“I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything if everyouwas to slip up,” she had answered simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness. Then she had added: “There’s one thing I can tell you, Mr. Robinson: that if ever any one was to do you a turn——!” And she had paused again, tossing back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by the plumes of a chieftainess, while Hyacinth asked what would occur in that contingency. “Well, there’d beoneleft behind who would take it up!” she had announced; and in the tone of the declaration there had been something clear and brave. It struck Hyacinth as a strange fate—though not stranger after all than his native circumstances—that one’s memory should come to be represented by a shop-girl overladen with bracelets of imitation silver; but he was reminded that Millicent was a fine specimen of a woman of a type opposed to the whining, and that in her large, free temperament many disparities were reconciled.
On the other hand the intensity of Paris had not much power to transfigure the impression made upon him by such intercourse with Paul Muniment as he had enjoyed during the weeks that followed Pinnie’s death—an impression considerably more severe than any idea of renunciation or oblivion that could connect itself with Millicent. Why it should have had the taste of sadness was not altogether clear, for Muniment’s voice was as distinct as any in the chorus of approbation excited by the news that the youth was about to cultivate the most characteristic of the pleasures of gentility—an applausive unanimity the effect of which was to place his journey to Paris in a light almost ridiculous. What had got into them all—did they think he was good for nothing but to amuse himself? Mr. Vetch had been the most zealous, but the others clapped him on the back almost exactly in the same manner he had seen his mates in Soho bring their palms down on one of their number when it was disclosed to them that his “missus” had made him yet once again a father. That had been Poupin’s tone, and his wife’s as well; and even poor Schinkel, with his everlasting bandage, whom he had met in Lisson Grove, appeared to feel it necessary to remark that a little run across the Rhine while he was about it would open his eyes to a great many wonders. The Poupins shedtears of joy, and the letters which have already been mentioned and which lay day after day on the mantel-shelf of the little room our hero occupied at anhôtel garnitremendously tall and somewhat lopsided in the Rue Jacob (that recommendation proceeded also from Lisson Grove, the garni being kept by a second cousin of Madame Eustache) these valuable documents had been prepared by the obliging exile many days before his young friend was ready to start. It was almost refreshing to Hyacinth when old Crook, the sole outspoken dissentient, told him he was a blockhead to waste his money on the bloody French. This worthy employer of labour was evidently disgusted at such an innovation; if he wanted a little recreation why couldn’t he take it as it had been taken in Soho from the beginning of time, in the shape of a trip to Brighton or two or three days of alcoholic torpor? Old Crook was right. Hyacinth conceded freely that he was a blockhead, and was only a little uncomfortable that he couldn’t explain why he didn’t pretend not to be and had a kind of right to that compensatory ease.
Paul guessed why, of course, and smiled approval with a candour which gave Hyacinth a strange inexpressible heartache. He already knew his friend’s view of him as mainly ornamental, as adapted only to the softer forms of the subversive energy, as constituted in short to show that the revolution was not necessarily brutal and illiterate; but in the light of the cheerful stoicism with which Muniment faced the sacrifice our hero was committed to, the latter had found it necessary to remodel a good deal his original conception of his sturdy friend’s character. The result of this process was not that he admired it less but that he felt almost awe-stricken in presence of it. There had been an element of that sort in his appreciation of Muniment from the first, but theweight now to carry was the sense of such a sublime consistency. Hyacinth felt that he himself could never have risen so high. He was competent to take the stiff engagement to Hoffendahl and was equally competent to keep it; but he couldn’t have had the same fortitude for another, couldn’t have detached himself from personal prejudice so effectually as to put forward in that manner for the terrible “job” a little chap he to all appearance really liked. That Muniment did like him it never occurred to the little chap to doubt. He had quite all the air of it to-day; he had never been more good-humoured, more placidly talkative; he was like an elder brother who knew that the “youngster” was clever and felt rather proud of it even when there was no one there to see. That temporary look of suspending their partnership which had usually marked him at the “Sun and Moon” was never visible in other places; in Audley Court he only chaffed his young friend occasionally for taking him too seriously. To-day that devotee hardly knew just how to take him; the episode of which Hoffendahl was the central figure had, as far as one could see, made so little change in his attitude. For a loyal servant, an effective agent, he was so extraordinarily candid—bitterness and denunciation so rarely sat on his lips. The criticism of everything—since everything was wrong—took so little of his time. It was as if he had been ashamed to complain; and indeed for himself as the months went on he had nothing particular to complain of. He had had a rise at the chemical works and a plan of getting a bigger room for Rosy was under serious consideration. On behalf of others he never sounded the pathetic note—he thought that sort of thing unbusiness-like; and the most that he did in the way of expatiation on the woes of humanity was occasionally to allude tocertain statistics, certain “returns,” in regard to the remuneration of industries, applications for employment and the discharge of hands. In such matters as these he was deeply versed, moving ever in a dry, statistical and scientific air in which it cost Hyacinth an effort of respiration to accompany him. Simple and kindly as he was, and thoughtful of the sufferings of beasts, attentive and merciful to small insects and addicted even to kissing dirty babies in Audley Court, he sometimes emitted a short, satiric gleam which showed that his esteem for the poor was small and that if he had no illusions about the people who had got everything into their hands he had as few about those who had egregiously failed to do so. He was tremendously reasonable, which was largely why Hyacinth admired him, having a desire to be so himself but finding it terribly difficult.
Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy, exact knowledge, the way he kept himself clean (save for fine chemical stains on his hands) in circumstances of foul contact, constituted a group of qualities that had always appeared to his admirer singularly enviable. Most enviable of all was the force that enabled him to sink personal sentiment where a great public good was to be attempted and yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest. It seemed to our friend that ifhehad introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for his purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such a recommendation and everything had been settled, he would have preferred never to look at the young fellow again. That was his weakness and Paul carried it off far otherwise. It must be added that he had never made an allusion to their visit to the great taskmaster; so that Hyacinth also, out of pride, held his tongue on the subject. If his friend didn’t propose expressly to yearn over him he wasn’tgoing to beg for it (especially as he didn’t want it) by restless references. It had originally been a surprise to him that Muniment should be willing to countenance a possible assassination; but after all none of his ideas were narrow (one had such a sense that they ripened all the while) and if a pistol-shot would do any good he was not the man to raise pedantic objections. It is true that as regards his quiet acceptance of the predicament in which Hyacinth might be placed by it our young man had given him the benefit of a certain amount of doubt; it had occurred to him that perhaps Muniment had his own good grounds for believing that imperative sign would never really arrive, so that he might only be treating himself to the entertainment of judging of a little bookbinder’s nerve. But in this case why did he take an interest in the little bookbinder’s going to Paris? That was a thing he wouldn’t have cared for had he held that in fact there was nothing to fear. He despised the sight of idleness, and in spite of the indulgence he had more than once been good enough to express on the subject of his young friend’s sneaking love of ease what he would have been most likely to say at present was: “Go to Paris? Go to the dickens! Haven’t you been out at grass long enough for one while, didn’t you lark enough in the country there with the noble lady, and hadn’t you better take up your tools again before you forget how to handle them?” Rosy had said something of that sort in her free, familiar way—whatever her intention she had been in effect only a little less caustic than old Crook: that Mr. Robinson was going in for a life of leisure, a life of luxury, like herself; she must congratulate him on having the means and the time. Oh the time—that was the great thing! She could speak with knowledge, having always enjoyed these advantages herself. And she intimated—orwas she mistaken?—that his good fortune emulated hers also in the matter of his having a high-born and beneficent friend (such a blessing now he had lost dear Miss Pynsent) who covered him with little attentions. Rose Muniment in short had been more exasperating than ever.
The Boulevard became even more brilliant as the evening went on and Hyacinth wondered whether he had a right to occupy the same table for so many hours. The theatre on the other side discharged its multitude; the crowd thickened on the wide asphalt, on the terrace of the café; gentlemen accompanied by ladies of whom he knew already how to characterise the type—des femmes très-chic—passed into the portals of Tortoni. The nightly emanation of Paris seemed to rise more richly, to float and hang in the air, to mingle with the universal light and the many-voiced sound, to resolve itself into a thousand solicitations and opportunities, addressed, however, mainly to those in whose pockets the chink of a little loose gold might respond. Hyacinth’s retrospections had not made him drowsy, but quite the reverse; he grew restless and excited and a kind of pleasant terror of the place and hour entered into his blood. But it was nearly midnight and he got up to walk home, taking the line of the Boulevard toward the Madeleine. He passed down the Rue Royale, where comparative stillness reigned; and when he reached the Place de la Concorde, to cross the bridge which faces the Corps Législatif, he found himself almost isolated. He had left the human swarm and the obstructed pavements behind, and the wide spaces of the splendid square lay quiet under the summer stars. The plash of the great fountains was audible and he could almost hear the wind-stirred murmur of the little wood of the Tuileries on one side and of the vague expanse of the Champs Elysées on theother. The place itself—the Place Louis Quinze, the Place de la Révolution—had given him a sensible emotion from the day of his arrival; he had recognised so quickly its tremendous historic character. He had seen in a rapid vision the guillotine in the middle, on the site of the inscrutable obelisk, and the tumbrils, with waiting victims, were stationed round the circle now made majestic by the monuments of the cities of France. The great legend of the French Revolution, a sunrise out of a sea of blood, was more real to him here than anywhere else; and, strangely, what was most present was not its turpitude and horror, but its magnificent energy, the spirit of creation that had been in it, not the spirit of destruction. That shadow was effaced by the modern fairness of fountain and statue, the stately perspective and composition; and as he lingered before crossing the Seine a sudden sense overtook him, making his heart falter to anguish—a sense of everything that might hold one to the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great cities, the charm of travel and discovery, the generosity of admiration. The tears rose to his eyes as they had done more than once in the past six months, and a question, low but poignant, broke from his lips, to end in nothing. “How could he—howcouldhe——?” It may be explained that “he” was a reference to Paul Muniment; for Hyacinth had dreamed of the religion of friendship.
Three weeks after this he found himself in Venice, whence he addressed to the Princess Casamassima a letter of which I reproduce the principal passages.
