BOOK FIFTH

XXXVIII

Hyacinth found, this winter, considerable occupation for his odd hours, his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in hand the books which he had promised himself, at Medley, to inclose in covers worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life (these brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight), and of the confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she should receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in thinking that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand as specimens of rare work, while connoisseurs bent their heads over them, smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention stirred itself, and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he sat up late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this time his skill was of a very high order. Old Crookenden recognised it by raising the rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among the traditions of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to the end wore the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches, Hyacinth learned accidentally that several books that he had given him to do had been carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the villa, where they were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden circle who came to tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself, indeed, was included in this company on a great occasion—invited to a musical party where he made the acquaintance of half a dozen Miss Crookendens, an acquaintance which consisted in his standing in a corner, behind several broad-backed old ladies, and watching the rotation, at the piano and the harp, of three or four of his master’s thick-fingered daughters. “You know it’s a tremendously musical house,” said one of the old ladies to another (she called it ‘’ouse’); but the principal impression made upon him by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was that it was wonderfully different from the Princess’s playing.

He knew that he was the only young man from the shop who had been invited, not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a wig which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides being accompanied by a little frightened, furtive wife, who closed her eyes, as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs Crookenden spoke to her. The Poupins were not there—which, however, was not a surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that (even if they had been asked, which they were not) they had objections of principle to putting their feet chez les bourgeois. They were not asked because, in spite of the place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business, it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife (though she was certainly no one’s else); and the evidence of this irregularity was conceived to reside, vaguely, in the fact that she had never been seen save in a camisole. There had doubtless been an apprehension that if she had come to the villa she would not have come with the proper number of hooks and eyes, though Hyacinth, on two or three occasions, notably the night he took the pair to Mr Vetch’s theatre, had been witness of the proportions to which she could reduce her figure when she wished to give the impression of a lawful tie.

It was not clear to him how the distinction conferred upon him became known in Soho, where, however, it excited no sharpness of jealousy—Grugan, Roker, and Hotchkin being hardly more likely to envy a person condemned to spend a genteel evening than they were to envy a monkey performing antics on a barrel-organ: both forms of effort indicated an urbanity painfully acquired. But Roker took his young comrade’s breath half away with his elbow and remarked that he supposed he saw the old man had spotted him for one of the darlings at home; inquiring, furthermore, what would become in that case of the little thing he took to France, the one to whom he had stood champagne and lobster. This was the first allusion Hyacinth had heard made to the idea that he might some day marry his master’s daughter, like the virtuous apprentice of tradition; but the suggestion, somehow, was not inspiring, even when he had thought of an incident or two which gave colour to it. None of the Miss Crookendens spoke to him—they all had large faces and short legs and a comical resemblance to that elderly male with wide nostrils, their father, and, unlike the Miss Marchants, at Medley, they knew who he was—but their mother, who had on her head the plumage of a cockatoo, mingled with a structure of glass beads, looked at him with an almost awful fixedness and asked him three distinct times if he would have a glass of negus.

He had much difficulty in getting his books from the Princess; for when he reminded her of the promise she had given him at Medley to make over to him as many volumes as he should require, she answered that everything was changed since then, that she was completely dépouillée, that she had now no pretension to have a library, and that, in fine, he had much better leave the matter alone. He was welcome to any books that were in the house, but, as he could see for himself, these were cheap editions, on which it would be foolish to expend such work as his. He asked Madame Grandoni to help him—to tell him, at least, whether there were not some good volumes among the things the Princess had sent to be warehoused; it being known to him, through casual admissions of her own, that she had allowed her maid to save certain articles from the wreck and pack them away at the Pantechnicon. This had all been Assunta’s work, the woman had begged so hard for a few reservations—a loaf of bread for their old days; but the Princess herself had washed her hands of the business. “Chè, chè, there are boxes, I am sure, in that place, with a little of everything,” said the old lady, in answer to his inquiry; and Hyacinth conferred with Assunta, who took a sympathetic, talkative, Italian interest in his undertaking and promised to fish out for him whatever worthy volumes should remain. She came to his lodging, one evening, in a cab, with an armful of pretty books, and when he asked her where they had come from waved her forefinger in front of her nose, in a manner both mysterious and expressive. He brought each volume to the Princess, as it was finished; but her manner of receiving it was to shake her head over it with a kind, sad smile. “It’s beautiful, I am sure, but I have lost my sense for such things. Besides, you must always remember what you once told me, that a woman, even the most cultivated, is incapable of feeling the difference between a bad binding and a good. I remember your once saying that fine ladies had brought shoemaker’s bindings to your shop, and wished them imitated. Certainly those are not the differences I most feel. My dear fellow, such things have ceased to speak to me; they are doubtless charming, but they leave me cold. What will you have? One can’t serve God and mammon.” Her thoughts were fixed on far other matters than the delight of dainty covers, and she evidently considered that in caring so much for them Hyacinth resembled the mad emperor who fiddled in the flames of Rome. European society, to her mind, was in flames, and no frivolous occupation could give the measure of the emotion with which she watched them. It produced occasionally demonstrations of hilarity, of joy and hope, but these always took some form connected with the life of the people. It was the people she had gone to see, when she accompanied Hyacinth to a music-hall in the Edgware Road; and all her excursions and pastimes, this winter, were prompted by her interest in the classes on whose behalf the revolution was to be wrought.

