience in reply to this appeal and was rather surprised at the manner in which Hyacinth began: “How shall I explain? It’s not a question of that sort.”
“Has she been making love to you then?”
“If you should ever see her you’d understand how absurd that supposition is.”
“How shall I ever see her?” returned Mr. Vetch. “In the absence of that privilege I think there’s something in my idea.”
“She looks quite over my head,” said Hyacinth simply. “It’s by no means impossible you may see her. She wants to know my friends, to know the people who live in the Place. And she would take a particular interest in you on account of your opinions.”
“Ah I’ve no opinions now—none any more!” the old man broke out sadly. “I only had them to frighten Pinnie.”
“She was easily frightened,” said Hyacinth.
“Yes, and easily reassured. Well, I like to know about your life,” his neighbour sighed irrelevantly. “But take care the great lady doesn’t lead you too far.”
“How do you mean, too far?”
“Isn’t she a conspiring socialist, a dabbler in plots and treasons? Doesn’t she go in for a general rectification, as Eustache calls it?”
Hyacinth had a pause. “You should see the place—you should see what she wears, what she eats and drinks.”
“Ah you mean that she’s inconsistent with her theories? My dear boy, she’d be a droll woman if she weren’t. At any rate I’m glad of it.”
“Glad of it?” Hyacinth repeated.
“For you, I mean, when you stay with her; it’s more luxurious!” Mr. Vetch exclaimed, turning round and smiling. At this moment a little rap on the floor above, given by Lady Aurora, announced that Hyacinth might at last come up and see Pinnie. Mr. Vetch listened and recognised it, and it led him to say with considerable force: “There’sa woman whose theories and conduct do square!”
Hyacinth, on the threshold, leaving the room, stopped long enough to meet it. “Well, when the day comes for my friend to give up—you’ll see.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt there are things she’ll bring herself to sacrifice,” the old man retorted. But Hyacinth was already out of hearing.
Mr. Vetch waited below till Lady Aurora should come down and give him the news he was in suspense for. His mind was pretty well made up about Pinnie. It had seemed to him the night before that death was written in her face, and he judged it on the whole a very good moment for her to lay down her earthly burden. He had reasons for believing that the future couldn’t be sweet to her. As regards Hyacinth his mind was far from being at ease; for though aware in a general way that he had taken up with strange company, and though having flattered himself of old that he should be pleased to see the boy act out his life and solve the problem of his queer inheritance, he was worried by the absence of full knowledge. He put out his pipe in anticipation of Lady Aurora’s reappearance and without this consoler was more accessible still to certain fears that had come to him in consequence of a recent talk, or rather an attempt at a talk, with Eustache Poupin. It was through the Frenchman that he had gathered the little he knew about the occasion of Hyacinth’s strange and high “social” adventure. His vision of the matter had been wholly inferential; for Hyacinth had made a mystery of his absence to Pinnie, merely letting her know that there was a lady in the case and that the best luggage he could muster and the best way his shirts could be done up would still be far fromgood enough. Poupin had seen Godfrey Sholto at the “Sun and Moon,” and it had come to him, through Hyacinth, that a remarkable feminine influence in the Captain’s life was conducive in some way to his presence in Bloomsbury—an influence, moreover, by which Hyacinth himself, for good or for evil, was in peril of being touched. Sholto was the young man’s visible link with a society for which Lisson Grove could have no importance in the scheme of the universe save as a short cut (too disagreeable to be frequently used) out of Bayswater; therefore if Hyacinth left town with a new hat and a pair of kid gloves it must have been to move in the direction of that superior circle and in some degree at the solicitation of the before-mentioned feminine influence. So much as this the Frenchman suggested explicitly enough, as his manner was, to the old fiddler; but his talk had a strain of other and rarer reference which excited Mr. Vetch’s curiosity rather than satisfied it. They were obscure, these deeper implications; they were evidently painful to the speaker; they were confused and embarrassed and totally wanting in that effect of high hand-polish which usually characterised the lightest allusions of M. Poupin. It was the fiddler’s fancy that his friend had something on his mind which he was not at liberty to impart, and that it related to Hyacinth and might, for those who took an interest in the singular lad, give ground for no small anxiety. Mr. Vetch, on his own part, nursed this anxiety into a tolerably definite shape: he persuaded himself that the Frenchman had been leading the boy too far in the line of social criticism, had given him a push on some crooked path where a slip would be a likely accident. When on a subsequent occasion, with Poupin, he indulged in a hint of this suspicion, the bookbinder flushed a good deal and declared that hisconscience was pure. It was one of his peculiarities that when his colour rose he looked angry, and Mr. Vetch held that his displeasure was a proof that in spite of his repudiations he had been unwise; though before they parted Eustache gave this sign of softness that he shed tears of emotion of which the source was not clear to the fiddler and which appeared in a general way to be dedicated to Hyacinth. The interview had taken place in Lisson Grove, where Madame Poupin, however, had not shown herself.