“This is probably the last time I shall write you before I return to London. Of course you’ve been in this place and you’ll easily understand why here, especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable impressions, what a revelation of the exquisite! Ihave a room in a little campo opposite a small old church which has cracked marble slabs let into the front; and in the cracks grow little, wild, delicate flowers of which I don’t know the name. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress and with buttons in it like a sofa; and it flops to and fro laboriously as women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the middle of the campo is a fountain that looks still older than the church; it has a primitive, barbaric air, and I’ve an idea it was put there by the first settlers—those who came to Venice from the mainland, from Aquileia. Observe how much historical information I’ve already absorbed; it won’t surprise you, however, for you never wondered at anything after you discovered I knew something of Schopenhauer. I assure you I don’t think of that musty misogynist in the least to-day, for I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of as they glide with a small clatter and with their old copper water-jars to the fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the effect is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look underfed) is framed in the old faded shawl. They have also the most engaging hair, which never has done curling, and they slip along together, in couples or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s eye—so that its geniality doesn’t matter—dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in Italy makes. The weather is splendid and I roast—but I like it; apparently I was made to be spitted and ‘done,’ and I discover that I’ve been cold all my life even when I thought I was warm. I’ve seen none of the beautiful patricians who sat for the great painters—the gorgeous beings whosegolden hair was intertwined with pearls; but I’m studying Italian in order to talk with the shuffling, clicking maidens who work in the bead-factories—I’m determined to make one or two of them look at me. When they’ve filled their old water-pots at the fountain it’s jolly to see them perch them on their heads and patter away over the polished Venetian stones. It’s a charm to be in a country where the women don’t wear the hideous British bonnet. Even in my own class—forgive the expression, I remember it used to offend you—I’ve never known a young female in London to put her nose out of the door without it; and if you had frequented such young females as much as I have you would have learnt of what degradation that dreary imposition is the source. The floor of my room is composed of little brick tiles, and to freshen the air in this temperature one sprinkles it, as you no doubt know, with water. Before long if I keep on sprinkling I shall be able to swim about; the green shutters are closed and the place makes a very good tank. Through the chinks the hot light of the campo comes in. I smoke cigarettes and in the pauses of this composition recline on a faded magenta divan in the corner. Convenient to my hand in that attitude are the works of Leopardi and a second-hand dictionary. I’m very happy—happier than I have ever been in my life save at Medley—and I don’t care for anything but the present hour. It won’t last long, for I’m spending all my money. When I’ve finished this I shall go forth and wander about in the splendid Venetian afternoon; and I shall spend the evening in that enchanted square of Saint Mark’s which resembles an immense open-air drawing-room, listening to music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between those two strange old columns of the piazzetta which seem to make a doorway for it. I can scarcely believethat it’s of myself I’m telling you these fine things; I say to myself a dozen times a day that Hyacinth Robinson isn’t in it—I pinch my leg to see if I’m not dreaming. But a short time hence, when I’ve resumed the exercise of my profession in sweet Soho, I shall have proof enough that it has been my very self: I shall know this by the terrible grind of the life and the penance to come.
“That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply demoralised. It won’t be for you, however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my demoralisation began from the moment I first approached you. Dear Princess, I may have done you good, but you haven’t done me much. I trust you’ll understand what I mean by that speech and not think it flippant or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand and enter into the misery of the people—though I protest I don’t know much about it; but you’ve led my imagination into quite another train. Nevertheless I’m not wholly pretending it’s all your fault if I’ve lost sight of the sacred cause almost altogether in my recent adventures. It’s not that it hasn’t been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing as we go, that want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the immense majority of the human race. I’ve found them everywhere but haven’t minded them. Forgive the cynical confession. What has struck me is the great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of them—the splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which doubtless the miserable many have also in their degree contributed. The face of Europe appears to be covered with them and they’ve had much the greater part of my attention. They seem to me inestimably precious and beautiful and I’ve become conscious more than ever before of how little I understandwhat in the great rectification you and Poupin propose to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things I shall be too sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I tell youle fond de ma pensée, as you used to say?—I feel myself capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a traitor, for you know the obligation I supremely, I immutably recognise. The monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less of a ‘bloody sell’ and life more of a lark—our friend Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too cheap and to wish to substitute for them something in which I can’t somehow believe as I do in things with which the yearnings and the tears of generations have been mixed. You know how extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl—to speak only of him; but if there’s one thing that’s more clear about him than another, it’s that he wouldn’t have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything and I’ve a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution. You’ll say I talk of it all at my ease while in a delicious capital I smoke cigarettes on a magenta divan; and I give you leave to scoff at me if it turns out that when I come back to London without a penny in my pocket I don’t hold the same language. I don’t know what it comes from, but during the last three months there has crept over me a deep mistrust of that same grudging attitude—the intolerance of positions and fortunesthat are higher and brighter than one’s own; a fear, moreover, that I may in the past have been actuated by such motives, and a devout hope that if I’m to pass away while I’m yet young it may not be with that odious stain upon my soul.”
He spent the first days after his return to London in a process supposed by him to be the quest of a lodging; but in reality he was pulling himself together for the business of his livelihood, an effort he found by no means easy or agreeable. As he had told the Princess, he was demoralised, and the perspective of old Crook’s dirty staircase had never seemed so steep. He lingered on the brink before he plunged again into Soho: he wished not to go back to the shop till he should be settled and delayed to get settled in order not to go back to the shop. He saw no one during this interval, not even Mr. Vetch; he waited to call on the fiddler till he should have the appearance of not coming as a beggar or a borrower—have recovered his employment and be able to give an address, as he had heard Captain Sholto say. He went to South Street—not meaning to go in at once but wishing to look at the house—and there he had the surprise of seeing the advertisement of an auctioneer in the window of the Princess’s late residence. He had not expected to find her in town—having heard from her the last time three weeks before, when she had said nothing about her prospects; but he was puzzled by this indication that she had moved away altogether. There was something in it all, however, that he felt he had at bottom been expecting; it appearedto prove the justice of a suspicion attached to all the steps of any intercourse with the Princess—a vague apprehension that one might suddenly stretch out one’s hand and miss her altogether from one’s side. He decided to ring at the door and ask for news of her; but there was no response to his summons: the stillness of an August afternoon—the year had come round again from his first visit—hung over the place, the blinds were down and the caretaker appeared to be absent. Before these facts he was much at a loss; unless indeed he should address a letter to his wonderful friend at Medley. It would doubtless be forwarded, though her short lease of the country-house had terminated, as he knew, several weeks before. Captain Sholto was of course a possible agent, a probable source of light; but nothing would have induced Hyacinth to ask such a service of him.
