BOOK FIFTH (continued 2)

“If you will stay on, she shall have everything.” The Prince spoke in a very low tone, with a manner that betrayed the shame he felt at his attempt at bribery.

Madame Grandoni gave him an astonished glance and moved away from him. “What does that mean? I thought you didn’t care.”

I know not what explanation of his inconsequence her companion would have given her if at that moment the door of the room had not been pushed open to permit the entrance of Hyacinth Robinson. He stopped short on perceiving that Madame Grandoni had a visitor, but before he had time to say anything the old lady addressed him with a certain curtness: “Ah, you don’t fall well; the Princess isn’t at home.”

“That was mentioned to me, but I ventured to come in to see you, as I have done before,” Hyacinth replied. Then he added, as if he were retreating, “I beg many pardons. I was not told that you were not alone.”

“My visitor is going, but I am going too,” said Madame Grandoni. “I must take myself to my room—I am all falling to pieces. Therefore kindly excuse me.”

Hyacinth had had time to recognise the Prince, and this nobleman paid him the same compliment, as was proved by his asking of Madame Grandoni, in a rapid aside, in Italian, “Isn’t it the bookbinder?”

“Sicuro,” said the old lady; while Hyacinth, murmuring a regret that he should find her indisposed, turned back to the door.

“One moment—one moment, I pray!” the Prince interposed, raising his hand persuasively and looking at him with an unexpected, exaggerated smile. “Please introduce me to the gentleman,” he added, in English, to Madame Grandoni.

She manifested no surprise at the request—she had none left, apparently, for anything—but pronounced the name of Prince Casamassima, and then added, for Hyacinth’s benefit, “He knows who you are.”

“Will you permit me to keep you a very little minute?” the Prince continued, addressing the other visitor; after which he remarked to Madame Grandoni, “I will speak with him a little. It is perhaps not necessary that we should incommode you, if you do not wish to stay.”

She had for a moment, as she tossed off a satirical little laugh, a return of her ancient drollery: “Remember that if you talk long she may come back! Yes, yes, I will go upstairs. Felicissima notte, signori!” She took her way to the door, which Hyacinth, considerably bewildered, held open for her.

The reasons for which Prince Casamassima wished to converse with him were mysterious; nevertheless, he was about to close the door behind Madame Grandoni, as a sign that he was at the service of her companion. At this moment the latter extended again a courteous, remonstrant hand. “After all, as my visit is finished and as yours comes to nothing, might we not go out?”

“Certainly, I will go with you,” said Hyacinth. He spoke with an instinctive stiffness, in spite of the Prince’s queer affability, and in spite also of the fact that he felt sorry for the nobleman, to whose countenance Madame Grandoni’s last injunction, uttered in English, had brought a deep and painful blush. It is needless to go into the question of what Hyacinth, face to face with an aggrieved husband, may have had on his conscience, but he assumed, naturally enough, that the situation might be grave, though indeed the Prince’s manner was, for the moment, incongruously conciliatory. Hyacinth invited his new acquaintance to pass, and in a minute they were in the street together.

“Do you go here—do you go there?” the Prince inquired, as they stood a moment before the house. “If you will permit, I will take the same direction.” On Hyacinth’s answering that it was indifferent to him the Prince said, turning to the right, “Well, then, here, but slowly, if that pleases you, and only a little way.” His English was far from perfect, but his errors were mainly errors of pronunciation, and Hyacinth was struck with his effort to express himself very distinctly, so that in intercourse with a little representative of the British populace his foreignness should not put him at a disadvantage. Quick as he was to perceive and appreciate, Hyacinth noted how a certain quality of breeding that was in his companion enabled him to compass that coolness, and he mentally applauded his success in a difficult feat. Difficult he judged it because it seemed to him that the purpose for which the Prince wished to speak to him was one which must require a deal of explanation, and it was a sign of training to explain adequately, in a foreign tongue, especially if one were agitated, to a person in a social position very different from one’s own. Hyacinth knew what the Prince’s estimate of his importance must be (he could have no illusions as to the character of the people his wife received); but while he heard him carefully put one word after the other he was able to smile to himself at his needless precautions. Hyacinth reflected that at a pinch he could have encountered him in his own tongue; during his stay at Venice he had picked up an Italian vocabulary. “With Madame Grandoni I spoke of you,” the Prince announced, dispassionately, as they walked along. “She told me a thing that interested me,” he added; “that is why I walk with you.” Hyacinth said nothing, deeming that better by silence than in any other fashion he held himself at the disposal of his interlocutor. “She told me you have changed—you have no more the same opinions.”

“The same opinions?”

“About the arrangement of society. You desire no more the assassination of the rich.”

“I never desired any such thing!” said Hyacinth, indignantly.

“Oh, if you have changed, you can confess,” the Prince rejoined, in an encouraging tone. “It is very good for some people to be rich. It would not be right for all to be poor.”

“It would be pleasant if all could be rich,” Hyacinth suggested.

“Yes, but not by stealing and shooting.”

“No, not by stealing and shooting. I never desired that.”

“Ah, no doubt she was mistaken. But to-day you think we must have patience,” the Prince went on, as if he hoped very much that Hyacinth would allow this valuable conviction to be attributed to him. “That is also my view.”

“Oh, yes, we must have patience,” said Hyacinth, who was now smiling to himself in the dark.

