The house in Madeira Crescent was a low stucco-fronted edifice in a shabby, shallow semicircle, and Hyacinth could see as they approached it that the window-place in the parlour, on a level with the street-door, was ornamented by a glass case containing stuffed birds and surmounted by an alabaster Cupid. He was sufficiently versed in his London to know that the descent in the scale of the gentility was almost immeasurable for a person who should have moved into that quarter from the neighbourhood of Park Lane. The street was not squalid and was strictly residential; but it was mean and meagre and fourth-rate and had in the highest degree that petty parochial air, that absence of style and elevation, which is the stamp of whole districts of London and which Hyacinth had already more than once mentally compared with the high-piled, important look of the Parisian perspective. It was marked by the union of every quality which should have made it detestable to the Princess; it was almost as bad as Lomax Place. As they stopped before the narrow ill-painted door, on which the number of the house appeared on a piece of common porcelain cut in a fanciful shape, it struck him that he had felt in their long walk the touch of the passion persuading his companion to divest herself of her superfluities, but that it would take the romantic out of one’s heroismto settle one’s self in such a paltry Philistine row. However, if the Princess had wished to mortify the flesh she had chosen an effective means of doing so, and of mortifying the spirit as well. The long light of the grey summer evening was still in the air and Madeira Crescent wore a soiled, dusty expression. A hand-organ droned in front of a neighbouring house and the cart of the local washerwoman, to which a donkey was harnessed, was drawn up opposite. The local children as well were dancing on the pavement to the music of the organ, and the scene was surveyed from one of the windows by a gentleman in a dirty dressing-gown, smoking a pipe, who made Hyacinth think of Mr. Micawber. The young man gave the Princess a deep look before they went into the house, and she smiled as if she guessed every comment he hadn’t uttered.
The long, circuitous walk with her from the far-away south of London had been strange and delightful; it reminded him more queerly than he could have expressed of some of the rambles he had taken on summer evenings with Millicent Henning. It was impossible to resemble this young lady less than the Princess resembled her, but in her enjoyment of her unwonted situation (she had never before, on a summer’s evening—to the best of Hyacinth’s belief at least—lost herself in the unfashionable districts on the arm of a seedy artisan) the distinguished personage exhibited certain coincidences with the shop-girl. She stopped as Millicent had done to look into the windows of vulgar establishments and amused herself with picking out the abominable objects she should like to possess; selecting them from a new point of view, that of a reduced fortune and the domestic arrangements of the “lower middle class,” and deriving extreme diversion from the idea that she now belonged tothat aggrieved body. She was in a state of light, fresh, sociable exhilaration which Hyacinth had hitherto not in the same degree seen in her, and before they reached Madeira Crescent it had become clear to him that her present phase was little more than a brillianttour de force—which he could yet not imagine her keeping up long, for the simple reason that after the novelty and strangeness of the affair had passed away she wouldn’t be able to endure the contact of so much that was common and ugly. For the moment, none the less, her discoveries in this line diverted her as all discoveries did, and she pretended to be sounding in a scientific spirit—that of the social philosopher, the student and critic of manners—the depths of the British Philistia. Hyacinth was struck more than ever with the fund of life that was in her, the energy of feeling, the high, free, reckless spirit. These things expressed themselves, as the couple proceeded, in a hundred sallies and droll proposals, kindling the young man’s pulses and making him conscious of the joy with which, in any extravagance, he would bear her company to the death. She affected him at this moment as playing with life so audaciously and defiantly that the end of it all would inevitably be some violent catastrophe.
She desired exceedingly that Hyacinth should take her to a music-hall or a coffee-tavern; she even professed a curiosity to see the inside of a public-house. Since she still had self-control enough to remember that if she stayed out beyond a certain hour Madame Grandoni would begin to worry about her they were obliged to content themselves with the minor “lark,” as the Princess was careful to designate their peep into an establishment, glittering with polished pewter and brass, which bore the name of the “Happy Land.” He had feared she would turnnervous after the narrow, befingered door had swung behind her, or that at all events she would be disgusted at what she might see and hear in such a place and would immediately wish to retreat. By good luck, however, there were only two or three convivial spirits in occupancy and the presence of the softer sex was apparently not so rare as to excite surprise. The softer sex furthermore was embodied in a big, hard, red woman, the publican’s wife, who looked as if she were in the habit of dealing with all sorts and mainly interested in seeing whether even the finest put down their money before they were served. The Princess pretended to “have something” and to admire the ornamentation of the bar; and when Hyacinth asked her in a low tone what disposal they should make, when the great changes came, of such an embarrassing type as that, replied off-hand, “Oh, drown her in a barrel of beer!” She professed when they came out to have been immensely interested in the “Happy Land” and was not content until Hyacinth had fixed an evening on which they might visit a music-hall together. She talked with him largely, by fits and starts, of his adventures abroad and his impressions of France and Italy; breaking off suddenly with some irrelevant but almost extravagantly appreciative allusion to Rose Muniment and Lady Aurora and then returning with a question as to what he had seen and done—the answer to which, however, in many cases, she was not at pains to wait for. Yet it implied her having paid considerable attention to what he told her that she should be able to say toward the end, with that fraternising frankness which was always touching because it appeared to place her at one’s mercy, to show how she counted on one’s having an equal loyalty: “Well, my dear friend, you’ve not wasted your time; you know everything, you’vemissed nothing; there are lots of things you can tell me—so that we shall have some famous talks in the winter evenings.” This last reference was apparently to the coming season, and there was something in the tone of quiet friendship with which it was uttered and which seemed to involve so many delightful things, something that for Hyacinth bound them still closer together. To live out of the world with her that way, lost among the London millions in a queer little cockneyfied retreat, was a refinement of intimacy—with revelations perhaps even beyond those that had left him wonder-struck at Medley.
They found Madame Grandoni sitting alone in the twilight, very patient and peaceful and having after all, it was clear, accepted the situation too completely to fidget at such a trifle as her companion’s not coming home at a ladylike hour. She had placed herself in the back part of the tawdry little drawing-room, which looked into a small smutty garden whence by the open front window the sound of the hurdy-gurdy and the voices of the children romping to its music came to her through the summer dusk. The influence of London was present in a mitigated far-away hum, and for some reason or other at that moment the place took on to our young friend the semblance of the home of an exile—a spot and an hour to be remembered with a throb of fondness in some danger or sorrow of after-years. The old lady never moved from her chair as she saw the Princess come in with the little bookbinder, and her observation rested on that member of their circle as familiarly as if she had seen him go out with her in the afternoon. The Princess stood smiling a moment before her mild monitress. “I’ve done a great thing. What do you think I’ve done?” she asked as she drew off her gloves.