Altogether the old man was a prey to suppositions which led him to feel how much he himself had outlived the democratic glow of his prime. He had ended by accepting everything—though indeed he couldn’t swallow the idea that a trick should be played upon Hyacinth; and even by taking an interest in current politics, as to which of old he had held the opinion—the opinion deep-based in the Poupins to-day—that they had been invented on purpose to throw dust in the eyes of disinterested reformers and to circumvent the social solution. He had renounced that problem some time ago; there was no way to clear it up that didn’t seem to make a bigger mess than the actual muddle of human affairs, which by the time one had reached sixty-five might mostly cease to exasperate. Mr. Vetch could still feel a certain sharpness on the subject of the prayer-book and the bishops, and if at moments he was a little ashamed of having accepted this world could reflect that at all events he continued to repudiate every other. The idea of great changes, however, took its place among the dreams of his youth; for what was any possible change in the relations of men and women but a new combination of the same elements? If the elements could be made different the thing would be worth thinking of; but it was not only impossible to introduce anynew ones—no means had yet been discovered for getting rid of the old. The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man, and their position with regard to each other at any given moment could be of interest only to the grim, invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the ages, bow-backed over the table. This laxity had come upon our fiddling friend with the increase of his measurement round the waist and with that of the little heap of half-crowns and half-sovereigns that had accumulated in a tin box very stiffly padlocked which he kept under his bed and the interwoven threads of sentiment and custom uniting him to the dressmaker and her foster-son. If he was no longer pressing about the demands he felt he should have a right to make of society, as he had been in the days when his conversation scandalised Pinnie, so he was now not pressing for Hyacinth either; reflecting that though indeed the constituted powers might have to “count” with him it would be in better taste for him not to be importunate about a settlement. What he had come to fear for the interesting youth was that he should be precipitated by crude agencies into depths where the deplorable might not exclude the ridiculous. It may even be said that Mr. Vetch had a secret project of settling a little on his behalf.
Lady Aurora peeped into the room, very noiselessly, nearly half an hour after Hyacinth had left it, and let the fiddler know that she was called to other duties but that the nurse had come back and the doctor had promised to look in at five o’clock. She herself would return in the evening, and meanwhile Hyacinth was with his aunt, who had recognised him without a protest; indeed seemed intensely happy that he should be near her again and lay there with closed eyes, very weak and speechless,holding his hand. Her restlessness had passed and her fever abated, but she had no pulse to speak of and Lady Aurora didn’t disguise the fact that by any good judgement she was rapidly sinking. Mr. Vetch had already accepted it and after her ladyship had quitted him he lighted another philosophic pipe upon it, lingering on, till the doctor came, in the dressmaker’s dismal, forsaken bower, where in past years he had indulged in so many sociable droppings-in and hot tumblers. The echo of all her little simple surprises and pointless contradictions, her gasping reception of contemplative paradox, seemed still to float in the air; but the place felt as relinquished and bereft as if she were already beneath the sod. Pinnie had always been a wonderful hand at “putting away”; the litter that testified to her most elaborate efforts was often immense, but the reaction in favour of an unspeckled carpet was greater still; and on the present occasion, before taking to her bed, she had found strength to sweep and set in order as tidily as if she had been sure the room would never again know her care. Even to the old fiddler, who had not Hyacinth’s sensibility to the scenery of life, it had the cold propriety of a place arranged for interment. After the doctor had seen Pinnie that afternoon there was no doubt left as to its soon being the stage of dismal preliminaries.
Miss Pynsent, however, resisted her malady for nearly a fortnight more, during which Hyacinth was constantly in her room. He never went back to old Crook’s, with whose establishment, through violent causes, his relations seemed indefinitely suspended; and in fact for the rest of the time that Pinnie demanded his care absented himself but twice from Lomax Place during more than a few minutes. On one of these occasions he travelled over to Audley Court and spent an hour there; on the other he metMillicent Henning by previous understanding and took a walk with her on the Embankment. He tried to find an hour to go and thank Madame Poupin for a sympathetic offering, many times repeated, oftisaneconcocted after a receipt thought supreme by the couple in Lisson Grove (though little appreciated in the neighbourhood generally); but he was obliged to acknowledge her kindness only by a respectful letter, which he composed with some trouble, though much elation, in the French tongue, peculiarly favourable, as he believed, to little courtesies of this kind. Lady Aurora came again and again to the darkened house, where she diffused her beneficent influence in nightly watches, in the most modern sanative suggestions, in conversations with Hyacinth more ingeniously addressed than her fluttered embarrassments might have betrayed to the purpose of diverting his mind, and in tea-makings (there was a great deal of this liquid consumed on the premises during Pinnie’s illness) after a system more enlightened than the usual fashion of Pentonville. She was the bearer of several messages and of a good deal of medical advice from Rose Muniment, whose interest in the dressmaker’s case irritated Hyacinth by its fine courage, which even at second-hand was still extravagant: she appeared very nearly as resigned to the troubles of others as she was to her own.