He turned away from South Street with a strange sinking of the heart; his state of ignorance struck inward, as it were—had the force of a deeply disquieting portent. He went to old Crook’s only when he had arrived at his last penny. This, however, was very promptly the case. He had disembarked at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in his pocket and had lived on that sum for three days. The old fiddler in Lomax Place was having a chop before he went to the theatre, and he invited Hyacinth to share his repast, sending out at the same time for another pot of beer. He took the youth with him to the play, where, as at that season there were very few spectators, he had no difficulty in finding him a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of him and peered strangely over his spectacles—Mr. Vetch wore the homely double glass in these latter years—when he learned that Hyacinth had found a retreat not in their old familiar quarter but in the unexploredpurlieus of Westminster. What had determined our young man was the fact that from this part of the town the journey was comparatively a short one to Camberwell; he had suffered so much, before Pinnie’s death, from being separated by such a distance from his best friends. There was a pang in his heart connected with the image of Paul Muniment, but none the less the prospect of an evening hour from time to time in Audley Court struck him as one of the few nameable beguilements of his odd future. He could have gone straight to Camberwell to live, but that would carry him too far from the scene of his profession, and in Westminster he was nearer to old Crook’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He said to Mr. Vetch that if it would givehimpleasure he would abandon his lodging and take another in Pentonville. But the old man replied after a moment that he should be sorry to put that constraint upon him; if he were to make such an exaction Hyacinth would think he wanted to watch him.
“How do you mean, to watch me?”
Mr. Vetch had begun to tune his fiddle and he scraped it a little before answering. “I mean it as I’ve always meant it. Surely you know that in Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched you as a child on the edge of a pond watches the little boat he has constructed and set afloat.”
“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after all, very little of me,” Hyacinth said.
“I made what I could of that little. It was better than nothing.”
Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s arm; he had never felt so acute a kindness for him, not even when accepting his thirty pounds before going abroad. “Certainly I’ll come to see you.”
“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr. Vetch observed without heeding these words butcontinuing to scrape. He had always, even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements) that there was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner of expressing gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity.
Hyacinth took little interest in the piece, which was an inanimate revival; he had been at the Théâtre Français and the tradition of that house was still sufficiently present to him to make any other style of interpretation of comedy appear at the best but a confident form of horseplay. He sat in one of the front stalls, close to the orchestra; and while the thing went forward—or backward, ever backward, as it seemed to him—his thoughts wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty boards, revolving round a question which had come up immensely during the last few hours. The Princess was acapricciosa—this at least had been Madame Grandoni’s account of her; and was that blank, expressionless house in South Street a sign that an end had come to the particular caprice in which he had happened to be involved? On his return to London the desire to be with her again on the same terms as at Medley had begun to ache in him like a sorrow or a dreaded wrong—so sharp was his sense that if he mightn’t absolutely count upon her she had been all cruelly, all abominably dishonest. Yet the wonder of the other time remained, in the great silence that had come, altogether a wonder. Circumstances had favoured in an extraordinary degree his visit to her, and it was by no means clear that they would again be so accommodating or that what had been possible for a few days should be possible with continuity and in the midst of the ceremoniesand complications of London. Hyacinth felt poorer than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had had money and spent it, whereas in previous times he had never had it to spend. He never for an instant regretted his squandered wealth, for he said to himself that he had made a good bargain and become master of a precious equivalent. The equivalent was a rich experience—an experience that would grow richer still as he should talk it over, in the right conditions thatshewould find again, with the one person in the world to whom he was now interesting. His poverty would be no obstacle to their friendship so long as he should have a pair of legs to carry him to her door; for she liked him better shabby than furbished up, and she had given him too many pledges, they had taken together too many appointments, worked out too many ideas, to be disconcerted on either side by obstacles that were merely a part of the general conventionality. He was to go with her into the slums, to introduce her to the worst that London contained—he should have precisely to make acquaintance with it first—to show her the reality of the horrors of which she dreamed the world might be purged. He had ceased himself to care for the slums and had reasons for not wishing to spend his remnant in the study of foul things; but he would go through with his part of the engagement. He might be detached and mechanical, but any dreariness would have a gilding that should involve an association with her. What indeed if she should have changed, have availed herself of that great right of unapologetic inconsequence which he believed to be, at least in their relation with nobodies, the highest luxury of the happy? What if, from a high insolence which he thought of as lurking somewhere in the side-scenes of her nature, though he had really not once seen it step to thefront, she should toss back her perfect head with a movement signifying that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no more? His imagination represented her this evening in places where a barrier of dazzling light shut her out from access or even from any appeal. He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms where “the dukes” had possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded, covered with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found a reassurance in reflecting that after all she would be unlikely to throw him personally over so long as she should remain as deeply compromised, subterraneously speaking, as she had—successfully it seemed—tried to become, and that it would not be easy for her to liberate herself from that entanglement. She had of course told him more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already committed herself, and he remembered with a strange perverse elation that she had gone very far indeed.
In the intervals of the foolish play Mr. Vetch, who lingered in his place in the orchestra while his mates descended into the little hole under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time about the dingy house at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished galleries he had been staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters and said: “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.”
“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured while his friend went on:
“I was in Paris in 1846; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue Mogador. I judge from your letters that everything’s changed. Does the Rue Mogador still exist? Yes, everything’s changed. I daresay it’sall much finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events I’m right in supposing—am I not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made you really happy.”
“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth replied.
The fiddler projected his old, white, conscious face; it had the stale smoothness that betrays a sedentary occupation, thirty years spent in a close crowd, amid the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint. “I thought you were sad about Pinnie.”
“When I jumped with that avidity at your proposing I should take a tour? Poor old Pinnie!” Hyacinth added.
“Well, I hope you think a little better of the world. We mustn’t make up our minds too early in life.”
“Oh I’ve made up mine: the world’s an awfully jolly place.”
“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old pair of shoes—I like so much less the idea of putting on the new ones.”
“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked. “What have I known but kindness? People have done such a lot for me.”
“Oh well, of course they’ve liked you. But that’s all right,” murmured Mr. Vetch, beginning to scrape again. What remained in Hyacinth’s mind from their colloquy was the fact that this veteran, whom he regarded distinctly as cultivated, had thought his letters clever. He only wished he had made them cleverer still; he had no doubt of his ability to have done so.