“God knows! I’ve ceased to think!”—andMadame Grandoni stared up with her fat, empty hands on the arms of her chair.
“I’ve come on foot from the far south of London—how many miles? four or five—and I’m not a particle tired.”
“Che forza, che forza!” the old woman sighed. “She’ll knock you up completely,” she added, turning to Hyacinth with her customary compassion.
“Poor darling,shemisses the carriage,” Christina remarked, passing out of the room.
Madame Grandoni’s eyes followed her and Hyacinth made out in them a considerable lassitude, a plaintive bewilderment and surrender. “Don’t you like to use cabs—I mean hansoms?” he asked, wishing to be of comfort and suggestion.
“It’s not true I miss anything; my life’s only too full,” she replied. “I lived worse than this—in my bad days.” In a moment she went on: “It’s because you’re here—she doesn’t like Assunta to come.”
“Assunta—because I’m here?” Hyacinth didn’t immediately catch her meaning.
“You must have seen her Italian maid at Medley. She has kept her and is ashamed of it. When we’re alone Assunta comes for her hat and things. But she likes you to think she waits on herself.”
“That’s a weakness—when she’s so strong! And what does Assunta think of it?” Hyacinth asked, looking at the stuffed birds in the window, the alabaster Cupid, the wax flowers on the chimney-piece, the florid antimacassars on the chairs, the sentimental engravings on the walls—in frames of papier-mâché and “composition,” some of them enveloped in pink tissue paper—and the prismatic glass pendants attached to everything.
“She says, ‘What on earth will it matter to-morrow?’”
“Does she mean that to-morrow the Princess will have her luxury back again? Hasn’t she sold all her beautiful things?”
Madame Grandoni made up a face. “She has kept a few. They’re put away.”
“A la bonne heure!” Hyacinth cried with a laugh. He sat down with the ironical old woman; he spent nearly half an hour in desultory conversation with her before candles were brought in and while their friend was in Assunta’s hands. He noticed how resolutely the Princess had withheld herself from any attempt to sweeten the dose she had taken it into her head to swallow, to mitigate the ugliness of her vulgar little house. She had respected its horrible signs and tokens, had left rigidly in their places the gimcracks finding favour in Madeira Crescent. She had flung no draperies over the pretentious furniture and disposed no rugs upon the staring carpet; and it was plainly her theory that the right way to acquaint one’s self with the sensations of the wretched was to suffer the anguish of exasperated taste. Presently a female servant came in—not the sceptical Assunta, but a stunted young woman of the maid-of-all-work type, the same who had opened the door to the pair a short time before—and let him know of the Princess’s wishing him to understand that he was expected to remain to tea. He learned from Madame Grandoni that the custom of an early dinner followed in the evening by the frugal repast of the lower orders was another of Christina’s mortifications; and when shortly afterwards he saw the table laid in the back parlour, which was also the dining-room, and observed the nature of the crockery with which it was decorated, he noted that whether or no her earnestness were durable it was at any rate for the time intense. Madame Grandoni put before him definitely, as the Princess had done only in scraps,the career of the two ladies since his departure from Medley, their relinquishment of that fine house and the sudden arrangements Christina had made to change her mode of life after they had been only ten days in South Street. At the climax of the London season, in a society which only desired to treat her as one of its brightest ornaments, she had retired to Madeira Crescent, concealing her address—with only partial success of course—from every one, and inviting a celebrated curiosity-monger to come and look at her bibelots and tell her what he would give for the lot. In this manner she had parted with them at a fearful sacrifice. She had wished to avoid the nine days’ wonder of a public sale; for, to do her justice, though she liked to be original she didn’t like to be notorious, an occasion of stupid chatter. What had precipitated this violent step was a remonstrance received from her husband just after she had left Medley on the subject of her excessive expenditure: he had written her that it was past a joke—as she had appeared to consider it—and that she must really pull up. Nothing could gall her more than an interference on that head—since she maintained that she knew the exact figure of the Prince’s income, of which her allowance was an insignificant part—and she had pulled up with a vengeance, as Hyacinth might perceive. The young man divined on this occasion one of the eminent lady’s high anxieties, of which he had never thought before—the danger of the Prince’s absolutely putting on the screw, of his attempting to make her come back and live with him by withholding supplies altogether. In this case she would find herself in a very tight place, though she had a theory that if she should go to law about the matter the courts would allow her a separate maintenance. This course, however, it would scarce be in her character to adopt; she wouldbe more likely to waive her right and support herself by lessons in music and the foreign tongues supplemented by the remnant of property that had come to her from her mother. That she was capable of returning to the Prince some day as an effect of her not daring to face the loss of luxury was an idea that couldn’t occur to our youth in the midst of her assurances, uttered at various times, that she positively yearned for a sacrifice; and such an apprehension was less present to him than ever while he listened to Madame Grandoni’s account of the manner in which their friend’s rupture with the fashionable world had been enacted. It must be added that the old lady devoted a deep groan to her not knowing how it would all end, as some of Christina’s economies were most expensive; and when Hyacinth pressed her a little she proceeded to say that it was not at present the question of complications arising from the Prince that troubled her most, but the fear that his wife was seriously compromised by her reckless, her wicked correspondences: letters arriving from foreign countries, from God knew whom (Christina never told her, nor did she desire it), all about uprisings and manifestations and liberations—of so much one could be sure—and other matters that were no concern of honest folk. Hyacinth but half knew what Madame Grandoni meant by this allusion, which seemed to show that during the last few months their hostess had considerably extended her revolutionary connexion: he only thought of Hoffendahl, whose name, however, he was careful not to pronounce, and wondered whether his friend had been writing to the Master to intercede forhim, to beg that he might be let off. His cheeks burned at the thought, but he contented himself with remarking to his entertainer that their extraordinary companion enjoyed the sense of danger. The oldlady wished to know how she would enjoy the hangman’s rope—with which,du train dont elle allait, she might easily make acquaintance; and when he expressed the hope that she didn’t regard him as a counsellor of imprudence replied: “You, my poor child? Oh I saw into you at Medley. You’re a simplecodino!”