To ask himself whether she were in earnest was now an old story to him, and, indeed, the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased to have any practical relevancy. It was just as she was, superficial or profound, that she held him, and she was, at any rate, sufficiently animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences, actual and possible. Some of these might be serious, even if she herself were not, and there were times when Hyacinth was much visited by the apprehension of them. On the Sundays that she had gone with him into the darkest places, the most fetid holes, in London, she had always taken money with her, in considerable quantities, and always left it behind. She said, very naturally, that one couldn’t go and stare at people, for an impression, without paying them, and she gave alms right and left, indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgment, as simply as the abbess of some beggar-haunted convent, or a lady-bountiful of the superstitious, unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles of economical science; partly because she was not a woman to be directed and regulated—she could take other people’s ideas, but she could never take their way. Besides, what did it matter? To himself, what did it matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or into wrong ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The Princess was an embodied passion—she was not a system; and her behaviour, after all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to relieving others. And then misery was sown so thick in her path that wherever her money was dropped it fell into some trembling palm. He wondered that she should still have so much cash to dispose of, until she explained to him that she came by it through putting her personal expenditure on a rigid footing. What she gave away was her savings, the margin she had succeeded in creating; and now that she had tasted of the satisfaction of making little hoards for such a purpose she regarded her other years, with their idleness and waste, their merely personal motives, as a long, stupid sleep of the conscience. To do something for others was not only so much more human, but so much more amusing!

She made strange acquaintances, under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened to extraordinary stories, and formed theories about them, and about the persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex, attempted to establish social relations with them, and was the cause of infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent, who was always smoking at the window, and who reminded Hyacinth of Mr Micawber. She received visits that were a scandal to the Crescent, and Hyacinth neglected his affairs, whatever they were, to see what tatterdemalion would next turn up at her door. This intercourse, it is true, took a more fruitful form as her intimacy with Lady Aurora deepened; her ladyship practised discriminations which she brought the Princess to recognise, and before the winter was over Hyacinth’s services in the slums were found unnecessary. He gave way with relief, with delight, to Lady Aurora, for he had not in the least understood his behaviour for the previous four months, nor taken himself seriously as a cicerone. He had plunged into a sea of barbarism without having any civilising energy to put forth. He was conscious that the people were miserable—more conscious, it often seemed to him, than they themselves were; so frequently was he struck with their brutal insensibility, a grossness impervious to the taste of better things or to any desire for them. He knew it so well that the repetition of contact could add no vividness to the conviction; it rather smothered and befogged his impression, peopled it with contradictions and difficulties, a violence of reaction, a sense of the inevitable and insurmountable. In these hours the poverty and ignorance of the multitude seemed so vast and preponderant, and so much the law of life, that those who had managed to escape from the black gulf were only the happy few, people of resource as well as children of luck; they inspired in some degree the interest and sympathy that one should feel for survivors and victors, those who have come safely out of a shipwreck or a battle. What was most in Hyacinth’s mind was the idea, of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was a syllable, that the flood of democracy was rising over the world; that it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; that, whatever it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom a magnificent energy; and that it might be trusted to look after its own. When democracy should have its way everywhere, it would be its fault (whose else?) if want and suffering and crime should continue to be ingredients of the human lot. With his mixed, divided nature, his conflicting sympathies, his eternal habit of swinging from one view to another, Hyacinth regarded this prospect, in different moods, with different kinds of emotion. In spite of the example Eustache Poupin gave him of the reconcilement of disparities, he was afraid the democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings or for the finest sort of conversation. The Princess gave up these things in proportion as she advanced in the direction she had so audaciously chosen; and if the Princess could give them up it would take very transcendent natures to stick to them. At the same time there was joy, exultation, in the thought of surrendering one’s self to the wave of revolt, of floating in the tremendous tide, of feeling one’s self lifted and tossed, carried higher on the sun-touched crests of billows than one could ever be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own. That vision could deepen to a kind of ecstasy; make it indifferent whether one’s ultimate fate, in such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to be submerged in bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on resisting cliffs. Hyacinth felt that, whether his personal sympathy should rest finally with the victors or the vanquished, the victorious force was colossal and would require no testimony from the irresolute.