It may be imagined whether the first hours he spent at old Crook’s after he took up work again were altogether to his taste, and what was the nature of the reception given him by his former comrades,whom he found exactly in the same attitudes and the same clothes (he knew and hated every article they wore) and with the same primitive pleasantries on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were mingled; the place and the people affected him as loathsome, but there was something delightful in handling his tools. He gave a little private groan of relief when he discovered that he still liked his work and that the shining swarm of his ideas in the matter of sides and backs returned to him. They came in still brighter, more suggestive form, and he had the satisfaction of feeling that his taste had improved, that it had been purified by experience, and that the covers of a book might be made to express an astonishing number of high conceptions. Strange enough it was, and a proof surely of our little hero’s being a true artist, that the impressions he had accumulated during the last few months appeared to mingle and confound themselves with the very sources of his craft and to lie open to technical “rendering.” He had quite determined by this time to carry on his life as if nothing were hanging over him and he had no intention of remaining a little bookbinder to the end of his days; for that medium would after all translate only some of his conceptions. Yet his trade was a resource, an undiminished resource, for the present, and he had a particular as well as a general motive in attempting new flights—the prevision of the exquisite work he was to do during the coming year for the Princess, work it was so definite to him he owed her. When that debt should have been paid and his other arrears made up he proposed to himself to write something. He was far from having decided as yet what it should be; the only point settled was that it should be very remarkable and should not, at least on the face of it, have anything to do with a fresh deal of the social pack.That was to be his transition—into literature: to bind the book, charming as the process might be, was after all much less fundamental than to write it. It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once that it would be a fine thing to produce a rare death-song.
It is not surprising that among such reveries as this he should have been conscious of a narrow range in the tone of his old work-fellows. They had only one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds and had gone to spend them in France with a regular high one. He was aware in advance of the diffusion of this legend and did his best to allow for it, taking the simplest course, which was to gainsay nothing, but to catch the ball as it came and toss it still further, enlarging and embroidering humorously until Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the rest, who struck him as not having washed since he left them, seemed really to begin to understand how it was he could have spent such a rare sum in so short a time. The impressiveness of this achievement helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could see that, though the treatment it received was superficially irreverent, the sense that he was very sharp and that the springs of his sharpness were somehow secret gained a good deal of strength from it. Hyacinth was not incapable of being rather pleased that itshouldbe supposed, even by Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand pounds in less than five months, especially as to his own conscience the fact had altogether yet to be proved. He got off on the whole easily enough to feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men at old Crook’s showed at any rate no symptoms of the social jealousy lying at the bottom of the desire for a fresh deal. This was doubtless an accident and not inherent in the fact that they were highlyskilled workmen—old Crook had no others—and therefore sure of constant employment; for it was impossible to be more skilled in a special line than Paul Muniment, who yet—though not out of jealousy of course—went in for the great grim restitution. What struck him most, after he had got used again to the sense of his apron and bent his back a while over his battered table, was the simple, synthetic patience of the others who had benttheirbacks and felt the rub of that dirty drapery all the while he was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling through boulevards and museums and admiring the purity of the Venetian girl-face. With Poupin, to be sure, his relations were all particular; but the explanations he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such as could make him very unhappy, once he had determined to resist as much as possible the friction of a consciousness as galling at times as a misfitting harness. There was, moreover, more sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his young friend and pupil had failed to cultivate in Paris the rich opportunities he had offered him. “You’re cooling off, my child; there’s something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself that anything has been done or that humanity suffers a particle less?Enfinit’s between you and your conscience.”
“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth grimaced; this expositor’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so, having grown of late strangely hollow and rococo.
“You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is absolute, except of course in those classes in which, from the very nature of the infamies on which they’re founded, no conscience can exist. Speak to me, however, of my City;sheis always divine,” Poupin went on, though showingsigns of irritation when Hyacinth began to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible dilemma—gratified as a Parisian and a patriot but all disconcerted as a lover of liberty: it cost him a pang to admit that anything amid theseuils sacréswas defective, yet he saw still less his way to concede that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the Second Empire or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the régime before which the inspired Commune had gone down in blood and fire. “Ah yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will be finer still when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn back to his work with a feeling of sickness. Everywhere, everywhere he saw the ulcer of envy—the greed of a party hanging together only that it might despoil another to its advantage. In old Eustache, one of the “pure,” this was especially disenchanting.
The landing at the top of the stairs in Audley Court was always dark; but it seemed darker than ever to Hyacinth while he fumbled for the door-latch after he had heard Rose Muniment’s penetrating voice bid him come in. During that instant his ear caught the sound, if it could trust itself, of another voice, which prepared him a little for the spectacle fully presented as soon as the door—his attempt to reach the handle in his sudden agitation proving fruitless—was opened to him by Paul. His friend stood there tall and hospitable, saying something loud and jovial that he didn’t distinguish. His eyes had crossed the threshold in a flash, but his step faltered a moment, only to obey, however, the vigour of Muniment’s outstretched hand. Hyacinth’s glance had gone straight, and though with four persons in it Rosy’s little apartment looked crowded he saw no one but the object of his quick preconception—no one but the Princess Casamassima seated beside the low sofa, the grand feature introduced during his absence from London, on which, arrayed in the famous pink dressing-gown, Miss Muniment now received her visitors. He wondered afterwards why he should have been so startled; for he had said often enough both to himself and to his wonderful lady that so far as she was concerned he was proof against astonishment: it was so evident that thenote of her conduct would always be a sort of splendour of freedom. In fact now that he perceived she had made her way to Camberwell without his assistance the feeling in possession of him was a refined embarrassment; he blushed a little as he entered the circle, the fourth member of which was inevitably Lady Aurora Langrish. Was it that his intimacy with the Princess gave him a certain sense of responsibility for her course in respect to people who knew her as yet so scantly, and that there was something too little explained in the confidence with which she had practised a descent upon them? It indeed came over our young man that by this time perhaps they knew her a good deal; and moreover a woman’s behaviour spoke for itself when she could sit looking in that fashion like a radiant angel dressed in a simple bonnet and mantle and immensely interested in an appealing corner of the earth. It took Hyacinth but an instant to infer that her character was in a different phase from any yet exhibited to him. There had been a glory of gentleness about her the night he made her acquaintance, and she had never ceased at any moment since to strike him as full of the imagination of sympathy and pity, unless perforce in relation to her husband, against whom—for reasons after all doubtless very sufficient—her heart appeared absolutely steeled. Now at any rate this high mildness had deepened to a rapture of active, ministering charity. She had put off her splendour, but her beauty was unquenchably bright; she had made herself humble for her pious excursion; she had, beside Rosy (who in the pink dressing-gown looked much the more luxurious of the two), almost the attitude of an hospital nurse; and it was easy to see from the meagre line of her garments that she was tremendously in earnest. If Hyacinth was flurried her own countenance expressed no confusion;for her evidently this queer little bower of poverty and pain was a place in which it was perfectly natural thatheshould turn up. The sweet, still greeting her eyes offered him might exquisitely have conveyed that she had been waiting for him, that she knew he would come and that there had been a tacit appointment for that very moment. They said other things besides in their beautiful friendliness; they said: “Don’t notice me too much or make any kind of scene. I’ve an immense deal to say to you, but remember that I’ve the rest of our life before me to say it in. Consider only what will be easiest and kindest to these people, these delightful people, whom I find enchanting (why didn’t you ever tell me more—I mean really more—about them?). It won’t be particularly complimentary to them if you’ve the air of seeing a miracle in my presence here. I’m very glad of your return. The quavering, fidgety ‘ladyship’ is as striking as the others.”