They had by this time reached the end of the little Crescent, where the Prince paused under the street-lamp. He considered Hyacinth’s countenance for a moment by its help, and then he pronounced, “If I am not mistaken, you know very well the Princess.”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “She has been very kind to me.”

“She is my wife—perhaps you know.”

Again Hyacinth hesitated, but after a moment he replied, “She has told me that she is married.” As soon as he had spoken these words he thought them idiotic.

“You mean you would not know if she had not told you, I suppose. Evidently, there is nothing to show it. You can think if that is agreeable to me.”

“Oh, I can’t think, I can’t judge,” said Hyacinth.

“You are right—that is impossible.” The Prince stood before his companion, and in the pale gaslight the latter saw more of his face. It had an unnatural expression, a look of wasted anxiety; the eyes seemed to glitter, and Hyacinth conceived the unfortunate nobleman to be feverish and ill. He continued in a moment: “Of course you think it strange—my conversation. I want you to tell me something.”

“I am afraid you are very unwell,” said Hyacinth.

“Yes, I am unwell; but I shall be better if you will tell me. It is because you have come back to good ideas—that is why I ask you.”

A sense that the situation of the Princess’s husband was really pitiful, that at any rate he suffered and was helpless, that he was a gentleman and even a person who would never have done any great harm—a perception of these appealing truths came into Hyacinth’s heart, and stirred there a desire to be kind to him, to render him any service that, in reason, he might ask. It appeared to Hyacinth that he must be pretty sick to ask any service at all, but that was his own affair. “If you would like me to see you safely home, I will do that,” our young man remarked; and even while he spoke he was struck with the oddity of his being already on such friendly terms with a person whom he had hitherto supposed to be the worst enemy of the rarest of women. He found himself unable to consider the Prince with resentment.

This personage acknowledged the civility of his offer with a slight inclination of his high slimness. “I am very much obliged to you, but I will not go home. I will not go home till I know this—to what house she has gone. Will you tell me that?”

“To what house?” Hyacinth repeated.

“She has gone with a person whom you know. Madame Grandoni told me that. He is a Scotch chemist.”

“A Scotch chemist?” Hyacinth stared.

“I saw them myself—two hours, three hours, ago. Listen, listen; I will be very clear,” said the Prince, laying his forefinger on the other hand with an explanatory gesture. “He came to that house—this one, where we have been, I mean—and stayed there a long time. I was here in the street—I have passed my day in the street! They came out together, and I watched them, I followed them.”

Hyacinth had listened with wonder, and even with suspense; the Prince’s manner gave an air of such importance, such mystery, to what he had to relate. But at this he broke out: “This is not my business—I can’t hear it! I don’t watch, I don’t follow.”

The Prince stared a moment, in surprise; then he rejoined, more quickly than he had spoken yet, “But they went to a house where they conspire, where they prepare horrible acts. How can you like that?”

“How do you know it, sir?” Hyacinth inquired, gravely.

“It is Madame Grandoni who has told me.”

“Why, then, do you ask me?”

“Because I am not sure, I don’t think she knows. I want to know more, to be sure of what is done in that house. Does she go there only for the revolution,” the Prince demanded, “or does she go there to be alone with him?”

“With him?” The Prince’s tone and his excited eyes infused a kind of vividness into the suggestion.

“With the tall man—the chemist. They got into a hansom together; the house is far away, in the lost quarters.”

Hyacinth drew himself together. “I know nothing about the matter, and I don’t care. If that is all you wish to ask me, we had better separate.”

The Prince’s face elongated; it seemed to grow paler. “Then it is not true that you hate those abominations!”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “How can you know about my opinions? How can they interest you?”

The Prince looked at him with sick eyes; he raised his arms a moment, a certain distance, and then let them drop at his sides. “I hoped you would help me.”

“When we are in trouble we can’t help each other much!” our young man exclaimed. But this austere reflection was lost upon the Prince, who at the moment Hyacinth spoke had already turned to look in the direction from which they had proceeded, the other end of the Crescent, his attention apparently being called thither by the sound of a rapid hansom. The place was still and empty, and the wheels of this vehicle reverberated. The Prince peered at it through the darkness, and in an instant he cried, under his breath, excitedly, “They have come back—they have come back! Now you can see—yes, the two!” The hansom had slackened pace and pulled up; the house before which it stopped was clearly the house the two men had lately quitted. Hyacinth felt his arm seized by the Prince, who, hastily, by a strong effort, drew him forward several yards. At this moment a part of the agitation that possessed the unhappy Italian seemed to pass into his own blood; a wave of anxiety rushed through him—anxiety as to the relations of the two persons who had descended from the cab; he had, in short, for several instants, a very exact revelation of the state of feeling of a jealous husband. If he had been told, half an hour before, that he was capable of surreptitious peepings, in the interest of such jealousy, he would have resented the insult; yet he allowed himself to be checked by his companion just at the nearest point at which they might safely consider the proceedings of the couple who alighted. It was in fact the Princess, accompanied by Paul Muniment. Hyacinth noticed that the latter paid the cabman, who immediately drove away, from his own pocket. He stood with the Princess for some minutes at the door of the house—minutes during which Hyacinth felt his heart beat insanely, ignobly, he couldn’t tell why.