Hyacinth had been seized the day after his return from Medley with a sharp desire to do something enterprising and superior on Pinnie’s behalf. He felt the pressure of an angry sense that she was dying of her poor career, of her uneffaced remorse for the trick she had played him in his boyhood—as if he hadn’t long ago and indeed at the time forgiven it, judging it to have been the highest wisdom!—of something basely helpless in the attitude of her acquaintance. He wanted to do somethingthat should prove to himself he had got the very best opinion about the invalid it was possible to have: so he insisted that Mr. Buffery should consult with a West End doctor if the West End doctor would consent to meet Mr. Buffery. An oracle not averse to this condescension was discovered through Lady Aurora’s agency—she had not brought him of her own movement because on the one hand she hesitated to impose on the little household in Lomax Place the expense of such a visit, and on the other, with all her narrow personal economies for the sake of her charities, had not the means to meet it herself; and in prevision of the great man’s fee Hyacinth applied to Mr. Vetch, as he had applied before, for a loan. The great man came and was wonderfully civil to Mr. Buffery, whose conduct of the case he pronounced judicious; he remained several minutes in the house, gazing at Hyacinth over his spectacles—he seemed rather more concerned about him than about the patient—and with almost the whole of the Place turning out to stare at his chariot. After all he consented to accept no fee. He put the question aside with a gesture full of urbanity—a course disappointing and displeasing to Hyacinth, who felt in a manner cheated of the full effect of the fine thing he had wished to do for Pinnie; though when he said as much or something like it to Mr. Vetch the caustic fiddler greeted the observation with a face of amusement which, considering the situation, verged on the unseemly.
Hyacinth at any rate had done the best he could, and the fashionable doctor had left directions which foreshadowed commerce with an expensive chemist in Bond Street—a prospect by which our young man was to some extent consoled. Poor Pinnie’s decline, however, was not arrested, and one evening more than a week after his return from Medley, ashe sat with her alone, it struck him that her mild spirit must already have passed. The respectable nurse had moved away to supper, and by the aid of the staircase a perceptible odour of fizzling bacon indicated that a more cheerful state of things prevailed in the lower regions. Hyacinth couldn’t make out if his old friend were asleep or awake; he believed she had not lost consciousness, yet for more than an hour she had given no sign of life. At last she put out her hand as if aware he was near her and wished to feel for him, and murmured: “Why did she come? I didn’t want to see her.” In a moment, as she went on, he perceived to whom she was alluding: her mind had travelled back through all the years to the dreadful day—she had described every incident of it to him—when Mrs. Bowerbank had invaded her quiet life and startled her sensitive conscience with a message from the prison. “She sat there so long—so long. She was so very large and I was so frightened. She moaned and moaned and cried—too dreadful. I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t help it!” Her thought wandered from Mrs. Bowerbank in the discomposed show-room, enthroned on the yellow sofa, to the tragic creature at Milbank, whose accents again, for the hour, lived in her ears; and mixed with this mingled vision was still the haunting sense that she herself might have acted differently. That had been cleared up in the past, so far as Hyacinth’s intention was concerned; but what was most alive in Pinnie at the present hour was the passion of repentance, of still further expiation. It sickened him that she should believe these things were still necessary, and he leaned over her and talked tenderly, said everything he could think of to soothe her. He told her not to think of that dismal far-off time, which had ceased long ago to have any consequences for either ofthem; to consider only the future, when she should be quite strong again and he would look after her and keep her all to himself and take care of her better, far better than he had ever done before. He had thought of many things while he sat with Pinnie watching the shadows made by the night-lamp—high, imposing shadows of objects low and mean—and among them he had followed with an imagination that went further in that direction than ever before the probable consequences of his not having been adopted in his babyhood by the dressmaker. The workhouse and the gutter, ignorance and cold, filth and tatters, nights of huddling under bridges and in doorways, vermin, starvation and blows, possibly even the vigorous efflorescence of an inherited disposition to crime—these things, which he saw with unprecedented vividness, suggested themselves as his natural portion. Intimacies with a princess, visits to fine old country-houses, intelligent consideration, even, of the best means of inflicting a scare on the classes of privilege, would in that case not have been within his compass; and that Pinnie should have rescued him from such a destiny and put these luxuries within his reach represented almost a grand position as opposed to a foul, if he could only have the magnanimity to take it so.