The Princess came back to tea in a very dull gown and with a bunch of keys at her girdle; and nothing could have suggested the thrifty housewife better than the manner in which she superintended the laying of the cloth and the placing on it of a little austere refreshment—a pile of bread and butter flanked by a pot of marmalade and a morsel of bacon. She filled the teapot from a shiny tin canister locked up in a cupboard, of which the key worked with difficulty, and made the tea with her own superb hands; taking pains, however, to explain to Hyacinth that she was far from imposing that régime on Madame Grandoni, who understood that the grocer had a standing order to supply her, for her private consumption, with any delicacy she might desire. For herself she had never been so well as since following a homely diet. On Sundays they had muffins and sometimes for a change a smoked haddock or even a fried sole. Hyacinth lost himself in worship of the Princess’s housewifely ways and of the exquisite figure she made as a small bourgeoise; judging that if her attempt to combine plain living with high thinking were all a burlesque it was at least the most finished entertainment she had yet offered him. She talked to Madame Grandoni of Lady Aurora; described her with much drollery, even to the details of her dress; declared that she was a delightful creature and one of the most interesting persons she had seen for an age; expressed to Hyacinth the conviction that she should like her exceedingly if the poordear would only believe a little inher. “But I shall like her whether she does or not,” the Princess all the same declared. “I always know when that’s going to happen; it isn’t so common. She’ll begin very well with me and be ‘fascinated’—isn’t that the way people begin with me?—but she won’t understand me at all nor make out in the least what kind of a queer fish I am, try as I may to show her. When she thinks she does at last she’ll give me up in disgust and never know she has understood me quite wrong. That has been the way with most of the people I’ve liked; they’ve run away from meà toutes jambes. Oh I’ve inspired aversions!” she mirthfully wailed as she handed Hyacinth his cup of tea. He recognised it by the aroma as a mixture not inferior to that of which he had partaken at Medley. “I’ve never succeeded in knowing any one who would do me good, for by the time I began to improve under their influence they could put up with me no longer.”
“You told me you were going to visit the poor. I don’t understand what your Gräfin was doing there,” said Madame Grandoni.
“She had come out of charity—in the same way as I. She evidently goes about immensely over there; I shall insist on her taking me with her.”
“I thought you had promised to letmebe your guide in those explorations,” Hyacinth promptly pleaded.
The Princess looked at him a moment. “Dear Mr. Robinson, Lady Aurora knows more than you.”
“There have been times surely when you’ve complimented me on my knowledge.”
“Oh I mean more about the lower classes!” she returned; and oddly enough there was a sense in which he was unable to deny the claim made for her ladyship. He presently came back to something said by his hostess a moment before, declaringthat it had not been the way with Madame Grandoni and him to take to their heels, and to this she replied: “Oh you’ll run away yet! Don’t be afraid.”
“I think that if I had been capable of quitting you I should have done it by this time: I’ve neglected such opportunities,” the old woman sighed. Hyacinth now made out that her eye had quite lost or intermitted its fine old pleasantry: she was troubled about many things.
“It’s true that if you didn’t leave me when I was rich it wouldn’t look well for you to leave me at present,” the Princess suggested; and before Madame Grandoni could meet this speech she said to Hyacinth: “I liked that odd man, your friend Muniment, so much for saying he wouldn’t come to see me. ‘What good would it do him,’ poor fellow? What good would it do him indeed? You were not so difficult: you held off a little and pleaded obstacles, but one easily saw you’d come down,” she continued while she covered her guest with her mystifying smile. “Besides I was smarter then, more splendid; I had on gewgaws and suggested worldly lures. I must have been more attractive. But I liked him for refusing,” she repeated; and of the many words she uttered that evening it was these that made most impression on our hero. He remained an hour after tea, for on rising from the table she had gone to the piano—not depriving herself of this resource she had a humble instrument of the so-called “cottage” kind—and begun to play in a manner that reminded him of her commemorative outburst, as he might have fancied it, the day of his arrival at Medley. The night had grown close and as the piano was in the front room he opened at her request the window that looked into Madeira Crescent. Beneath it assembled the youth of both sexes, the dingyloiterers, who had clustered an hour before round the hurdy-gurdy. But on this occasion they didn’t caper about; they leaned in silence against the area-rails and listened to the wondrous music. When Hyacinth told the player of the spell she had thrown on them she declared that it made her singularly happy; she added that she was really glad, almost proud, of her day; she felt as if she had begun to do something for the people. Just before he took leave she encountered some occasion for saying that she was certain the odd man in Audley Court wouldn’t come; and he forbore to contradict her because he believed in fact he wouldn’t.
How right had been her prevision that Lady Aurora would be fascinated at first was proved as soon as Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square—a visit he was promptly led to pay by a deep sense of the obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie’s death. The conditions in which he found her were quite the same as those of his visit the year before; she was spending the unfashionable season in her father’s empty house and amid a desert of brown holland and the dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen so much of her during Pinnie’s illness that he felt—or had felt then—that he knew her almost intimately, that they had become real friends, almost comrades, and might meet henceforth without reserves or ceremonies. She was in spite of this as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the other occasion: not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and apparently unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer. Hyacinth, however, always liked extremely to be with her, for she was the person in the world who quietly, delicately and as a matter of course treated him most as a gentleman and appeared most naturally to take him for one. She had never addressed him the handsome flattering freedoms that had fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained at all her view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptivemanner, which took all sorts of equalities and communities for granted, was a homage to the idea of his fine essence. It was in this manner that she now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he found himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian theories of Venice in Belgravia after the fashion of the cosmopolites bred by those wastes. It took him none the less but a few minutes to be sure Lady Aurora’s heart was not in these considerations; the deferential smile she bent upon him while she sat with her head thrust forward and her long hands clasped in her lap was slightly mechanical, her attitude all perfunctory. When he gave her his views of some of thearrière-penséesof M. Gambetta—for he had views not altogether, as he thought, deficient in originality—she didn’t interrupt, for she never interrupted; but she took advantage of his first pause to say quickly and irrelevantly: “Will the Princess Casamassima come again to Audley Court?”
“I’ve no doubt she’d come again if they’d particularly like her to.”
“I do hope she will. She’s very wonderful,” Lady Aurora richly breathed.
“Oh yes, she’s very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure.”
“Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to have such an experience again. Don’t you think her quite different from anybody one has ever seen?” But her ladyship added before waiting for an answer to this: “I liked her quite extraordinarily.”
“She liked you just as much. I know it would give her great pleasure if you could go to see her,” Hyacinth said.
“Fancy that!” his companion gasped; and she instantly obtained the Princess’s address from himand made a note of it in a small shabby pocket-book. She mentioned that the card the Princess had given her in Camberwell exhibited in fact no address, and he recognised that vagary—the Princess was so off-hand. Then she said, hesitating a little: “Does she really care for the poor?”
“If she doesn’t,” the young man replied, “I can’t imagine what interest she has in pretending to.”
“If she does she’s very remarkable—she deserves great honour.”
“You really care—so why is she more remarkable than you?” Hyacinth demanded.