Hyacinth’s reception at the hands of his old friends was cordial enough quite to obliterate the element of irony that had lurked, fifteen weeks before, in their godspeed; their welcome was not boisterous, but it seemed to express the idea that the occasion, already so rare and agreeable, needed but his arrival to make it perfect. By the time he had been three minutes in the room he was able to measure the impression produced by the Princess, who, it was clear, had cast the charm of the worshipful over the little company. This was in the air, in the face of each, in their smiling, their excited eyes and heightened colour; even Rosy’s wan grimace, at all times screwed up to ecstasy, had the supreme glitter of great occasions. Lady Aurora looked more than ever dishevelled with interest and wonder; the long strands of her silky hair floated like gossamer while,in her extraordinary, religious attention, with her hands raised and clasped to her bosom as if she were praying, her respiration rose and fell. She had never seen any one like the Princess; but Hyacinth’s apprehension of some months before had been groundless—she evidently didn’t think her “flashy.” She thought her divine and a revelation of beauty and benignity; and the illuminated, amplified room could contain no dissentient opinion. It was her beauty primarily that “fetched” them, Hyacinth could easily see, and it was not hidden from him that the impression had been made as much on Paul Muniment as on his companions. It was not in Paul’s nature to be jerkily demonstrative and he had not lost his head on the present occasion; but he had already appreciated the difference between a plain, suspicious man’s preconception of a meretricious, factitious, fine lady and the actual influence of such a personage. She was gentler, fairer, wiser than even a chemical expert could have guessed in advance. In short she held the trio in her hand, having reduced Lady Aurora to exactly the same simplicity as the others, and she performed admirably and artistically for their benefit. Almost before Hyacinth had had time to wonder how she had found the Muniments out—he had no recollection of giving her specific directions—she mentioned that Captain Sholto had been so good as to introduce her; doing so as if she owed him that explanation and were a woman who would be scrupulous in such a case. It was rather a blow to him to learn she had been accepting the Captain’s mediation, and this was not softened by her saying she was too impatient to wait for his own return: he was apparently so pleased with the roving life that one couldn’t be sure it would ever take place. The Princess might at least have been sure that to see her again very soon was still more necessary tohis happiness than anything the roving life could offer. No adventure was so prodigious as sticking as fast as possible toher.
It came out in the conversation he had with her, to which the others listened with respectful curiosity, that Captain Sholto had brought her a week before, but that she had then seen only Miss Muniment. “I took the liberty of coming again by myself to-day, because I wanted to see the whole family,” she developed, looking from Paul to Lady Aurora with a bright blandness which purified the statement (as regarded her ladyship) of impertinence. The Princess added frankly that she had now been careful to arrive at an hour when she thought Mr. Muniment might be at home. “When I come to see gentlemen I like at least to find them,” she continued, and she was so great a lady that there was no dowdy diffidence in her attitude: it was a simple matter for her to call on a young man employed at large chemical works if she had a reason. Hyacinth could see that the reason had already been brought forward—her immense interest in problems that Mr. Muniment had completely mastered and in particular their common acquaintance with the extraordinary man whose mission it was to solve them. He learned later that she had pronounced the name of the great, patient, powerful Hoffendahl. A part of the lustre in Rosy’s eye came no doubt from the declaration she had inevitably been moved to make in respect to any sympathy with wicked theories that might be imputed toher; and of course the effect of this intensely individual little protest—such was always its effect—emanating from the sofa and the pink dressing-gown was to render the home of the Muniments still more quaint and original. In that spot Paul always gave the pleasantest go-by to any attempt to draw out his views; so you would havethought, to hear him, that he allowed himself the reputation of having them only in order to get a “rise” out of his sister and let their visitors see with what wit and spirit she could repudiate them. This, however, would only be a reason the more for the Princess’s following up her scent. She would doubtless not expect to get at the bottom of his ideas in Audley Court: the opportunity would occur rather in case of his having the civility—on which surely she might count—to come and talk them over with her in her own house.
Hyacinth mentioned to her the disappointment he had had in South Street and she replied: “Oh, I’ve given up that house and taken quite a different one.” But she didn’t say where it was, and in spite of her having given him so much the right to expect she would communicate to him a matter so nearly touching them both as a change of address he felt a great shyness about asking.