Her eyes were open and fixed on him, but the sharp ray the little dressmaker used to direct into Lomax Place as she plied her needle at the window had completely left them. “Not there—what should I do there?” she inquired very softly. “Not with the great—the great—” and her voice failed.
“The great what? What do you mean?”
“You know—you know,” she went on, making another effort. “Haven’t you been with them? Haven’t they received you?”
“Ah they won’t separate us, Pinnie; they won’tcome between us as much as that,” said Hyacinth; and he sank to his knees by her bed.
“Youmust be separate—that makes me happier. I knew they’d find you at last.”
“Poor Pinnie, poor Pinnie,” murmured the young man.
“It was only for that—now I’m going,” she sighed.
“If you’ll stay with me you needn’t fear,” he smiled at her.
“Oh what wouldtheythink?” she quavered.
“I like you best,” he insisted.
“You’ve had me always. Now it’s their turn; they’ve waited.”
“Yes indeed they’ve waited!” Hyacinth said.
“But they’ll make it up; they’ll make up everything!” the poor woman panted. Then she added: “I couldn’t, couldn’t help it!”—which was the last flicker of her strength. She gave no further sign of consciousness and four days later ceased to breathe. Hyacinth was with her and Lady Aurora, but neither could recognise the moment.
Hyacinth and Mr. Vetch carried her bier with the help of Eustache Poupin and Paul Muniment. Lady Aurora was at the funeral and Madame Poupin as well and twenty neighbours from Lomax Place; but the most distinguished member—in appearance at least—of the group of mourners was Millicent Henning, the grave yet brilliant beauty of whose countenance, the high propriety of whose demeanour and the fine taste and general style of whose rich black “costume” excited no little attention. Mr. Vetch had his idea; he had been nursing it ever since Hyacinth’s return from Medley, and three days after Pinnie had been consigned to the earth he broached it to his young friend. The funeral had been on a Friday and Hyacinth had mentioned that he should return to old Crook’s on Monday morning.This was Sunday night and he had been out for a walk neither with Millicent Henning nor with Paul Muniment, but alone, after the manner of old days. When he came in he found the fiddler waiting for him and snuffing a tallow candle in the blighted show-room. He had three or four little papers in his hand, which exhibited some jottings of his pencil, and Hyacinth guessed, what was the truth but not all the truth, that he had come to speak to him about business. Pinnie had left a little will, of which she had appointed her old friend executor; this fact had already become known to our hero, who thought such an arrangement highly natural. Mr. Vetch informed him of the purport of this simple and judicious document and mentioned that he had been looking into the dressmaker’s “affairs.” They consisted, poor Pinnie’s affairs, of the furniture of the house in Lomax Place, of the obligation to pay the remainder of a quarter’s rent and of a sum of money in the savings bank. Hyacinth was surprised to learn that Pinnie’s economies had produced fruit at this late day (things had gone so ill with her in recent years, and there had been often such a want of money in the house) until Mr. Vetch explained to him with eager clearness that he himself had watched over the little hoard, accumulated during the period of her comparative prosperity, with the stiff determination that it should be sacrificed only in case of desperate stress. Work had become scarce with her but she could still do it when it came, and the money was to be kept for the very possible event of her turning helpless. Mercifully enough she had not lived to see that day, and the sum in the bank had survived her, though diminished by more than half. She had left no debts but the matter of the house and those incurred during her illness. Of course the fiddler had known—he hastened to give his youngfriend this assurance—that Pinnie, had she become infirm, would have been able to count absolutely uponhimfor the equivalent, in her old age, of the protection she had given him in his youth. But what if an accident had overtaken Hyacinth? What if he had incurred some horrid penalty for his revolutionary dabblings, which, little dangerous as they might be to society, were quite capable, in a country where authority, though good-natured, liked occasionally making an example, to put him on the wrong side of a prison-wall? At any rate, for better or worse, by pinching and scraping, she had saved a little, and of that little after everything was paid off a fraction would still be left. Everything was bequeathed to Hyacinth—everything but a couple of plated candlesticks and the old “cheffonier” which had been so handsome in its day; these Pinnie begged Mr. Vetch to accept in recognition of services beyond all price. The furniture, everything he didn’t want for his own use, Hyacinth could sell in a lump, and with the proceeds he could wipe out old scores. The sum of money would remain to him; it amounted in its reduced condition to about thirty-seven pounds. In mentioning this figure Mr. Vetch appeared to imply that Hyacinth would be master of a very pretty little fortune. Even to the young man himself, in spite of his recent initiations, such a windfall seemed far from contemptible; it represented sudden possibilities of still not returning to old Crook’s. It represented them, that is, till he presently remembered the various advances made him by the fiddler, and till he reflected that by the time these had been repaid there would hardly be twenty pounds left. That, however, was a far larger sum than he had ever had in his pocket at once. He thanked the old man for his information and remarked—and there was no hypocrisy in the speech—thathe was too sorry Pinnie had not given herself the benefit of the whole of the little fund in her lifetime. To this her executor replied that it had yielded her an interest far beyond any other investment, for he was persuaded she had believed she should never live to enjoy it, and that this faith had been rich to her in pictures, visions of the effect, for her brilliant boy, of his “coming into” something handsome.