“What does he say? what does she say?” hissed the Prince; and when he demanded, the next moment, “Will he go in again, or will he go away?” our sensitive youth felt that a voice was given to his own most eager thought. The pair were talking together, with rapid sequences, and as the door had not yet been opened it was clear that, to prolong the conversation on the steps, the Princess delayed to ring. “It will make three, four, hours he has been with her,” moaned the Prince.

“He may be with her fifty hours!” Hyacinth answered, with a laugh, turning away, ashamed of himself.

“He has gone in—sangue di Dio!” cried the Prince, catching his companion again by the arm and making him look. All that Hyacinth saw was the door just closing; the Princess and Muniment were on the other side of it. “Is that for the revolution?” the trembling nobleman panted. But Hyacinth made no answer; he only gazed at the closed door an instant, and then, disengaging himself, walked straight away, leaving the Italian, in the darkness, to direct a great helpless, futile shake of his stick at the indifferent house.

XLI

Hyacinth waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the door the splendour of her appearance did much to justify her delay. He heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a creaking of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward into the narrow, dusky passage where he had been standing for a quarter of an hour. She looked flushed; she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume; and she instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle, at him, to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large vulgar hands. Hyacinth opened the door—it was so natural an assumption that they would not be able to talk properly in the passage—and they came out to the low steps, lingering there in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. The winter was not over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty sun-tints and faint transparencies. There was warmth and there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church bells were ringing. Miss Henning remarked that it was a ‘shime’ she couldn’t have a place to ask a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such a grind for your living, and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger than a pill-box? She couldn’t, herself, abide waiting outside; she knew something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose (the time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!) and it always made her feel quite miserable. It was something cruel. If she could have what she liked she knew what she would have; and she hinted at a mystic bower where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the morning paper, or a nice view out of the window, or even a glass of sherry—so that, in an adjacent apartment, she could dress without getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.

“I don’t know how I ’ave pitched on my things,” she remarked, presenting her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware that she had put a small plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being so fine, he had come to propose to her to take a walk with him, in the manner of ancient times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park and stroll beside the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it, if she liked, and watch the lambkins, or feed the ducks, if she would put a crust in her pocket. The prospect of paddling Miss Henning entirely declined; she had no idea of wetting her flounces, and she left those rough pleasures, especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young woman. But she didn’t mind if she did go for a turn, though he didn’t deserve any such favour, after the way he hadn’t been near her, if she had died in her garret. She was not one that was to be dropped and taken up at any man’s convenience—she didn’t keep one of those offices for servants out of place. Millicent expressed the belief that if the day had not been so lovely she would have sent Hyacinth about his business; it was lucky for him that she was always forgiving such was her sensitive, generous nature) when the sun was out. Only there was one thing—she couldn’t abide making no difference for Sunday; it was her personal habit to go to church, and she should have it on her conscience if she gave it up for a lark. Hyacinth had already been impressed, more than once, by the manner in which his blooming friend stickled for the religious observance: of all the queer disparities of her nature, her devotional turn struck him as perhaps the queerest. She held her head erect through the longest and dullest sermon, and came out of the place of worship with her fine face embellished by the publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by the general secularity of Hyacinth’s behaviour, especially taken in conjunction with his general straightness, and was only consoled a little by the fact that if he didn’t drink, or fight, or steal, at least he indulged in unlimited wickedness of opinion—theories as bad as anything that people got ten years for. Hyacinth had not yet revealed to her that his theories had somehow lately come to be held with less tension; an instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a grievance which ministered so much to sociability. He had not reflected that she would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if her condemnation of his godlessness had been deprived of confirmatory indications.

On the present occasion she let him know that she would go for a walk with him if he would first accompany her to church; and it was in vain he represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine, and in the interval there would be no time left. She replied, with a toss of her head, that she dined when she liked; besides on Sundays she had cold fare—it was left out for her; an argument to which Hyacinth had to assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete, thanks to the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and explanation, in which, in spite of great freedom of complaint, perpetual announcements of intended change, impending promotion and high bids for her services in other quarters, she had always enshrouded her private affairs. Hyacinth walked by her side to the place of worship she preferred—her choice was made apparently from a large experience; and as they went he remarked that it was a good job he wasn’t married to her. Lord, how she would bully him, how she would ‘squeeze’ him, in such a case! The worst of it would be that—such was his amiable, peace-loving nature—he would obey like a showman’s poodle. And pray, whom was a man to obey, asked Millicent, if he was not to obey his wife? She sat up in her pew with a majesty that carried out this idea; she seemed to answer, in her proper person, for creeds and communions and sacraments; she was more than devotional, she was almost pontifical. Hyacinth had never felt himself under such distinguished protection; the Princess Casamassima came back to him, in comparison, as a Bohemian, a shabby adventuress. He had come to see her to-day not for the sake of her austerity (he had had too gloomy a week for that), but for that of her genial side; yet now that she treated him to the severer spectacle it struck him for the moment as really grand sport—a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She had her phases and caprices, like the Princess herself; and if they were not the same as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent they proved at least that she was as brave a woman. No one but a capital girl could give herself such airs; she would have a consciousness of the large reserve of pliancy required for making up for them. The Princess wished to destroy society and Millicent wished to uphold it; and as Hyacinth, by the side of his childhood’s friend, listened to practised intonings, he was obliged to recognise the liberality of a fate which had sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the best opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the original and the beauty of the conventional.