Their companions watched them as if they considered that something rather witty and showy now would be likely to come off between them; but Hyacinth was too full of regard for his beautiful friend’s tacit notification to him that they must not appear too thick, which was after all more flattering than the most pressing inquiries or the most liberal announcements about herself could have been. She never asked him when he had come back; and indeed it was not long before Rose Muniment took that business on herself. Hyacinth, however, ventured to assure himself if Madame Grandoni were still at her post and even to remark—when his fellow-visitor had replied, “Oh yes, still, still. The great refusal, as Dante calls it, has not yet come off”—“You ought to bring her to see Miss Rosy. She’s a person Miss Rosy would particularly appreciate.”
“I’m sure I should be most happy to receive anyfriend of the Princess Casamassima,” said this young lady from the sofa; and when the Princess answered that she certainly would not fail to produce Madame Grandoni some day, Hyacinth—though he doubted if the presentation would really take place—guessed how much she wished her old friend might have heard the strange, bedizened little invalid make that speech.
There were only three other seats, for the introduction of the sofa—the question profoundly studied in advance—had rendered necessary the elimination of certain articles; so that Muniment, on his feet, hovered round the little circle with his hands in his pockets, laughing freely and sociably but not looking at the Princess; even if, as Hyacinth was sure, none the less agitated by her presence.
“You ought to tell us about foreign parts and the grand things you’ve seen; except that our distinguished visitor must know all about them,” Muniment threw out to him. Then he added: “Surely, at any rate, you’ve seen nothing more worthy of your respect than Camberwell.”
“Is this the worst part?” the Princess asked, looking up with her noble, interested face.
“The worst, madam? What grand ideas you must have! We admire Camberwell immensely.”
“It’s my brother’s ideas that are grand!” cried Rose Muniment, betraying him conscientiously. “He does want everything changed, no less than you, Princess; though he’s more cunning than you and won’t give one a handle where one can take him up. He thinks all this part most objectionable—as if dirty people won’t always make everything dirty where they live! I daresay he thinks there ought to be no dirty people, and it may be so; only if every one was clean where would be the merit? You’d get no credit for keeping yourself tidy. If it’s a questionof soap and water, at any rate, every one can begin by himself. My brother thinks the whole place ought to be as handsome as Brompton.”
“Ah yes, that’s where the artists and literary people live, isn’t it?” the Princess asked attentively.
“I’ve never seen it, but it’s very well laid out,” Rosy returned with her competent manner.
“Oh I like Camberwell better than that,” Muniment said with due amusement.
The Princess turned to Lady Aurora and, with the air of appealing to her for her opinion, gave her a glance that travelled in a flash from the topmost bow of her large misfitting hat to the crumpled points of her substantial shoes. “I must getyouto tell me the truth,” she breathed. “I want so much to know London—the real London. It seems so difficult!”
Lady Aurora looked a little frightened, but at the same time gratified, and after a moment responded: “I believe a great many artists live in Saint John’s Wood.”
“I don’t care about the artists!” said the Princess, shaking her head slowly and with the sad smile that sometimes made her beauty so inexpressibly touching.
“Not when they’ve painted you such beautiful pictures?” Rosy demanded. “We know about your pictures—we’ve admired them so much. Mr. Hyacinth has described to us your precious possessions.”
The Princess transferred her smile to Rosy and rested it on that young lady’s shrunken countenance with the same ineffable head-shake. “You do me too much honour. I’ve no possessions.”
“Gracious, was it all a make-believe?” Rosy cried, flashing at Hyacinth an eye that was never so eloquent as when it demanded an explanation.
“I’ve nothing in the world—nothing but the clothes on my back!” the Princess repeated very gravely and without looking at their indiscreet friend.
The words struck Hyacinth as an admonition, so that, though much puzzled, he made no attempt for the moment to reconcile the contradiction. He only replied: “I meant the things in the house. Of course I didn’t know to whom they belonged.”
“There are no things in my house now,” the Princess went on; and there was a touch of pure, high resignation in the words.
“Laws, I shouldn’t like that!” Rose Muniment declared, glancing with complacency over her own decorated walls. “Everything here belongs to me.”
“I shall bring Madame Grandoni to see you,” said the Princess irrelevantly but kindly.
“Do you think it’s not right to have a lot of things about?” Lady Aurora, with sudden courage, inquired of her distinguished companion, pointing a vague chin at her but looking into one of the upper angles of the room.
“I suppose one must always settle that for one’s self. I don’t like to be surrounded with objects I don’t care for, and I can care only for one thing—that is for one class of things—at a time. Dear lady,” the Princess pursued, “I fear I must confess to you that my heart’s not in bibelots. When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put in their mouths I can dispense with tapestry and old china.” And her fair face, bent charmingly, conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to argue that if she was narrow at least she was honest.
Hyacinth wondered, rather vulgarly, what strange turn she had taken and whether this singular picture of her denuded personality were not one of her famous caprices, a whimsical joke, a nervous perversity. Meanwhile he heard Lady Aurora urgeanxiously: “But don’t you think we ought to make the world more beautiful?”
“Doesn’t the Princess make it so by the mere fact of her existence?” Hyacinth interposed, his perplexity escaping in a harmless manner through this graceful hyperbole. He had observed that though the lady in question could dispense with old china and tapestry she couldn’t dispense with a pair of immaculate gloves which fitted her to a charm.
“My people have a mass of things, you know, but I’ve really nothing myself,” said Lady Aurora, as if she owed this assurance to such a representative of suffering humanity.
“The world will be beautiful enough when it becomes good enough,” the Princess resumed. “Is there anything so ugly as unjust distinctions, as the privileges of the few contrasted with the degradation of the many? When we want to beautify we must begin at the right end.”
“Surely there are none of us but what have our privileges!” Rose Muniment exclaimed with eagerness. “What do you say to mine, lying here between two members of the aristocracy and with Mr. Hyacinth thrown in?”