“What effect did she mean—do you mean?” Hyacinth asked. As soon as he had spoken he felt he knew what the old man would say—it would be a reference to Pinnie’s belief in his reunion with his “relations” and to the facilities thirty-seven pounds would afford him for cutting a figure among them; and for a moment Mr. Vetch looked at him as if exactly that response were on his lips. At the end of the moment, however, he replied quite differently.
“She hoped you’d go abroad and see the world.” The fiddler watched his young friend and then added: “She had a particular wish you should go to Paris.”
Hyacinth had turned pale at this suggestion and for a moment said nothing. “Ah Paris!” he almost wailed at last.
“She would have liked you even to take a little run down to Italy.”
“Doubtless that would be jolly. But there’s a limit to what one can do with twenty pounds.”
“How do you mean, with twenty pounds?” the old man asked, lifting his eyebrows while the wrinkles in his forehead made deep shadows in the candlelight.
“That’s about what will remain after I have settled my account with you.”
“How do you mean, your account with me? I shan’t take any of your money.”
Hyacinth’s eyes wandered over his interlocutor’s suggestive shabbiness. “I don’t want to be beastly ungracious, but supposeyoushould lose your powers.”
“My dear boy, I shall have one of the resources that was open to Pinnie. I shall look to you to be the support of my old age.”
“You may do so with perfect safety, except for that danger you just mentioned—of my being imprisoned or hanged.”
“It’s precisely because I think the danger will be less if you go abroad that I urge you to take this chance. You’ll see the world and you’ll like it better. You’ll think society, even as it is, has some good points,” said Mr. Vetch.
“I’ve never liked it better than the last few months.”
“Ah well, wait till you see Paris!”
“Oh, Paris, Paris,” Hyacinth repeated vaguely—and he stared into the turbid flame of the candle as if making out the most brilliant scenes there: an attitude, accent and expression which the fiddler interpreted both as the vibration of a latent hereditary chord and a symptom of the acute sense of opportunity.
The Boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, with the variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of shops and cafés seen through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant porches of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure and prosperity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening in June. Hyacinth had been walking about all day—he had walked from rising till bedtime every day of the week spent since his arrival—and now an extraordinary fatigue, a tremendous lassitude had fallen upon him, which, however, was not without its delight of sweet satiety, and he settled himself in a chair beside a little table in front of Tortoni’s not so much to rest from it as to enjoy it. He had seen so much, felt so much, learnt so much, thrilled and throbbed and laughed and sighed so much during the past several days that he was conscious at last of the danger of becoming incoherent to himself and of the need of balancing his accounts.
To-night he came to a full stop; he simply sat at the door of the most dandified café in Paris and felt his pulse and took stock of his impressions. He had been intending to visit the Variétés Theatre, which blazed through intermediate lights and through the thin foliage of trees not favoured by the asphalt, onthe other side of the great avenue. But the impression of Chaumont—he relinquished that for the present; it added to the luxury of his situation to reflect that he should still have plenty of time to see thesuccès du jour. The same effect proceeded from his determination to order amarquisewhen the waiter, whose superior shirt-front and whisker emerged from the long white cylinder of an apron, came to take his commands. He knew the decoction was expensive—he had learnt as much at the moment he happened to overhear for the first time a mention of it; which had been the night before as he sat in his stall during anentr’acteof the Comédie Française. A gentleman beside him, a young man in evening-dress, conversing with an acquaintance in the row behind, recommended the latter to refresh himself with the luxury in question after the play: there was nothing like it, the speaker remarked, of a hot evening in the open air when one was thirsty. The waiter brought Hyacinth a tall glass of champagne in which a pineapple ice was in solution, and our hero felt he had hoped for a sensation no less intense in looking for an empty table on Tortoni’s terrace. Very few tables were empty, and it was his belief that the others were occupied by high celebrities; at any rate they were just the types he had had a prevision of and had wanted most to meet when the extraordinary opportunity to come abroad with his pockets full of money (it was more extraordinary even than his original meeting with the Princess) turned real to him in Lomax Place. He knew about Tortoni’s from his study of the French novel, and as he sat there he had a vague sense of fraternising with Balzac and Alfred de Musset: there were echoes and reminiscences of their works in the air, all confounded with the indefinable exhalations, the strange composite odour, half agreeable, half impure, of the Boulevard.“Splendid Paris, charming Paris”—that refrain, the fragment of an invocation, a beginning without an end, hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth’s ears; the only articulate words that got themselves uttered in the hymn of praise his imagination had been addressing to the French capital from the first hour of his stay. He recognised, he greeted with a thousand palpitations, the seat of his maternal ancestors—was proud to be associated with so much of the superb, so many proofs of a civilisation that had no visible rough spots. He had his perplexities and even now and then a revulsion for which he had made no allowance, as when it came over him that the most brilliant city in the world was also the most blood-stained; but the great sense that he understood and sympathised was preponderant, and his comprehension gave him wings—appeared to transport him to still wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations.