“Oh it’s very different—she’s so wonderfully attractive!” Lady Aurora replied, making recklessly the one allusion to the oddity of her own appearance in which he was destined to hear her indulge. She became conscious of it the moment she had spoken, and said quickly, to turn it off: “I should like to talk with her, but I’m rather afraid. She’s tremendously clever.”
“Ah what she is—‘tremendously’—you’ll find out when you know her!” he could but all portentously sigh.
His hostess looked at him a little and then vaguely returned: “How very interesting!” The next moment she continued: “She might do so many other things. She might charm the world.”
“She does that, whatever she does,” Hyacinth smiled. “It’s all by the way; it needn’t interfere.”
“That’s what I mean, that most other people would be content—beautiful as she is. There’s great merit when you give up something.”
“She has known a great many bad people and she wants to know some good,” he explained. “Therefore be sure to go to her soon.”
“She looks as if she had known nothing bad since she was born,” said Lady Aurora rapturously. “Ican’t imagine her going into all the dreadful places she’d have to.”
“You’ve gone into them, and it hasn’t hurt you,” he suggested.
“How do you know that? My family think it has.”
“You make me glad then that I haven’t a family,” said the young man.
“And the Princess—has she no one?”
“Ah yes, she has a husband. But she doesn’t live with him.”
“Is he one of the bad persons?” asked Lady Aurora as earnestly as a child listening to a tale.
“Well, I don’t like to abuse him—he’s down.”
“If I were a man I should be in love with her,” said Lady Aurora. Then she added: “I wonder if we might work together.”
“That’s exactly what she hopes.”
“I won’t show her the worst places,” her ladyship maliciously protested.
To which her visitor returned: “I expect you’ll do what every one else has done—which is exactly what she wants!” Before he took leave he said to her: “Do you know if Paul Muniment also liked the Princess?”
She meditated a moment, apparently with some intensity. “I think she struck him as extraordinarily beautiful—as the most beautiful person he had ever seen.”
“Does he still believe her a humbug?”
“Still?” asked Lady Aurora as if she didn’t understand.
“I mean that that was the impression apparently made upon him last winter by my description of her.”
“Oh I’m sure he thinks her tremendously plucky!” Which was all the satisfaction Hyacinth got just then as to Muniment’s estimate of the Princess.
A few days later he returned to Madeira Crescent in the evening, the only time he was free, the Princess having given him a general invitation to take tea with her. He felt he ought to be discreet in acting on it, though he was not without reasons that would have warranted him in going early and often. He had a peculiar dread of her growing used to him and tired of him—boring herself in his society; yet at the same time he had rather a sharp vision of her boring herself without him during the dull summer evenings when even Paddington was out of town. He wondered what she did, what visitors dropped in, what pastimes she cultivated, what saved her from the sudden vagary of throwing up the whole of her present game. He remembered that there was a complete side of her life with which he was almost unacquainted—Lady Marchant and her daughters, at Medley, and three or four other persons who had called while he was there being, in his experience, the only illustrations of it—and didn’t know, by the same token, to what extent she had in spite of her transformation preserved relations with her old friends; but he made out as looming the day she would discover that what she found in Madeira Crescent was less striking than what she missed. Going thither a second time he noted, for all this, that he had done her great injustice: she was full of resources, she had never been so happy, she found time to read, to write, to commune with her piano and above all to think—a delightful detachment from the invasive, vulgar, gossiping, distracting world she had known hitherto. The only interruption to her felicity was that she received quantities of notes from her former acquaintance, endless appeals to give some account of herself, to say what had become of her, to come and stay with them in the country. With these survivals of her past she took a very shortway, she simply burned them without answering. She told Hyacinth immediately that Lady Aurora had called two days before, at an hour when she was not in, and that she had straightway addressed her in return an invitation to come to tea any evening at eight o’clock. That was the way the people in Madeira Crescent entertained each other—the Princess knew everything about them now and was eager to impart her knowledge; and the evening, she was sure, would be much more convenient to Lady Aurora, whose days were filled with good works, with peregrinations of charity. Her ladyship arrived ten minutes after Hyacinth; she assured the Princess her invitation had been expressed in a manner so flattering that she was unwilling to wait more than a day to respond. She was introduced to Madame Grandoni and tea all bustlingly served; Hyacinth being gratefully conscious the while of the “considerate” way in which Lady Aurora forbore to appear bewildered at meeting him in such society. She knew he frequented it, having been witness of his encounter with their high personage in Audley Court; but it might have startled her to have ocular evidence of the footing on which he stood. Everything the Princess did or said at this time had for effect, whatever its purpose, to make her seem more rare and fine; and she had seldom given him greater pleasure than by the exquisite art she put forth to win Lady Aurora’s confidence, to place herself under the pure and elevating influence of the noble spinster. She made herself small and simple; she spoke of her own little aspirations and efforts; she appealed and persuaded; she laid her white hand on her gentle guest’s, gazing at her with an interest all visibly sincere but which yet derived half its effect from the contrast between the quality of her beauty, the whole air of her person, and the hard, drearyproblems of misery and crime. It was touching and Lady Aurora was touched; that was quite clear as they sat together on the sofa after tea and the Princess protested that she only wanted to know what her new friend was doing—what she had done for years—in order that she might go and do likewise. She asked personal questions with a directness that was sometimes embarrassing to the subject—he had seen that habit in her from the first—and her yearning guest, though charmed and excited, was not quite comfortable at being so publicly probed and sounded. The public was formed of Madame Grandoni and Hyacinth; but the old lady—whose intercourse with the visitor had consisted almost wholly of watching her with a deep, speculative anxiety—presently shuffled away and was heard, through the thin partitions that prevailed in Madeira Crescent, to ascend to her own apartment. It seemed to Hyacinth that he ought also in delicacy to retire, and this was his intention from one moment to the other; to him certainly—and the very second time she met him—Lady Aurora had made as much of her confession as he had a right to look for. After that one little flash of egotism he had never again heard her refer to her own feelings or conditions.