The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations, and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either cause, but they were important for himself, if only because they would rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual laceration of the rebound. There was no peace for him between the two currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate, plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, supercivilised sire. They continued to toss him from one side to the other; they arrayed him in intolerable defiances and revenges against himself. He had a high ambition: he wanted neither more nor less than to get hold of the truth and wear it in his heart. He believed, with the candour of youth, that it is brilliant and clear-cut, like a royal diamond; but in whatever direction he turned in the effort to find it, he seemed to know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face. The thought of his mother had filled him, originally, with the vague, clumsy fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but since the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things in the world as it was constituted grew intensely dear to him, he had tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human countenance for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation. To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea had a kind of shame in it, as an act of treachery would have had; for he could almost hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct of a gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of fanatics and cads. He had got over thinking that it would not have become his father to talk of what was proper to gentlemen, and making the mental reflection that from him, at least, the biggest cad in London could not have deserved less consideration. He had worked himself round to allowances, to interpretations, to such hypotheses as the evidence in the Times, read in the British Museum on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, did not exclude; though they had been frequent enough, and too frequent, his hours of hot resentment against the man who had attached to him the stigma he was to carry for ever, he threw himself, in other conditions, and with a certain success, into the effort to find condonations, excuses, for him. It was comparatively easy for him to accept himself as the son of a terribly light Frenchwoman; there seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his having for his other parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness. He was too poor to afford it. Sometimes, in his imagination, he sacrificed one to the other, throwing over Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when the theory failed that his father would have done great things for him if he had lived, or the assumption broke down that he had been Florentine Vivier’s only lover, he cursed and disowned them alike; sometimes he arrived at conceptions which presented them side by side, looking at him with eyes infinitely sad but quite unashamed—eyes which seemed to tell him that they had been hideously unfortunate but had not been base. Of course his worst moments now, as they had always been the worst, were those in which his grounds for thinking that Lord Frederick had really been his father perversely fell away from him. It must be added that they always passed, for the mixture that he felt himself so tormentingly, so insolubly, to be could be accounted for in no other manner.

I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were a constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in any view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamp-light and tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which was most his own lay round him under her pall, like an immeasurable breathing monster, he felt, with a vague excitement, as he had felt before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened, but it was filled, again, by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and strange blurred reflections and emanations into a sky without stars. He suspended, as it were, his small sensibility in the midst of it, and it quivered there with joy and hope and ambition, as well as with the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations with the mistress of it were more organised than they had been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity, it was better, at least, for Hyacinth. It made her more near and him more free; and if there had been a danger of her nature seeming really to take the tone of the vulgar things about her, he would only have had to remember her as she was at Medley to restore the perspective. In truth, her beauty always appeared to have the setting that best became it; her fairness made the element in which she lived and, among the meanest accessories, constituted a kind of splendour. Nature had multiplied the difficulties in the way of her successfully representing herself as having properties in common with the horrible populace of London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his night-walks to Paddington, or homeward; the populace of London were scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular, were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. ‘What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?’ he asked himself, as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the shame; for the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect.