In other days, in London, he had thought again and again of his mother’s father, the revolutionary watchmaker who had known the ecstasy of the barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his reveries had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to nothing about him. He figured him in his mind, this mystic ancestor, had a conviction that he was very short like himself and had curly hair, an immense talent for his work and an extraordinary natural eloquence, together with many of the most attractive qualities of the French character. But he was reckless and a little cracked, also probably immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions; his life had been an incurable fever and its tragic termination was a matter of course. None the less it would have been a charm to hear him talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which even political madness could never quench; for hisgrandson had a theory that he spoke the French tongue of an earlier time, delightful and sociable in accent and phrase, exempt from the baseness of modern slang. This vague yet vivid personage became our young friend’s constant companion from the day of his arrival; he roamed about with Florentine’s boy hand in hand, sat opposite him at dinner, by the small table in the restaurant, finished the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer—treating him furthermore to innumerable revelations and counsels. He knew the lad’s secret without being told and looked at him across the diminutive tablecloth where the great cube of bread, pushed aside a little, left room for his elbows—it puzzled Hyacinth that the people of Paris should ever have had the fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so big; gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with lips which seemed to murmur that when one was to die to-morrow one must eat and drink, one must gratify all one’s poor senses all one could to-day. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man considered that Hyacinth Vivier was of his own time of life and could enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. Wondering repeatedly where the barricade on which his grandfather must have fallen had been erected he at last satisfied himself—though I am unable to trace the course of the induction—that it had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré very near to the Church of Saint-Roch. The pair had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through the principal churches—the republican martyr was very good-natured about this; through the passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues, across all the bridges and above all again and again along the river, where the quays were an endlessentertainment to Hyacinth, who lingered by the half-hour beside the boxes of old books on the parapets, stuffing his pockets with fivepenny volumes while the bright industries of the Seine flashed and glittered beneath him and on the other bank the glorious Louvre stretched either way for a league. Our young man took the same satisfaction in the Louvre as if he had been invited there, as he had been to poor obliterated Medley; he haunted the museum during all the first days, couldn’t look enough at certain pictures nor sufficiently admire the high polish of the great floors in which the golden frescoed ceilings repeated themselves. All Paris struck him as tremendously artistic and decorative; he felt as if hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy, Philistine world, a world in which the taste was the taste of Little Peddlington and the idea of beautiful arrangement had never had an influence. In his ancestral city it had been active from the first, and that was why his quick sensibility responded and why he murmured his constant refrain whenever the fairness of the great monuments arrested him in the pearly silvery light or he saw them take grey-blue, delicate tones at the end of stately vistas. It seemed to him the place expressed herself, and did it in the grand style, while London remained vague and blurred, inarticulate, blunt and dim. Splendid Paris, charming Paris indeed!
Eustache Poupin had given him letters to three or four democratic friends, ardent votaries of the social question, who had by a miracle either escaped the cruelty of exile or suffered the outrage of pardon and, in spite of republicanmouchardsno less infamous than the imperial and the periodical swoops of a despotism which had only changed its buttons and postage-stamps, kept alive the sacred spark which would some day become a consuming flame.Hyacinth, however, had not had the thought of delivering these introductions; he had accepted them because Poupin had had such a solemn glee in writing them, and also because he had not the courage to let the couple in Lisson Grove know how since that terrible night at Hoffendahl’s a change had come over the spirit of his dream. He had not grown more concentrated, he had grown more relaxed, and it was inconsistent with relaxation that he should rummage out Poupin’s friends—one of whom lived in the Batignolles and the others in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—and make believe he cared for what they cared for in the same way as they cared for it. What was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of how the society that surrounded him should be destroyed; it was much more the sense of the wonderful, precious things it had produced, of the fabric of beauty and power it had raised. That destruction was waiting for it there was forcible evidence, known to himself and others, to show; but since this truth had risen before him in its magnitude he had become conscious of a transfer, partial if not complete, of his sympathies; the same revulsion of which he had given a sign to the Princess in saying that now he pitied the rich, those who were regarded as happy. While the evening passed therefore, as he kept his place at Tortoni’s, the emotion that was last to visit him was compunction for not having put himself in relation with poor Poupin’s friends, for having neglected to make the acquaintances of earnest people.