“You’re certainly lucky—with Lady Aurora Langrish. I wish she would come and seeme,” the Princess genially sighed as she rose.
“Do go, my lady, and tell me if it’s so poor!” Rosy went on gaily.
“I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of art,” Hyacinth broke out. “The more the better, whether people are hungry or not. In the way of ameliorating influences are not those the most definite?”
“A piece of bread and butter’s more to the purpose if your stomach’s empty,” the Princess declared.
“Robinson has been corrupted by foreign influences,”Paul Muniment suggested. “He doesn’t care for bread and butter now; he likes French cookery.”
“Yes, but I don’t get it. And have you sent away the little man, the Italian, with the white cap and apron?” Hyacinth asked of the Princess.
She hesitated a moment but presently replied laughing and not in the least offended at his question, though it was an attempt to put her in the wrong from which Hyacinth had not been able to refrain in his astonishment at these ascetic pretensions: “I’ve sent him away many times!”
Lady Aurora had also got up; she stood there gazing at her beautiful fellow-visitor with a timidity that made her wonder only more apparent. “Your servants must be awfully fond of you.”
“Oh my servants!” said the Princess as if it were only by a stretch of the meaning of the word that she could be said to enjoy the ministrations of menials. Her manner seemed to imply that she had a charwoman for an hour a day. Hyacinth caught the tone and determined that since she was going, as it appeared, he would break off his own visit and accompany her. He had flattered himself at the end of three weeks of Medley that he knew her in every phase, but here was a field of freshness. She turned to Paul Muniment and put out her hand to him, and while he took it in his own his face was visited by the most beautiful eyes that had ever rested there. “Will you come and see me one of these days?” she asked with a voice as pure as her glance.
Hyacinth waited for Paul’s answer with an emotion that could only be accounted for by his affectionate sympathy, the manner in which he had spoken of him to the Princess and which he wished him to justify, the interest he had in his appearing completelythe fine fellow he believed him. Muniment neither stammered nor blushed; he held himself straight and looked back at his interlocutress with eyes at least as open as her own to everything that concerned him. Then by way of answer: “Well madam, pray what good will it do me?” And the tone of the words was so humorous and kindly, and so instinct with a plain manly sense, that though they were not gallant Hyacinth was not ashamed for him. At the same moment he observed that Lady Aurora was watching their friend as if she had at least an equal stake in what he might say.
“Ah none; only me perhaps a little.” With this rejoinder and with a wonderful, sweet, indulgent dignity in which there was none of the stiffness of pride or resentment the Princess quitted him and approached Lady Aurora. She asked ifshewouldn’t do her the kindness to come. She should like so much to know her and had an idea there was a great deal they might talk about. Lady Aurora said she should be delighted, and the Princess took one of her cards out of her pocket and gave it to the noble spinster. After she had done so she stood a moment holding her hand and brought out: “It has really been such a happiness to me to meet you. Please don’t think it’s very clumsy if I say Idolike you so!” Lady Aurora was evidently exceedingly moved and impressed; but Rosy, when the Princess took leave of her and the irrepressible invalid had assured her of the pleasure with which she should receive her again, uttered the further truth that in spite of this she herself could never conscientiously enter into such theories.
“If every one was equal,” Rosy asked, “where would be the gratification I feel in getting a visit from a grandee? That’s what I have often said to her ladyship, and I consider that I’ve kept her inher place a little. No, no; no equality whileI’m about the place!”
The company appeared to comprehend that there was a natural fitness in Hyacinth’s seeing the great lady on her way, and accordingly no effort was made to detain him. He guided her, with the help of an attendant illumination from Muniment, down the dusky staircase, and at the door of the house there was a renewed, brief leave-taking with their host, who, however, showed no signs of relenting or recanting in respect to the Princess’s invitation. The warm evening had by this time grown thick and the population of Audley Court appeared to be passing it for the most part in the open air. As Hyacinth assisted his companion to thread her way through groups of sprawling, chattering children, gossiping women with bare heads and babies at the breast and heavily-planted men smoking very bad pipes, it seemed to him that their project of exploring the slums was already in the way of execution. He said nothing till they gained the outer street, but then, pausing a moment, inquired how she would be conveyed. Had she a carriage somewhere or should he try and get a cab?
“A carriage, my dear fellow? For what do you take me? I won’t trouble you about a cab: I walk everywhere now.”
“But if I had not been here?”
“I should have gone alone”; and she smiled at him through the turbid twilight of Camberwell.
“And where, please, gracious heaven? I may at least have the honour of accompanying you.”
“Certainly, if you can walk so far.”
“So far as what, dear Princess?”
“As Madeira Crescent, Paddington.”
“Madeira Crescent, Paddington?” Hyacinth stared.
“That’s what I call it when I’m with people with whom I wish to be fine, as with you. I’ve taken a small house there.”
“Then it’s really true that you’ve given up your beautiful things?”
“I’ve sold everything to give to the poor.”
“Ah, Princess——!” the young man almost moaned; for the memory of some of her treasures was vivid to him.
She became very grave, even stern, and with an accent of reproach that seemed to show she had been wounded where she was most sensitive demanded: “When I said I was willing to make the last sacrifice did you then believe I was lying?”
“Haven’t you keptanything?” he went on without heeding this challenge.
She looked at him a moment. “I’ve keptyou!” Then she passed her hand into his arm and they moved forward. He saw what she had done; she was living in a little ugly, bare, middle-class house and wearing simple gowns; and the energy and good faith of her behaviour, with the abruptness of the transformation, took away his breath. “I thought I should please you so much,” she added after they had gone a few steps. And before he had time to reply, as they came to a part of the street where there were small shops, those of butchers, greengrocers and pork-pie men, with open fronts, flaring lamps and humble purchasers, she broke out joyously: “Ah, this is the way I like to see London!”