Fortunately, on this particular Sunday, there was no sermon (fortunately, I mean, from the point of view of Hyacinth’s heretical impatience), so that after the congregation dispersed there was still plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our friends traversed that barely-interrupted expanse of irrepressible herbage which stretches from the Birdcage Walk to Hyde Park Corner, and took their way to Kensington Gardens, beside the Serpentine. Once Millicent’s religious exercises were over for the day (she as rigidly forbore to repeat them in the afternoon as she made a point of the first service), once she had lifted her voice in prayer and praise, she changed her allure; moving to a different measure, uttering her sentiments in a high, free manner, and not minding that it should be perceived that she had on her very best gown and was out, if need be, for the day. She was mainly engaged, for some time, in overhauling Hyacinth for his long absence, demanding, as usual, some account of what he had been ‘up to’. He listened to her philosophically, liking and enjoying her chaff, which seemed to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and absolutely declining to satisfy her. He remarked, as he had had occasion to do before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had a right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily; and even the indignation with which she received this plea did not make him feel that an éclaircissement between them could be a serious thing. There was nothing to explain and nothing to forgive; they were a pair of very fallible individuals, united much more by their weaknesses than by any consistency or fidelity that they might pretend to practise toward each other. It was an old acquaintance—the oldest thing, to-day, except Mr Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and strange as this may appear, it inspired our young man with a kind of indulgent piety. The probability that Millicent ‘kept company’ with other men had quite ceased to torment his imagination; it was no longer necessary to his happiness to be certain about it in order that he might dismiss her from his mind. He could be as happy without it as with it, and he felt a new modesty in regard to prying into her affairs. He was so little in a position to be stern with her that her assumption that he recognised a right on her own part to chide him seemed to him only a part of her perpetual clumsiness—a clumsiness that was not soothing but was nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of the things he liked her for.

“If you have come to see me only to make jokes at my expense, you had better have stayed away altogether,” she said, with dignity, as they came out of the Green Park. “In the first place it’s rude, in the second place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”

“My dear Millicent, the motions you go through, the resentment you profess, are purely perfunctory,” her companion replied. “But it doesn’t matter; go on—say anything you like. I came to see you for recreation, for a little entertainment without effort of my own. I scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you would make me laugh—I have been so dismal for a long time. In fact, I am dismal still. I wish I had your disposition! My mirth is feverish.”

“The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect me,” Miss Henning announced. “You lead a bad life. I know what to think about that,” she continued, irrelevantly.

“And is it out of respect for you that you wish me to lead a better one? To-day, then, is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us get on the grass,” Hyacinth continued; “it is innocent and pastoral to feel it under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you; you understand everything.”

“I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything you hide,” the young woman returned, as the great central expanse of Hyde Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before them.

“Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean from this time forth to cease to seek safety in concealment. You’ll know nothing about me then, for it will be all under your nose.”

“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “What will you do when you’re so bad you can’t go to the shop?” she added, with a sudden transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that, she said she could see he was in a fever; she hadn’t noticed it at first, because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was it something he had caught in some of those back slums, where he went prying about with his wicked ideas? It served him right for taking as little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine friends—a precious lot they were, that put it off on him to do all the nasty part!—would they find the doctor, and the port wine, and the money, and all the rest, when he was laid up—perhaps for months—through their putting such rot into his head and his putting it into others that could carry it even less? Millicent stopped on the grass, in the watery sunshine, and bent on her companion an eye in which he perceived, freshly, an awakened curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a pledge of substantial comradeship. Suddenly she exclaimed, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision which she had used a moment before, “You little rascal, you’ve got something on your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?”

“My poor girl, your talk is a queer mixture,” Hyacinth murmured. “But it may well be. It is not queerer than my life.”

“Well, I’m glad you admit that!” the young woman cried, walking on with a flutter of her ribbons.

“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth continued. “Yes, you should see me in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”

“You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t believe that half the time you know what you do mean, yourself. I don’t believe you even know, with all your thinking, what you do think. That’s your disease.”

“It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,” Hyacinth rejoined. “I mean to think no more—I mean to give it up. Avoid it yourself, my dear Millicent—avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.”

“I don’t care how I live, nor where I live,” said Millicent, “so long as I can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut it fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember that day I came back to Lomax Place ever so long ago, and called on poor dear Miss Pynsent (she couldn’t abide me; she didn’t like my form), and waited till you came in, and went out for a walk with you, and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you weren’t satisfactory to me then, and that I consider myself remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything, and you never told one nothing at all.”

“What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth inquired, putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything you like.”

“I dare say you’ll tell me a lot of trash! Certainly, I tried kindness,” Miss Henning declared.

“Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her companion, strolling along with her in close association.

She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well, then, has she—has she chucked you over?”

Hyacinth turned his eyes away; he looked at the green expanse, misty and sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem larger; at the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of Kensington Gardens; at a shining reach of the Serpentine on one side and the far façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege of their view, on the other. “Well, you know I rather think so,” he replied, in a moment.

“Ah, the nasty brute!” cried Millicent, as they resumed their walk.

Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of Kensington Gardens, those scattered over the slope which rises gently from the side of the water most distant from the old red palace. They had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed there for the convenience of that part of the public for which a penny is not, as the French say, an affair, and Millicent, of whom such speculations were highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the question whether the functionary charged with collecting the said penny would omit to come and ask for his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy her pleasures gratis, as well as to see others do so, and even that of sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion as she might feel that nothing would be paid for it. The man came round, however, and after that her pleasure could only take the form of sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This question had been settled, and two or three others, of a much weightier kind, had come up. At the moment we again participate in the conversation of the pair Millicent was leaning forward, earnest and attentive, with her hands clasped in her lap and her multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled forward upon her wrists. Her face, with its parted lips and eyes clouded to gentleness, wore an expression which Hyacinth had never seen there before and which caused him to say to her, “After all, dear Milly, you’re a good old fellow!”

“Why did you never tell me before—years ago?” she asked.

“It’s always soon enough to commit an imbecility! I don’t know why I tell you to-day, sitting here in a charming place, in balmy air, amid pleasing suggestions, without any reason or practical end. The story is hideous, and I have held my tongue for so long! It would have been an effort, an impossible effort, at any time, to do otherwise. Somehow, to-day it hasn’t been an effort; and indeed I have spoken just because the air is sweet, and the place ornamental, and the day a holiday, and your company exhilarating. All this has had the effect that an object has if you plunge it into a cup of water—the water overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very foul liquid indeed. Excuse the bad odour!”

There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she listened to what had gone before; it lingered there, and as a colour heightened by emotion is never unbecoming to a handsome woman, it enriched her exceptional expression. “I wouldn’t have been so rough with you,” she presently remarked.

“My dear lass, this isn’t rough!” her companion exclaimed.

“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own, as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.

“Very likely. I’m a nervous little beast,” said Hyacinth.

“Any one would be nervous, to think of anything so awful. And when it’s yourself!” And the girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a contingency. “You require sympathy,” she added, in a tone that made Hyacinth smile; the words sounded like a medical prescription.

“A tablespoonful every half-hour,” he rejoined, keeping her hand, which she was about to draw away.

“You would have been nicer, too,” Millicent went on.

“How do you mean, I would have been nicer?”

“Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away her hand, as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.

“It’s a pity I have always been so terribly under the influence of women,” Hyacinth murmured, folding his arms.

He was surprised at the delicacy with which Millicent replied: “You must remember that they have a great deal to make up to you.”

“Do you mean for my mother? Ah, she would have made it up, if they had let her! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he continued. “It’s wonderful the kindness they have shown me, and the amount of pleasure I have derived from their society.”

It would perhaps be inquiring too closely to consider whether this reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from her own bosom had an irritating effect on Millicent; at all events after a moment’s silence she answered it by asking, “Does she know—your trumpery Princess?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t mind it.”

“That’s most uncommonly kind of her!” cried the girl, with a scornful laugh.

“It annoys me very much to hear you apply invidious epithets to her. You know nothing about her.”

“How do you know what I know, please?” Millicent asked this question with the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she dropped her voice, as if she remembered that she was in the presence of a great misfortune. “Hasn’t she treated you most shamefully, and you such a regular dear?”

“Not in the least. It is I that, as you may say, have rounded on her. She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as she was. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent, and I have been fickle.”

“Your interest has declined, in the Princess?” Millicent questioned, following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.

“Oh dear, no. I mean only in some views that I used to have.”

“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good job!” Miss Henning exclaimed, with an indulgent laugh, as if, after all, Hyacinth’s views and the changes in his views were not what was most important. “And your grand lady still holds for the costermongers?”

“She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery; she wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to be done, and of the courage and devotion of those that set themselves to do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples I’m a very poor creature.”

“You are a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself, I promise you I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t chucked you over why in the name of common sense did you say just now that she has? And why is your dear old face as white as my stocking?”

Hyacinth looked at her awhile without answering, as if he took a placid pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”

She put out her hand and took possession of his own; for a minute she held it, as if she wished to check herself, finding some influence in his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the ornamental water and the landscape-gardening beyond, which was reflected in it; until Millicent turned her eyes again upon her companion and remarked, “Well, that’s the way I’d have served him too!”

It took him a moment to perceive that she was alluding to the vengeance wrought upon Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”

“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on.

“A queer variety, cara mia,” her companion rejoined, not very candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s incurable indiscretions. They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking up.”

“Oh, it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”

“Pray, what did I ever say, in those days?”

“It wasn’t what you said,” Millicent answered, with refinement. “I guessed the whole business—except, of course, what she got her time for, and you being taken to that death-bed—that day I came back to the Place. Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is no more than I thought then; it only makes you nicer.”