It did not occur to Hyacinth that the Princess had withdrawn her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still further the condition of the poor, she placed herself in the hands of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her knowledge, and her capacity to answer any question it could come into the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness of his own desultory and superficial attitude toward the great question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve, and toward which his steps could direct themselves, with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the time, in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless did not literally characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as natural as anything else (everything in life was queer enough); he had by this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. ‘Of each’—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe was, simply, very fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends, whom long pauses, during which they simply looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, could not make uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamp-light, and interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences, all turning to the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was picnicking; but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat, or looked after the fire, or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all, in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home, never dining out nor going to parties, ignorant of the dissipations of the town. There was something in the isolation of the room, when the kettle was on the hob and he had given his wet umbrella to the maid and the Princess made him sit in a certain place near the fire, the better to dry his shoes—there was something that evoked the idea of the vie de province, as he had read about it in French works. The French term came to him because it represented more the especial note of the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the facility, of talk. She expressed herself often in the French tongue itself; she could borrow that convenience, for certain shades of meaning, though she had told Hyacinth that she didn’t like the people to whom it was native. Certainly, the quality of her conversation was not provincial; it was singularly free and unrestricted; there was nothing one mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say herself. She had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional danger-posts. Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see it—with which, in any direction, intellectually, she could fling open her windows. There was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility—in seeing a creature capable, socially, of immeasurable flights sit dove-like, with folded wings.

The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent (her days, like his own, were filled with work, and she came in the evening), and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous interest to each other, and each rejoiced that the other was not a bit different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would give her up—all nice people did, very soon; but to Hyacinth the end of her ladyship’s almost breathless enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was bewildered, but she was fascinated; and she thought the Princess not only the most distinguished, the most startling, the most edifying and the most original person in the world, but the most amusing and the most delightful to have tea with. As for the Princess, her sentiment about Lady Aurora was the same that Hyacinth’s had been: she thought her a saint, the first she had ever seen, and the purest specimen conceivable; as good in her way as St Francis of Assisi, as tender and naïve and transparent, of a spirit of charity as sublime. She held that when one met a human flower as fresh as that in the dusty ways of the world one should pluck it and wear it; and she was always inhaling Lady Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her and holding her hand. The spinster was frightened at her generosity, at the way her imagination embroidered; she wanted to convince her (as the Princess did on her own side) that such exaggerations destroyed their unfortunate subject. The Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way she put them on and wore them, in the economies she practised in order to have money for charity and the ingenuity with which these slender resources were made to go far, in the very manner in which she spoke, a kind of startled simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these particulars; to learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her bonnets at the same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves, to ask, in the same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has got a ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a French milliner, and that if there was anything in the world she loathed it was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected by the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as she was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her friend.

One evening, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual, Hyacinth met Lady Aurora on the doorstep, leaving the house. She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad news. She said, “Oh, how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague laugh; but she went her way, without stopping to talk.

Hyacinth, on going in, mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her, and this lady replied, “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner. You would have assisted at a scene.”

“At a scene?” Hyacinth repeated, not understanding what violence could have taken place between mutual adorers.

“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I am going too far.”

“I imagine you tell her things that you don’t tell me,” said Hyacinth.

“Oh, you, my dear fellow!” the Princess murmured. She spoke absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady Aurora, and as if the futility of telling things to Hyacinth had become a commonplace.

There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace with her ‘views’ being quite extinct. The tone they now, for the most part, took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging commiseration for insanity on the one hand and benightedness on the other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went to fantastic lengths in the way of reaction; and it was their habit and their entertainment to hurl all manner of denunciation at each other’s head. They had given up serious discussion altogether, and when they were not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities I have mentioned, they talked of matters as to which it could not occur to them to differ. There were evenings when the Princess did nothing but relate her life and all that she had seen of humanity, from her earliest years, in a variety of countries. If the evil side of it appeared mainly to have been presented to her view, this did not diminish the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her power, the greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light pictorial, dramatic evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him hang on her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign courts (he delighted to know how sovereigns lived and conversed), there was often, for hours together, nothing to indicate that she would have liked to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of one. Nevertheless, his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to what she was really doing in the dark and in what queer consequences she might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to know by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He did so but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the validity of his warrant; but on one occasion, when she challenged him, he replied, smiling and hesitating, “Well, I must say, it seems to me that, from what I have told you, it ought to strike you that I have a title.”

“You mean your famous engagement, your vow? Oh, that will never come to anything.”

“Why won’t it come to anything?”

“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a novel.”

“Vous me rendez la vie!” said Hyacinth, theatrically.

“You won’t have to do it,” the Princess went on.

“I think you mean I won’t do it. I have offered, at least; isn’t that a title?”

“Well, then, you won’t do it,” said the Princess; and they looked at each other a couple of minutes in silence.

“You will, I think, at the pace you are going,” the young man resumed.

“What do you know about the pace? You are not worthy to know!”