Who in the world, if one should come to that, was as earnest as he himself or had given such signal even though secret proofs of it? He could lay that unction to his soul in spite of his having amused himself cynically, spent all his time in theatres, galleries, walks of pleasure. The feeling had notfailed him with which he accepted Mr. Vetch’s furtherance—the sense that since he was destined to perish in his flower he was right to make a dash at the beautiful, horrible world. That reflexion had been natural enough, but what was strange was the fiddler’s own impulse, his desire to do something pleasant for him, to beguile him and ship him off. What had been most odd in this was the way Mr. Vetch appeared to overlook the fact that his young friend had already had that year such a turn of dissipation as was surely rare in the experience of London artisans. This was one of the many things Hyacinth thought of; he thought of the others in turn and out of turn; it was almost the first time he had sat still long enough to collect himself. A hundred confused reverberations of the recent past crowded on him and he saw that he had lived more intensely in the previous six months than in all the rest of his time. The succession of events finally straightened itself and he tasted over some of those rarest, strangest moments. His last week at Medley in especial had already become a far-off fable, the echo of a song; he could read it over as a romance bound in vellum and gold, gaze at it as he would have gazed at some exquisite picture. His visit there had been perfect to the end, and even the three days compromised by Sholto’s sojourn had not broken the spell, for the three more that had elapsed before his own departure—when the Princess herself had given him the signal—were the most important of all. It was then she had made it clear to him that she was in earnest, was prepared for the last sacrifice. He felt her his standard of comparison, his authority, his measure, his perpetual reference; and in taking possession of his mind to this extent she had completely renewed it. She was altogether a new term, and now that he was in a foreign country he observedhow much her conversation, itself so foreign, had prepared him to understand it. In Paris he saw of course a great many women and noticed almost all of them, especially the actresses; inwardly confronting their movement, their speech, their manner of dressing, with that of his extraordinary friend. He judged her to be beyond them in every respect, though there were one or two actresses who had the air of trying to copy her.
The recollection of the last days he had spent with her affected him now like the touch of a tear-washed cheek. She had in the last intimacy, strangest and richest of revelations, shed tears for him, and it was his suspicion that her secret idea was to frustrate the redemption of his vow to Hoffendahl, to the immeasurable body that Hoffendahl represented. She pretended to have accepted it, and what she said was simply that when he should have played his part she would engage to save him—to fling a cloud about him as the goddess-mother of the Trojan hero used in Virgil’s poem toescamoterÆneas. What she meant was in his view to prevent him from playing his part at all. She was in earnest for herself, not for him. The main result of his closest commerce with her, in which somehow, all without herself stooping, she had only raised him higher and higher and absolutely highest, had been to make him feel that he was good enough for anything. When he had asked her the last day if he might write to her she said Yes, after two or three weeks. He had written about Pinnie’s death, and again just before coming abroad, and in doing so had taken account of something else she had said in regard to their correspondence—that she didn’t wish vague phrases, protestations or compliments; she wanted the realities of his life, the smallest, the “dearest,” the most personal details. Therefore he had treated her to the whole business of the break-up in Lomax Place,including the sale of the rickety furniture and similar sordid items. He had told her what that transaction brought—a beggarly sum, but sufficient to help a little to pay debts, and had informed her further that one of the ways Mr. Vetch had taken to hurry him off to Paris was to press upon him thirty pounds out of his quaint little hoard, crowning the sum already inherited from Pinnie—which, in a manner that none of Hyacinth’s friends of course could possibly regard as frugal or even as respectable, was now consecrated to a mere excursion. He even mentioned that he had ended by accepting the thirty pounds, adding that he feared his peculiar situation—she would know what he meant by that—made for a failure of proper dignity: it disposed one to grab all one could get, kept one at least very tolerant of whims that took the form of offered comforts.