She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of unskillful exaggeration, for he himself honestly could not understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose, as it were, to the surface, it diffused a sense of rest, almost of protection, deepening, at any rate, the luxury of the balmy holiday, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so that, though neither of them had dined, Hyacinth would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something bitter that was happening to him, making it stop awhile or pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of which they themselves were weary; but they regarded it now with a kind of wounded indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a compensation, but it seemed at least a resource. She too, evidently, was highly content; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She interrogated him about his father’s family, and whether they were going to let him go on like that always, without ever holding out so much as a little finger to him; and she declared, in a manner that was meant to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of the turn made him smile, that if she were one of them she couldn’t ‘abear’ the thought of a relation of hers being in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old Crookenden’s and of the feebleness of a young man of his parts contenting himself with a career which was after all a mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books; but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practised differed from that of a plumber, a glazier. He had not forgotten the shock he once administered to her by letting her know that he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from the summit of her own intellectual profession, for she wore mantles and jackets and shawls, and the long trains of robes exhibited in the window on dummies of wire and taken down to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about them and showing them off, and persuading people of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what those people owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question made her reflect for a moment; after which she returned, with the finest spirit, “Well, if your position was so miserable, ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift? Oh, it’s something cruel!” she cried; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. She wouldn’t have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had gentlefolks’ blood in her veins! “If they had noticed you they would have liked you,” she was so good as to observe; but she immediately remembered, also, that in that case he would have been carried away quite over her head. She was not prepared to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the ‘real’ by way of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice which was wasted, however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed history of the personage in question. Millicent was tender and tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really made little impression upon her; she accounted it an accident much less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and moved; but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail, with the later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things produced a generous agitation—something the same in kind as the impressions she had occasionally derived from the perusal of the Family Herald. What affected her most, and what she came back to, was the whole element of Lord Frederick and the misery of Hyacinth’s having got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn’t get over his friends not having done something, though her imagination was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest thing in the world, to Hyacinth, to find her apparently assuming that if he had not been so inefficient he might have ‘worked’ the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory. She wouldn’t have been a nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh, the left hand was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, didn’t care for that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience, and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having bragged about his grand relations. They had become vivid and concrete to her now, in comparison with the timid shadows that Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in the hushed past of her companion with the oddest mixture of sympathy and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane voices holloaing for echoes.

“Me only—me and her? Certainly, I ought to be obliged, even though it is late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have worse to tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in the chemical line?”

“No, we have never talked about it.”

“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as mentioned it?”

“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his sister.”

“How do you know that, if he never spoke?”

“Oh, because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And how did his sister know it?”

“Oh, I don’t know; she guessed it.”

Millicent stared. “It was none of her business.” Then she added, “He was jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?” She asked this question in her loud, free voice, which rang through the bright stillness of the place.

Hyacinth delayed for a minute to answer her, and when at last he did so it was without looking at her: “I don’t know; I can’t make it out.”

“Well, I can, then!” And Millicent jerked him round toward her and inspected him with her big bright eyes. “You silly baby, has he been serving you?” She pressed her question upon him; she asked if that was what disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently, after an instant, she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to her ladyship—is that his game?” she broke out. “Do you mean to say she’d look at the likes of him?”

“The likes of him? He’s as fine a man as stands!” said Hyacinth. “They have the same views, they are doing the same work.”

“Oh, he hasn’t changed his opinions, then—not like you?”

“No, he knows what he wants; he knows what he thinks.”

“Very much the same work, I’ll be bound!” cried Millicent, in large derision. “He knows what he wants, and I dare say he’ll get it.”

Hyacinth got up, turning away from her; but she also rose, and passed her hand into his arm. “It’s their own business; they can do as they please.”

“Oh, don’t try to be a saint; you put me out of patience!” the girl responded, with characteristic energy. “They’re a precious pair, and it would do me good to hear you say so.”

“A man shouldn’t turn against his friends,” Hyacinth went on, with desperate sententiousness.

“That’s for them to remember; there’s no danger of your forgetting it.” They had begun to walk, but she stopped him; she was suddenly smiling at him, and her face was radiant. She went on, with caressing inconsequence: “All that you have told me—it has made you nicer.”

“I don’t see that, but it has certainly made you so. My dear girl, you’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added, as they strolled on again.

XLII

He had no intention of going in the evening to Madeira Crescent, and that is why he asked his companion, before they separated, if he might not see her again, after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now, and he feared them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element; it had visions for him that passed even before his closed eyes—sharp doubts and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of suffering. He wanted company, to light up his gloom, and this had driven him back to Millicent, in a manner not altogether consistent with the respect which it was still his theory that he owed to his nobler part. He felt no longer free to drop in at the Crescent, and tried to persuade himself, in case his mistrust should be overdone, that his reasons were reasons of magnanimity. If Paul Muniment were seriously occupied with the Princess, if they had work in hand for which their most earnest attention was required (and Sunday was very likely to be the day they would take: they had spent so much of the previous Sunday together), it would be delicate on his part to stay away, to leave his friend a clear field. There was something inexpressibly representative to him in the way that friend had abruptly decided to re-enter the house, after pausing outside with its mistress, at the moment he himself stood peering through the fog with the Prince. The movement repeated itself innumerable times, to his moral perception, suggesting to him things that he couldn’t bear to learn. Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous, even after he had become so, and to prove to himself that he was not he had gone to see the Princess one evening in the middle of the week. Hadn’t he wanted Paul to know her, months and months before, and now was he to entertain a vile feeling at the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested, in each party to it, upon aspirations that he respected? The Princess had not been at home, and he had turned away from the door without asking for Madame Grandoni; he had not forgotten that on the occasion of his previous visit she had excused herself from remaining in the drawing-room. After the little maid in the Crescent had told him the Princess was out he walked away with a quick curiosity—a curiosity which, if he had listened to it, would have led him to mount upon the first omnibus that travelled in the direction of Camberwell. Was Paul Muniment, who was such a rare one, in general, for stopping at home of an evening—was he also out, and would Rosy, in this case, be in the humour to mention (for of course she would know) where he had gone? Hyacinth let the omnibus pass, for he suddenly became aware, with a throb of horror, that he was in danger of playing the spy. He had not been near Muniment since, on purpose to leave his curiosity unsatisfied. He allowed himself however to notice that the Princess had now not written him a word of consolation, as she had been so kind as to do once or twice before when he had knocked at her door without finding her. At present he had missed her twice in succession, and yet she had given no sign of regret—regret even on his own behalf. This determined him to stay away awhile longer; it was such a proof that she was absorbingly occupied. Hyacinth’s glimpse of the Princess in earnest conversation with Muniment as they returned from the excursion described by the Prince, his memory of Paul’s relenting figure crossing the threshold once more, could leave him no doubt as to the degree of that absorption.