He did know, however; that is, he knew that she was in communication with foreign socialists and had, or believed she had, irons on the fire—that she held in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in great movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch her askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and had only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now become constant, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising papers; of being dragged, herself, as an accomplice in direful plots, into a court of justice—possibly into a prison. “If she would only burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she groaned to Hyacinth, in her helpless gloom. Hyacinth could only guess what it might be that she kept; asking himself whether she were seriously entangled, were being exploited by revolutionary Bohemians, predatory adventurers who counted on her getting frightened at a given moment and offering hush-money to be allowed to slip out (out of a complicity which they, of course, would never have taken seriously); or were merely coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap sensations, discussing preliminaries which, for her, could have no second stage. It would have been easy for Hyacinth to smile at the Princess’s impression that she was ‘in it’, and to conclude that even the cleverest women do not know when they are superficial, had not the vibration remained which had been imparted to his nerves two years before, of which he had spoken to his hostess at Medley—the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forces secretly arrayed against the present social order were pervasive and universal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand of an acquaintance that one might touch, or the eye of a stranger that might rest a moment upon one’s own. They were above, below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life; and it was no disproof of them to say it was too odd that they should lurk in a particular improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely their strength, and they would doubtless exhibit much stranger incidents than this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when she flattered herself that she was.

“You do go too far,” Hyacinth said to her, the evening Lady Aurora had passed him at the door.

To which she answered, “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman! She’s an angel, but she isn’t in the least in it,” she added, in a moment. She would give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when he pressed her she inquired whether he had brought the copy of Browning that he had promised the last time. If he had, he was to sit down and read it to her. In such a case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to insist; he was glad enough not to talk about the everlasting nightmare. He took Men and Women from his pocket, and read aloud for half an hour; but on his making some remark on one of the poems, at the end of this time he perceived the Princess had been paying no attention. When he charged her with this levity she only replied, looking at him musingly, “How can one, after all, go too far? That’s a word of cowards.”

“Do you mean her ladyship is a coward?”

“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions. The way the English can go half-way to a thing, and then stick in the middle!” the Princess exclaimed, impatiently.

“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me that Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”

“We are all afraid of some things, and brave about others,” the Princess went on.

“The thing Lady Aurora is most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,” Hyacinth remarked.

His companion looked at him, but she did not take this up. “There is one particular in which she would be very brave. She would marry her friend—your friend—Mr Muniment.”

“Marry him, do you think?”

“What else, pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks on.”

“And what would Belgrave Square, and Inglefield, and all the rest of it, say?”

“What do they say already, and how much does it make her swerve? She would do it in a moment; and it would be fine to see it, it would be magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle, at the idea of any great freedom of action.

“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the middle,” Hyacinth rejoined.

“Ah, it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion. When it’s a question of that, the English, to do them justice, don’t stick!”

This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth, and he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung friend should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her name, and the few habits of gentility that survived in her life, of making herself a scandal, a fable, and a nine days’ wonder, for Muniment’s sake; the young chemist’s assistant being, to his mind, as we know, exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures and renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what ideas Muniment might have on the subject of a union with a young woman who should have come out of her class for him. He would marry some day, evidently, because he would do all the natural, human, productive things; but for the present he had business on hand which would be likely to pass first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give evidence of this—he didn’t think people could really come out of their class; he held that the stamp of one’s origin is ineffaceable and that the best thing one can do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could easily imagine how it would put him out to be mixed up, closely, with a person who, like Lady Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She can’t marry him unless he asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he reflected.

“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess, thoughtfully.

XXXIX

On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at four o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his visit to Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy’s room at about five, carefully dressed and brushed, and ruddy with the freshness of an abundant washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa, with a conscious smile, knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after a moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him, “My dear Mr Muniment, you are going to see the Princess.”

“Well, have you anything to say against it?” Mr Muniment asked.

“Not a word; you know I like princesses. But you have.”

“Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,” the young man rejoined. “There’s something to be said against everything, if you’ll give yourself trouble enough.”

“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against you.”

“The man’s a sneak who is only and always praised,” Muniment remarked. “If you didn’t hope to be finely abused, where would be the encouragement?”

“Ay, but not with reason,” said Rosy, who always brightened to an argument.

“The better the reason, the greater the incentive to expose one’s self. However, you won’t hear it, if people do heave bricks at me.”

“I won’t hear it? Pray, don’t I hear everything? I should like any one to keep anything from me!” And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her recumbent head.