“Do you stay in town like this, at such a season, on purpose to attend to your work?” the Princess asked; and there was something archly rueful in the tone in which she made this inquiry—as if it cost her just a pang to find that in taking such a line she herself had not been so original as she hoped. “Mr. Robinson has told me about your big house in Belgrave Square—you must let me come and see you there. Nothing would make me so happy as that you should allow me to help you a little—how little soever. Do you like to be helped or do you like to go quite alone? Are you veryindependent or do you need to look up, to cling, to lean on some one? Pardon me if I ask impertinent questions; we speak that way—rather, you know—in Rome, where I’ve spent a large part of my life. That idea of your being there by yourself, in your great dull home, with all your charities and devotions, makes a kind of picture in my mind; it’s quaint and touching, it’s like something in some English novel. Englishwomen are so awfully accomplished, are they not? I’m really a foreigner, you know, and though I’ve lived here a while it takes one some time to find those things outau juste. Is your work for the people therefore only one of your occupations or is it everything, does it absorb your whole life? That’s what I should like it to be for me. Do your family like you to throw yourself into all this or have you had to brave a certain amount of ridicule? I daresay you have; that’s where you English are strong, in braving ridicule. They have to do it so often, haven’t they? I don’t know whether I could do it. I never tried—but with you I think I would brave anything. Are your family clever and sympathetic? No? the kind of thing that one’s family generally is? Ah well, dear lady, we must make a little family together. Are you encouraged or disgusted? Do you go on doggedly or have you some faith, some great idea, that lifts you up? Are you actively religious now,par exemple? Do you do your work in connexion with any pious foundation or earnest movement, any missions or priests or sisters? I’m a Catholic, you know—but so little by my own doing! I shouldn’t mind in the least joining hands with any one who’s really producing results. I express myself awkwardly, but perhaps you know what I mean. Possibly you don’t know that I’m one of those who believe that a great new deal is destined to take placeand that it can’t make things worse than they are already. I believe, in a word, in the action of the people for themselves—the others will never act for them; and I’m all ready to actwiththem—in any intelligent or intelligible way. If that shocks you I shall be immensely disappointed, because there’s something in the impression you make on me that seems to suggest you haven’t the usual prejudices, so that if certain things were to happen you wouldn’t be afraid. You’re beautifully shy, are you not?—but you’re not craven. I suppose that if you thought the inequalities and oppressions and miseries now universal were a necessary part of life and were going on for ever you wouldn’t be interested in those people over the river (the bedridden girl and her brother I mean); because Mr. Robinson tells me they’re advanced socialists—or at least the brother is. Perhaps you’ll say you don’t care for him—the sister, to your mind, being the remarkable one. She’s indeed a perfect littlefemme du monde—she talks so much better than most of the people in society. I hope you don’t mind my saying that, because I’ve an idea you’re not in society. You can imagine whether I am! Haven’t you judged it like me, condemned it and given it up? Aren’t you sick of the egotism, the snobbery, the meanness, the frivolity, the immorality, the hypocrisy? Isn’t there a great resemblance in our situations? I don’t mean in our natures, for you’re far better than I shall ever be. Aren’t you quite divinely good? When I see a woman of your sort—not that I often do—I try to be a little less bad. You’ve helped hundreds, thousands of people: you must helpme!”
These remarks, which I have strung together, didn’t of course fall from the Princess’s lips in an uninterrupted stream; they were arrested and interspersed by frequent, inarticulate responses andembarrassed protests. Lady Aurora shrank from them even while they gratified her, blinking and fidgeting in the dazzling, direct light of her hostess’s sympathy. I needn’t repeat her answers, the more so as they none of them arrived at completion but passed away into nervous laughter and averted looks, the latter directed at the ceiling, the floor, the windows, and appearing to project a form of entreaty to some occult or supernatural power that the conversation should become more impersonal. In reply to the Princess’s allusion to the convictions prevailing in the Muniment family she said that the brother and sister thought differently about public questions but were of the same mind with regard to the interest taken by persons of the upper class in the working people, the attempt on the part of their so-called superiors to enter into their life: they pronounced it a great mistake. At this information the Princess looked much disappointed; she wished to know if the Muniments deemed it so impossible to do them any good. “Oh I mean a mistake fromourpoint of view,” said Lady Aurora. “They wouldn’t do it in our place; they think we had much better occupy ourselves with our own pleasures.” And as her new friend stared, not comprehending, she went on: “Rosy thinks we’ve a right to our own pleasures under all circumstances, no matter how badly off the poor may be; and her brother takes the ground that we’re not likely to have them much longer and that in view of what may happen we’re great fools not to make the most of them.”
“I see, I see. That’s very strong,” the Princess murmured in a tone of high appreciation.
“I daresay. But, all the same, whatever’s going to come onemustdo something.”
“You do think then that something’s going to come?” said the Princess.
“Oh immense changes, I daresay. But I don’t belong to anything, you know.”
The Princess thought this over. “No more do I. But many people do. Mr. Robinson for instance.” And she turned her golden light on Hyacinth.
“Oh if the changes depend onme——!” Mr. Robinson exclaimed with a blush.
“They won’t set the Thames on fire—I quite agree to that!”
Lady Aurora had the manner of not considering she had a warrant for going into the question of Hyacinth’s affiliations; so she stared abstractedly at the piano and in a moment remarked to her hostess: “I’m sure you play awfully well. I should like so much to hear you.”
Hyacinth could see their friend thought thisbanal. She had not asked Lady Aurora to spend the evening with her simply that they should fall back on the resources of the vulgar. Nevertheless she replied with perfect good nature that she should be delighted to play; only there was a thing she should like much better—which was that Lady Aurora should narrate her life.
“Oh don’t talk about mine; yours, yours!” her ladyship cried, colouring with eagerness and for the first time since her arrival indulging in the free gesture of laying her hand on that of the Princess.
“With so many grand confidences in the air I certainly had better take myself off,” said Hyacinth; and the Princess offered no opposition to his departure. She and Lady Aurora were evidently on the point of striking up a tremendous intimacy, and as he turned this idea over walking away it made him sad for strange vague reasons that he couldn’t have expressed.