Millicent hesitated when Hyacinth proposed to her that they should finish the day together. She smiled, and her splendid eyes rested on his with an air of indulgent interrogation; they seemed to ask whether it were worth her while, in face of his probable incredulity, to mention the real reason why she could not have the pleasure of acceding to his delightful suggestion. Since he would be sure to deride her explanation, would not some trumped-up excuse do as well, since he could knock that about without hurting her? I know not exactly in what sense Miss Henning decided; but she confessed at last that there was an odious obstacle to their meeting again later—a promise she had made to go and see a young lady, the forewoman of her department, who was kept in-doors with a bad face, and nothing in life to help her pass the time. She was under a pledge to spend the evening with her, and it was not her way to disappoint an expectation. Hyacinth made no comment on this speech; he received it in silence, looking at the girl gloomily.

“I know what’s passing in your mind!” Millicent suddenly broke out. “Why don’t you say it at once, and give me a chance to contradict it? I oughtn’t to care, but I do care!”

“Stop, stop—don’t let us fight!” Hyacinth spoke in a tone of pleading weariness; she had never heard just that accent before.

Millicent considered a moment. “I’ve a mind to play her false. She is a real lady, highly connected, and the best friend I have—I don’t count men,” the girl interpolated, smiling—“and there isn’t one in the world I’d do such a thing for but you.”

“No, keep your promise; don’t play any one false,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, you are a gentleman!” Miss Henning murmured, with a sweetness that her voice occasionally took.

“Especially—” Hyacinth began; but he suddenly stopped.

“Especially what? Something impudent, I’ll engage! Especially as you don’t believe me?”

“Oh, no! Don’t let’s fight!” he repeated.

“Fight, my darling? I’d fight for you!” Miss Henning declared.

Hyacinth offered himself, after tea, the choice between a visit to Lady Aurora and a pilgrimage to Lisson Grove. He was in a little doubt about the former experiment, having an idea that her ladyship’s family might have returned to Belgrave Square. He reflected, however, that he could not recognise that as a reason for not going to see her; his relations with her were not clandestine, and she had given him the kindest general invitation. If her august progenitors were at home she was probably at dinner with them; he would take that risk. He had taken it before, without disastrous results. He was determined not to spend the evening alone, and he would keep the Poupins as a more substantial alternative, in case her ladyship should not be able to receive him.

As soon as the great portal in Belgrave Square was drawn open before him, he perceived that the house was occupied and animated—if the latter term might properly be applied to a place which had hitherto given Hyacinth the impression of a magnificent mausoleum. It was pervaded by subdued light and tall domestics; Hyacinth found himself looking down a kind of colonnade of colossal footmen, an array more imposing even than the retinue of the Princess at Medley. His inquiry died away on his lips, and he stood there struggling with dumbness. It was manifest to him that some high festival was taking place, at which his presence could only be deeply irrelevant; and when a large official, out of livery, bending over him for a voice that faltered, suggested, not unencouragingly, that it might be Lady Aurora he wished to see, he replied in a low, melancholy accent, “Yes, yes, but it can’t be possible!” The butler took no pains to controvert this proposition verbally; he merely turned round, with a majestic air of leading the way, and as at the same moment two of the footmen closed the wings of the door behind the visitor, Hyacinth judged that it was his cue to follow him. In this manner, after traversing a passage where, in the perfect silence of the servants, he heard the shorter click of his plebeian shoes upon a marble floor, he found himself ushered into a small apartment, lighted by a veiled lamp, which, when he had been left there alone, without further remark on the part of his conductor, he recognised as the scene—only now more amply decorated—of one of his former interviews. Lady Aurora kept him waiting a few moments, and then fluttered in with an anxious, incoherent apology. The same transformation had taken place in her own appearance as in the aspect of her parental halls: she had on a light-coloured, crumpled-looking, faintly-rustling dress; her head was adorned with a kind of languid plume, terminating in little pink tips; and in her hand she carried a pair of white gloves. All her repressed eagerness was in her face, and she smiled as if she wished to anticipate any scruples or embarrassments on the part of her visitor; frankly recognising the brilliancy of her attire and the startling implications it might convey. Hyacinth said to her that, no doubt, on perceiving her family had returned to town, he ought to have backed out; he knew that must make a difference in her life. But he had been marched in, in spite of himself, and now it was clear that he had interrupted her at dinner. She answered that no one who asked for her at any hour was ever turned away; she had managed to arrange that, and she was very happy in her success. She didn’t usually dine—there were so many of them, and it took so long. Most of her friends couldn’t come at visiting-hours, and it wouldn’t be right that she shouldn’t ever receive them. On that occasion she had been dining, but it was all over; she was only sitting there because she was going to a party. Her parents were dining out, and she was just in the drawing-room with some of her sisters. When they were alone it wasn’t so long, though it was rather long afterwards, when they went up again. It wasn’t time yet: the carriage wouldn’t come for nearly half an hour. She hadn’t been to an evening thing for months and months, but—didn’t he know?—one sometimes had to do it. Lady Aurora expressed the idea that one ought to be fair all round and that one’s duties were not all of the same species; some of them would come up from time to time that were quite different from the others. Of course it wasn’t just, unless one did all, and that was why she was in for something to-night. It was nothing of consequence; only the family meeting the family, as they might do of a Sunday, at one of their houses. It was there that papa and mamma were dining. Since they had given her that room for any hour she wanted (it was really tremendously convenient), she had determined to do a party now and then, like a respectable young woman, because it pleased them—though why it should, to see her at a place, was more than she could imagine. She supposed it was because it would perhaps keep some people, a little, from thinking she was mad and not safe to be at large—which was of course a sort of thing that people didn’t like to have thought of their belongings. Lady Aurora explained and expatiated with a kind of nervous superabundance; she talked more continuously than Hyacinth had ever heard her do before, and the young man saw that she was not in her natural equilibrium. He thought it scarcely probable that she was excited by the simple prospect of again dipping into the great world she had forsworn, and he presently perceived that he himself had an agitating effect upon her. His senses were fine enough to make him feel that he revived certain associations and quickened certain wounds. She suddenly stopped talking, and the two sat there looking at each other, in a kind of occult community of suffering. Hyacinth made several mechanical remarks, explaining, insufficiently, why he had come, and in the course of a very few moments, quite independently of these observations, it seemed to him that there was a deeper, a measurelessly deep, confidence between them. A tacit confession passed and repassed, and each understood the situation of the other. They wouldn’t speak of it—it was very definite that they would never do that; for there was something in their common consciousness that was inconsistent with the grossness of accusation. Besides, the grievance of each was an apprehension, an instinct of the soul—not a sharp, definite wrong, supported by proof. It was in the air and in their restless pulses, and not in anything that they could exhibit or complain of. Strange enough it seemed to Hyacinth that the history of each should be the counterpart of that of the other. What had each done but lose that which he or she had never had? Things had gone ill with them; but even if they had gone well, if the Princess had not combined with his friend in that manner which made his heart sink and produced an effect exactly corresponding upon that of Lady Aurora—even in this case what would prosperity, what would success, have amounted to? They would have been very barren. He was sure the singular creature before him would never have had a chance to take the unprecedented social step for the sake of which she was ready to go forth from Belgrave Square for ever; Hyacinth had judged the smallness of Paul Muniment’s appetite for that complication sufficiently to have begun really to pity her ladyship long ago. And now, even when he most felt the sweetness of her sympathy, he might wonder what she could have imagined for him in the event of his not having been supplanted—what security, what completer promotion, what honourable, satisfying sequel. They were unhappy because they were unhappy, and they were right not to rail about that.

“Oh, I like to see you—I like to talk with you,” said Lady Aurora, simply. They talked for a quarter of an hour, and he made her such a visit as any gentleman might have made to any lady. They exchanged remarks about the lateness of the spring, about the loan-exhibition at Burlington House—which Hyacinth had paid his shilling to see—about the question of opening the museums on Sunday, about the danger of too much coddling legislation on behalf of the working-classes. He declared that it gave him great pleasure to see any sign of her amusing herself; it was unnatural never to do that, and he hoped that now she had taken a turn she would keep it up. At this she looked down, smiling, at her frugal finery, and then she replied, “I dare say I shall begin to go to balls—who knows?”

“That’s what our friends in Audley Court think, you know—that it’s the worst mistake you can make, not to drink deep of the cup while you have it.”

“Oh, I’ll do it, then—I’ll do it for them!” Lady Aurora exclaimed. “I dare say that, as regards all that, I haven’t listened to them enough.” This was the only allusion that passed on the subject of the Muniments.

Hyacinth got up—he had stayed long enough, as she was going out; and as he held out his hand to her she seemed to him a heroine. She would try to cultivate the pleasures of her class if the brother and sister in Camberwell thought it right—try even to be a woman of fashion in order to console herself. Paul Muniment didn’t care for her, but she was capable of considering that it might be her duty to regulate her life by the very advice that made an abyss between them. Hyacinth didn’t believe in the success of this attempt; there passed before his imagination a picture of the poor lady coming home and pulling off her feathers for ever, after an evening spent in watching the agitation of a ball-room from the outer edge of the circle, with a white, irresponsive face. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” he said, laughing.

“Oh, I don’t mind dying.”

“I think I do,” Hyacinth declared, as he turned away. There had been no mention whatever of the Princess.

It was early enough in the evening for him to risk a visit to Lisson Grove; he calculated that the Poupins would still be sitting up. When he reached their house he found this calculation justified; the brilliancy of the light in the window appeared to announce that Madame was holding a salon. He ascended to this apartment without delay (it was free to a visitor to open the house-door himself), and, having knocked, obeyed the hostess’s invitation to enter. Poupin and his wife were seated, with a third person, at a table in the middle of the room, round a staring kerosene lamp adorned with a globe of clear glass, of which the transparency was mitigated only by a circular pattern of bunches of grapes. The third person was his friend Schinkel, who had been a member of the little party that waited upon Hoffendahl. No one said anything as Hyacinth came in; but in their silence the three others got up, looking at him, as he thought, rather strangely.