“There’s a good deal I keep from you, my dear,” said Paul, rather dryly.

“You mean there are things I don’t want, I don’t take any trouble, to know. Indeed and indeed there are: things that I wouldn’t know for the world—that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you was to go down on your knees. But if I did—if I did, I promise you that just as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are others,” the young woman went on—“there are others that you will just be so good as to tell me. When the Princess asked you to come and see her you refused, and you wanted to know what good it would do. I hoped you would go, then; I should have liked you to go, because I wanted to know how she lived, and whether she had things handsome, or only in the poor way she said. But I didn’t push you, because I couldn’t have told you what good it would do you: that was only the good it would have done me. At present I have heard everything from Lady Aurora, and I know that it’s all quite decent and tidy (though not really like a princess a bit), and that she knows how to turn everything about and put it best end foremost, just as I do, like, though I oughtn’t to say it, no doubt. Well, you have been, and more than once, and I have had nothing to do with it; of which I am very glad now, for reasons that you perfectly know—you’re too honest a man to pretend you don’t. Therefore, when I see you going again, I just inquire of you, as you inquired of her, what good does it do you?”

“I like it—I like it, my dear,” said Paul, with his fresh, unembarrassed smile.

“I dare say you do. So should I, in your place. But it’s the first time I have heard you express the idea that we ought to do everything we like.”

“Why not, when it doesn’t hurt any one else?”

“Oh, Mr Muniment, Mr Muniment!” Rosy exclaimed, with exaggerated solemnity, holding up a straight, attenuated forefinger at him. Then she added, “No, she doesn’t do you good, that beautiful, brilliant woman.”

“Give her time, my dear—give her time,” said Paul, looking at his watch.

“Of course you are impatient, but you must hear me. I have no doubt she’ll wait for you; you won’t lose your turn. Please, what would you do if any one was to break down altogether?”

“My bonny lassie,” the young man rejoined, “if you only keep going, I don’t care who fails.”

“Oh, I shall keep going, if it’s only to look after my friends and get justice for them,” said Miss Muniment—“the delicate, sensitive creatures who require support and protection. Have you really forgotten that we have such a one as that?”

The young man walked to the window, with his hands in his pockets, and looked out at the fading light. “Why does she go herself, then, if she doesn’t like her?”

Rose Muniment hesitated a moment. “Well, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she broke out. “I think a woman on her back is cleverer than a man on his two legs. And you such a wonderful one, too!”

“You are all too clever for me, my dear. If she goes—and twenty times a week, too—why shouldn’t I go, once in ever so long? Especially as I like her, and Lady Aurora doesn’t.”

“Lady Aurora doesn’t? Do you think she’d be guilty of hypocrisy? Lady Aurora delights in her; she won’t let me say that she herself is fit to dust the Princess’s shoes. I needn’t tell you how she goes down before them she likes. And I don’t believe you care a button; you have got something in your head, some wicked game or other, that you think she can hatch for you.”

At this Paul Muniment turned round and looked at his sister a moment, smiling still and whistling just audibly. “Why shouldn’t I care? Ain’t I soft, ain’t I susceptible?”

“I never thought I should hear you ask that, after what I have seen these four years. For four years she has come, and it’s all for you, as well it might be, and you never showing any more sense of what she’d be willing to do for you than if you had been that woollen cat on the hearth-rug!”

“What would you like me to do? Would you like me to hang round her neck and hold her hand, the same as you do?” Muniment asked.

“Yes, it would do me good, I can tell you. It’s better than what I see—the poor lady getting spotted and dim, like a mirror that wants rubbing.”

“You know a good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,” Muniment remarked in a moment, with a face that gave no sign of seeing a reason in what she said. “Your mind is too poetical. There’s nothing that I should care for that her ladyship would be willing to do for me.”

“She would marry you at a day’s notice—she’d do that.”

“I shouldn’t care for that. Besides, if I was to ask her she would never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for that, for you.”

“Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!” cried Rosy, gaily.

“But what’s to be gained, if I can have her, for you, without any risk?”

“You won’t have her for me, or for any one, when she’s dead of a broken heart.”

“Dead of a broken tea-cup!” said the young man. “And, pray, what should we live on, when you had got us set up?—the three of us, without counting the kids.”

He evidently was arguing from pure good-nature, and not in the least from curiosity; but his sister replied as eagerly as if he would be floored by her answer: “Hasn’t she got two hundred a year of her own? Don’t I know every penny of her affairs?”