The Sunday following this occasion he spent almost entirely with the Muniments, with whom, since his return to his work, he had been able to have no long, fraternising talk of the kind that had marked their earlier relations. The present, however, was a happy day; it added its large measure to the esteem in which he now held the inscrutable Paul. The warm, bright, September weather enriched even the dinginess of Audley Court, and while in the morning Rosy’s brother and their visitor sat beside her sofa the trio amused themselves with discussing a dozen different plans for giving a festive turn to the day. There had been moments in the last six months when Hyacinth had the conviction he should never again be able to enter into such ideas as that, and these moments had been connected with the strange conversion taking place in his mental image of the man whose hardness—of course he was obliged to be hard—he had never expected to see turned upon a passionate admirer. At present, for the hour at least, the darkness had cleared away and Paul’s company become a sustaining, inspiring influence. He had never been kinder, jollier, safer, as it were; it had never appeared more desirable to hold fast to him and trust him. Less than ever would an observer have guessed at a good reason why the two young men might have winced as they lookedat each other. Rosy naturally took part in the question debated between her companions—the question whether they should limit their excursion to a walk in Hyde Park; should embark at Lambeth Pier on the penny steamer which would convey them to Greenwich; or should start presently for Waterloo Station and go thence by train to Hampton Court. Miss Muniment had visited none of these scenes, but she contributed largely to the discussion, for which she seemed perfectly qualified; talked about the crowd on the steamer and the inconvenience arising from drunken persons on the return quite as if she had suffered from such drawbacks; reminded the others that the view from the hill at Greenwich was terribly smoky and at that season the fashionable world—half the attraction of course—altogether absent from Hyde Park; and expressed strong views in favour of Wolsey’s old palace, with whose history she appeared intimately acquainted. She threw herself into her brother’s holiday with eagerness and glee, and Hyacinth marvelled again at the stoicism of the hard, bright creature, polished, as it were, by pain, whose imagination appeared never to concern itself with her own privations, so that she could lie in her close little room the whole golden afternoon without bursting into sobs as she saw the western sunbeams slant upon the shabby, ugly, familiar paper of her wall and thought of the far-off fields and gardens she should never see. She talked immensely of the Princess, for whose beauty, grace and benevolence she could find no sufficient praise; declaring that of all the fair faces that had ever hung over her couch—and Rosy spoke as from immense opportunities for comparison—she had far the noblest and most refreshing. She seemed to make a kind of light in the room and to leave it behind after she had gone. Rosy could call up her image as shecould hum a tune she had heard, and she expressed in her quaint, particular way how, as she lay there in the quiet hours, she repeated over to herself the beautiful air. The Princess might be anything, she might be royal or imperial, and Rosy was well aware how littlesheshould complain of the dulness of a life in which such apparitions as that could pop in any day. She made a difference in the place—it gave it a regular finish for her to have come there; if it was good enough for a princess it was good enough for the likes ofher, and she hoped she shouldn’t hear again of Paul’s wishing her to move out of a room with which she should have henceforth such delightful associations. The Princess had found her way to Audley Court and perhaps wouldn’t find it to another lodging, for they couldn’t expect her to follow them about London at their pleasure; and at any rate she had evidently been altogether struck with the little room, so that if they were quiet and canny who could say but the fancy would take her to send them a bit of carpet or a picture, or even a mirror with a gilt frame, to make it a bit more tasteful? Rosy’s transitions from pure enthusiasm to the imaginative calculation of benefits were performed with a serenity peculiar to herself. Her chatter had so much spirit and point that it always commanded attention, but to-day Hyacinth was less tolerant of it than usual, because so long as it lasted Muniment held his tongue, and what he had been anxious about was much more Paul’s impression of the Princess. Rosy made no remark to him on the monopoly he had so long enjoyed of this wonderful lady: she had always had the manner of an indulgent incredulity about Hyacinth’s social adventures, and he saw the hour might easily come when she would begin to talk of their grand acquaintance as if she herself had been the first to discover her. She hadmuch to say, however, about the nature of the connexion Lady Aurora had formed with her, and she was mainly occupied with the glory she had drawn upon herself by bringing two such exalted persons together. She fancied them alluding, in the great world, to the occasion on which “we first met—at Miss Muniment’s, you know”; and she related how Lady Aurora, who had been in Audley Court the day before, had declared she owed her a debt she could never repay. The two ladies had liked each other more, almost, than they liked any one; and wasn’t it a rare picture to think of them moving hand in hand, like great twin lilies, through the bright upper air? Muniment inquired in rather a coarse, unsympathetic way what the mischief she ever wanted ofher; which led Hyacinth to demand in return: “What do you mean? What does who want of whom?”
“What does the beauty of beauties want ofourpoor plain lady? She has a totally different stamp. I don’t know much about women, but I can see that.”
“Where do you see a different stamp? They both have the stamp of their rank!” cried Rosy.
“Who can ever tell what women want, at any time?” Hyacinth asked with the off-handedness of a man of the world.
“Well, my boy, if you don’t know any more than I you disappoint me! Perhaps if we wait long enough she’ll tell us some day herself.”
“Tell you what she wants of Lady Aurora?”
“I don’t mind about Lady Aurora so much; but what in the name of long journeys she wants withus!”
“Don’t you think you’re worth a long journey?” Rosy cried gaily. “If you weren’t my brother, which is handy for seeing you, and I weren’t confined to my sofa, I’d go from one end of England tothe other to make your acquaintance! He’s in love with the Princess,” she went on to Hyacinth, “and he asks those senseless questions to cover it up. What does any one want of anything?”
It was decided at last that the two young men should go down to Greenwich, and after they had partaken of bread and cheese with Rosy they embarked on a penny steamer. The boat was densely crowded, and they leaned, rather squeezed together, in the fore part of it, against the rail of the deck, and watched the big black fringe of the yellow stream. The river had always for Hyacinth a deep beguilement. The ambiguous appeal he had felt as a child in all the aspects of London came back to him from the dark detail of its banks and the sordid agitation of its bosom: the great arches and pillars of the bridges, where the water rushed and the funnels tipped and sounds made an echo and there seemed an overhanging of interminable processions; the miles of ugly wharves and warehouses; the lean protrusions of chimney, mast and crane; the painted signs of grimy industries staring from shore to shore; the strange, flat, obstructive barges, straining and bumping on some business as to which everything was vague but that it was remarkably dirty; the clumsy coasters and colliers which thickened as one went down; the small loafing boats whose occupants, somehow, looking up from their oars at the steamer, as they rocked in the oily undulations of its wake, appeared profane and sarcastic; in short all the grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing activity of the turbid flood. In the good-natured crowd, amid the fumes of vile tobacco, beneath the shower of sooty particles and to the accompaniment of the bagpipe of a dingy Highlander who sketched occasionally an unconvincing reel, Hyacinth forbore to speak to his companionof what he had most at heart; but later, as they lay in the brown, crushed grass on one of the slopes of Greenwich Park and saw the river stretch away and shine beyond the pompous colonnades of the Hospital, he asked him if there were any truth in what Rosy had said about his being sweet on their friend the Princess. He said “their friend” on purpose, speaking as if, now that she had been twice to Audley Court, Muniment might be regarded as knowing her almost as well as he himself did. He wished to conjure away the idea that he was jealous of Paul, and if he desired information on the point I have mentioned this was because it still made him almost as uncomfortable as it had done at first that his comrade should take the scoffing view. He didn’t easily see such a fellow as Muniment wheel about from one day to the other, but he had been present at the most exquisite exhibition he had ever observed the Princess make of that divine power of conciliation which was not perhaps in social intercourse the art she chiefly exercised but was certainly the most wonderful of her secrets, and it would be remarkable indeed that a sane young man shouldn’t have been affected by it. It was familiar to Hyacinth that Muniment wasn’t easily reached or rubbed up by women, but this might perfectly have been the case without detriment to the Princess’s ability to work a miracle. The companions had wandered through the great halls and courts of the Hospital; had gazed up at the glories of the famous painted chamber and admired the long and lurid series of the naval victories of England—Muniment remarking to his friend that he supposed he had seen the match to all that in foreign parts, offensive little travelled beggar that he was. They had not ordered a fish-dinner either at the “Trafalgar” or the “Ship”—having a frugal vision of tea and shrimps with Rosyon their return—but they had laboured up and down the steep undulations of the shabby, charming park; made advances to the tame deer and seen them amble foolishly away; watched the young of both sexes, hilarious and red in the face, roll in promiscuous accouplement over the slopes; gazed at the little brick observatory, perched on one of the knolls, which sets the time to English history and in which Hyacinth could see that his companion took an expert, a technical interest; wandered out of one of the upper gates and admired the trimness of the little villas at Blackheath, where Muniment declared it his conception of supreme social success to be able to live. He pointed out two or three small semi-detached houses, faced with stucco and with “Mortimer Lodge” or “The Sycamores” inscribed on the gate-posts, and Hyacinth guessed these to be the sort of place where he would like to end his days—in high pure air, with a genteel window for Rosy’s couch and a cheerful view of suburban excursions. It was when they came back into the Park that, being rather hot and a little sated, they stretched themselves under a tree and Hyacinth yielded to his curiosity.
“Sweet on her—sweet on her, my boy!” said Muniment. “I might as well be sweet on the dome of Saint Paul’s, which I just make out off there.”
“The dome of Saint Paul’s doesn’t come to see you and doesn’t ask you to return the visit.”
“Oh I don’t return visits—I’ve got plenty of jobs of my own to attend to. If I don’t put myself out for the Princess isn’t that a sufficient answer to your question?”
“I’m by no means sure,” said Hyacinth. “If you went to see her, simply and civilly, because she asked you, I shouldn’t regard it as a proof you had taken a fancy to her. Your hanging off is more suspicious;it may mean that you don’t trust yourself—that you’re in danger of falling in love if you go in for a more intimate acquaintance.”
“It’s a rum go, your wanting me to make up to her. I shouldn’t think it would suit your book,” Muniment returned while he stared at the sky with his hands clasped under his head.
“Do you suppose I’m afraid of you?” his comrade asked. “Besides,” Hyacinth added in a moment, “why the devil should I care now?”
Paul made for a little no rejoinder; he turned over on his side and, with his arm resting on the ground, leaned his head on his hand. Hyacinth felt his eyes on his own face, but he also felt himself colouring and didn’t meet them. He had taken a private vow never to indulge, to this companion, in certain inauspicious references, and the words just spoken had slipped out of his mouth too easily. “What do you mean by that?” Paul demanded at last; and when Hyacinth looked at him he saw nothing but the strong, fresh, irresponsible, the all so manly and sturdy face. Its owner had had time before speaking to prefigure a meaning.
Suddenly an impulse he had never known before, or rather that he had always resisted, took possession of our young man. There was a mystery which it concerned his happiness to clear up, and he became unconscious of his scruples, of his pride, of the strength he had ever believed to be in him—the strength for going through his work and passing away without a look behind. He sat forward on the grass with his arms round his knees and offered his friend a presence quickened by his difficulties. For a minute the two pairs of eyes met with extreme clearness, and then Hyacinth brought out: “What an extraordinary chap you are!”
“You’ve hit it there!” Paul smiled.
“I don’t want to make a scene or work on your feelings, but how will you like it when I’m strung up on the gallows?”
“You mean for Hoffendahl’s job? That’s what you were alluding to just now?” Muniment lay there in the same position, chewing a long blade of dry grass which he held to his lips with his free hand.
“I didn’t mean to speak of it; but after all why shouldn’t it come up? Naturally I’ve thought of it a good deal.”
“What good does that do?” Muniment returned. “I hoped you didn’t—I noticed you never spoke of it. You don’t like it. You’d rather chuck it up,” he added.
There was not in his voice the faintest note of irony or contempt, no sign whatever that he passed judgement on such an attitude. He spoke in a quiet, human, memorising manner, as if it had originally quite entered into his thought to allow for weak regrets. Nevertheless the complete reasonableness of his tone itself cast a chill on Hyacinth’s spirit; it was like the touch of a hand at once very firm and very soft, yet strangely cold. “I don’t want in the least to repudiate business, but did you suppose I liked it?” our hero asked with rather a forced laugh.
“My dear fellow, how could I tell? You like a lot of things I don’t. You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations—whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”
“If you object, for yourself, to change, and are so fond of still waters, why have you associated yourself with a revolutionary movement?” Hyacinth demanded with a little air of making rather a good point.
“Just for that reason!” Paul blandly said. “Isn’t our revolutionary movement as quiet as the grave?Who knows, who suspects anything like the full extent of it?”
“I see. You take only the quiet parts!”
In speaking these words Hyacinth had had no derisive intention, but a moment later he flushed with the sense that they had a sufficiently low sound. Paul, however, appeared to see no offence in them, and it was in the gentlest, most suggestive way, as if he had been thinking over what might comfort his little mate, that he replied: “There’s one thing you ought to remember—that it’s quite on the cards the beastly call may never be made.”
“I don’t desire that reminder,” Hyacinth said; “and moreover you must let me tell you I somehow don’t easily fancyyoumixed up with things that don’t come off. Anything you have to do with will come off, I think.”
Muniment reflected a moment, as if his little mate were charmingly ingenious. “Surely I’ve nothing to do with the particular job——!”
“With the execution, perhaps not; but how about the idea of it? You seemed to me to have a great deal to do with it the night you took me to see him.”
Paul changed his posture, raising himself, and in a moment was seated Turk-fashion beside his friend. He put his arm over his shoulder and drew him, studying his face; and then in the kindest manner in the world he brought out: “There are three or four definite chances in your favour.”
“I don’t want second-rate comfort, you know,” said Hyacinth with his eyes on the distant atmospheric mixture that represented London.
“What the devildoyou want?” Paul asked, still holding him and with perfect good humour.
“Well, to get inside ofyoua little; to know how a chap feels when he’s going to part with his particular pal.”
“To part with him?” this character repeated.
“I mean putting it at the worst.”
“I should think you’d know by yourself—if you’re going to part withme.”
