I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the Princess’s residencein Madeira Crescent, but because they were a constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in any view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamplight and tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which was most his own lay round him under her pall like an immeasurable breathing monster he felt with a vague excitement, as he had felt before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened, but it was filled again by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and strange, blurred reflexions and emanations into a sky without stars. He suspended, so to say, his small sensibility in the midst of it, to quiver there with joy and hope and ambition as well as with the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations with its mistress were more organised than they had been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity, it was better at least for poor Mr. Robinson. It made her more near and him more free; and if there had been a danger of her nature’s seeming really to take the tone of the vulgar things about her he would only have had to remember her as she was at Medley to restore the perspective. Her beautyalways appeared in truth to have the setting that best became it; her fairness made the element in which she lived and, among the meanest accessories, constituted a kind of splendour. Nature had emphasised the difficult, the deterrent, for her establishing properties in common with the horrible populace of London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his night-walks to Paddington or homeward; the populace of London were scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls in particular were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be in the great scheme of things for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference and only shifted the shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect.
It didn’t occur to our young man that the Princess had withdrawn her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still further the condition of the poor, she had placed herself in the hands of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her knowledge and her capacity to answer any question it could come into the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness of his own desultoryand superficial view of the great question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve and toward which his steps could direct themselves with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the time in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless didn’t literally characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends whom long pauses, during which they merely looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, couldn’t make uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamplight, interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences that all turned to the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was picnicking, but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in theway she listened, in the way she played with the cat or looked after the fire or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home, never dining out nor going to parties, ignorant of the dissipations of the town. There was something in the isolation of the room when the kettle was on the hob and he had given his wet umbrella to the maid and his friend had made him sit in a certain place near the fire, the better to dry his shoes—there was something that evoked the idea of thevie de provincehe had read about in French fiction. The French term came to him because it represented more the especial note of the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the facility, of talk. She expressed herself often in the French tongue itself; she could borrow that convenience for certain shades of meaning, though she had told Hyacinth she had her own intenser Latin view of the people to whom it was native. Certainly the strain of her discourse was not provincial; her talk was singularly free and unabashed; there was nothing one mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say herself. She had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional danger-posts. Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see it—with which in any direction, intellectually, she could fling open her windows. There was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility—in seeing a creature capable socially of immeasurable flights sit dove-like and with folded wings.
The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent—her days, like his own, were filled with work, so that she came in the evening—and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous interest to each other, each rejoicing that the other was not a bit different.The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would give her up—all nice people did very soon; but to the acuteness of our hero’s observation the end of her ladyship’s almost breathless enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was bewildered but was fascinated; she thought her foreign friend not only the most distinguished, the most startling, the most edifying and the most original person in the world, but the most amusing and the most delightful to have tea with. As for that personage herself her sentiment about Lady Aurora was the same Hyacinth’s had been: she held her a saint, the first she had ever seen, and the purest specimen conceivable; as good in her way as Saint Francis of Assisi, as tender and quaint and transparent, of a spirit of charity as sublime. She felt that when one met a human flower as fresh as that in the dusty ways of the world one should pluck it and wear it; and she was always inhaling Lady Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her and holding her hand. The spinster was frightened at her generosity, at the way her imagination embroidered; she wanted to convince her—as the Princess did on her own side—that such exaggerations destroyed their unfortunate subject. The Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way she put them on and wore them, in the economies she practised in order to have money for charity and the ingenuity with which these slender resources were made to go far—in the very manner in which she spoke, a kind of startled simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these particulars; to learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her bonnets at the same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves, to ask in the same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has got a ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a French milliner and that if there was anythingin the world she loathed it was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected by the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as she was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her friend.
One night, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual, Hyacinth met the pilgrim from Belgrave Square just leaving the house. She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad news. She said, “Oh how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague laugh, but she went her way without stopping to talk. Three minutes later he mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her, and this lady replied: “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner. You’d have assisted at a scene.”
“At a scene?” he repeated, not understanding what violence could have taken place between mutual adorers.
“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I’m going too far.”
“I imagine you tell her things you don’t tell me,” Hyacinth said.
“Oh you, my dear fellow!” his hostess murmured. She spoke absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady Aurora and as if the futility of telling things to Mr. Robinson had become a commonplace.
There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace with her “views” being quite extinct. The tone they now for the most part took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging commiseration for lunacy on the one hand and pusillanimity on the other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went fantasticlengths in the way of reaction, a point where it was their habit and their amusement to hurl all manner of denunciation at each other’s head. They had given up serious discussion altogether and when not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities I have mentioned, talked for a compromise of matters as to which it couldn’t occur to them to differ. There were evenings when she did nothing but relate her life and all she had seen of humanity, from her earliest years, in a variety of countries. If evil appearances seemed mainly to have been presented to her view this didn’t diminish the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her power, the greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light mimetic, dramatic evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him hang on her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign courts—he delighted to know how monarchs lived and conversed—there was often for hours together nothing to indicate that she would have liked to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of one. Nevertheless his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to what she was really doing in such holes and in what queer penalties she might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to know by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He did so but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the validity of his warrant; but on an occasion when she had challenged him he replied, smiling and hesitating: “Well, I must say it seems to me that from what I’ve told you it ought to strike you I’ve rather a title.”
“You mean your famous pledge to ‘act’ on demand? Oh that will never come to anything.”
“Why won’t it come to anything?”
“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a novel.”
“Vous me rendez la vie!” Hyacinth said theatrically.
“You won’t have to do it,” she went on.
“I think you mean I won’t do it. I’ve offered at least. Isn’t that a title?”
“Well then you won’t do it,” said the Princess; after which they looked at each other a couple of minutes in silence.
“You will, I think, at the pace you’re going,” the young man resumed.
“What do you know about the pace? You’re not worthy to know!”
He did know, however; that is he knew her to be in communication with strange birds of passage, to have, or to believe she had, irons on the fire, to hold in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in great movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch her askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and had only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now dismally acute, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising papers; of being dragged herself, as an accomplice in direful plots, into a court of justice, possibly into a prison. “If she would only burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she groaned to Hyacinth in her helpless gloom. He could only guess what it might be she kept; asking himself if she were seriously entangled, were being really exploited by plausible outlaws, predatory adventurers who counted on her getting frightened at a given moment and offering hush-money to be allowed to slip out—out of a complicity which they themselves of course would never have taken seriously; or were merely coquettingwith paper schemes, giving herself cheap sensations, discussing preliminaries that could have no second stage. It would have been easy for him to smile at her impression that she was “in it,” and to conclude that even the cleverest women fail to know when they are futile, had not the vibration remained which had been imparted to his nerves two years before and of which he had spoken to his hostess at Medley—the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forces secretly arrayed against the present social order were pervasive and universal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand of an acquaintance that one might touch or the eye of a stranger that might rest a moment on one’s own. They were above, below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life; and it was no disproof of them to say it was too odd they should lurk in a particular, improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely their strength, and they would doubtless have still queerer features to show than this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when she most flattered herself she was.
“You do go too far,” he none the less said to her the evening Lady Aurora had passed him at the door.
To which she answered: “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman’s an angel, yet isn’t in the least in it,” she added in a moment. She would give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when he pressed her she asked if he had brought the copy of Browning he had promised the last time. If he had he was to sit down and read it to her. In such a case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to insist; he was glad enough not to talk about the everlasting nightmare. He tookMen and Womenfrom his pocket and read aloud for twentyminutes; but on his making some remark on one of the poems at the end of this time he noted that his companion had paid no attention. When he charged her with this levity she only replied, looking at him musingly: “Howcanone, after all, go too far? That’s the word of cowards.”
“Do you mean her ladyship’s a coward?”
“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions. The way the English can go half-way to a thing and then stick in the middle!” the Princess exclaimed impatiently.
“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”
“We’re all afraid of some things and brave about others,” his friend pursued.
“The thing Lady Aurora’s most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,” Hyacinth returned.
His companion looked at him but wouldn’t take this up. “There’s one particular in which she would be very brave. She’d marry her friend—your friend—Mr. Muniment.”
“Marry him, do you think?”
“What else pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks on.”
“And what would Belgrave Square and Inglefield and all the rest of it say?”
“What do they say already and how much does it make her swerve? She’d do it in a moment, and it would be fine to see it, it would be magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle at the idea of any great, free stroke.
“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the middle,” Hyacinth declared.
“Ah it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion. When it’s a question of that the English, to do them justice, don’t stick!”
This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth, and he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung associate should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her name, and the few habits of gentility that survived in her life, of making herself a scandal, a fable and a nine days’ wonder, for Muniment’s sake: the young chemical expert being, to his mind, as we know, exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures and renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what opinions Muniment himself might hold on the subject of a union with a young woman who should have come out of her class for him. He would marry some day, evidently, because he would do all the natural, human, productive things; but for the present he had business on hand which would be likely to pass first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give evidence of this—he didn’t think people could really come out of their class; he believed the stamp of one’s origin ineffaceable and that the best thing one can do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could easily imagine how it would put him out to be mixed up closely with a person who, like Lady Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She can’t marry him unless he asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he reflected.
“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess thoughtfully.
On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at four o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his visit to Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy’s room at about five, carefully dressed and brushed and ruddy with the freshness of an abundant washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa with a conscious smile, knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after a moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him: “My dear Mr. Muniment, you’re going to see the Princess.”
“Well, have you anything to say against it?” Mr. Muniment asked.
“Not a word; you know I like princesses. Butyouhave.”
“Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,” the young man returned. “There’s something to be said against everything if you give yourself trouble enough.”
“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against my big brother.”
“The man’s a sneak who’s only and always praised,” Paul lucidly remarked. “If you didn’t hope to be finely abused where would be the encouragement?”
“Ay, but not with reason,” said Rosy, who always brightened to an argument.
“The better the reason the greater the incentive to expose one’s self. However, you won’t hear of it—if people do heave bricks at me.”
“I won’t hear of it? Pray don’t I hear of everything? I should like any one to keep anything fromme!” And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her recumbent head.
“There’s a good deal I keep from you, my dear,” said Paul rather dryly.
“You mean there are things I don’t want, I don’t take any trouble, to know. Indeed and indeed there are: things I wouldn’t hear of for the world—that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you were to go down on your knees. But if I did, if I did, I promise you that just as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are others,” the young woman went on, “there are special points on which you’ll just be so good as to enlighten me. When the Princess asked you to come and see her you refused and wanted to know what good it would do. I hoped you’d go then; I should have liked you to go, because I wanted to know how she lived and whether she really had things handsome or only in the poor way she said. But I didn’t push you, because I couldn’t have told you what good it would do you: that was only the good it would have done me. At present I’ve heard everything from Lady Aurora and that it’s all quite decent and tidy—though not really like a princess a bit—and that she knows how to turn everything about and put it best end foremost, just as I do, like, though I oughtn’t to say it, no doubt. Well, you’ve been, and more than once, and I’ve had nothing to do with it; of which I’m very glad now, for reasons you perfectly know—you’re too honest a man to pretend you don’t.Therefore when I see you going again I just inquire of you, as you inquired of her, what gooddoesit do you?”
“I like it—I like it, my dear,” said Paul with his fresh, unembarrassed smile.
“I daresay you do. So should I in your place. But it’s the first time I have heard you express the idea that we ought to do everything we like.”
“Why not, when it doesn’t hurt any one else?”
“Oh Mr. Muniment, Mr. Muniment!” Rosy exclaimed with exaggerated solemnity, holding up at him a straight, attenuated forefinger. Then she added: “No, she doesn’t do you good, that beautiful, brilliant woman.”
“Give her time, my dear—give her time,” said Paul, looking at his watch.
“Of course you’re impatient, but youmusthear me. I’ve no doubt she’ll wait for you—you won’t lose your turn. But what would you do, please, if any one was to break down altogether?”
“My bonnie lassie,” the young man returned, “ifyouonly keep going I don’t care who fails.”
“Oh I shall keep going, if it’s only to look after my friends and get justice for them,” said Miss Muniment—“the delicate, sensitive creatures who require support and protection. Have you really forgotten that we’ve such a one as that?”
The young man walked to the window with his hands in his pockets and looked out at the fading light. “Why does she go herself then, if she doesn’t like her?”
Rose Muniment hesitated a moment. “Well, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she broke out. “I think a woman on her back’s sharper than a man on his two legs. And you such a wonderful one too!”
“You’re all too sharp for me, my dear. If she goes—and twenty times a week too—why shouldn’t Igo once in ever so long? Especially as I like her and Lady Aurora doesn’t.”
“Lady Aurora doesn’t? Do you think she’d be guilty of hypocrisy? Lady Aurora delights in her; she won’t let me say that she’s fit to dust the Princess’s shoes. I needn’t tellyouhow she goes down before them she likes. And I don’t believe you care a button; you’ve something in your head, some wicked game or other, that you think she can hatch for you.”
At this he turned round and looked at her a moment, smiling still and whistling just audibly. “Why shouldn’t I care? Ain’t I soft, ain’t I susceptible?”
“I never thought I should hear you ask that—after what I’ve seen these four years. For four years she has come, and it’s all for you—as well it might be; yet with your never showing any more sense of what she’d be willing to do for you than if you had been that woollen cat on the hearthrug!”
“What would you like me to do? Would you like me to hang round her neck and hold her hand the same as you do?” Muniment asked.
“Yes, it would do me good, I can tell you. It’s better than what I see—the poor lady getting spotted and dim like a mirror that wants rubbing.”
“How the devil am I to rub her?” Muniment quaintly asked. “You know a good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,” he pursued with a face that gave no sign of seeing a reason in what she said. “Your mind’s too poetical—as full of sounding strings and silver chords as some old, elegant harp. There’s nothing in the world I should care for that her ladyship would be willing to do for me.”
“She’d marry you at a day’s notice—she’d do that for you.”
“I shouldn’t care a hang for that. Besides, if Iwas to lay it before her she’d never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for that—for you.”
“Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!” cried Rosy with high cheer.
“But what’s to be gained if I can have her for you without any risk?”
“You won’t have her for me or for any one when she’s dead of a broken heart.”
“Dead of a broken tea-cup!” said the young man; “And pray what should we live on when you had got us set up?—the three of us without counting the kids.”
He evidently was arguing from pure good nature and not in the least from curiosity; but his sister replied as eagerly as if he would be floored by her answer: “Hasn’t she got a hundred a year of her own? Don’t I know every penny of her affairs?”
Paul gave no sign of any inward judgement passed on Rosy’s conception of the delicate course or of a superior policy; perhaps indeed, for it is perfectly possible, her question didn’t strike him as having a mixture of motives. He only said with a small, pleasant, patient sigh: “I don’t want the dear old girl’s money.”
His sister, in spite of her eagerness, waited twenty seconds; then she flashed at him: “Pray do you like the Princess’s better?”
“If I did there’d be much more of it,” he quietly returned.
“How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?” Rosy cried.
“Lord, how you give me away!” laughed her brother. “Daughters of earls, wives of princes—I’ve only to pick.”
“I don’t speak of the Princess so long as there’s a Prince. But if you haven’t seen that Lady Aurora’s a beautiful, wonderful exception and quite unlike anyone else in all the wide world—well, all I can say is thatIhave.”
“I thought it was your opinion,” Paul objected, “that the swells should remain swells and the high ones keep their place.”
“And pray would she lose hers if she were to marry you?”
“Her place at Inglefield certainly,” he answered as lucidly as if his sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.
“Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?”
“Surely you appear to think so from the way you always question her about it.”
“Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any madder,” Rosy continued. “They’ve given her up, and if she were to marry you——”
“If she were to marry me they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,” Paul broke in.
She flinched a moment, then said serenely: “Oh I don’t care for that!”
“You ought to, to be consistent, though possibly she shouldn’t, admitting that she wouldn’t. You’ve more imagination than logic—which of course for a woman is quite right. That’s what makes you say that her ladyship’s in affliction because I go to a place she herself goes to without the least compulsion.”
“She goes to keep you off,” said Rosy with decision.
“To keep me off?”
“To interpose with the Princess—and in a sense to interfere against her. To be nice to her and conciliate her, so she mayn’t take you.”
“Has she told you any such rigmarole as that?” Paul inquired, this time staring a little.
“Do I need to be told things to know them? I’m not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” Rosy answered with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear she was capable of wizardry.
“You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the young man returned. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a little less poor.”
“Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.”
“She knows I’m not helpless so long as you’re about the place, and that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.”
“She wants to assist me to assist you then!” the girl exclaimed with the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused: it was a spirit that seemed of a sudden, in argument, to mock at her own contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you’re plotting and working and waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.”
“My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She couldn’t if she would.”
“And no more do I, I suppose you mean.”
“No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would you could. However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for all there happens to be of it. I’m not doing much, you know.”
Rosy lay there looking up at him. “It must be pretty thick when you talk that way. However, I don’t care what you bring on, for I know I shall be looked after.”
“Nothing’s going to happen—nothing’s going to happen,” Paul remarked simply.
Her rejoinder to this was to say in a moment: “You’ve a different tone since you’ve taken up the Princess.”
She spoke with a certain severity, but he broke out as if he hadn’t heard her: “I like your idea of the female aristocracy quarrelling over a dirty brute like me.”
“I don’t know how dirty you are, but I know you smell of soap,” said his sister inexorably. “They won’t quarrel; that’s not the way they do it. Yes, you’re taking a different tone for some purpose I can’t discover just yet.”
“What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?” Paul demanded.
“Why then do you speak as if you weren’t remarkable, immensely remarkable—more remarkable than anything any one, male or female, good or bad, of the aristocracy or of the vulgar sort, can ever do for you?”
“What on earth have I ever done to show it?” he asked as with amusement.
“Oh I don’t know your secrets, and that’s one of them. But we’re out of the common beyond any one, you and I, and between ourselves, with the door fastened, we might as well admit it.”
“I admit it for you with all my heart!” the young man promptly laughed.
“Well then if I admit it for you that’s all that’s required.”
The pair considered themselves a while in silence, as if each were tasting agreeably the distinction the other conferred; then Muniment said: “If I’m such an awfully superior chap why shouldn’t I behave in keeping?”
“Oh you do, you do!”
“For all that you don’t like it.”
“It isn’t so much what you do. It’s whatshedoes.”
“How do you mean, what she does?”
“She makes Lady Aurora suffer.”
“Oh I can’t go into that,” said Paul. “A man feels such a muff, talking about the women who ‘suffer’ for him.”
“Well, if they do it I think a man might bear it!” Rosy retorted. “That’s what a manis. When it comes to being sorry, oh that’s too ridiculous!”
“There are plenty of things in the world I’m sorry for,” he patiently conceded. “One of them is that you should keep me gossiping here when I want to go out.”
“Oh I don’t care if I worry her a little. Does she do it on purpose?” Rosy continued.
“You ladies must settle all that together”—and he rubbed his hat with the cuff of his coat. It was a new one, the bravest he had ever possessed, and in a moment he put it on his head as if to re-enforce his reminder to his sister that it was time she should release him.
“Well, you do look genteel,” she said with high complacency. “No wonder she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,” she explained. “You never went to any such expense for her ladyship.”
“My dear, the Princess is worth it, she’s worth it.” Which appeared at last on his part all seriously spoken.
“Will she help you very much?” Rosy demanded, as at the touch of it, with a strange, sudden transition to eagerness.
“Well,” said Paul, “that’s rather what I look for.”
She threw herself forward on her sofa with a movement that was rare with her and, shaking her clasped hands, exclaimed: “Then go off, go off quickly!”
He came round and kissed her as if he were not more struck than usual with her freakish inconsistency.“It’s not bad to have a little person at home who wants a fellow to succeed.”
“Oh I know they’ll look after me.” And she sank back on her pillow with an air of agreeable security.
He was aware that whenever she said “they,” without further elucidation, she meant the populace surging up in his rear, and he met it with his usual ease. “I don’t think we’ll leave it much to ‘them.’”
“No it’s not much you’ll leave to them, I’ll be bound.”
He gave a louder laugh at this and said: “You’re the deepest of the lot, Miss Muniment.”
Her eyes kindled at his praise and as she rested them on his own she brought out: “Ah I pity the poor Princess too, you know!”
“Well now, I’m not conceited, but I don’t,” Paul returned, passing in front of the little mirror on the mantel-shelf.
“Yes, you’ll succeed, and so shall I—butshewon’t,” Rosy went on.
He stopped a moment with his hand on the latch of the door and said gravely, almost sententiously: “She’s not only handsome, handsome as a picture, but she’s uncommon sharp and has taking ways beyond anything ever known.”
“I know her ways,” his sister replied. Then as he left the room she called after him: “But I don’t care for anything so long as you become prime minister of England!”
Three-quarters of an hour after this he knocked at the door in Madeira Crescent, and was immediately ushered into the parlour, where the Princess, in her bonnet and mantle, sat alone. She made no movement as he came in; she only looked up at him with a smile.
“You’re braver than I gave you credit for,” she said in her rich voice.
“I shall learn to be brave if I associate a while longer with you. But I shall never cease to be shy,” Muniment added, standing there and looking tall in the middle of the small room. He cast his eyes about him for a place to sit down, but she gave him no help to choose; she only watched him in silence from her own place, her hands quietly folded in her lap. At last, when without remonstrance from her he had selected the most uncomfortable chair in the room, she replied:
“That’s only another name for desperate courage. I put on my things on the chance, but I didn’t expect you.”
“Well, here I am—that’s the great thing,” he said good-humouredly.
“Yes, no doubt it’s a very great thing. But it will be a still greater thing when you’re there.”
“I’m afraid you hope too much,” the young man observed. “Where is it? I don’t think you told me.”
The Princess drew a small folded letter from her pocket and, without saying anything, held it out to him. He got up to take it from her, opened it and as he read it remained standing in front of her. Then he went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it. At this act she rose quickly, as to save the document, but the expression of his face while he turned round to her made her stop. The smile that came into her own was a little forced. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “I take it the house is known. If we go I suppose we may admit that we go.”
Paul’s face showed he had been annoyed, but he answered quietly enough: “No writing—no writing.”
“You’re terribly careful,” said the Princess.
“Careful of you—yes.”
She sank upon her sofa again, asking her companionto ring for tea; they would do much better to have it before going out. When the order had been given she went on: “I see I shall have much less keen emotion than when I acted by myself.”
“Is that what you go in for—keen emotion?”
“Surely, Mr. Muniment. Don’t you?”
“God forbid! I hope to have as little of any sort as possible.”
“Of course one doesn’t want any vague rodomontade, one wants to do something. But it would be hard if one couldn’t have a little pleasure by the way.”
“My pleasure’s in keeping very cool,” Muniment said.
“So is mine. But it depends on how you understand it. I like quietness in the midst of a tumult.”
“You’ve rare ideas about tumults. They’re not good in themselves.”
The Princess considered this a moment. “I wonder if you’re too prudent. I shouldn’t like that. If it’s made an accusation against you that you’ve been—where we’re going—shall you deny it?”
“With that prospect it would be simpler not to go at all, wouldn’t it?” he lucidly asked.
“Which prospect do you mean? That of being found out or that of having to lie?”
“I suppose that if you lie well enough you’re not found out.” And he spoke again as for amusement.
“You won’t take me seriously,” said the Princess—and without irritation, without resentment, with accepted, intelligent sadness. Yet there was a fineness of reproach in the tone in which she added: “I don’t believe you want to go at all.”
“Why else should I have come—especially if I don’t take you seriously?”
“That has never been a reason for a man’s not going to see a woman,” said the Princess. “It’s usually a reason in favour of it.”
Paul turned his steady eyes over the room, looking from one article of furniture to another: this was a way he had when engaged in a discussion, and it suggested not so much his reflecting on what his interlocutor said as that his thoughts were pursuing a bravely independent course. Presently he took up her remark. “I don’t know that I quite understand what you mean by that question of taking a woman seriously.”
“Ah you’re very perfect!” she lightly wailed. “Don’t you consider that the changes you look for will be also for our benefit?”
“I don’t think they’ll alter your position.”
“If I didn’t hope for that I wouldn’t do anything,” said the Princess.
“Oh I’ve no doubt you’ll do a great deal.”
The young man’s companion was silent for some minutes, during which he also was content to say nothing. “I wonder you can find it in your conscience to work with me,” she observed at last.
“It isn’t in my conscience I find it,” he laughed.
The maid-servant brought in the tea, and while his hostess made a place for it on a table beside her she returned: “Well, I don’t care, for I think I have you in my power.”
“You’ve every one in your power,” Paul declared.
“Every one’s no one,” she answered rather dryly; and a moment later she said to him: “That extraordinary little sister of yours—surely you takeherseriously?”
“I’m particularly fond of her, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t think her position will ever be altered.”
“Are you alluding to her position in bed? If you consider that she’ll never recover her health,” the Princess said, “I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“Oh her health will do. I mean that she’ll continueto be, like all the most amiable women, just a kind of ornament to life.”
She had already noted that he pronounced amiable “emiable”; but she had accepted this peculiarity of her visitor in the spirit of imaginative transfigurement in which she had accepted several others. “Toyourlife of course. She can hardly be said to be an ornament to her own.”
“Her life and mine are all one.”
“She’s a prodigious person”—the Princess dismissed her. But while he drank his tea she remarked that for a revolutionist he was certainly prodigious as well; and he wanted to know in answer if it weren’t rather in keeping for revolutionists to be revolutionary. He drank three cups, declaring his hostess’s decoction rare; it was better even than Lady Aurora’s. This led him to observe as he put down his third cup, looking round the room again lovingly, almost covetously: “You’ve got everything so handy I don’t see what interest you can have.”
“How do you mean, what interest?”
“In getting in so uncommon deep.”
The light in her face flashed on the instant into pure passion. “Do you consider that I’m in—really far?”
“Up to your neck, ma’am.”
“And do you think thatil y vaof my neck—I mean that it’s in danger?” she translated eagerly.
“Oh I understand your French. Well, I’ll look after you,” Muniment said.
“Remember then definitely that I expect not to lie.”
“Not even for me?” Then he added in the same familiar tone, which was not rough nor wanting in respect, but only homely and direct, suggestive of growing acquaintance: “If I was your husband I’d come and take you away.”
“Please don’t speak of my husband,” she returned gravely. “You’ve no qualification for doing so. You know nothing whatever about him.”
“I know what Hyacinth has told me.”
“Oh Hyacinth!” she sighed impatiently. There was another silence of some minutes, not disconnected apparently from this reference to the little bookbinder; but when Muniment spoke after the interval it was not to carry on the allusion.
“Of course you think me very plain and coarse.”
“Certainly you’ve not such a nice address as Hyacinth”—the Princess had no wish, on her side, to evade the topic. “But that’s given to very few,” she added; “and I don’t know that pretty manners are exactly what we’re working for.”
“Ay, it won’t be very endearing when we cut down a few allowances,” her visitor concurred. “But I want to please you; I want to be as much as possible like Hyacinth,” he went on.
“That’s not the way to please me. I don’t forgive him—he’s very foolish.”
“Ah don’t say that; he’s a fine little flute!” Paul protested.
“He’s a delightful nature, with extraordinary qualities. But he’s deplorably conventional.”
“Yes, if you talk about taking things seriously—hetakes them so,” Muniment again agreed.
“Has he ever told you his life?” the Princess asked.
“He hasn’t required to tell me. I’ve seen a good bit of it.”
“Yes, but I mean before you knew him.”
Paul thought. “His birth and his poor mother? I think it was Rosy told me all that.”
“And pray how didsheknow?”
“Ah when you come to the way Rosy knows——!” He gave that up. “She doesn’t like people in sucha box at all. She thinks we ought all to be grandly born.”
“Then they agree, for so does poor Hyacinth.” The Princess had a pause, after which, as with a deep effort: “I want to ask you something. Have you had a visit from Mr. Vetch?”
“The old gentleman who fiddles? No, he has never done me that honour.”
“It was because I prevented him then. I told him to leave it to me.”
“To leave what now?” And Paul looked out in placid perplexity.
“He’s in great distress about Hyacinth—about the danger he runs. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” Muniment answered slowly. “But where doeshecome in? I thought it was supposed to be a grand secret.”
“So it is. He doesn’t know anything; he only suspects.”
“How doyouknow then?”
She had another wait. “Oh I’m like Rosy—I find out. Mr. Vetch, as I suppose you’re aware, has been near Hyacinth all his life; he takes a most affectionate interest in him. He believes there’s something hanging over him and wants it to be made impossible.” She paused afresh, but her visitor made no response and she continued: “He was going to see you, to beg you to do something, to interfere; he seemed to suppose your power in such a matter would be very great. But as I tell you, I requested him—a particular favour to me—to let you alone.”
“What favour would it be to you?” Muniment asked.
“It would give me the satisfaction of feeling you not worried.”
He appeared struck with the curious inadequacy of this explanation, considering what was at stake;so that he confessed to almost rude amusement. “That was considerate of you beyond everything.”
“It was not meant as consideration for you; it was a piece of calculation.” Having made this statement the Princess gathered up her gloves and turned away, walking to the chimney-piece, where she stood arranging her bonnet-ribbons in the mirror with which it was decorated. Paul watched her with clear curiosity; in spite both of his inaccessibility to nervous agitation and of the general scepticism he had cultivated about her he was not proof against her faculty of creating a feeling of suspense, a tension of interest, on the part of those involved with her. He followed her movements, but plainly didn’t follow her calculations, so that he could only listen more attentively when she brought out suddenly: “Do you know why I asked you to come and see me? Do you know why I went to see your sister? It was all a plan,” said the Princess.
“We hoped it was just an ordinary, humane, social impulse,” the young man returned.
“It was humane, it was even social, but it was not ordinary. I wanted to save Hyacinth.”
“To save him?”
“I wanted to be able to talk with you just as I’m talking now.”
“That was a fine idea!” Paul candidly cried.
“I’ve an exceeding, a quite inexpressible regard for him. I’ve no patience with some of his opinions, and that’s why I permitted myself to say just now that he’s silly. But after all the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for—so I don’t see why they should be a ground of aversion. Robinson’s nature is singularly generous and his intelligence very fine, though therearethings he muddles up. You just now expressed strongly your own interest in him; therefore we ought to be perfectlyagreed. Agreed I mean about getting him out of his scrape.”
Muniment had the air of a man feeling he must consider a little before assenting to these successive propositions; it being a limitation of his intellect that he couldn’t respond without understanding. After a moment he answered, referring to his hostess’s last remark, in which the others appeared to culminate, and at the same time shaking his head with a rise of his strong eyebrows: “His scrape isn’t important.”
“You thought it was when you got him into it.”
“I thought it would give him pleasure.”
“That’s not a reason for letting people do what isn’t good for them.”
“I wasn’t thinking so much about what would be good for him as about what would be bad for some others. He can do as he likes.”
“That’s easy to say. They must be persuaded not to call him.”
“Persuade them then, dear madam.”
“How can I persuade them?” she cried. “If I could do that I wouldn’t have approached you. I’ve no influence, and even if I had it my motives would be suspected. You’re the one to come in.”
“Shall I tell them he funks it?” Muniment asked.
“He doesn’t—he doesn’t!” she declared.
“On what ground then shall I put it?”
“Tell them he has changed his opinions.”
“Wouldn’t that be rather like denouncing him as a traitor—and doing it hypocritically?”
“Tell them then it’s simply my wish.”
“That won’t doyoumuch good,” Paul said with his natural laugh.
“Will it put me in danger? That’s exactly what I want.”
“Yes; but as I understand you, you want to sufferforthe people, not by them. You’re very fondof Robinson; it couldn’t be otherwise,” the young man argued. “But you ought to remember that in the line you’ve chosen our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our shrinkings——” His voice had become low and grave, and he paused a little while the Princess’s deep and lovely eyes, attaching themselves to his face, showed how quickly she had been affected by this unwonted adjuration. He spoke now as if he were taking her seriously. “All those things are as nothing, they must never weigh a feather, beside our service.”
She began to draw on her gloves. “You’re a most extraordinary man.”
“That’s what Rosy tells me.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Do Hyacinth’s job? Because it’s better to do my own.”
“And pray whatisyour own?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul Muniment with perfect equanimity. “I expect to be instructed.”
“Have you taken an oath like Hyacinth?”
“Ah madam, the oathsItake I don’t tell,” he gravely returned.
“Ohyou——!” she breathed with a deep ambiguous cadence. She appeared to dismiss the question, but to suggest at the same time that he was very abnormal. This imputation was further conveyed by the next words she uttered. “And can you see a dear friend whirled away like that?”
At this, for the first time, her visitor showed impatience. “You had better leave my dear friend to me.”
The Princess, her eyes still fixed on him, gave a long, soft sigh. “Well then, shall we go?”
He took up his hat again, but made no movement toward the door. “If you did me the honour to seek my acquaintance, to ask me to come andsee you, only in order to say what you’ve just said about Hyacinth, perhaps we needn’t carry out the form of going to the place you proposed. Wasn’t this only your pretext?”
“I believe youareafraid!” she frankly returned; but in spite of her exclamation the pair presently went out of the house. They quitted the door together, after having stood on the step a little to look up and down, apparently for a cab. So far as the darkness, which was now complete, permitted the prospect to be scanned, there was no such vehicle within hail. They turned to the left and after a walk of several minutes, during which they were engaged in small dull by-streets, emerged on a more populous way, where they found lighted shops and omnibuses and the evident chance of a hansom. Here they stayed afresh and very soon an empty hansom passed and, at a sign, pulled up near them. Meanwhile, it should be recorded, they had been followed, at an interval, by a cautious figure, a person who, in Madeira Crescent, when they came out of the house, was stationed on the other side of the street, at a considerable distance. On their appearing he had retreated a little, still, however, keeping them in sight. When they moved away he had moved in the same direction, watching them but maintaining his distance. He had drawn nearer, seemingly because he couldn’t control his eagerness, as they passed into Westbourne Grove, and during the minute they stood there had been exposed to recognition by the Princess should she have happened to turn her head. In the event of her having felt such an impulse she would have discovered, in the lamplight, that her noble husband was hovering in her rear. But she was otherwise occupied; she failed to see that at one moment he came so close as to suggest an intention of breaking out on her from behind. The readerscarce need be informed, nevertheless, that his design was but to satisfy himself as to the kind of person his wife was walking with. The time allowed him for this research was brief, especially as he had perceived, more rapidly than he sometimes perceived things, that they were looking for a vehicle and that with its assistance they would pass out of his range—a reflexion which caused him to give half his attention to the business of hailing any second cab that should come that way. There are parts of London in which you may never see a cab at all, but there are none in which you may see only one; in accordance with which fortunate truth Prince Casamassima was able to wave his stick to good purpose as soon as the two objects of his pursuit had rattled away. Behind them now, in the gloom, he had no fear of being seen. In little more than an instant he had jumped into another hansom, the driver of which accompanied the usual exclamation of “All right, sir!” with a small, amused grunt, regarded by the Prince as eminently British, after he had hissed at him, over the hood, expressively and in a manner by no means indicative of that nationality, the injunction, “Follow, follow, follow!”
An hour after her companion had left the house with Paul Muniment Madame Grandoni came down to supper, a meal for which she made use, in gloomy solitude, of the little back parlour. She had pushed away her plate and sat motionless, staring at the crumpled cloth with her hands folded on the edge of the table, when she became aware that a gentleman had been ushered into the drawing-room and was standing before the fire in discreet suspense. At the same moment the maid-servant approached the old lady, remarking with bated breath: “The Prince, the Prince, mum! It’s you he ’ave asked for, mum!” Upon this Madame Grandoni called out to the visitor from her place, addressed him as her poor, dear, distinguished friend and bade him come and give her his arm. He obeyed with solemn alacrity, conducting her to the front room and the fire. He helped her to arrange herself in her chair and gather her shawl about her; then he seated himself at hand and remained with his dismal eyes bent on her. After a moment she said: “Tell me something about Rome. The grass in Villa Borghese must already be thick with flowers.”
“I would have brought you some if I had thought,” he answered. Then he turned his gaze about the room. “Yes, you may well ask in such a black little hole as this. My wife shouldn’t live here,” he added.
“Ah my dear friend, for all she’s your wife——!” the old woman exclaimed.
The Prince sprang up in sudden, sharp agitation, and then she saw that the stiff propriety with which he had come into the room and greeted her was only an effort of his good manners. He was really trembling with excitement. “It’s true—it’s true! Shehaslovers—shehaslovers!” he broke out. “I’ve seen it with my eyes and I’ve come here to know!”
“I don’t know what you’ve seen, but your coming here to know won’t have helped you much. Besides, if you’ve seen you know for yourself. At any rate I’ve ceased to be able to tell you.”
“You’re afraid—you’re afraid!” cried the visitor with a wild, accusatory gesture.
The old woman looked up at him with slow speculation. “Sit down and be quiet, very quiet. I’ve ceased to pay attention—I take no heed.”
“Well, I do then,” said the Prince, subsiding a little. “Don’t you know she has gone out to a house in a horrible quarter with a man?”
“I think it highly probable, dear Prince.”
“And who is he? That’s what I want to discover.”
“How can I tell you? I haven’t seen him.”
He looked at her with eyes of anguish. “Dear lady, is that kind to me when I’ve counted on you?”
“Oh I’m not kind any more; it’s not a question of that. I’m angry—as angry almost as you.”
“Then why don’t you watch her, eh?”
“It’s not with her I’m angry. It’s with myself,” said Madame Grandoni, all in thought.
“For becoming so indifferent, do you mean?”
“On the contrary, for staying in the house.”
“Thank God you’re still here, or I couldn’t have come. But what a lodging for the Princess!” thevisitor exclaimed. “She might at least live in a manner befitting.”
“Eh, the last time you were in London you thought it too expensive!” she cried.
He cast about him. “Whatever she does is wrong. Is it because it’s so bad that you must go?” he went on.
“It’s foolish—foolish—foolish,” said his friend, slowly and impressively.
“Foolish,che, che! He was in the house nearly an hour, this one.”
“In the house? In what house?”
“Here where you sit. I saw him go in, and when he came out it was after a long time, and she with him.”
“And where were you meanwhile?”
Again the Prince faltered. “I was on the other side of the street. When they came out I followed them. It was more than an hour ago.”
“Was it for that you came to London?”
“Ah what I came for——! To put myself in hell!”
“You had better go back to Rome,” said Madame Grandoni.
“Of course I’ll go back, but only if you’ll tell me who this one is! How can you be ignorant, dear friend, when he comes freely in and out of the place?—where I have to watch at the door for a moment I can snatch. He wasn’t the same as the other.”
“As the other?”
“Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one I met in the house that Sunday afternoon.”
“I sit in my room almost always now,” said the old woman. “I only come down to eat.”
“Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,” the Prince returned.
“Better for whom?”
“I mean that if you didn’t withdraw yourself you could at least answer my questions.”
“Ah but I haven’t the slightest desire to answer them,” Madame Grandoni replied. “You must remember that I’m not here as your spy.”
“No,” said the Prince in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. “If you had given me more information I shouldn’t have been obliged to come here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this evening I spent two hours walking up and down opposite there, like a groom waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a personal impression. It was so I saw him come in. He’s not a gentleman—not even one of the strange ones of this country.”
“I think he’s Scotch or Welsh,” Madame Grandoni explained.
“Ah then youhaveseen him?”
“No, but I’ve heard him. He speaks straight out (the floors of this house are not built as we build in Italy) and his voice is the same I’ve noticed in the people of the wild parts, where they ‘shoot.’ Besides, she has told me—some few things. He’s a chemist’s assistant.”
“A chemist’s assistant?Santo Dio!And the other one, a year ago—more than a year ago—was a bookbinder.”
“Oh the bookbinder——!” the old woman wailed.
“And does she associate with no people of good? Has she no other society?”
“For me to tell you more, Prince, you must wait till I’m free,” she pleaded.
“How do you mean, free?”
“I must choose. I must either go away—and then I can tell you what I’ve seen—or if I stay here I must hold my tongue.”