Paul Muniment gave no sign of any mental criticism he may have made on Rosy’s conception of the delicate course, or of a superior policy; perhaps, indeed, for it is perfectly possible, her inquiry did not strike him as having a mixture of motives. He only rejoined, with a little pleasant, patient sigh, “I don’t want the dear old girl’s money.”

His sister, in spite of her eagerness, waited twenty seconds; then she flashed at him, “Pray, do you like the Princess’s better?”

“If I did, there would be more of it,” he answered, quietly.

“How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?” Rosy cried.

“Lord, how you give me away!” laughed her brother. “Daughters of earls, wives of princes—I have only to pick.”

“I don’t speak of the Princess, so long as there’s a prince. But if you haven’t seen that Lady Aurora is a beautiful, wonderful exception, and quite unlike any one else in all the wide world—well, all I can say is that I have.”

“I thought it was your opinion,” Paul objected, “that the swells should remain swells, and the high ones keep their place.”

“And, pray, would she lose hers if she were to marry you?”

“Her place at Inglefield, certainly,” said Paul, as patiently as if his sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.

“Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?”

“Surely you appear to think so, from the way you always question her about it,” replied Paul.

“Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any madder,” his sister continued. “They have given her up, and if she were to marry you—”

“If she were to marry me, they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,” Paul broke in.

Rosy flinched a moment; then she said, serenely, “Oh, I don’t care for that!”

“You ought to, to be consistent, though, possibly, she shouldn’t, admitting that she wouldn’t. You have more imagination than logic—which of course, for a woman, is quite right. That’s what makes you say that her ladyship is in affliction because I go to a place that she herself goes to without the least compulsion.”

“She goes to keep you off,” said Rosy, with decision.

“To keep me off?”

“To interpose, with the Princess; to be nice to her and conciliate her, so that she may not take you.”

“Did she tell you any such rigmarole as that?” Paul inquired, this time staring a little.

“Do I need to be told things, to know them? I am not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” answered Rosy, with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear that she was capable of wizardry.

“You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the young man rejoined. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a little less poor.”

“Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.”

“She knows I am not helpless so long as you are about the place, and that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.”

“She wants to assist me to assist you, then!” the girl exclaimed, with the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused; it was a spirit that seemed, at moments, in argument, to mock at her own contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you are plotting and working and waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.”

“My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She couldn’t if she would.”

“And no more do I, I suppose you mean.”

“No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would, you could. However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for there’s mighty little of it. I’m not doing much, you know.”

Rosy lay there looking up at him. “It must be pretty thick, when you talk that way. However, I don’t care what happens, for I know I shall be looked after.”

“Nothing will happen—nothing will happen,” Paul remarked, simply.

The girl’s rejoinder to this was to say in a moment, “You have a different tone since you have taken up the Princess.”

She spoke with a certain severity, but he broke out, as if he had not heard her, “I like your idea of the female aristocracy quarrelling over a dirty brute like me.”

“I don’t know how dirty you are, but I know you smell of soap,” said Rosy, with serenity. “They won’t quarrel; that’s not the way they do it. Yes, you are taking a different tone, for some purpose that I can’t discover just yet.”

“What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?” her brother asked.

“Why then do you speak as if you were not remarkable, immensely remarkable—more remarkable than anything any one, male or female, good or bad, of the aristocracy or of the vulgar sort, can ever do for you?”

“What on earth have I ever done to show it?” Paul demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know your secrets, and that’s one of them. But we’re out of the common beyond any one, you and I, and, between ourselves, with the door fastened, we might as well admit it.”

“I admit it for you, with all my heart,” said the young man, laughing.

“Well, then, if I admit it for you, that’s all that’s required.”

The brother and sister considered each other a while in silence, as if each were tasting, agreeably, the distinction the other conferred; then Muniment said, “If I’m such an awfully superior chap, why shouldn’t I behave in keeping?”

“Oh, you do, you do!”

“All the same, you don’t like it.”

“It isn’t so much what you do; it’s what she does.”

“How do you mean, what she does?”

“She makes Lady Aurora suffer.”

“Oh, I can’t go into that,” said Paul. “A man feels like a muff, talking about the women that ‘suffer’ for him.”

“Well, if they do it, I think you might bear it!” Rosy exclaimed. “That’s what a man is. When it comes to being sorry, oh, that’s too ridiculous!”