At this Hyacinth prostrated himself, tumbled over to the grass on his face, which he buried in his hands. He remained in this attitude, saying nothing, a long time; and while he lay there he thought, with a sudden, quick flood of association, of many strange things. Most of all he had the sense of the brilliant charming day; the warm stillness, touched with cries of amusement; the sweetness of loafing there in an interval of work with a chum who was a tremendously fine fellow even if he didn’t understand the inexpressible. Paul also kept the peace, and Hyacinth felt him all unaffectedly puzzled. He wanted now to relieve him, so that he pulled himself together again and turned round, saying the first thing he could think of, in relation to the general subject of their talk, that would carry them away from the personal question. “I’ve asked you before, and you’ve told me, but somehow I’ve never quite grasped it—so I just touch on the matter again—exactly what good you think it will do.”
“The stroke of work, eh? Well, you must remember that as yet we know only very vaguely what it is. It’s difficult therefore to measure closely the importance it may have, and I don’t think I’ve ever, in talking with you, pretended to fix that importance. I don’t suppose it will matter immensely whether your own engagement’s carried out or not; but if it is it will have been a detail in a scheme of which the general effect will be decidedly useful. I believe, and you pretend to believe, though I’m not sure you do, in the advent of the democracy. It will help the democracy to get possession that the classes that keep them down shall be admonished from timeto time that they’ve a very definite and very determined intention of doing so. An immense deal will depend upon that. Hoffendahl’s a jolly admonisher.”
Hyacinth listened to this explanation with an expression of interest that was not feigned; and after a moment he returned: “When you say you believe in the democracy I take for granted you mean you positively wish for their coming into power, as I’ve always supposed. Now what I really have never understood is this—why you should desire to put forward a lot of people whom you regard almost without exception as rather dismal donkeys.”
“Ah my dear lad,” Paul laughed, “when one undertakes to meddle in human affairs one must deal with human material. The upper classes have the longest ears.”
“I’ve heard you say you were working for an equality in human conditions—to abolish the immemorial inequality. What you want then for all mankind is the selfsame shade of asininity.”
“That’s very neat; did you pick it up in France? Damn the too-neat, you know; it’s as bad as the too-rotten. The low tone of our fellow-mortals is a result of bad conditions; it’s the conditions I want to alter. When those who have no start to speak of have a good one it’s but fair to infer they’ll go further. I want to try them, you know.”
“But why equality?” Hyacinth asked. “Somehow that word doesn’t say so much to me as it used to. Inequality—inequality! I don’t know whether it’s by dint of repeating it over to myself, butthatdoesn’t shock me as it used.”
“They didn’t put you up to that in France, I’m sure!” Paul exclaimed. “Your point of view’s changed. You’ve risen in the world.”
“Risen? Good God, what have I risen to?”
“True enough; you were always a bloated littleswell!” And the so useful man at the great chemical works gave his young friend a sociable slap on the back. There was a momentary bitterness in its being imputed to such a one as Hyacinth, even in joke, that he had taken sides with the lucky beggars as a class, and he had it on his tongue’s end to ask his friend if he had never guessed what his proud titles were—the bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter out of which he had been picked by a poor sewing-girl. But his lifelong reserve on this point was a habit not easily broken, and before such a challenge could burn through it Paul had gone on: “If you’ve ceased to believe we can do anything it will be rather awkward, you know.”
“I don’t know what I believe, God help me!” Hyacinth remarked in a tone of an effect so lugubrious that his mate indulged in prompt hilarity of attenuation. But our young man added: “I don’t want you to think I’ve ceased to care for the people. What am I but one of the poorest and meanest of them?”
“You, my boy? You’re a duke in disguise, and so I thought the first time I ever saw you. That night I took you to our precious ‘exchange of ideas’—I liked the beggar’s name for it—you had a little way with you that made me forget it; I mean that your disguise happened to be better than usual. As regards caring for the people there’s surely no obligation at all,” Muniment continued. “I wouldn’t if I could help it—you can bet your life on that. It all depends on what you see. The wayI’ve used my eyes in that sink of iniquity off there has led to my seeing that present arrangements won’t do. They won’t do,” he repeated placidly.
“Yes, I see that too,” said Hyacinth, with the same dolefulness that had marked his tone a moment before—a dolefulness begotten of the rather helplesssense that, whatever he saw, he saw—and this was always the case—so many other things besides. He saw the immeasurable misery of the people, and yet he saw all that had been, as it were, rescued and redeemed from it: the treasures, the felicities, the splendours, the successes of the world. This quantity took the form sometimes, to his imagination, of a vast, vague, dazzling presence, an irradiation of light from objects undefined, mixed with the atmosphere of Paris and of Venice. He presently added that a hundred things Muniment had told him about the foul horrors of the worst districts of London, pictures of incredible shame and suffering that he had put before him, came back to him now with the memory of the passion they had kindled at the time.
“Oh I don’t want you to go by what I’ve told you; I want you to go by what you’ve seen yourself. I remember there were things you toldmethat weren’t bad in their way.” And at this Paul Muniment sprang to his feet, as if their conversation had drawn to an end or they must at all events be thinking of their homeward way. Hyacinth got up too while his companion stood there. Paul was looking off toward London with a face that expressed all the healthy singleness of his vision. Suddenly he remarked, as if it occurred to him to complete, or at any rate confirm, the declaration he had made a short time before: “Yes, I don’t believe in the millennium, but I do believe in the democracy with achance.”
He struck Hyacinth while he spoke these words as such a fine embodiment of the spirit of the people; he stood there in his powerful, sturdy newness with such an air of having learnt what he had learnt and of good nature that had purposes in it, that our hero felt the simple inrush of his old, frequent pride at having a person of that promise, a nature of that capacity, for a friend. He passed his hand into thearm that was so much stronger and longer than his own and said with an imperceptible tremor of voice: “It’s no use your saying I’m not to go by what you tell me. I’d go by what you tell me anywhere. There’s no awkwardness to speak of. I don’t know that I believe exactly what you believe, but I believe inyou, and doesn’t that come to the same thing?”
Paul evidently appreciated the cordiality and candour of this little tribute, and the way he showed it was by a motion of his elbow, to check his companion, before they started to leave the spot, and by looking down at him with a certain anxiety of friendliness. “I should never have taken you to that shop that night if I hadn’t thought you’d jump at the job. It was that flaring little oration of yours, at the club, when you floored Delancey for saying you were afraid, that put me up to it.”
“I did jump at it—upon my word I did; and it was just what I was looking for. That’s all correct!” said Hyacinth cheerfully as they went forward. There was a strain of heroism in these words—of heroism of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in their interlocked arms. Hyacinth didn’t make the reflexion that he was infernally literal; he dismissed the sentimental problem that had worried him; he condoned, excused, admired—he merged himself, resting happy for the time, in the consciousness that Paul was a grand person, that friendship was a purer feeling than love, and that there was an immense deal of affection between them. He didn’t even observe at that moment that it was preponderantly on his own side.