What he didn’t mention to his shining friend was the manner in which he had been received by Paul Muniment and by Millicent Henning on his return from Medley. Millicent’s reception had been of the queerest; it had been quite unexpectedly mild. She had made him no scene of violence and appeared to have given up the line of throwing a blur of recrimination over her own equivocal doings. She treated him as if she liked him for having got in with the swells; she had an appreciation of success which would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that he was really successful. She tried to make him describe the style of life that was led in a house where people were invited to stay like that without having to pay, and she surprised almost as much as she gratified him by not indulging in any of her former digs at the Princess. She was lavish of ejaculations when he answered certain of her questions—ejaculations that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh I say!” and “Oh my stars!”—and he was more than ever struckwith her detestable habit of saying “Aye, that’s where it is” when he had made some remark to which she wished to give an intelligent and sympathetic assent. But she didn’t jeer at the Princess’s private character; she stayed her satire in a case where there was such an opening for it. Hyacinth reflected that this was lucky for her: he couldn’t have stood it (nervous and anxious as he was about Pinnie) if she had had at such a time the bad taste to be low and abusive. Under that stress he would have broken with her completely—would have been too disgusted. She displeased him enough as it was by her vulgar tricks of speech. There were two or three little, recurrent thumb-marks of the common that smutched her more blackly for him than their size warranted—as when she said “full up” for full, “sold out” for sold, or remarked to him that she supposed he was now going to “chuck up” his work at old Crook’s. It was as if he were fairly requiring of her to speakbetterthan women of fashion. These phrases at any rate had fallen upon his ear many a time before, but now they seemed almost unpardonable enough to quarrel about. Not that he had any wish to quarrel, for if the question had been pushed he would have admitted that to-day his intimacy with the Princess had caused any claims he might have had upon Millicent to lapse. Millicent was all discretion, however; she only, it was evident, wished to convey to him that it was better for both parties they should respect each other’s liberty. A genial understanding on this subject was what Miss Henning desired, and Hyacinth forbade himself to inquire what use she proposed to make of her freedom. During the month that elapsed between Pinnie’s death and his visit to Paris he had seen her several times, since the respect for each other’s freedom had somehow not implied cessation of intercourse and it was onlynatural she should have been soft to him in his bereaved condition. Hyacinth’s sentiment about Pinnie was deep, and Millicent was clever enough to guess it; the consequence of which was that on these occasions she was very soft indeed. She talked to him almost as if she had been his mother and he a convalescent child; called him her dearest dear and a precious young rascal and her own old boy; moralised a good deal, abstained from beer (till she learnt he had inherited a fortune), and when he remarked once (moralising a little too) that after the death of a person we have loved we are haunted by the memory of our failures of kindness, of generosity, rejoined with a dignity that made the words almost a contribution to the philosophic view, “Yes, that’s where it is!”
Something in her behaviour at this period had even made Hyacinth wonder if there were not some mystical sign in his appearance, some fine betrayal in the very expression of his face, of the predicament in which he had been placed by Diedrich Hoffendahl; he began to suspect anew the operation of that “beastlyattendrissement” he had detected of old in people who had the benefit of Miss Pynsent’s innuendoes. The compassion Millicent felt for him had never been one of the reasons why he liked her; it had fortunately been corrected, moreover, by his power to make her furious. This evening, on the Boulevard, as he watched the endless facial successions, one of the ideas that came to him was that it was odd he should like her even yet; for heaven knew he liked the Princess better, and he had hitherto supposed that when a sentiment of this kind had the energy of a possession it made a clean sweep of all minor predilections. But it was clear to him that she still existed for him as a loud-breathing feminine fact, that he couldn’t feel he had quite done withher or she with him, and that in spite of his having now so many other things to admire there was still a comfort in the recollection of her robust beauty and her primitive passions. Hyacinth thought of her as some clever young barbarian who in ancient days should have made a pilgrimage to Rome might have thought of a Dacian or Iberian mistress awaiting his return on the rough provincial shore. If Millicent judged his visit at a “hall” a proof of the sort of success that was to attend him—how he reconciled this with the supposition that she perceived as a ghostly crown intermingled with his curly hair the lurid light of destiny, the aureola of martyrdom, he would have had some difficulty in explaining—if Miss Henning considered, on his return from Medley, that he had taken his place on the winning side it was only consistent of her to borrow a grandeur from the fact of his course of travel; and indeed by the time he was ready to start she spoke of his participation in this privilege of the upper classes as if she had invented it herself and had even contributed materially to the funds required. It had been her theory from the first that she only liked people of spirit; and Hyacinth certainly had never had so much spirit as when he went “abroad,” after the fashion of Mr. Vetch of old, with a hat-box. He could say to himself quite without bitterness that of course she would profit by his absence to put her relations with Sholto on a comfortable footing; yet somehow, after all, at this moment, as her distant English face out-blossomed the nearer, the livid Parisian, it had not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It was the general brightness of Paris perhaps that made him see things sharp; at any rate he remembered with kindness something she had said to him the last time he saw her and that it touched him exceedingly at the moment. He had happened toobserve to her in a friendly way that now Miss Pynsent had gone she was, with the exception of Mr. Vetch, the person in his whole circle who had known him longest. To this Millicent had replied that Mr. Vetch wouldn’t live for ever and that she should then have the satisfaction of being his very oldest friend. “Oh well, I shan’t live for ever either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to ask if by chance he had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I might get smashed in a row”; and when she broke out into scorn of his silly notion of turning everything up—as if any one wanted to know what a costermonger would like, or any of that low sort at the East End!—he amused himself with inquiring if she were satisfied with the condition of society and thought nothing ought to be done for people who at the end of a lifetime of starvation wages had only the reward of the hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave.