The Boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations,
with the variety and gaiety of the crowd, the
dazzle of shops and cafés seen through uncovered
fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant porches
of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the
far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the
uproar of pleasure and prosperity, the general
magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening in June.
Hyacinth had been walking about all day—he had
walked from rising till bedtime every day of the week
spent since his arrival—and now an extraordinary
fatigue, a tremendous lassitude had fallen upon him,
which, however, was not without its delight of sweet
satiety, and he settled himself in a chair beside a little
table in front of Tortoni’s not so much to rest from
it as to enjoy it. He had seen so much, felt so much,
learnt so much, thrilled and throbbed and laughed
and sighed so much during the past several days that
he was conscious at last of the danger of becoming
incoherent to himself and of the need of balancing
his accounts.
To-night he came to a full stop; he simply sat at
the door of the most dandified café in Paris and felt
his pulse and took stock of his impressions. He had
been intending to visit the Variétés Theatre, which
blazed through intermediate lights and through the
thin foliage of trees not favoured by the asphalt, on
the other side of the great avenue. But the impression
of Chaumont—he relinquished that for the
present; it added to the luxury of his situation to
reflect that he should still have plenty of time to see the
succès du jour. The same effect proceeded from his
determination to order a marquise when the waiter,
whose superior shirt-front and whisker emerged from
the long white cylinder of an apron, came to take his
commands. He knew the decoction was expensive—he
had learnt as much at the moment he happened
to overhear for the first time a mention of it; which
had been the night before as he sat in his stall during
an entr’acte of the Comédie Française. A gentleman
beside him, a young man in evening-dress, conversing
with an acquaintance in the row behind,
recommended the latter to refresh himself with the
luxury in question after the play: there was nothing
like it, the speaker remarked, of a hot evening in the
open air when one was thirsty. The waiter brought
Hyacinth a tall glass of champagne in which a pineapple
ice was in solution, and our hero felt he had
hoped for a sensation no less intense in looking for
an empty table on Tortoni’s terrace. Very few tables
were empty, and it was his belief that the others were
occupied by high celebrities; at any rate they were
just the types he had had a prevision of and had
wanted most to meet when the extraordinary opportunity
to come abroad with his pockets full of money
(it was more extraordinary even than his original
meeting with the Princess) turned real to him in
Lomax Place. He knew about Tortoni’s from his
study of the French novel, and as he sat there he had
a vague sense of fraternising with Balzac and Alfred
de Musset: there were echoes and reminiscences of
their works in the air, all confounded with the indefinable
exhalations, the strange composite odour,
half agreeable, half impure, of the Boulevard.
“Splendid Paris, charming Paris”—that refrain,
the fragment of an invocation, a beginning without
an end, hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth’s ears;
the only articulate words that got themselves uttered
in the hymn of praise his imagination had been
addressing to the French capital from the first hour of
his stay. He recognised, he greeted with a thousand
palpitations, the seat of his maternal ancestors—was
proud to be associated with so much of the superb,
so many proofs of a civilisation that had no visible
rough spots. He had his perplexities and even now
and then a revulsion for which he had made no
allowance, as when it came over him that the most
brilliant city in the world was also the most blood-stained;
but the great sense that he understood and
sympathised was preponderant, and his comprehension
gave him wings—appeared to transport him
to still wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations.
In other days, in London, he had thought again
and again of his mother’s father, the revolutionary
watchmaker who had known the ecstasy of the
barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his
reveries had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that
he knew next to nothing about him. He figured him
in his mind, this mystic ancestor, had a conviction
that he was very short like himself and had curly
hair, an immense talent for his work and an extraordinary
natural eloquence, together with many of
the most attractive qualities of the French character.
But he was reckless and a little cracked, also probably
immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible
passions; his life had been an incurable fever
and its tragic termination was a matter of course.
None the less it would have been a charm to hear
him talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which
even political madness could never quench; for his
grandson had a theory that he spoke the French
tongue of an earlier time, delightful and sociable
in accent and phrase, exempt from the baseness of
modern slang. This vague yet vivid personage
became our young friend’s constant companion
from the day of his arrival; he roamed about with
Florentine’s boy hand in hand, sat opposite him at
dinner, by the small table in the restaurant, finished
the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer—treating
him furthermore to innumerable revelations
and counsels. He knew the lad’s secret without
being told and looked at him across the diminutive
tablecloth where the great cube of bread, pushed
aside a little, left room for his elbows—it puzzled
Hyacinth that the people of Paris should ever have
had the fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so
big; gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing
comprehension and with lips which seemed to murmur
that when one was to die to-morrow one must eat
and drink, one must gratify all one’s poor senses all
one could to-day. There was nothing venerable, no
constraint of importance or disapproval, in this
edifying and impalpable presence; the young man
considered that Hyacinth Vivier was of his own time
of life and could enter into his pleasures as well as
his pains. Wondering repeatedly where the barricade
on which his grandfather must have fallen had been
erected he at last satisfied himself—though I am
unable to trace the course of the induction—that it
had bristled across the Rue Saint-Honoré very near
to the Church of Saint-Roch. The pair had now
roamed together through all the museums and gardens,
through the principal churches—the republican martyr
was very good-natured about this; through the
passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues,
across all the bridges and above all again and again
along the river, where the quays were an endless
entertainment to Hyacinth, who lingered by the
half-hour beside the boxes of old books on the parapets,
stuffing his pockets with fivepenny volumes while
the bright industries of the Seine flashed and glittered
beneath him and on the other bank the glorious
Louvre stretched either way for a league. Our
young man took the same satisfaction in the Louvre
as if he had been invited there, as he had been to
poor obliterated Medley; he haunted the museum
during all the first days, couldn’t look enough at
certain pictures nor sufficiently admire the high
polish of the great floors in which the golden frescoed
ceilings repeated themselves. All Paris struck him
as tremendously artistic and decorative; he felt as
if hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy, Philistine
world, a world in which the taste was the taste of
Little Peddlington and the idea of beautiful arrangement
had never had an influence. In his ancestral
city it had been active from the first, and that was
why his quick sensibility responded and why he
murmured his constant refrain whenever the fairness
of the great monuments arrested him in the pearly
silvery light or he saw them take grey-blue, delicate
tones at the end of stately vistas. It seemed to him
the place expressed herself, and did it in the grand
style, while London remained vague and blurred,
inarticulate, blunt and dim. Splendid Paris, charming
Paris indeed!
Eustache Poupin had given him letters to three
or four democratic friends, ardent votaries of the
social question, who had by a miracle either escaped
the cruelty of exile or suffered the outrage of pardon
and, in spite of republican mouchards no less infamous
than the imperial and the periodical swoops
of a despotism which had only changed its buttons
and postage-stamps, kept alive the sacred spark
which would some day become a consuming flame.
Hyacinth, however, had not had the thought of
delivering these introductions; he had accepted them
because Poupin had had such a solemn glee in writing
them, and also because he had not the courage to let
the couple in Lisson Grove know how since that
terrible night at Hoffendahl’s a change had come
over the spirit of his dream. He had not grown more
concentrated, he had grown more relaxed, and it was
inconsistent with relaxation that he should rummage
out Poupin’s friends—one of whom lived in the
Batignolles and the others in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—and
make believe he cared for what they
cared for in the same way as they cared for it. What
was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of
how the society that surrounded him should be
destroyed; it was much more the sense of the wonderful,
precious things it had produced, of the fabric
of beauty and power it had raised. That destruction
was waiting for it there was forcible evidence, known
to himself and others, to show; but since this truth
had risen before him in its magnitude he had become
conscious of a transfer, partial if not complete, of his
sympathies; the same revulsion of which he had
given a sign to the Princess in saying that now he
pitied the rich, those who were regarded as happy.
While the evening passed therefore, as he kept his
place at Tortoni’s, the emotion that was last to visit
him was compunction for not having put himself
in relation with poor Poupin’s friends, for having
neglected to make the acquaintances of earnest
people.
Who in the world, if one should come to that, was
as earnest as he himself or had given such signal
even though secret proofs of it? He could lay that
unction to his soul in spite of his having amused
himself cynically, spent all his time in theatres,
galleries, walks of pleasure. The feeling had not
failed him with which he accepted Mr. Vetch’s furtherance—the
sense that since he was destined to perish
in his flower he was right to make a dash at the
beautiful, horrible world. That reflexion had been
natural enough, but what was strange was the
fiddler’s own impulse, his desire to do something
pleasant for him, to beguile him and ship him off.
What had been most odd in this was the way Mr.
Vetch appeared to overlook the fact that his young
friend had already had that year such a turn of
dissipation as was surely rare in the experience of
London artisans. This was one of the many things
Hyacinth thought of; he thought of the others in
turn and out of turn; it was almost the first time
he had sat still long enough to collect himself. A
hundred confused reverberations of the recent past
crowded on him and he saw that he had lived more
intensely in the previous six months than in all the
rest of his time. The succession of events finally
straightened itself and he tasted over some of those
rarest, strangest moments. His last week at Medley
in especial had already become a far-off fable, the
echo of a song; he could read it over as a romance
bound in vellum and gold, gaze at it as he would have
gazed at some exquisite picture. His visit there
had been perfect to the end, and even the three days
compromised by Sholto’s sojourn had not broken
the spell, for the three more that had elapsed before
his own departure—when the Princess herself had
given him the signal—were the most important of all.
It was then she had made it clear to him that she
was in earnest, was prepared for the last sacrifice.
He felt her his standard of comparison, his authority,
his measure, his perpetual reference; and in taking
possession of his mind to this extent she had completely
renewed it. She was altogether a new term,
and now that he was in a foreign country he observed
how much her conversation, itself so foreign, had
prepared him to understand it. In Paris he saw of
course a great many women and noticed almost all of
them, especially the actresses; inwardly confronting
their movement, their speech, their manner of dressing,
with that of his extraordinary friend. He judged her to
be beyond them in every respect, though there were one
or two actresses who had the air of trying to copy her.
The recollection of the last days he had spent with
her affected him now like the touch of a tear-washed
cheek. She had in the last intimacy, strangest and
richest of revelations, shed tears for him, and it was
his suspicion that her secret idea was to frustrate
the redemption of his vow to Hoffendahl, to the
immeasurable body that Hoffendahl represented.
She pretended to have accepted it, and what she
said was simply that when he should have played
his part she would engage to save him—to fling a
cloud about him as the goddess-mother of the Trojan
hero used in Virgil’s poem to escamoter Æneas.
What she meant was in his view to prevent him from
playing his part at all. She was in earnest for herself,
not for him. The main result of his closest commerce
with her, in which somehow, all without herself
stooping, she had only raised him higher and higher
and absolutely highest, had been to make him feel
that he was good enough for anything. When he
had asked her the last day if he might write to her
she said Yes, after two or three weeks. He had
written about Pinnie’s death, and again just before
coming abroad, and in doing so had taken account
of something else she had said in regard to their
correspondence—that she didn’t wish vague phrases,
protestations or compliments; she wanted the realities
of his life, the smallest, the “dearest,” the most
personal details. Therefore he had treated her to
the whole business of the break-up in Lomax Place,
including the sale of the rickety furniture and similar
sordid items. He had told her what that transaction
brought—a beggarly sum, but sufficient to help a
little to pay debts, and had informed her further
that one of the ways Mr. Vetch had taken to hurry
him off to Paris was to press upon him thirty pounds
out of his quaint little hoard, crowning the sum
already inherited from Pinnie—which, in a manner
that none of Hyacinth’s friends of course could
possibly regard as frugal or even as respectable,
was now consecrated to a mere excursion. He even
mentioned that he had ended by accepting the thirty
pounds, adding that he feared his peculiar situation—she
would know what he meant by that—made
for a failure of proper dignity: it disposed one to
grab all one could get, kept one at least very tolerant
of whims that took the form of offered comforts.
What he didn’t mention to his shining friend was
the manner in which he had been received by Paul
Muniment and by Millicent Henning on his return
from Medley. Millicent’s reception had been of the
queerest; it had been quite unexpectedly mild. She
had made him no scene of violence and appeared
to have given up the line of throwing a blur of
recrimination over her own equivocal doings. She
treated him as if she liked him for having got in with
the swells; she had an appreciation of success which
would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that
he was really successful. She tried to make him
describe the style of life that was led in a house where
people were invited to stay like that without having
to pay, and she surprised almost as much as she
gratified him by not indulging in any of her former
digs at the Princess. She was lavish of ejaculations
when he answered certain of her questions—ejaculations
that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh I say!” and
“Oh my stars!”—and he was more than ever struck
with her detestable habit of saying “Aye, that’s
where it is” when he had made some remark to which
she wished to give an intelligent and sympathetic
assent. But she didn’t jeer at the Princess’s private
character; she stayed her satire in a case where there
was such an opening for it. Hyacinth reflected that
this was lucky for her: he couldn’t have stood it
(nervous and anxious as he was about Pinnie) if she
had had at such a time the bad taste to be low and
abusive. Under that stress he would have broken
with her completely—would have been too disgusted.
She displeased him enough as it was by her vulgar
tricks of speech. There were two or three little,
recurrent thumb-marks of the common that smutched
her more blackly for him than their size warranted—as
when she said “full up” for full, “sold out” for
sold, or remarked to him that she supposed he was
now going to “chuck up” his work at old Crook’s.
It was as if he were fairly requiring of her to speak
better than women of fashion. These phrases at any
rate had fallen upon his ear many a time before,
but now they seemed almost unpardonable enough
to quarrel about. Not that he had any wish to
quarrel, for if the question had been pushed he
would have admitted that to-day his intimacy with
the Princess had caused any claims he might have
had upon Millicent to lapse. Millicent was all discretion,
however; she only, it was evident, wished to
convey to him that it was better for both parties
they should respect each other’s liberty. A genial
understanding on this subject was what Miss Henning
desired, and Hyacinth forbade himself to inquire what
use she proposed to make of her freedom. During
the month that elapsed between Pinnie’s death and
his visit to Paris he had seen her several times, since
the respect for each other’s freedom had somehow
not implied cessation of intercourse and it was only
natural she should have been soft to him in his
bereaved condition. Hyacinth’s sentiment about
Pinnie was deep, and Millicent was clever enough to
guess it; the consequence of which was that on these
occasions she was very soft indeed. She talked to
him almost as if she had been his mother and he a
convalescent child; called him her dearest dear and
a precious young rascal and her own old boy;
moralised a good deal, abstained from beer (till she
learnt he had inherited a fortune), and when he
remarked once (moralising a little too) that after
the death of a person we have loved we are haunted
by the memory of our failures of kindness, of generosity,
rejoined with a dignity that made the words
almost a contribution to the philosophic view, “Yes,
that’s where it is!”
Something in her behaviour at this period had
even made Hyacinth wonder if there were not some
mystical sign in his appearance, some fine betrayal
in the very expression of his face, of the predicament
in which he had been placed by Diedrich Hoffendahl;
he began to suspect anew the operation of that
“beastly attendrissement” he had detected of old
in people who had the benefit of Miss Pynsent’s
innuendoes. The compassion Millicent felt for him
had never been one of the reasons why he liked her;
it had fortunately been corrected, moreover, by his
power to make her furious. This evening, on the
Boulevard, as he watched the endless facial successions,
one of the ideas that came to him was that
it was odd he should like her even yet; for heaven
knew he liked the Princess better, and he had hitherto
supposed that when a sentiment of this kind had
the energy of a possession it made a clean sweep of
all minor predilections. But it was clear to him that
she still existed for him as a loud-breathing feminine
fact, that he couldn’t feel he had quite done with
her or she with him, and that in spite of his having
now so many other things to admire there was still
a comfort in the recollection of her robust beauty
and her primitive passions. Hyacinth thought of
her as some clever young barbarian who in ancient
days should have made a pilgrimage to Rome might
have thought of a Dacian or Iberian mistress awaiting
his return on the rough provincial shore. If Millicent
judged his visit at a “hall” a proof of the sort of
success that was to attend him—how he reconciled
this with the supposition that she perceived as a
ghostly crown intermingled with his curly hair the
lurid light of destiny, the aureola of martyrdom, he
would have had some difficulty in explaining—if Miss
Henning considered, on his return from Medley,
that he had taken his place on the winning side it
was only consistent of her to borrow a grandeur from
the fact of his course of travel; and indeed by the
time he was ready to start she spoke of his participation
in this privilege of the upper classes as if she
had invented it herself and had even contributed
materially to the funds required. It had been her
theory from the first that she only liked people of
spirit; and Hyacinth certainly had never had so
much spirit as when he went “abroad,” after the
fashion of Mr. Vetch of old, with a hat-box. He could
say to himself quite without bitterness that of course
she would profit by his absence to put her relations
with Sholto on a comfortable footing; yet somehow,
after all, at this moment, as her distant English face
out-blossomed the nearer, the livid Parisian, it had
not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It
was the general brightness of Paris perhaps that
made him see things sharp; at any rate he remembered
with kindness something she had said to him
the last time he saw her and that it touched him
exceedingly at the moment. He had happened to
observe to her in a friendly way that now Miss Pynsent
had gone she was, with the exception of Mr. Vetch,
the person in his whole circle who had known him
longest. To this Millicent had replied that Mr.
Vetch wouldn’t live for ever and that she should
then have the satisfaction of being his very oldest
friend. “Oh well, I shan’t live for ever either,” said
Hyacinth; which led her to ask if by chance he had
a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but
I might get smashed in a row”; and when she broke
out into scorn of his silly notion of turning everything
up—as if any one wanted to know what a costermonger
would like, or any of that low sort at the
East End!—he amused himself with inquiring if
she were satisfied with the condition of society and
thought nothing ought to be done for people who at
the end of a lifetime of starvation wages had only the
reward of the hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave.
“I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything if ever
you was to slip up,” she had answered simply, looking
at him with her beautiful boldness. Then she
had added: “There’s one thing I can tell you, Mr.
Robinson: that if ever any one was to do you a
turn——!” And she had paused again, tossing back
the head she carried as if it were surmounted by the
plumes of a chieftainess, while Hyacinth asked what
would occur in that contingency. “Well, there’d
be one left behind who would take it up!” she
had announced; and in the tone of the declaration
there had been something clear and brave. It struck
Hyacinth as a strange fate—though not stranger after
all than his native circumstances—that one’s memory
should come to be represented by a shop-girl overladen
with bracelets of imitation silver; but he was reminded
that Millicent was a fine specimen of a woman of a
type opposed to the whining, and that in her large,
free temperament many disparities were reconciled.
On the other hand the intensity of Paris had not
much power to transfigure the impression made upon
him by such intercourse with Paul Muniment as he
had enjoyed during the weeks that followed Pinnie’s
death—an impression considerably more severe than
any idea of renunciation or oblivion that could
connect itself with Millicent. Why it should have
had the taste of sadness was not altogether clear,
for Muniment’s voice was as distinct as any in the
chorus of approbation excited by the news that the
youth was about to cultivate the most characteristic
of the pleasures of gentility—an applausive unanimity
the effect of which was to place his journey to Paris
in a light almost ridiculous. What had got into
them all—did they think he was good for nothing
but to amuse himself? Mr. Vetch had been the
most zealous, but the others clapped him on the
back almost exactly in the same manner he had seen
his mates in Soho bring their palms down on one of
their number when it was disclosed to them that his
“missus” had made him yet once again a father.
That had been Poupin’s tone, and his wife’s as well;
and even poor Schinkel, with his everlasting bandage,
whom he had met in Lisson Grove, appeared to
feel it necessary to remark that a little run across
the Rhine while he was about it would open his
eyes to a great many wonders. The Poupins shed
tears of joy, and the letters which have already been
mentioned and which lay day after day on the mantel-shelf
of the little room our hero occupied at an hôtel
garni tremendously tall and somewhat lopsided in
the Rue Jacob (that recommendation proceeded also
from Lisson Grove, the garni being kept by a second
cousin of Madame Eustache) these valuable documents
had been prepared by the obliging exile many days
before his young friend was ready to start. It
was almost refreshing to Hyacinth when old Crook,
the sole outspoken dissentient, told him he was a
blockhead to waste his money on the bloody French.
This worthy employer of labour was evidently disgusted
at such an innovation; if he wanted a little
recreation why couldn’t he take it as it had been
taken in Soho from the beginning of time, in the shape
of a trip to Brighton or two or three days of alcoholic
torpor? Old Crook was right. Hyacinth conceded
freely that he was a blockhead, and was only a little
uncomfortable that he couldn’t explain why he didn’t
pretend not to be and had a kind of right to that
compensatory ease.
Paul guessed why, of course, and smiled approval
with a candour which gave Hyacinth a strange inexpressible
heartache. He already knew his friend’s
view of him as mainly ornamental, as adapted only
to the softer forms of the subversive energy, as
constituted in short to show that the revolution was
not necessarily brutal and illiterate; but in the light
of the cheerful stoicism with which Muniment faced
the sacrifice our hero was committed to, the latter
had found it necessary to remodel a good deal his
original conception of his sturdy friend’s character.
The result of this process was not that he admired
it less but that he felt almost awe-stricken in presence
of it. There had been an element of that sort in his
appreciation of Muniment from the first, but the
weight now to carry was the sense of such a sublime
consistency. Hyacinth felt that he himself could
never have risen so high. He was competent to take
the stiff engagement to Hoffendahl and was equally
competent to keep it; but he couldn’t have had the
same fortitude for another, couldn’t have detached
himself from personal prejudice so effectually as to
put forward in that manner for the terrible “job”
a little chap he to all appearance really liked. That
Muniment did like him it never occurred to the
little chap to doubt. He had quite all the air of it
to-day; he had never been more good-humoured,
more placidly talkative; he was like an elder brother
who knew that the “youngster” was clever and
felt rather proud of it even when there was no one
there to see. That temporary look of suspending
their partnership which had usually marked him at
the “Sun and Moon” was never visible in other
places; in Audley Court he only chaffed his young
friend occasionally for taking him too seriously.
To-day that devotee hardly knew just how to take
him; the episode of which Hoffendahl was the
central figure had, as far as one could see, made so
little change in his attitude. For a loyal servant, an
effective agent, he was so extraordinarily candid—bitterness
and denunciation so rarely sat on his lips.
The criticism of everything—since everything was
wrong—took so little of his time. It was as if he
had been ashamed to complain; and indeed for
himself as the months went on he had nothing
particular to complain of. He had had a rise at the
chemical works and a plan of getting a bigger room
for Rosy was under serious consideration. On behalf
of others he never sounded the pathetic note—he
thought that sort of thing unbusiness-like; and the
most that he did in the way of expatiation on the
woes of humanity was occasionally to allude to
certain statistics, certain “returns,” in regard to the
remuneration of industries, applications for employment
and the discharge of hands. In such matters
as these he was deeply versed, moving ever in a dry,
statistical and scientific air in which it cost Hyacinth
an effort of respiration to accompany him. Simple
and kindly as he was, and thoughtful of the sufferings
of beasts, attentive and merciful to small insects
and addicted even to kissing dirty babies in Audley
Court, he sometimes emitted a short, satiric gleam
which showed that his esteem for the poor was small
and that if he had no illusions about the people
who had got everything into their hands he had as
few about those who had egregiously failed to do so.
He was tremendously reasonable, which was largely
why Hyacinth admired him, having a desire to be so
himself but finding it terribly difficult.
Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-coloured
coolness, his easy, exact knowledge, the way he kept
himself clean (save for fine chemical stains on his
hands) in circumstances of foul contact, constituted
a group of qualities that had always appeared to his
admirer singularly enviable. Most enviable of all was
the force that enabled him to sink personal sentiment
where a great public good was to be attempted
and yet keep up the form of caring for that minor
interest. It seemed to our friend that if he had
introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for his
purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such
a recommendation and everything had been settled,
he would have preferred never to look at the young
fellow again. That was his weakness and Paul
carried it off far otherwise. It must be added that he
had never made an allusion to their visit to the great
taskmaster; so that Hyacinth also, out of pride,
held his tongue on the subject. If his friend didn’t
propose expressly to yearn over him he wasn’t
going to beg for it (especially as he didn’t want it)
by restless references. It had originally been a
surprise to him that Muniment should be willing to
countenance a possible assassination; but after all
none of his ideas were narrow (one had such a sense
that they ripened all the while) and if a pistol-shot
would do any good he was not the man to raise
pedantic objections. It is true that as regards his
quiet acceptance of the predicament in which Hyacinth
might be placed by it our young man had given him
the benefit of a certain amount of doubt; it had
occurred to him that perhaps Muniment had his own
good grounds for believing that imperative sign would
never really arrive, so that he might only be treating
himself to the entertainment of judging of a little
bookbinder’s nerve. But in this case why did he take
an interest in the little bookbinder’s going to Paris?
That was a thing he wouldn’t have cared for had
he held that in fact there was nothing to fear. He
despised the sight of idleness, and in spite of the
indulgence he had more than once been good enough
to express on the subject of his young friend’s sneaking
love of ease what he would have been most likely
to say at present was: “Go to Paris? Go to the
dickens! Haven’t you been out at grass long enough
for one while, didn’t you lark enough in the country
there with the noble lady, and hadn’t you better
take up your tools again before you forget how to
handle them?” Rosy had said something of that
sort in her free, familiar way—whatever her intention
she had been in effect only a little less caustic
than old Crook: that Mr. Robinson was going in
for a life of leisure, a life of luxury, like herself; she
must congratulate him on having the means and the
time. Oh the time—that was the great thing! She
could speak with knowledge, having always enjoyed
these advantages herself. And she intimated—or
was she mistaken?—that his good fortune emulated
hers also in the matter of his having a high-born and
beneficent friend (such a blessing now he had lost
dear Miss Pynsent) who covered him with little
attentions. Rose Muniment in short had been more
exasperating than ever.
The Boulevard became even more brilliant as the
evening went on and Hyacinth wondered whether he
had a right to occupy the same table for so many
hours. The theatre on the other side discharged its
multitude; the crowd thickened on the wide asphalt,
on the terrace of the café; gentlemen accompanied
by ladies of whom he knew already how to characterise
the type—des femmes très-chic—passed into the
portals of Tortoni. The nightly emanation of Paris
seemed to rise more richly, to float and hang in
the air, to mingle with the universal light and the
many-voiced sound, to resolve itself into a thousand
solicitations and opportunities, addressed, however,
mainly to those in whose pockets the chink of a little
loose gold might respond. Hyacinth’s retrospections
had not made him drowsy, but quite the reverse;
he grew restless and excited and a kind of pleasant
terror of the place and hour entered into his blood.
But it was nearly midnight and he got up to walk
home, taking the line of the Boulevard toward the
Madeleine. He passed down the Rue Royale, where
comparative stillness reigned; and when he reached
the Place de la Concorde, to cross the bridge which
faces the Corps Législatif, he found himself almost
isolated. He had left the human swarm and the
obstructed pavements behind, and the wide spaces
of the splendid square lay quiet under the summer
stars. The plash of the great fountains was audible
and he could almost hear the wind-stirred murmur
of the little wood of the Tuileries on one side and of
the vague expanse of the Champs Elysées on the
other. The place itself—the Place Louis Quinze,
the Place de la Révolution—had given him a sensible
emotion from the day of his arrival; he had recognised
so quickly its tremendous historic character. He
had seen in a rapid vision the guillotine in the middle,
on the site of the inscrutable obelisk, and the tumbrils,
with waiting victims, were stationed round the circle
now made majestic by the monuments of the cities
of France. The great legend of the French Revolution,
a sunrise out of a sea of blood, was more real to him
here than anywhere else; and, strangely, what was
most present was not its turpitude and horror, but
its magnificent energy, the spirit of creation that
had been in it, not the spirit of destruction. That
shadow was effaced by the modern fairness of fountain
and statue, the stately perspective and composition;
and as he lingered before crossing the Seine a sudden
sense overtook him, making his heart falter to
anguish—a sense of everything that might hold one
to the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the
fascination of great cities, the charm of travel and
discovery, the generosity of admiration. The tears
rose to his eyes as they had done more than once in
the past six months, and a question, low but poignant,
broke from his lips, to end in nothing. “How could
he—how could he——?” It may be explained that
“he” was a reference to Paul Muniment; for
Hyacinth had dreamed of the religion of friendship.
Three weeks after this he found himself in Venice,
whence he addressed to the Princess Casamassima
a letter of which I reproduce the principal passages.
“This is probably the last time I shall write you
before I return to London. Of course you’ve been
in this place and you’ll easily understand why here,
especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear
Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable
impressions, what a revelation of the exquisite! I
have a room in a little campo opposite a small old
church which has cracked marble slabs let into the
front; and in the cracks grow little, wild, delicate
flowers of which I don’t know the name. Over the
door of the church hangs an old battered leather
curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress and
with buttons in it like a sofa; and it flops to and fro
laboriously as women and girls, with shawls on their
heads and their feet in little wooden shoes which
have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the middle
of the campo is a fountain that looks still older
than the church; it has a primitive, barbaric air, and
I’ve an idea it was put there by the first settlers—those
who came to Venice from the mainland, from
Aquileia. Observe how much historical information
I’ve already absorbed; it won’t surprise you, however,
for you never wondered at anything after you
discovered I knew something of Schopenhauer. I
assure you I don’t think of that musty misogynist in
the least to-day, for I bend a genial eye on the women
and girls I just spoke of as they glide with a small
clatter and with their old copper water-jars to the
fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully
sweet and the effect is charming when its pale, sad oval
(they all look underfed) is framed in the old faded
shawl. They have also the most engaging hair, which
never has done curling, and they slip along together,
in couples or threes, interlinked by the arms and
never meeting one’s eye—so that its geniality doesn’t
matter—dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns whose
limp folds make the same delightful line that everything
else in Italy makes. The weather is splendid
and I roast—but I like it; apparently I was made to
be spitted and ‘done,’ and I discover that I’ve been
cold all my life even when I thought I was warm.
I’ve seen none of the beautiful patricians who sat
for the great painters—the gorgeous beings whose
golden hair was intertwined with pearls; but I’m
studying Italian in order to talk with the shuffling,
clicking maidens who work in the bead-factories—I’m
determined to make one or two of them look at
me. When they’ve filled their old water-pots at the
fountain it’s jolly to see them perch them on their
heads and patter away over the polished Venetian
stones. It’s a charm to be in a country where
the women don’t wear the hideous British bonnet.
Even in my own class—forgive the expression, I
remember it used to offend you—I’ve never known
a young female in London to put her nose out of the
door without it; and if you had frequented such
young females as much as I have you would have
learnt of what degradation that dreary imposition
is the source. The floor of my room is composed of
little brick tiles, and to freshen the air in this temperature
one sprinkles it, as you no doubt know, with
water. Before long if I keep on sprinkling I shall
be able to swim about; the green shutters are closed
and the place makes a very good tank. Through
the chinks the hot light of the campo comes in. I
smoke cigarettes and in the pauses of this composition
recline on a faded magenta divan in the corner.
Convenient to my hand in that attitude are the works
of Leopardi and a second-hand dictionary. I’m very
happy—happier than I have ever been in my life
save at Medley—and I don’t care for anything but
the present hour. It won’t last long, for I’m spending
all my money. When I’ve finished this I shall
go forth and wander about in the splendid Venetian
afternoon; and I shall spend the evening in that
enchanted square of Saint Mark’s which resembles
an immense open-air drawing-room, listening to
music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between
those two strange old columns of the piazzetta which
seem to make a doorway for it. I can scarcely believe
that it’s of myself I’m telling you these fine things;
I say to myself a dozen times a day that Hyacinth
Robinson isn’t in it—I pinch my leg to see if I’m
not dreaming. But a short time hence, when I’ve
resumed the exercise of my profession in sweet Soho,
I shall have proof enough that it has been my very
self: I shall know this by the terrible grind of the life
and the penance to come.
“That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply
demoralised. It won’t be for you, however, in this
case, to cast the stone at me; for my demoralisation
began from the moment I first approached you.
Dear Princess, I may have done you good, but you
haven’t done me much. I trust you’ll understand
what I mean by that speech and not think it flippant
or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand
and enter into the misery of the people—though
I protest I don’t know much about it; but you’ve
led my imagination into quite another train. Nevertheless
I’m not wholly pretending it’s all your fault
if I’ve lost sight of the sacred cause almost altogether
in my recent adventures. It’s not that it hasn’t
been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest
result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing
as we go, that want and toil and suffering are the
constant lot of the immense majority of the human
race. I’ve found them everywhere but haven’t
minded them. Forgive the cynical confession. What
has struck me is the great achievements of which
man has been capable in spite of them—the splendid
accumulations of the happier few, to which doubtless
the miserable many have also in their degree contributed.
The face of Europe appears to be covered
with them and they’ve had much the greater part
of my attention. They seem to me inestimably
precious and beautiful and I’ve become conscious
more than ever before of how little I understand
what in the great rectification you and Poupin propose
to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things
I shall be too sorry to see you touch, even you with
your hands divine; and—shall I tell you le fond
de ma pensée, as you used to say?—I feel myself
capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a
traitor, for you know the obligation I supremely, I
immutably recognise. The monuments and treasures
of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests
of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation
as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms,
the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the
rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the
same, the world is less of a ‘bloody sell’ and life
more of a lark—our friend Hoffendahl seems to me to
hold them too cheap and to wish to substitute for
them something in which I can’t somehow believe as
I do in things with which the yearnings and the tears
of generations have been mixed. You know how
extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl—to speak
only of him; but if there’s one thing that’s more
clear about him than another, it’s that he wouldn’t
have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable
old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the
Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a
little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little
piece of anything and I’ve a great horror of that
kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of
the idea of a redistribution. You’ll say I talk of it
all at my ease while in a delicious capital I smoke
cigarettes on a magenta divan; and I give you leave
to scoff at me if it turns out that when I come back
to London without a penny in my pocket I don’t
hold the same language. I don’t know what it comes
from, but during the last three months there has crept
over me a deep mistrust of that same grudging
attitude—the intolerance of positions and fortunes
that are higher and brighter than one’s own; a fear,
moreover, that I may in the past have been actuated
by such motives, and a devout hope that if I’m to
pass away while I’m yet young it may not be with
that odious stain upon my soul.”
He spent the first days after his return to London
in a process supposed by him to be the quest of a
lodging; but in reality he was pulling himself together
for the business of his livelihood, an effort he found
by no means easy or agreeable. As he had told the
Princess, he was demoralised, and the perspective
of old Crook’s dirty staircase had never seemed so
steep. He lingered on the brink before he plunged
again into Soho: he wished not to go back to the
shop till he should be settled and delayed to get
settled in order not to go back to the shop. He saw
no one during this interval, not even Mr. Vetch;
he waited to call on the fiddler till he should have
the appearance of not coming as a beggar or a
borrower—have recovered his employment and be
able to give an address, as he had heard Captain
Sholto say. He went to South Street—not meaning
to go in at once but wishing to look at the house—and
there he had the surprise of seeing the advertisement
of an auctioneer in the window of the
Princess’s late residence. He had not expected to
find her in town—having heard from her the last
time three weeks before, when she had said nothing
about her prospects; but he was puzzled by this
indication that she had moved away altogether.
There was something in it all, however, that he
felt he had at bottom been expecting; it appeared
to prove the justice of a suspicion attached to all
the steps of any intercourse with the Princess—a
vague apprehension that one might suddenly stretch
out one’s hand and miss her altogether from one’s
side. He decided to ring at the door and ask for
news of her; but there was no response to his
summons: the stillness of an August afternoon—the
year had come round again from his first visit—hung
over the place, the blinds were down and
the caretaker appeared to be absent. Before these
facts he was much at a loss; unless indeed he should
address a letter to his wonderful friend at Medley.
It would doubtless be forwarded, though her short
lease of the country-house had terminated, as he
knew, several weeks before. Captain Sholto was of
course a possible agent, a probable source of light;
but nothing would have induced Hyacinth to ask
such a service of him.
He turned away from South Street with a strange
sinking of the heart; his state of ignorance struck
inward, as it were—had the force of a deeply disquieting
portent. He went to old Crook’s only when
he had arrived at his last penny. This, however,
was very promptly the case. He had disembarked
at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in his
pocket and had lived on that sum for three days.
The old fiddler in Lomax Place was having a chop
before he went to the theatre, and he invited Hyacinth
to share his repast, sending out at the same time for
another pot of beer. He took the youth with him
to the play, where, as at that season there were very
few spectators, he had no difficulty in finding him
a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of him
and peered strangely over his spectacles—Mr. Vetch
wore the homely double glass in these latter years—when
he learned that Hyacinth had found a retreat
not in their old familiar quarter but in the unexplored
purlieus of Westminster. What had determined our
young man was the fact that from this part of the
town the journey was comparatively a short one to
Camberwell; he had suffered so much, before Pinnie’s
death, from being separated by such a distance from
his best friends. There was a pang in his heart
connected with the image of Paul Muniment, but
none the less the prospect of an evening hour from
time to time in Audley Court struck him as one of
the few nameable beguilements of his odd future.
He could have gone straight to Camberwell to live,
but that would carry him too far from the scene of
his profession, and in Westminster he was nearer to
old Crook’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He
said to Mr. Vetch that if it would give him pleasure
he would abandon his lodging and take another in
Pentonville. But the old man replied after a moment
that he should be sorry to put that constraint upon
him; if he were to make such an exaction Hyacinth
would think he wanted to watch him.
“How do you mean, to watch me?”
Mr. Vetch had begun to tune his fiddle and he
scraped it a little before answering. “I mean it as
I’ve always meant it. Surely you know that in
Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched
you as a child on the edge of a pond watches the
little boat he has constructed and set afloat.”
“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after
all, very little of me,” Hyacinth said.
“I made what I could of that little. It was better
than nothing.”
Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s
arm; he had never felt so acute a kindness for him,
not even when accepting his thirty pounds before
going abroad. “Certainly I’ll come to see you.”
“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr.
Vetch observed without heeding these words but
continuing to scrape. He had always, even into the
shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English
good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd
elements) that there was a shyness, an aversion to
possible phrase-making, in his manner of expressing
gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory
tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of
sincerity.
Hyacinth took little interest in the piece, which
was an inanimate revival; he had been at the
Théâtre Français and the tradition of that house
was still sufficiently present to him to make any
other style of interpretation of comedy appear at
the best but a confident form of horseplay. He sat
in one of the front stalls, close to the orchestra;
and while the thing went forward—or backward,
ever backward, as it seemed to him—his thoughts
wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty
boards, revolving round a question which had come
up immensely during the last few hours. The Princess
was a capricciosa—this at least had been Madame
Grandoni’s account of her; and was that blank,
expressionless house in South Street a sign that an
end had come to the particular caprice in which he
had happened to be involved? On his return to
London the desire to be with her again on the same
terms as at Medley had begun to ache in him like
a sorrow or a dreaded wrong—so sharp was his sense
that if he mightn’t absolutely count upon her she
had been all cruelly, all abominably dishonest. Yet
the wonder of the other time remained, in the great
silence that had come, altogether a wonder. Circumstances
had favoured in an extraordinary degree
his visit to her, and it was by no means clear that
they would again be so accommodating or that what
had been possible for a few days should be possible
with continuity and in the midst of the ceremonies
and complications of London. Hyacinth felt poorer
than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had had
money and spent it, whereas in previous times he
had never had it to spend. He never for an instant
regretted his squandered wealth, for he said to himself
that he had made a good bargain and become
master of a precious equivalent. The equivalent
was a rich experience—an experience that would
grow richer still as he should talk it over, in the
right conditions that she would find again, with the
one person in the world to whom he was now interesting.
His poverty would be no obstacle to their
friendship so long as he should have a pair of legs
to carry him to her door; for she liked him better
shabby than furbished up, and she had given him
too many pledges, they had taken together too many
appointments, worked out too many ideas, to be
disconcerted on either side by obstacles that were
merely a part of the general conventionality. He
was to go with her into the slums, to introduce her
to the worst that London contained—he should have
precisely to make acquaintance with it first—to show
her the reality of the horrors of which she dreamed
the world might be purged. He had ceased himself
to care for the slums and had reasons for not wishing
to spend his remnant in the study of foul things;
but he would go through with his part of the engagement.
He might be detached and mechanical, but
any dreariness would have a gilding that should
involve an association with her. What indeed if
she should have changed, have availed herself of
that great right of unapologetic inconsequence which
he believed to be, at least in their relation with
nobodies, the highest luxury of the happy? What
if, from a high insolence which he thought of as
lurking somewhere in the side-scenes of her nature,
though he had really not once seen it step to the
front, she should toss back her perfect head with
a movement signifying that he was too basely literal
and that she knew him no more? His imagination
represented her this evening in places where a barrier
of dazzling light shut her out from access or even
from any appeal. He saw her with other people,
in splendid rooms where “the dukes” had possession
of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded, covered
with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found
a reassurance in reflecting that after all she would
be unlikely to throw him personally over so long as
she should remain as deeply compromised, subterraneously
speaking, as she had—successfully it
seemed—tried to become, and that it would not be
easy for her to liberate herself from that entanglement.
She had of course told him more, at Medley,
of the manner in which she had already committed
herself, and he remembered with a strange perverse
elation that she had gone very far indeed.
In the intervals of the foolish play Mr. Vetch, who
lingered in his place in the orchestra while his mates
descended into the little hole under the stage, leaned
over the rail and asked his young friend occasional
questions, carrying his eyes at the same time about
the dingy house at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished
galleries he had been staring for so many a year.
He came back to Hyacinth’s letters and said: “Of
course you know they were clever; they entertained
me immensely. But as I read them I thought of
poor Pinnie: I wished she could have listened to
them; they would have made her so happy.”
“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured while
his friend went on:
“I was in Paris in 1846; I stayed at a small hotel
in the Rue Mogador. I judge from your letters that
everything’s changed. Does the Rue Mogador still
exist? Yes, everything’s changed. I daresay it’s
all much finer, but I liked it very much as it was
then. At all events I’m right in supposing—am I
not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made
you really happy.”
“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I
was happy enough,” Hyacinth replied.
The fiddler projected his old, white, conscious face;
it had the stale smoothness that betrays a sedentary
occupation, thirty years spent in a close crowd, amid
the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint.
“I thought you were sad about Pinnie.”
“When I jumped with that avidity at your proposing
I should take a tour? Poor old Pinnie!”
Hyacinth added.
“Well, I hope you think a little better of the
world. We mustn’t make up our minds too early
in life.”
“Oh I’ve made up mine: the world’s an awfully
jolly place.”
“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old
pair of shoes—I like so much less the idea of putting
on the new ones.”
“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked.
“What have I known but kindness? People have
done such a lot for me.”
“Oh well, of course they’ve liked you. But that’s
all right,” murmured Mr. Vetch, beginning to scrape
again. What remained in Hyacinth’s mind from
their colloquy was the fact that this veteran, whom
he regarded distinctly as cultivated, had thought
his letters clever. He only wished he had made
them cleverer still; he had no doubt of his ability
to have done so.
It may be imagined whether the first hours he
spent at old Crook’s after he took up work again
were altogether to his taste, and what was the nature
of the reception given him by his former comrades,
whom he found exactly in the same attitudes and
the same clothes (he knew and hated every article
they wore) and with the same primitive pleasantries
on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were mingled;
the place and the people affected him as loathsome,
but there was something delightful in handling his
tools. He gave a little private groan of relief when
he discovered that he still liked his work and that
the shining swarm of his ideas in the matter of sides
and backs returned to him. They came in still
brighter, more suggestive form, and he had the satisfaction
of feeling that his taste had improved, that it
had been purified by experience, and that the covers
of a book might be made to express an astonishing
number of high conceptions. Strange enough it was,
and a proof surely of our little hero’s being a true
artist, that the impressions he had accumulated
during the last few months appeared to mingle and
confound themselves with the very sources of his
craft and to lie open to technical “rendering.” He
had quite determined by this time to carry on his
life as if nothing were hanging over him and he had
no intention of remaining a little bookbinder to the
end of his days; for that medium would after all
translate only some of his conceptions. Yet his
trade was a resource, an undiminished resource, for
the present, and he had a particular as well as a
general motive in attempting new flights—the prevision
of the exquisite work he was to do during the
coming year for the Princess, work it was so definite
to him he owed her. When that debt should have
been paid and his other arrears made up he proposed
to himself to write something. He was far from
having decided as yet what it should be; the only
point settled was that it should be very remarkable
and should not, at least on the face of it, have anything
to do with a fresh deal of the social pack.
That was to be his transition—into literature: to
bind the book, charming as the process might be,
was after all much less fundamental than to write
it. It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once
that it would be a fine thing to produce a rare death-song.
It is not surprising that among such reveries as
this he should have been conscious of a narrow range
in the tone of his old work-fellows. They had only
one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds
and had gone to spend them in France with a regular
high one. He was aware in advance of the diffusion
of this legend and did his best to allow for it, taking
the simplest course, which was to gainsay nothing,
but to catch the ball as it came and toss it still
further, enlarging and embroidering humorously until
Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the rest,
who struck him as not having washed since he left
them, seemed really to begin to understand how it
was he could have spent such a rare sum in so short
a time. The impressiveness of this achievement
helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could
see that, though the treatment it received was superficially
irreverent, the sense that he was very sharp
and that the springs of his sharpness were somehow
secret gained a good deal of strength from it.
Hyacinth was not incapable of being rather pleased
that it should be supposed, even by Grugan, Roker
and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand
pounds in less than five months, especially as to his
own conscience the fact had altogether yet to be
proved. He got off on the whole easily enough to
feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men
at old Crook’s showed at any rate no symptoms of
the social jealousy lying at the bottom of the desire
for a fresh deal. This was doubtless an accident
and not inherent in the fact that they were highly
skilled workmen—old Crook had no others—and
therefore sure of constant employment; for it was
impossible to be more skilled in a special line than
Paul Muniment, who yet—though not out of jealousy
of course—went in for the great grim restitution.
What struck him most, after he had got used again
to the sense of his apron and bent his back a while
over his battered table, was the simple, synthetic
patience of the others who had bent their backs and
felt the rub of that dirty drapery all the while he
was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling through
boulevards and museums and admiring the purity
of the Venetian girl-face. With Poupin, to be sure,
his relations were all particular; but the explanations
he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such
as could make him very unhappy, once he had determined
to resist as much as possible the friction of
a consciousness as galling at times as a misfitting
harness. There was, moreover, more sorrow than
anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his
young friend and pupil had failed to cultivate in
Paris the rich opportunities he had offered him.
“You’re cooling off, my child; there’s something
about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself
that anything has been done or that humanity
suffers a particle less? Enfin it’s between you and
your conscience.”
“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth
grimaced; this expositor’s phrases about humanity,
which used to thrill him so, having grown of late
strangely hollow and rococo.
“You owe me no explanations; the conscience
of the individual is absolute, except of course in
those classes in which, from the very nature of the
infamies on which they’re founded, no conscience
can exist. Speak to me, however, of my City; she
is always divine,” Poupin went on, though showing
signs of irritation when Hyacinth began to praise to
him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of
December. In the presence of this picture he was
in a terrible dilemma—gratified as a Parisian and a
patriot but all disconcerted as a lover of liberty: it
cost him a pang to admit that anything amid the
seuils sacrés was defective, yet he saw still less his
way to concede that it could owe any charm to the
perjured monster of the Second Empire or even to
the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the
régime before which the inspired Commune had gone
down in blood and fire. “Ah yes, it’s very fine, no
doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will be finer still
when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth
to turn back to his work with a feeling of sickness.
Everywhere, everywhere he saw the ulcer of envy—the
greed of a party hanging together only that
it might despoil another to its advantage. In old
Eustache, one of the “pure,” this was especially
disenchanting.
The landing at the top of the stairs in Audley Court
was always dark; but it seemed darker than ever
to Hyacinth while he fumbled for the door-latch
after he had heard Rose Muniment’s penetrating
voice bid him come in. During that instant his ear
caught the sound, if it could trust itself, of another
voice, which prepared him a little for the spectacle
fully presented as soon as the door—his attempt
to reach the handle in his sudden agitation proving
fruitless—was opened to him by Paul. His friend
stood there tall and hospitable, saying something
loud and jovial that he didn’t distinguish. His eyes
had crossed the threshold in a flash, but his step
faltered a moment, only to obey, however, the vigour
of Muniment’s outstretched hand. Hyacinth’s glance
had gone straight, and though with four persons in
it Rosy’s little apartment looked crowded he saw no
one but the object of his quick preconception—no
one but the Princess Casamassima seated beside
the low sofa, the grand feature introduced during
his absence from London, on which, arrayed in the
famous pink dressing-gown, Miss Muniment now
received her visitors. He wondered afterwards why
he should have been so startled; for he had said
often enough both to himself and to his wonderful
lady that so far as she was concerned he was proof
against astonishment: it was so evident that the
note of her conduct would always be a sort of splendour
of freedom. In fact now that he perceived she
had made her way to Camberwell without his assistance
the feeling in possession of him was a refined
embarrassment; he blushed a little as he entered the
circle, the fourth member of which was inevitably
Lady Aurora Langrish. Was it that his intimacy
with the Princess gave him a certain sense of responsibility
for her course in respect to people who knew
her as yet so scantly, and that there was something
too little explained in the confidence with which she
had practised a descent upon them? It indeed came
over our young man that by this time perhaps they
knew her a good deal; and moreover a woman’s
behaviour spoke for itself when she could sit looking
in that fashion like a radiant angel dressed in a
simple bonnet and mantle and immensely interested
in an appealing corner of the earth. It took Hyacinth
but an instant to infer that her character was in a
different phase from any yet exhibited to him. There
had been a glory of gentleness about her the night
he made her acquaintance, and she had never ceased
at any moment since to strike him as full of the
imagination of sympathy and pity, unless perforce in
relation to her husband, against whom—for reasons
after all doubtless very sufficient—her heart appeared
absolutely steeled. Now at any rate this high mildness
had deepened to a rapture of active, ministering
charity. She had put off her splendour, but her
beauty was unquenchably bright; she had made
herself humble for her pious excursion; she had,
beside Rosy (who in the pink dressing-gown looked
much the more luxurious of the two), almost the
attitude of an hospital nurse; and it was easy to
see from the meagre line of her garments that she
was tremendously in earnest. If Hyacinth was
flurried her own countenance expressed no confusion;
for her evidently this queer little bower
of poverty and pain was a place in which it was
perfectly natural that he should turn up. The sweet,
still greeting her eyes offered him might exquisitely
have conveyed that she had been waiting for him,
that she knew he would come and that there had
been a tacit appointment for that very moment.
They said other things besides in their beautiful
friendliness; they said: “Don’t notice me too much
or make any kind of scene. I’ve an immense deal
to say to you, but remember that I’ve the rest of
our life before me to say it in. Consider only what
will be easiest and kindest to these people, these
delightful people, whom I find enchanting (why
didn’t you ever tell me more—I mean really more—about
them?). It won’t be particularly complimentary
to them if you’ve the air of seeing a miracle
in my presence here. I’m very glad of your return.
The quavering, fidgety ‘ladyship’ is as striking as
the others.”
Hyacinth’s reception at the hands of his old friends
was cordial enough quite to obliterate the element of
irony that had lurked, fifteen weeks before, in their
godspeed; their welcome was not boisterous, but
it seemed to express the idea that the occasion,
already so rare and agreeable, needed but his arrival
to make it perfect. By the time he had been three
minutes in the room he was able to measure the
impression produced by the Princess, who, it was
clear, had cast the charm of the worshipful over
the little company. This was in the air, in the
face of each, in their smiling, their excited eyes and
heightened colour; even Rosy’s wan grimace, at all
times screwed up to ecstasy, had the supreme glitter
of great occasions. Lady Aurora looked more than
ever dishevelled with interest and wonder; the long
strands of her silky hair floated like gossamer while,
in her extraordinary, religious attention, with her
hands raised and clasped to her bosom as if she
were praying, her respiration rose and fell. She had
never seen any one like the Princess; but Hyacinth’s
apprehension of some months before had been groundless—she
evidently didn’t think her “flashy.” She
thought her divine and a revelation of beauty and
benignity; and the illuminated, amplified room could
contain no dissentient opinion. It was her beauty
primarily that “fetched” them, Hyacinth could
easily see, and it was not hidden from him that the
impression had been made as much on Paul Muniment
as on his companions. It was not in Paul’s nature
to be jerkily demonstrative and he had not lost his
head on the present occasion; but he had already
appreciated the difference between a plain, suspicious
man’s preconception of a meretricious, factitious, fine
lady and the actual influence of such a personage.
She was gentler, fairer, wiser than even a chemical
expert could have guessed in advance. In short she
held the trio in her hand, having reduced Lady
Aurora to exactly the same simplicity as the others,
and she performed admirably and artistically for
their benefit. Almost before Hyacinth had had time
to wonder how she had found the Muniments out—he
had no recollection of giving her specific directions—she
mentioned that Captain Sholto had been
so good as to introduce her; doing so as if she owed
him that explanation and were a woman who would
be scrupulous in such a case. It was rather a blow
to him to learn she had been accepting the Captain’s
mediation, and this was not softened by her saying
she was too impatient to wait for his own return:
he was apparently so pleased with the roving life
that one couldn’t be sure it would ever take place.
The Princess might at least have been sure that to
see her again very soon was still more necessary to
his happiness than anything the roving life could
offer. No adventure was so prodigious as sticking
as fast as possible to her.
It came out in the conversation he had with her,
to which the others listened with respectful curiosity,
that Captain Sholto had brought her a week before,
but that she had then seen only Miss Muniment.
“I took the liberty of coming again by myself
to-day, because I wanted to see the whole family,”
she developed, looking from Paul to Lady Aurora
with a bright blandness which purified the statement
(as regarded her ladyship) of impertinence. The
Princess added frankly that she had now been careful
to arrive at an hour when she thought Mr.
Muniment might be at home. “When I come to
see gentlemen I like at least to find them,” she
continued, and she was so great a lady that there
was no dowdy diffidence in her attitude: it was a
simple matter for her to call on a young man employed
at large chemical works if she had a reason. Hyacinth
could see that the reason had already been brought
forward—her immense interest in problems that Mr.
Muniment had completely mastered and in particular
their common acquaintance with the extraordinary
man whose mission it was to solve them. He learned
later that she had pronounced the name of the great,
patient, powerful Hoffendahl. A part of the lustre
in Rosy’s eye came no doubt from the declaration
she had inevitably been moved to make in respect
to any sympathy with wicked theories that might
be imputed to her; and of course the effect of this
intensely individual little protest—such was always
its effect—emanating from the sofa and the pink
dressing-gown was to render the home of the Muniments
still more quaint and original. In that spot
Paul always gave the pleasantest go-by to any
attempt to draw out his views; so you would have
thought, to hear him, that he allowed himself the
reputation of having them only in order to get a
“rise” out of his sister and let their visitors see
with what wit and spirit she could repudiate them.
This, however, would only be a reason the more for
the Princess’s following up her scent. She would
doubtless not expect to get at the bottom of his
ideas in Audley Court: the opportunity would occur
rather in case of his having the civility—on which
surely she might count—to come and talk them over
with her in her own house.
Hyacinth mentioned to her the disappointment
he had had in South Street and she replied: “Oh,
I’ve given up that house and taken quite a different
one.” But she didn’t say where it was, and in spite
of her having given him so much the right to expect
she would communicate to him a matter so nearly
touching them both as a change of address he felt
a great shyness about asking.
Their companions watched them as if they considered
that something rather witty and showy now
would be likely to come off between them; but
Hyacinth was too full of regard for his beautiful
friend’s tacit notification to him that they must not
appear too thick, which was after all more flattering
than the most pressing inquiries or the most liberal
announcements about herself could have been. She
never asked him when he had come back; and
indeed it was not long before Rose Muniment took
that business on herself. Hyacinth, however, ventured
to assure himself if Madame Grandoni were
still at her post and even to remark—when his fellow-visitor
had replied, “Oh yes, still, still. The great
refusal, as Dante calls it, has not yet come off”—“You
ought to bring her to see Miss Rosy. She’s a
person Miss Rosy would particularly appreciate.”
“I’m sure I should be most happy to receive any
friend of the Princess Casamassima,” said this young
lady from the sofa; and when the Princess answered
that she certainly would not fail to produce Madame
Grandoni some day, Hyacinth—though he doubted
if the presentation would really take place—guessed
how much she wished her old friend might have
heard the strange, bedizened little invalid make that
speech.
There were only three other seats, for the introduction
of the sofa—the question profoundly studied
in advance—had rendered necessary the elimination
of certain articles; so that Muniment, on his feet,
hovered round the little circle with his hands in his
pockets, laughing freely and sociably but not looking
at the Princess; even if, as Hyacinth was sure, none
the less agitated by her presence.
“You ought to tell us about foreign parts and the
grand things you’ve seen; except that our distinguished
visitor must know all about them,” Muniment
threw out to him. Then he added: “Surely,
at any rate, you’ve seen nothing more worthy of
your respect than Camberwell.”
“Is this the worst part?” the Princess asked,
looking up with her noble, interested face.
“The worst, madam? What grand ideas you
must have! We admire Camberwell immensely.”
“It’s my brother’s ideas that are grand!” cried
Rose Muniment, betraying him conscientiously. “He
does want everything changed, no less than you,
Princess; though he’s more cunning than you and
won’t give one a handle where one can take him
up. He thinks all this part most objectionable—as
if dirty people won’t always make everything dirty
where they live! I daresay he thinks there ought to
be no dirty people, and it may be so; only if every
one was clean where would be the merit? You’d get
no credit for keeping yourself tidy. If it’s a question
of soap and water, at any rate, every one can begin
by himself. My brother thinks the whole place ought
to be as handsome as Brompton.”
“Ah yes, that’s where the artists and literary
people live, isn’t it?” the Princess asked attentively.
“I’ve never seen it, but it’s very well laid out,”
Rosy returned with her competent manner.
“Oh I like Camberwell better than that,” Muniment
said with due amusement.
The Princess turned to Lady Aurora and, with
the air of appealing to her for her opinion, gave her
a glance that travelled in a flash from the topmost
bow of her large misfitting hat to the crumpled points
of her substantial shoes. “I must get you to tell me
the truth,” she breathed. “I want so much to know
London—the real London. It seems so difficult!”
Lady Aurora looked a little frightened, but at the
same time gratified, and after a moment responded:
“I believe a great many artists live in Saint John’s
Wood.”
“I don’t care about the artists!” said the Princess,
shaking her head slowly and with the sad smile
that sometimes made her beauty so inexpressibly
touching.
“Not when they’ve painted you such beautiful
pictures?” Rosy demanded. “We know about
your pictures—we’ve admired them so much. Mr.
Hyacinth has described to us your precious possessions.”
The Princess transferred her smile to Rosy and
rested it on that young lady’s shrunken countenance
with the same ineffable head-shake. “You do me
too much honour. I’ve no possessions.”
“Gracious, was it all a make-believe?” Rosy
cried, flashing at Hyacinth an eye that was never
so eloquent as when it demanded an explanation.
“I’ve nothing in the world—nothing but the
clothes on my back!” the Princess repeated very
gravely and without looking at their indiscreet friend.
The words struck Hyacinth as an admonition, so
that, though much puzzled, he made no attempt for
the moment to reconcile the contradiction. He only
replied: “I meant the things in the house. Of
course I didn’t know to whom they belonged.”
“There are no things in my house now,” the
Princess went on; and there was a touch of pure,
high resignation in the words.
“Laws, I shouldn’t like that!” Rose Muniment
declared, glancing with complacency over her own
decorated walls. “Everything here belongs to me.”
“I shall bring Madame Grandoni to see you,”
said the Princess irrelevantly but kindly.
“Do you think it’s not right to have a lot of
things about?” Lady Aurora, with sudden courage,
inquired of her distinguished companion, pointing a
vague chin at her but looking into one of the upper
angles of the room.
“I suppose one must always settle that for one’s
self. I don’t like to be surrounded with objects I
don’t care for, and I can care only for one thing—that
is for one class of things—at a time. Dear
lady,” the Princess pursued, “I fear I must confess
to you that my heart’s not in bibelots. When
thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to
put in their mouths I can dispense with tapestry
and old china.” And her fair face, bent charmingly,
conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to argue
that if she was narrow at least she was honest.
Hyacinth wondered, rather vulgarly, what strange
turn she had taken and whether this singular picture
of her denuded personality were not one of her
famous caprices, a whimsical joke, a nervous perversity.
Meanwhile he heard Lady Aurora urge
anxiously: “But don’t you think we ought to
make the world more beautiful?”
“Doesn’t the Princess make it so by the mere
fact of her existence?” Hyacinth interposed, his
perplexity escaping in a harmless manner through
this graceful hyperbole. He had observed that
though the lady in question could dispense with old
china and tapestry she couldn’t dispense with a pair
of immaculate gloves which fitted her to a charm.
“My people have a mass of things, you know, but
I’ve really nothing myself,” said Lady Aurora, as if
she owed this assurance to such a representative of
suffering humanity.
“The world will be beautiful enough when it
becomes good enough,” the Princess resumed. “Is
there anything so ugly as unjust distinctions, as the
privileges of the few contrasted with the degradation
of the many? When we want to beautify we must
begin at the right end.”
“Surely there are none of us but what have our
privileges!” Rose Muniment exclaimed with eagerness.
“What do you say to mine, lying here between
two members of the aristocracy and with Mr.
Hyacinth thrown in?”
“You’re certainly lucky—with Lady Aurora
Langrish. I wish she would come and see me,”
the Princess genially sighed as she rose.
“Do go, my lady, and tell me if it’s so poor!”
Rosy went on gaily.
“I think there can’t be too many pictures and
statues and works of art,” Hyacinth broke out.
“The more the better, whether people are hungry
or not. In the way of ameliorating influences are
not those the most definite?”
“A piece of bread and butter’s more to the purpose
if your stomach’s empty,” the Princess declared.
“Robinson has been corrupted by foreign influences,”
Paul Muniment suggested. “He doesn’t
care for bread and butter now; he likes French
cookery.”
“Yes, but I don’t get it. And have you sent
away the little man, the Italian, with the white cap
and apron?” Hyacinth asked of the Princess.
She hesitated a moment but presently replied
laughing and not in the least offended at his question,
though it was an attempt to put her in the
wrong from which Hyacinth had not been able to
refrain in his astonishment at these ascetic pretensions:
“I’ve sent him away many times!”
Lady Aurora had also got up; she stood there
gazing at her beautiful fellow-visitor with a timidity
that made her wonder only more apparent. “Your
servants must be awfully fond of you.”
“Oh my servants!” said the Princess as if it
were only by a stretch of the meaning of the word
that she could be said to enjoy the ministrations
of menials. Her manner seemed to imply that she
had a charwoman for an hour a day. Hyacinth
caught the tone and determined that since she was
going, as it appeared, he would break off his own
visit and accompany her. He had flattered himself
at the end of three weeks of Medley that he knew
her in every phase, but here was a field of freshness.
She turned to Paul Muniment and put out her hand
to him, and while he took it in his own his face was
visited by the most beautiful eyes that had ever
rested there. “Will you come and see me one of
these days?” she asked with a voice as pure as her
glance.
Hyacinth waited for Paul’s answer with an emotion
that could only be accounted for by his affectionate
sympathy, the manner in which he had spoken of
him to the Princess and which he wished him to
justify, the interest he had in his appearing completely
the fine fellow he believed him. Muniment
neither stammered nor blushed; he held himself
straight and looked back at his interlocutress with
eyes at least as open as her own to everything that
concerned him. Then by way of answer: “Well
madam, pray what good will it do me?” And the
tone of the words was so humorous and kindly, and
so instinct with a plain manly sense, that though
they were not gallant Hyacinth was not ashamed for
him. At the same moment he observed that Lady
Aurora was watching their friend as if she had at
least an equal stake in what he might say.
“Ah none; only me perhaps a little.” With
this rejoinder and with a wonderful, sweet, indulgent
dignity in which there was none of the stiffness of
pride or resentment the Princess quitted him and
approached Lady Aurora. She asked if she wouldn’t
do her the kindness to come. She should like so
much to know her and had an idea there was a great
deal they might talk about. Lady Aurora said she
should be delighted, and the Princess took one of
her cards out of her pocket and gave it to the noble
spinster. After she had done so she stood a moment
holding her hand and brought out: “It has really
been such a happiness to me to meet you. Please
don’t think it’s very clumsy if I say I do like you
so!” Lady Aurora was evidently exceedingly moved
and impressed; but Rosy, when the Princess took
leave of her and the irrepressible invalid had assured
her of the pleasure with which she should receive her
again, uttered the further truth that in spite of this
she herself could never conscientiously enter into
such theories.
“If every one was equal,” Rosy asked, “where
would be the gratification I feel in getting a visit
from a grandee? That’s what I have often said to
her ladyship, and I consider that I’ve kept her in
her place a little. No, no; no equality while I’m
about the place!”
The company appeared to comprehend that there
was a natural fitness in Hyacinth’s seeing the great
lady on her way, and accordingly no effort was
made to detain him. He guided her, with the help
of an attendant illumination from Muniment, down
the dusky staircase, and at the door of the house
there was a renewed, brief leave-taking with their
host, who, however, showed no signs of relenting
or recanting in respect to the Princess’s invitation.
The warm evening had by this time grown thick
and the population of Audley Court appeared to be
passing it for the most part in the open air. As
Hyacinth assisted his companion to thread her way
through groups of sprawling, chattering children,
gossiping women with bare heads and babies at the
breast and heavily-planted men smoking very bad
pipes, it seemed to him that their project of exploring
the slums was already in the way of execution. He
said nothing till they gained the outer street, but
then, pausing a moment, inquired how she would
be conveyed. Had she a carriage somewhere or
should he try and get a cab?
“A carriage, my dear fellow? For what do you
take me? I won’t trouble you about a cab: I walk
everywhere now.”
“But if I had not been here?”
“I should have gone alone”; and she smiled at
him through the turbid twilight of Camberwell.
“And where, please, gracious heaven? I may at
least have the honour of accompanying you.”
“Certainly, if you can walk so far.”
“So far as what, dear Princess?”
“As Madeira Crescent, Paddington.”
“Madeira Crescent, Paddington?” Hyacinth
stared.
“That’s what I call it when I’m with people with
whom I wish to be fine, as with you. I’ve taken a
small house there.”
“Then it’s really true that you’ve given up your
beautiful things?”
“I’ve sold everything to give to the poor.”
“Ah, Princess——!” the young man almost
moaned; for the memory of some of her treasures
was vivid to him.
She became very grave, even stern, and with an
accent of reproach that seemed to show she had
been wounded where she was most sensitive demanded:
“When I said I was willing to make the
last sacrifice did you then believe I was lying?”
“Haven’t you kept anything?” he went on without
heeding this challenge.
She looked at him a moment. “I’ve kept you!”
Then she passed her hand into his arm and they
moved forward. He saw what she had done; she
was living in a little ugly, bare, middle-class house
and wearing simple gowns; and the energy and
good faith of her behaviour, with the abruptness
of the transformation, took away his breath. “I
thought I should please you so much,” she added
after they had gone a few steps. And before he had
time to reply, as they came to a part of the street
where there were small shops, those of butchers,
greengrocers and pork-pie men, with open fronts,
flaring lamps and humble purchasers, she broke out
joyously: “Ah, this is the way I like to see London!”
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 heroism
to 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 to
that 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 brilliant tour 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 turn
nervous 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’ve
missed 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!”—and
Madame 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, she misses 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 would
be 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
for him, 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 old
lady 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
simple codino!”
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 poor
dear would only believe a little in her. “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 me à 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 let me be 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, declaring
that 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 dingy
loiterers, 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, receptive
manner, 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 the
arrière-pensées of 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 him
and 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. “I
can’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 short
way, 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, dreary
problems 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 very
independent 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 out au 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 place
and 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 act with them—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 little femme 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 help me!”
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 and
embarrassed 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 from our point
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 one must do 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 on me——!” 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 this banal.
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 looked
at 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 she
could 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 little she should 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 of her, 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 had
much 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
of her; which led Hyacinth to demand in return:
“What do you mean? What does who want of
whom?”
“What does the beauty of beauties want of our
poor 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 with
us!”
“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 to
the 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 companion
of 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 Rosy
on 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 fancy you mixed 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 devil do you want?” Paul asked, still
holding him and with perfect good humour.
“Well, to get inside of you a 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 with me.”
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 time
to 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, but that
doesn’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 little
swell!” 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 way I’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 helpless
sense 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 told me that 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 a chance.”
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 the
arm 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
in you, 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.
A certain Sunday in November, more than three
months after she had gone to live in Madeira Crescent,
was so important an occasion for the Princess as to
require reporting with a certain fulness. Early in
the afternoon a loud peal from her door-knocker
came to her ear; it had a sound of resolution, almost
of defiance, which made her look up from her book
and listen. She was sitting alone by the fire, over
a heavy volume on Labour and Capital. It was not
yet four o’clock, but she had had candles this hour;
a dense brown fog made the daylight impure without
suggesting an answer to the question of whether the
scheme of nature had been to veil or to deepen the
sabbatical dreariness. She was not tired of Madeira
Crescent, such an idea she would indignantly have
repudiated; but the prospect of a visitor had a happy
application—the possibility even of his being an
ambassador or a cabinet minister or another of
the eminent personages with whom she had conversed
before embracing the ascetic life. They had
not knocked at her present door hitherto in any great
numbers, for more reasons than one; they were out
of town and she had taken pains to diffuse the belief
that she had left England. If the impression prevailed
it was exactly the impression she had desired;
she forgot this fact whenever she felt a certain
surprise—even, it may be, a certain irritation—in
perceiving that people were not taking the way to
Madeira Crescent. She was making the discovery,
in which she had had many predecessors, that to
hide in London is only too easy a game. It was very
much in that fashion that Godfrey Sholto was in the
habit of announcing himself when he reappeared
after the intervals she explicitly imposed on him;
there was a witless grace, for so world-worn a personage,
in the point he made of showing that he knocked
with confidence, that he had as good a right as
any other. This afternoon she would have accepted
his visit: she was perfectly detached from the
shallow, frivolous world in which he lived, but there
was still a freshness in her renunciation which
coveted reminders and enjoyed comparisons—he
would prove to her how right she had been to do
exactly what she was doing. It didn’t occur to her
that Hyacinth Robinson might be at her door, for it
had been understood between them that save by
special appointment he was to come to her only in
the evening. She heard in the hall, when the servant
arrived, a voice she failed to recognise; but in a
moment the door of the room was thrown open and
the name of Mr. Muniment pronounced. It may be
noted at once that she took pleasure in the sound, for
she had both wished to see more of Hyacinth’s
extraordinary friend and had given him up—so little
likely had it begun to appear that he would put
himself out for her. She had been glad he wouldn’t
come, as she had told Hyacinth three months before;
but now that he had come she was still more glad.
Presently he was sitting before her on the other
side of the fire, his big foot crossed over his big knee,
his large, gloved hands fumbling with each other,
drawing and smoothing in places the gloves of very
red, new-looking dogskin that appeared to hurt
him. So far as the size of his extremities and even
his attitude and movement went he might have
belonged to her former circle. With the details of his
dress remaining vague in the lamplight, which threw
into relief mainly his powerful, important head, he
might have been one of the most considerable men
she had ever known. The first thing she said to him
was that she wondered extremely what had brought
him at last to present himself: the idea, when she
proposed it, had clearly so little attracted him. She
had only seen him once since then—the day she
met him coming into Audley Court when she was
leaving it after a visit to his sister—and, as he probably
remembered, she had not on that occasion
repeated her invitation.
“It wouldn’t have done any good, at the time, if
you had,” Muniment returned with his natural laugh.
“Oh I felt that; my silence wasn’t accidental!”
the Princess declared with due gaiety.
“I’ve only come now—since you’ve asked me
the reason—because my sister has hammered at
me, week after week, dinning it into me that I ought
to. Oh I’ve been under the lash! If she had left me
alone I wouldn’t have come.”
The Princess blushed on hearing these words, but
neither with shame nor with pain; rather with the
happy excitement of being spoken to in a manner so
fresh and original. She had never before had a visitor
who practised so racy a frankness or who indeed had
so curious a story to tell. She had never before so
completely failed, and her failure greatly interested
her, especially as it seemed now to be turning a little
to success. She had succeeded promptly with every
one, and the sign of it was that every one had rendered
her a monotony of homage. Even poor little Hyacinth
had tried, in the beginning, to say grand things
to her. This very different type of man appeared to
have his thoughts fixed on anything but flowers of
speech; she felt the liveliest hope that he would move
further and further away from that delusion. “I
remember what you asked me—what good it would
do you. I couldn’t tell you then; and though I now
have had a long time to turn it over I haven’t thought
of it yet.”
“Oh but I hope it will do me some,” the young
man said. “A fellow wants a reward when he has
made a great effort.”
“It does me some,” the Princess freely answered.
“Naturally the awkward things I say amuse you.
But I don’t say them for that, but just to give you
an idea.”
“You give me a great many ideas. Besides, I
know you already a good deal.”
“From little Robinson, I suppose,” said Muniment.
She had a pause. “More particularly from Lady
Aurora.”
“Oh she doesn’t know much about me!” he
protested.
“It’s a pity you say that, because she likes you.”
“Yes, she likes me,” he serenely admitted.
Again his hostess hesitated. “And I hope you
like her.”
“Aye, she’s a dear old girl!”
The Princess reflected that her visitor was not a
gentleman, like Hyacinth; but this made no difference
in her present attitude. The expectation that
he would be a gentleman had had nothing to do with
her interest in him; that had in fact rested largely on
his probably finding felicity in a deep indifference
to the character. “I don’t know that there’s any
one in the world I envy so much,” she observed; a
statement that her visitor received in silence. “Better
than any one I’ve ever met she has solved the problem—which
if we are wise we all try to solve, don’t
we?—of getting out of herself. She has got out of
herself more perfectly than any one I’ve ever known.
She has merged herself in the passion of doing something
for others. That’s why I envy her,” she concluded
with an explanatory smile, as if perhaps he
didn’t understand her.
“It’s an amusement like any other,” said Paul
Muniment.
“Ah not like any other! It carries light into dark
places; it makes a great many wretched people
considerably less wretched.”
“How many, eh?” asked the young man, not
exactly as if he wished to dispute but as if it were
always in him to enjoy discussing.
The Princess wondered why he should wish to
argue at Lady Aurora’s expense. “Well, one who’s
very near to you, to begin with.”
“Oh she’s kind, most kind; it’s altogether
wonderful. But Rosy makes her considerably less
wretched,” Muniment added.
“Very likely, of course; and so she does me.”
“May I inquire what you’re wretched about?”
he went on.
“About nothing at all. That’s the worst of it.
But I’m much happier now than I’ve ever been.”
“Is that also about nothing?”
“No, about a sort of change that has taken
place in my life. I’ve been able to do some little
things.”
“For the poor, I suppose you mean. Do you refer
to the presents you’ve made to Rosy?” the young
man asked.
“The presents?” She appeared not to remember.
“Oh those are trifles. It isn’t anything one has been
able to give. It’s some talks one has had, some
convictions one has arrived at.”
“Convictions are a source of very innocent
pleasure,” said the young man, smiling at his interlocutress
with his bold, pleasant eyes, which seemed
to project their glance further and drive it harder
than any she had seen.
“Having them’s nothing. It’s the acting on
them,” the Princess replied.
“Yes; that doubtless too is good.” He continued
to look at her patiently, as if he liked to consider that
this might be what she had asked him to come for.
He said nothing more, and she went on:
“It’s far better of course when one’s a man.”
“I don’t know. Women do pretty well what they
like. My sister and you have managed, between you,
to bring me to this.”
“It’s more your sister, I suspect, than I. But
why, after all, should you have disliked so much to
come?”
“Well, since you ask me,” said Paul Muniment,
“I’ll tell you frankly, though I don’t mean it uncivilly,
that I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Most people don’t,” returned the Princess.
“But they usually take the risk.”
“Ah well, I’m the most prudent of men.”
“I was sure of it; that’s one of the reasons I
wanted to know you. I know what some of your
ideas are—Hyacinth Robinson has told me; and the
source of my interest in them is partly the fact
that you consider very carefully what you attempt.”
“That I do—I do,” he agreed.
The tone in which he said this would have been
almost ignoble, as regards a kind of northern canniness
latent in it, had it not been corrected by the
character of his face, his youth and strength, his
almost military eyes. The Princess recognised both
the shrewdness and the natural ease as she rejoined:
“To do anything in association with you would be
very safe. It would be sure to succeed.”
“That’s what poor Hyacinth thinks,” he said.
She wondered a little that he could allude in that
light tone to the faith their young friend had placed
in him, considering the consequences such a trustfulness
might yet have; but this curious mixture
of qualities could only make her visitor, as a tribune
of the people, more interesting to her. She abstained
for the moment from touching on the subject of
Hyacinth’s peculiar position and only pursued:
“Hasn’t he told you about me? Hasn’t he explained
me a little?”
“Oh his explanations are grand!” Muniment
laughed. “He’s fine sport when he talks about you.”
“Don’t betray him,” she said gently.
“There’s nothing to betray. You’d be the first to
admire it if you were there. Besides, I don’t betray,”
he added.
“I love him very much,” said the Princess; and
it would have been impossible for the most impudent
cynic to smile at the manner in which she made the
declaration.
Her guest accepted it respectfully. “He’s a sweet
little lad and, putting her ladyship aside, quite the
light of our humble home.”
There was a short pause after this exchange of
amenities, which the Princess terminated by inquiring:
“Wouldn’t some one else do his work quite as
well?”
“His work? Why, I’m told he’s a master-hand.”
“Oh I don’t mean his bookbinding.” Then she
added: “I don’t know if you know it, but I’m in
correspondence with a certain person. If you understand
me at all you’ll know whom I mean. I’m
acquainted with many of our most important men.”
“Yes, I know. Hyacinth has told me. Do you
mention it as a guarantee, so that I may know you’re
sound?”
“Not exactly; that would be weak, wouldn’t
it?” the Princess asked. “My soundness must
be in myself—a matter for you to appreciate
as you know me better; not in my references and
vouchers.”
“I shall never know you better. What business
is it of mine?”
“I want to help you,” she said; and as she made
this earnest appeal her face became transfigured: it
wore an expression of the most passionate yet the
purest longing. “I want to do something for the
cause you represent; for the millions who are rotting
under our feet—the millions whose whole life is
passed on the brink of starvation, so that the smallest
accident pushes them over. Try me, test me; ask
me to put my hand to something, to prove that I’m
as deeply in earnest as those who have already given
proof. I know what I’m talking about—what one
must meet and face and count with, the nature and
the immensity of your organisation. I’m not trifling.
No, I’m not trifling.”
Paul Muniment watched her with his steady smile
until this sudden outbreak had spent itself. “I was
afraid you’d be like this—that you’d turn on the
fountains and let off the fireworks.”
“Permit me to believe you thought nothing about
it. There’s no reason my fireworks should disturb
you.”
“I have always had a fear of clever women.”
“I see—that’s a part of your prudence,” said the
Princess reflectively. “But you’re the sort of man
who ought to know how to use them.”
He made no immediate answer to this; the way he
appeared to regard her suggested that he was not
following closely what she said so much as losing
himself in certain matters which were beside that
question—her beauty, for instance, her grace, her
fragrance, the spectacle of a manner and quality so
new to him. After a little, however, he brought out
irrelevantly: “I’m afraid I’m awfully rude.”
“Of course you are, but it doesn’t signify. What
I mainly object to is that you don’t meet my questions.
Wouldn’t some one else do Hyacinth Robinson’s
work quite as well? Is it necessary to take a nature
so delicate, so intellectual? Oughtn’t we to keep
him for something finer?”
“Finer than what?”
“Than what he’ll be called upon to do.”
“And pray what’s that?” the young man
demanded. “You know nothing about it; no more
do I,” he added in a moment. “It will require whatever
it will. Besides, if some one else might have
done it no one else volunteered. It happened that
Robinson did.”
“Yes, and you nipped him up!” the Princess
returned.
This expression made Muniment laugh. “I’ve
no doubt you can easily keep him if you want
him.”
“I should like to do it in his place—that’s what
I should like,” said the Princess.
“As I say, you don’t even know what it is.”
“It may be nothing,” she went on with her grave
eyes fixed on her visitor. “I daresay you think that
what I wanted to see you for was to beg you to let
him off. But it wasn’t. Of course it’s his own affair
and you can do nothing. But oughtn’t it to make
some difference if his opinions have changed?”
“His opinions? He never had any opinions,”
Muniment replied. “He’s not like you and me.”
“Well then, his feelings, his attachments. He
hasn’t the passion for the popular triumph that he
had when I first knew him. He’s much more tepid.”
“Ah well, he’s quite right.”
The Princess stared. “Do you mean that you are
giving up——?”
“A fine, stiff conservative’s a thing I perfectly
understand,” said Paul Muniment. “If I were on the
top I’d stick.”
“I see, you’re not narrow,” she breathed appreciatively.
“I beg your pardon, I am. I don’t call that wide.
One must be narrow to penetrate.”
“Whatever you are you’ll succeed,” said the
Princess. “Hyacinth won’t, but you will.”
“It depends upon what you call success!” the
young man returned. And in a moment, before she
could take it up, he added as he looked about the
room: “You’ve got a lovely home.”
“Lovely? My dear sir, it’s hideous. That’s what
I like it for,” she hastened to explain.
“Well, I like it, but perhaps I don’t know the
reason. I thought you had given up everything—pitched
your goods out of window for a grand
scramble.”
“It’s what I have done. You should have seen
me before.”
“I should have liked that,” he quite shamelessly
smiled. “I like to see solid wealth.”
“Ah you’re as bad as Hyacinth. I’m the only
consistent one!” the Princess sighed.
“You’ve a great deal left, for a person who has
given everything away.”
“These are not mine—these abominations—or
I would give them too!” Paul’s hostess returned
artlessly.
He got up from his chair, still looking over
the scene. “I’d give my nose for such a place
as this. At any rate, you’re not yet reduced to
poverty.”
“I’ve a little left—to help you.”
“I’d lay a wager you’ve a great deal,” he declared
with his north-country accent.
“I could get money—I could get money,” she
continued gravely. She had also risen and was
standing before him.
These two remarkable persons faced each other,
their eyes met again, and they exchanged a long,
deep glance of mutual scrutiny. Each seemed to drop
a plummet into the other’s mind. Then a strange
and, to the Princess, unexpected expression passed
over the countenance of her guest; his lips compressed
themselves as in the strain of a strong effort,
his colour rose and in a moment he stood there blushing
like a boy. He dropped his eyes and stared at the
carpet while he repeated: “I don’t trust women—I
don’t trust clever women!”
“I’m sorry, but after all I can understand it,”
she said; “therefore I won’t insist on the question
of your allowing me to work with you. But this
appeal I will make: help me a little yourself—help
me!”
“How do you mean, help you?” he asked as
he raised his eyes, which had a new, conscious
look.
“Advise me; you’ll know how. I’m in trouble—I’ve
gone very far.”
“I’ve no doubt of that!” Paul laughed.
“I mean with some of those people abroad. I’m
not frightened, but I’m worried. I want to know
what to do.”
“No, you’re not frightened,” Muniment returned
after a moment.
“I’m, however, in a sad entanglement. I think
you can straighten it out. I’ll give you the facts, but
not now, for we shall be interrupted—I hear my
old lady on the stairs. For this you must come back
to me.”
As she spoke the door opened, and Madame
Grandoni appeared cautiously, creeping, as if she
didn’t know what might be going on in the parlour.
“Yes, I’ll come back,” said Paul quietly but clearly
enough; with which he walked away, passing
Madame Grandoni on the threshold and overlooking
the hand-shake of farewell. In the hall he paused
an instant, feeling his hostess behind him; whereby
he learned that she had not come to exact from him
this omitted observance, but to say once more,
dropping her voice so that her companion, through
the open door, might not catch: “I could get money—I
could!”
He passed his hand through his hair and, as if he
had not heard, observed: “I’ve not after all given
you half Rosy’s messages.”
“Oh that doesn’t matter!” she answered as she
turned back into the parlour.
Madame Grandoni was in the middle of the room,
wrapped in her old shawl, looking vaguely round
her, and the two ladies heard the house-door close.
“And pray who may that be? Isn’t it a new face?”
the elder one inquired.
“He’s the brother of the little person I took you
to see over the river—the chattering cripple with
the wonderful manners.”
“Ah she had a brother! That then was why you
went?”
It was striking, the good humour with which the
Princess received this rather coarse thrust, which
could have been drawn from Madame Grandoni only
by the petulance and weariness of increasing age and
the antipathy she now felt to Madeira Crescent
and everything it produced. Christina bent a calm,
charitable smile on her ancient support and replied:
“There could have been no question of our seeing
him. He was of course at his work.”
“Ah how do I know, my dear? And is he a
successor?”
“A successor?”
“To the little bookbinder.”
“Mia cara,” said the Princess, “you’ll see how
absurd that question is when I tell you he’s his
greatest friend!”
Half an hour after the departure of the young
chemical expert she heard another rat-tat-tat at her
door; but this was a briefer, discreeter peal and was
accompanied by a faint tintinnabulation. The person
who had produced it was presently ushered in, without,
however, causing Madame Grandoni to look
round, or rather to look up, from an armchair as low
as a sitz-bath and of very much the shape of such a
receptacle, in which, near the fire, she had been
immersed. She left this care to the Princess, who
rose on hearing the name of the visitor pronounced
inadequately by her maid. “Mr. Fetch,” Assunta
called it; but that functionary’s mistress recognised
without difficulty the little fat “reduced” fiddler of
whom Hyacinth had talked to her, who, as Pinnie’s
most intimate friend, had been so mixed up with his
existence, and whom she herself had always had a
curiosity to see. Hyacinth had not told her he was
coming, and the unexpectedness of the apparition
added to its interest. Much as she liked seeing queer
types and exploring out-of-the-way social corners,
she never engaged in a fresh encounter nor formed a
new relation of this kind without a fit of nervousness,
a fear she might herself be wanting, might fail to hit
the right tone. She perceived in a moment, however,
that Mr. Vetch would take her as she was and require
no special adjustments; he was a gentleman and a
man of experience and she should only have to leave
the tone to him. He stood there with his large
polished hat in his two hands, a hat of the fashion
of ten years before, with a rusty sheen and an undulating
brim—stood there without a salutation or a
speech, but with a small fixed, acute, tentative smile
which seemed half to interrogate and half to explain.
What he explained, at all events, was that he was
clever enough to be trusted and that if he had called
this way, without ceremony and without an invitation,
he had a reason which she would be sure to think
good enough when she should hear it. There was
even a certain jauntiness in his confidence—an insinuation
that he knew how to present himself to a lady;
and though it quickly appeared that he really did,
this was the only thing about him that was inferior.
It suggested a long experience of actresses at rehearsal,
with whom he had formed habits of advice and
compliment.
“I know who you are—I know who you are,”
said the Princess, though she could easily see he knew
she did.
“I wonder if you also know why I’ve come to see
you,” Mr. Vetch replied, presenting the top of his
hat to her as if it were a looking-glass.
“No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m very glad. You
might even have come before.” Then she added with
her characteristic honesty: “Aren’t you aware of the
great interest I’ve taken in your nephew?”
“In my nephew? Yes, my young friend Robinson.
It’s for his sake I’ve ventured to intrude on you.”
She had been on the point of pushing a chair toward
him, but she stopped in the act, staring with
a smile. “Ah I hope you haven’t come to ask me to
give him up!”
“On the contrary—on the contrary!” the old
man returned, lifting his hand expressively and with
his head on one side as if he were holding his
fiddle.
“How do you mean, on the contrary?” she asked
after he had seated himself and she had sunk into
her former place. As if that might sound contradictious
she went on: “Surely he hasn’t any fear
that I shall cease to be a good friend to him?”
“I don’t know what he fears; I don’t know what
he hopes,” said Mr. Vetch, looking at her now with
a face in which she could see there was something
more tonic than old-fashioned politeness. “It will
be difficult to tell you, but at least I must try. Properly
speaking, I suppose, it’s no business of mine, as
I’m not a blood-relation to the boy; but I’ve known
him since he was a mite—he’s not much more even
now—and I can’t help saying that I thank you for
your great kindness to him.”
“All the same I don’t think you like it,” the
Princess declared. “To me it oughtn’t to be difficult
to say anything.”
“He has told me very little about you; he doesn’t
know I’ve taken this step,” the fiddler said, turning
his eyes about the room and letting them rest on
Madame Grandoni.
“Why do you speak of it as a ‘step’? That’s
what people say when they’ve to do something
disagreeable.”
“I call very seldom on ladies. It’s a long time
since I’ve been in the house of a person like the
Princess Casamassima. I remember the last time,”
said the old man. “It was to get my money from
a lady at whose party I had been playing—for a
dance.”
“You must bring your fiddle some time and play
to us. Of course I don’t mean for money,” the
Princess added.
“I’ll do it with pleasure, or anything else that will
gratify you. But my ability’s very small. I only
know vulgar music—things that are played at
theatres.”
“I don’t believe that. There must be things you
play for yourself—in your room alone.”
Mr. Vetch had a pause. “Now that I see you,
that I hear you, it helps me to understand.”
“I don’t think you do see me!” his hostess freely
laughed; on which he desired to know if there were
danger of Hyacinth’s coming in while he was there.
She replied that he only came, unless by prearrangement,
in the evening, and her visitor made a request
that she wouldn’t let their young friend imagine he
himself had been with her. “It doesn’t matter;
he’ll guess it, he’ll know it by instinct, as soon as he
comes in. He’s terribly subtle,” she said; and she
added that she had never been able to hide anything
from him. Perhaps this served her right—for
attempting to make a mystery of things not worth it.
“How well you know him!” the fiddler commented
while his eyes wandered again to Madame
Grandoni, who paid no attention to him as she sat
staring at the fire. He delayed visibly to say what he
had come for, and his hesitation could only be connected
with the presence of the old lady. He considered
that the Princess might have divined this
from his manner; he had an idea he could trust himself
to convey such an intimation with clearness and
yet with delicacy. But the most she appeared to
apprehend was that he desired to be presented to her
companion. “You must know the most delightful
of women. She also takes a particular interest in Mr.
Robinson: of a different kind from mine—much
more sentimental!” And then she explained to her
friend, who seemed absorbed in other ideas, that
Mr. Vetch was a distinguished musician, a person
whom she, who had known so many in her day and
was so fond of that kind of thing, would like to talk
with. The Princess spoke of “that kind of thing”
quite as if she herself had given it up, though Madame
Grandoni often heard her by the hour together
improvising at the piano revolutionary battle-songs
and pæans.
“I think you’re laughing at me,” Mr. Vetch said
to her while the other figure twisted itself slowly round
in its chair and regarded him. It looked at him
conveniently, up and down, and then sighed out:
“Strange people—strange people!”
“It’s indeed a strange world, madam,” the fiddler
replied; after which he inquired of the Princess if
he might have a little conversation with her in
private.
She looked about her, embarrassed and smiling.
“My dear sir, I’ve only this one room to receive in.
We live in a very small way.”
“Yes, your excellency is laughing at me. Your
ideas are very large too. However, I’d gladly come
at any other time that might suit you.”
“You impute to me higher spirits than I possess.
Why should I be so gay?” the Princess asked. “I
should be delighted to see you again. I’m extremely
curious as to what you may have to say to me. I’d
even meet you anywhere—in Kensington Gardens
or the British Museum.”
He took her deeply in before replying, and then,
his white old face flushing a little, exclaimed: “Poor
dear little Hyacinth!”
Madame Grandoni made an effort to rise from her
chair, but she had sunk so low that at first it was not
successful. Mr. Vetch gave her a hand of help, and
she slowly erected herself, keeping hold of him for
a moment after she stood there. “What did she tell
me? That you’re a great musician? Isn’t that
enough for any man? You ought to be content, my
dear gentleman. It has sufficed for people whom
I don’t believe you surpass.”
“I don’t surpass any one,” said poor Mr. Vetch.
“I don’t know what you take me for.”
“You’re not a wicked revolutionary then? You’re
not a conspirator nor an assassin? It surprises me,
but so much the better. In this house one can
never know. It’s not a good house, and if you’re a
respectable person it’s a pity you should come here.
Yes, she’s very gay and I’m very sad. I don’t know
how it will end. After me, I hope. The world’s not
good, certainly; but God alone can make it better.”
And as the fiddler expressed the hope that he was
not the cause of her leaving the room she went on:
“Doch, doch, you’re the cause; but why not you as
well as another? I’m always leaving it for some
one or for something, and I’d sooner do so for an
honest man, if you are one—but, as I say, who can
tell?—than for a destroyer. I wander about. I’ve
no rest. I have, however, a very nice room, the best
in the house. Me at least she doesn’t treat ill. It
looks to-day like the end of all things. If you’d turn
your climate the other side up the rest would do well
enough. Good-night to you, whoever you are.”
The old lady shuffled away in spite of Mr. Vetch’s
renewed apologies, and the subject of her criticism
stood before the fire watching the pair while he
opened the door. “She goes away, she comes back;
it doesn’t matter. She thinks it a bad house, but she
knows it would be worse without her. I remember
about you now,” the Princess added. “Mr. Robinson
told me you had been a great democrat in old days, but
that at present you’d ceased to care for the people.”
“The people—the people? That’s a silly term.
Whom do you mean?”
She hesitated. “Those you used to care for, to
plead for; those who are underneath every one,
underneath everything, and have the whole social
mass crushing them.”
“I see you think I’m a renegade. The way certain
classes arrogate to themselves the title of the people
has never pleased me. Why are some human beings
the people, the people only, and others not? I’m
of the people myself, I’ve worked all my days like
a knife-grinder and I’ve really never changed.”
“You mustn’t let me make you angry,” she
laughed as she sat down again. “I’m sometimes
very provoking, but you must stop me off. You
wouldn’t think it perhaps, but no one takes a snub
better than I.”
Mr. Vetch dropped his eyes a minute; he appeared
to wish to show that he regarded such a speech as
that as one of this great, perverse lady’s characteristic
humours and knew he should be wanting in respect
to her if he took it seriously or made a personal
application of it. “What I want is this,” he began
after a moment: “that you’ll, that you’ll——” But
he stopped before he had got further. She was
watching him, listening to him; she waited while
he paused. It was a long pause and she said nothing.
“Princess,” the old man broke out at last, “I’d
give my own life many times for that boy’s!”
“I always told him you must have been fond of
him!” she cried with bright exultation.
“Fond of him? Pray who can doubt it? I made
him, I invented him!”
“He knows it, moreover,” the Princess smiled.
“It’s an exquisite organisation.” And as the old
man gazed at her, not knowing apparently what
to make of her tone, she kept it up: “It’s a very
interesting opportunity for me to learn certain things.
Speak to me of his early years. How was he as
a child? When I like people I like them altogether
and want to know everything about them.”
“I shouldn’t have supposed there was much left
for you to learn about our young friend. You’ve
taken possession of his life,” Mr. Vetch added gravely.
“Yes, but as I understand you, you don’t complain
of it? Sometimes one does so much more than
one has intended. One must use one’s influence for
good,” she went on with the noble, gentle air of
accessibility to reason that sometimes lighted up her
face. And then irrelevantly: “I know the terrible
story of his mother. He told it me himself when he
was staying with me. In the course of my life I
think I’ve never been more affected.”
“That was my fault—that he ever learnt it. I
suppose he also told you that.”
“Yes, but I think he understood your idea. If
you had the question to determine again would you
judge differently?”
“I thought it would do him good,” said the old
man simply and rather wearily.
“Well, I daresay it has,” she returned with the
manner of wishing to encourage him.
“I don’t know what was in my head. I wanted
him to quarrel with society. Now I want him to be
reconciled to it,” Mr. Vetch remarked earnestly. He
appeared to desire her to understand how great a
point he made of this.
“Ah, but he is!” she immediately said. “We
often talk about that; he’s not like me, who see all
kinds of abominations. He’s a bloated little aristocrat.
What more would you have?”
“Those are not the opinions he expresses to me”—and
Mr. Vetch shook his head sadly. “I’m greatly
distressed and I don’t make out——! I’ve not come
here with the presumptuous wish to cross-examine
you, but I should like very much to know if I am
wrong in believing that he has gone about with you in
the bad quarters—in Saint Giles’s and Whitechapel.”
“We’ve certainly inquired and explored together,”
the Princess admitted, “and in the depths of this
huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful city we’ve seen sights
of unspeakable misery and horror. But we’ve been
not only in the slums; we’ve been to a music hall
and a penny-reading.”
The fiddler received this information at first in
silence, so that his hostess went on to mention some
of the phases of life they had observed; describing
with great vividness, but at the same time with a
kind of argumentative moderation, several scenes
which did little honour to “our boasted civilisation.”
“What wonder is it then that he should tell me
things can’t go on any longer as they are?” he
asked when she had finished. “He said only the
other day that he should regard himself as one of
the most contemptible of human beings if he should
do nothing to alter them, to better them.”
“What wonder indeed? But if he said that he
was in one of his bad days,” the Princess replied.
“He changes constantly and his impressions change.
The misery of the people is by no means always on
his heart. You tell me what he has told you; well,
he has told me that the people may perish over and
over rather than the conquests of civilisation shall
be sacrificed to them. He declares at such moments
that they’ll be sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the
ignorant masses get the upper hand.”
“He needn’t be afraid. That will never happen.”
“I don’t know. We can at least try,” she said.
“Try what you like, madam, but for God’s sake
get the boy out of his muddle!”
The Princess had suddenly grown excited in speaking
of the cause she believed in, and she gave for
the moment no heed to this appeal, which broke
from Mr. Vetch’s lips with a sudden passion of
anxiety. Her beautiful head raised itself higher and
the constant light of her fine eyes became an extraordinary
radiance. “Do you know what I say to
Mr. Robinson when he makes such remarks as that
to me? I ask him what he means by civilisation.
Let civilisation come a little, first, and then we’ll
talk about it. For the present, face to face with
those horrors, I scorn it, I deny it!” And she
laughed ineffable things, she might have been some
splendid siren of the Revolution.
“The world’s very sad and very hideous, and I’m
happy to say that I soon shall have done with it.
But before I go I want to save Hyacinth,” Mr. Vetch
insisted. “If he’s a bloated little aristocrat, as you
say, there’s so much the less fitness in his being
ground in your mill. If he doesn’t even believe in
what he pretends to do, that’s a pretty situation!
What’s he in for, madam? What devilish folly has
he undertaken?”
“He’s a strange mixture of contradictory impulses,”
said the Princess musingly. Then as if
calling herself back to the old man’s question she
pursued: “How can I enter into his affairs with you?
How can I tell you his secrets? In the first place I
don’t know them, and if I did—well, fancy me!”
Her visitor gave a long, low sigh, almost a moan,
of discouragement and perplexity. He had told her
that now he saw her he understood how their young
friend should have become her slave, but he wouldn’t
have been able to tell her that he understood her own
motives and mysteries, that he embraced the immense
anomaly of her behaviour. It came over him that she
was fine and perverse, a more complicated form of the
feminine mixture than any he had hitherto dealt with,
and he felt helpless and baffled, foredoomed to failure.
He had come prepared to flatter her without scruple,
thinking this would be the expert and effective way
of dealing with her; but he now recognised that these
primitive arts had, though it was strange, no application
to such a nature, while his embarrassment was
increased rather than diminished by the fact that
the lady at least made the effort to be accommodating.
He had put down his hat on the floor beside him
and his two hands were clasped on the knob of an
umbrella which had long since renounced pretensions
to compactness; he collapsed a little and his chin
rested on his folded hands. “Why do you take such
a line? Why do you believe such things?” he
asked; and he was conscious that his tone was weak
and his challenge beside the question.
“My dear sir, how do you know what I believe?
However, I have my reasons, which it would take
too long to tell you and which after all would not
particularly interest you. One must see life as one
can; it comes no doubt to each of us in different
ways. You think me affected of course and my
behaviour a fearful pose; but I’m only trying to
be natural. Are you not yourself a little inconsequent?”
she went on with the bright, hard mildness
which assured Mr. Vetch, while it chilled him, that
he should extract no pledge of relief from her. “You
don’t want our young friend to pry into the wretchedness
of London, because that excites his sense of
justice. It’s a strange thing to wish, for a person
of whom one is fond and whom one esteems, that
his sense of justice shall not be excited.”
“I don’t care a fig for his sense of justice—I don’t
care a fig for the wretchedness of London; and if I
were young and beautiful and clever and brilliant
and of a noble position, like you, I should care still
less. In that case I should have very little to say to
a poor mechanic—a youngster who earns his living
with a glue-pot and scraps of old leather.”
“Don’t misrepresent him; don’t make him out
what you know he’s not!” the Princess retorted
with her baffling smile. “You know he’s one of
the most civilised of little men.”
The fiddler sat breathing unhappily. “I only
want to keep him—to get him free.” Then he
added: “I don’t understand you very well. If you
like him because he’s one of the lower orders, how
can you like him because he’s a swell?”
She turned her eyes on the fire as if this little
problem might be worth considering, and presently
she answered: “Dear Mr. Vetch, I’m very sure
you don’t mean to be impertinent, but some things
you say have that effect. Nothing’s more annoying
than when one’s sincerity is doubted. I’m not bound
to explain myself to you. I ask of my friends to
trust me and of the others to leave me alone. Moreover,
anything not very nice you may have said to
me—out of inevitable awkwardness—is nothing to
the insults I’m perfectly prepared to see showered
upon me before long. I shall do things which will
produce a fine crop of them—oh I shall do things,
my dear sir! But I’m determined not to mind them.
Come therefore, pull yourself together. We both take
such an interest in young Robinson that I can’t see
why in the world we should quarrel about him.”
“My dear lady,” the old man pleaded, “I’ve
indeed not the least intention of failing in respect
or patience, and you must excuse me if I don’t look
after my manners. How can I when I’m so worried,
so haunted? God knows I don’t want to quarrel.
As I tell you, I only want to get Hyacinth free.”
“Free from what?” the Princess asked.
“From some abominable secret brotherhood or
international league that he belongs to, the thought
of which keeps me awake at night. He’s just the
sort of youngster to be made a catspaw.”
“Your fears seem very vague.”
“I hoped you would give me chapter and verse.”
“On what do your suspicions rest? What grounds
have you?” she insisted.
“Well, a great many; none of them very definite,
but all contributing something—his appearance, his
manner, the way he strikes me. Dear lady, one
feels those things, one guesses. Do you know that
poor infatuated phrasemonger Eustache Poupin, who
works at the same place as Hyacinth? He’s a very
old friend of mine and he’s an honest man, as phrasemongers
go. But he’s always conspiring and corresponding
and pulling strings that make a tinkle
which he takes for the death-knell of society. He
has nothing in life to complain of and drives a roaring
trade. But he wants folk to be equal, heaven help
him; and when he has made them so I suppose he’s
going to start a society for making the stars in the
sky all of the same size. He isn’t serious, though
he imagines he’s the only human being who never
trifles; and his machinations, which I believe are for
the most part very innocent, are a matter of habit and
tradition with him, like his theory that Christopher
Columbus, who discovered America, was a Frenchman,
and his hot foot-bath on Saturday nights. He
has not confessed to me that Hyacinth has taken
some intensely private engagement to do something
for the cause which may have nasty consequences,
but the way he turns off the idea makes me almost
as uncomfortable as if he had. He and his wife are
very sweet on their young friend, but they can’t
make up their minds to interfere; perhaps for them
indeed, as for me, there’s no way in which interference
can be effective. Only I didn’t put him up to
those devil’s tricks—or rather I did originally! The
finer the work, I suppose, the higher the privilege of
doing it; yet the Poupins heave socialistic sighs over
the boy, and their peace of mind evidently isn’t all
that it ought to be if they’ve given him a noble
opportunity. I’ve appealed to them in good round
terms, and they’ve assured me every hair of his head
is as precious to them as if he were their own child.
That doesn’t comfort me much, however, for the
simple reason that I believe the old woman (whose
grandmother, in Paris, in the Revolution, must certainly
have carried bloody heads on a pike) would be
quite capable of chopping up her own child if it would
do any harm to proprietors. Besides, they say, what
influence have they on Hyacinth any more? He’s
a deplorable little backslider; he worships false gods.
In short they’ll give me no information, and I daresay
they themselves are tied up by some unholy vow.
They may be afraid of a vengeance if they tell tales.
It’s all sad rubbish, but rubbish may be a strong
motive.”
The Princess listened attentively, following her
visitor with patience. “Don’t speak to me of the
French; I’ve never cared for them.”
“That’s awkward if you’re a socialist. You’re
likely to meet them.”
“Why do you call me a socialist? I hate tenth-rate
labels and flags,” she declared. Then she added:
“What is it you suppose on Mr. Robinson’s part?—for
you must suppose something.”
“Well, that he may have drawn some accursed
lot to do some idiotic thing—something in which
even he himself doesn’t believe.”
“I haven’t an idea of what sort of thing you
mean. But if he doesn’t believe in it he can easily
let it alone.”
“Do you think he’s a customer who will back out
of a real vow?” the fiddler asked.
The Princess freely wondered. “One can never
judge of people in that way till they’re tested.”
And the next thing: “Haven’t you even taken the
trouble to question him?”
“What would be the use? He’d tell me nothing.
It would be like a man giving notice when he’s going
to fight a duel.”
She sat for some seconds in thought; she looked
up at Mr. Vetch with a pitying, indulgent smile.
“I’m sure you’re worrying about a mere shadow;
but that never prevents, does it? I still don’t see
exactly how I can help you.”
“Do you want him to commit some atrocity, some
mad infamy?” the old man appealed.
“My dear sir, I don’t want him to do anything in
all the wide world. I’ve not had the smallest connexion
with any engagement of any kind that he may
have entered into. Do me the honour to trust me,” the
Princess went on with a certain high dryness of tone.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deprive myself of
your confidence. Trust the young man a little too.
He’s a gentleman and will behave as a gentleman.”
The fiddler rose from his chair, smoothing his hat
silently with the cuff of his coat. He stood there,
whimsical and piteous, as if the sense he had still
something to urge mingled with that of his having
received his dismissal and as if indeed both were
tinged with the oddity of another idea. “That’s
exactly what I’m afraid of!” he returned. Then he
added, continuing to look at her: “But he must
be very fond of life.”
The Princess took no notice of the insinuation
contained in these words. “Leave him to me—leave
him to me. I’m sorry for your anxiety, but
it was very good of you to come to see me. That
has been interesting, because you’ve been one of our
friend’s influences.”
“Unfortunately yes! If it hadn’t been for me
he wouldn’t have known Poupin, and if he hadn’t
known Poupin he wouldn’t have known his chemical
friend—what’s his name?—Muniment.”
“And has that done him harm, do you think?”
the Princess asked. She had risen to her feet.
“Surely: that deep fellow has been the main
source of his infection.”
“I lose patience with you!” she made answer,
turning away.
And indeed her visitor’s persistence was irritating.
He went on, lingering, his head thrust forward and
his short arms, out at his sides, terminating in his
hat and umbrella, which he held grotesquely and as
if intended for emphasis or illustration: “I’ve supposed
for a long time that it was either Muniment
or you who had got him into his scrape. It was you
I suspected most—much most; but if it isn’t you
it must be he.”
“You had better go to him then!”
“Of course I’ll go to him. I scarcely know
him—I’ve seen him but once—but I’ll speak my
mind.”
The Princess rang for her maid to usher Mr.
Vetch out, but at the moment he laid his hand on
the door of the room she checked him with a quick
gesture. “Now that I think of it don’t go, please,
to Mr. Muniment. It will be better to leave him
quiet. Leave him to me,” she added with a softer
smile.
“Why not, why not?” he pleaded. And as she
couldn’t tell him on the instant why not he asked:
“Doesn’t he know?”
“No, he doesn’t know; he has nothing to do
with it.” She suddenly found herself desiring to
protect Paul Muniment from the imputation that
was in Mr. Vetch’s mind—the imputation of an ugly
responsibility; and though she was not a person
who took the trouble to tell fibs this repudiation
on his behalf issued from her lips before she could
stay it. It was a result of the same desire, though
also an inconsequence, that she added: “Don’t do
that—you’ll spoil everything!” She went to him
suddenly eager, she herself opened the door for him.
“Leave him to me—leave him to me,” she continued
persuasively, while the fiddler, gazing at her,
dazzled and submissive, allowed himself to be wafted
away. A thought that excited her had come to her
with a bound, and after she had heard the house-door
close behind Mr. Vetch she walked up and
down the room half an hour, all restlessly, under
possession of it.