“There are plenty of things in the world I’m sorry for,” Paul rejoined, smiling. “One of them is that you should keep me gossiping here when I want to go out.”

“Oh, I don’t care if I worry her a little. Does she do it on purpose?” Rosy continued.

“You ladies must settle all that together,” Muniment answered, rubbing his hat with the cuff of his coat. It was a new one, the bravest he had ever possessed, and in a moment he put it on his head, as if to reinforce his reminder to his sister that it was time she should release him.

“Well, you do look genteel,” she remarked, complacently, gazing up at him. “No wonder she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,” she explained. “You never went to any such expense for her ladyship.”

“My dear, the Princess is worth it—she’s worth it,” said the young man, speaking seriously now, and reflectively.

“Will she help you very much?” Rosy demanded, with a strange, sudden transition to eagerness.

“Well,” said Paul, “that’s rather what I look for.”

She threw herself forward on her sofa, with a movement that was rare with her, and shaking her clasped hands she exclaimed, “Then go off, go off quickly!”

He came round and kissed her, as if he were not more struck than usual with her freakish inconsequence. “It’s not bad to have a little person at home who wants a fellow to succeed.”

“Oh, I know they will look after me,” she said, sinking back upon her pillow with an air of agreeable security.

He was aware that whenever she said ‘they’, without further elucidation, she meant the populace surging up in his rear, and he rejoined, always hilarious, “I don’t think we’ll leave it much to ‘them’.”

“No, it’s not much you’ll leave to them, I’ll be bound.”

He gave a louder laugh at this, and said, “You’re the deepest of the lot, Miss Muniment.”

Her eyes kindled at his praise, and as she rested them on her brother’s she murmured, “Well, I pity the poor Princess, too, you know.”

“Well, now, I’m not conceited, but I don’t,” Paul returned, passing in front of the little mirror on the mantel-shelf.

“Yes, you’ll succeed, and so shall I—but she won’t,” Rosy went on.

Muniment stopped a moment, with his hand on the latch of the door, and said, gravely, almost sententiously, “She is not only beautiful, as beautiful as a picture, but she is uncommon sharp, and she has taking ways, beyond anything that ever was known.”

“I know her ways,” his sister replied. Then, as he left the room, she called after him, “But I don’t care for anything, so long as you become prime minister of England!”

Three quarters of an hour after this Muniment knocked at the door in Madeira Crescent, and was immediately ushered into the parlour, where the Princess, in her bonnet and mantle, sat alone. She made no movement as he came in; she only looked up at him with a smile.

“You are braver than I gave you credit for,” she said, in her rich voice.

“I shall learn to be brave, if I associate a while longer with you. But I shall never cease to be shy,” Muniment added, standing there and looking tall in the middle of the small room. He cast his eyes about him for a place to sit down, but the Princess gave him no help to choose; she only watched him, in silence, from her own place, with her hands quietly folded in her lap. At last, when, without remonstrance from her, he had selected the most uncomfortable chair in the room, she replied—

“That’s only another name for desperate courage. I put on my bonnet, on the chance, but I didn’t expect you.”

“Well, here I am—that’s the great thing,” Muniment said, good-humouredly.

“Yes, no doubt it’s a very great thing. But it will be a still greater thing when you are there.”

“I am afraid you hope too much,” the young man observed. “Where is it? I don’t think you told me.”

The Princess drew a small folded letter from her pocket, and, without saying anything, held it out to him. He got up to take it from her, opened it, and, as he read it, remained standing in front of her. Then he went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it. At this movement she rose quickly, as if to save the document, but the expression of his face, as he turned round to her, made her stop. The smile that came into her own was a little forced. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “I take it the house is known. If we go, I suppose we may admit that we go.”

Muniment’s face showed that he had been annoyed, but he answered, quietly enough, “No writing—no writing.”

“You are terribly careful,” said the Princess.

“Careful of you—yes.”

She sank down upon her sofa again, asking her companion to ring for tea; they would do much better to have some before going out. When the order had been given, she remarked, “I see I shall have much less keen emotion than when I acted by myself.”

“Is that what you go in for—keen emotion?”

“Surely, Mr Muniment. Don’t you?”

“God forbid! I hope to have as little of it as possible.”

“Of course one doesn’t want any vague rodomontade; one wants to do something. But it would be hard if one couldn’t have a little pleasure by the way.”

“My pleasure is in quietness,” said Paul Muniment, smiling.

“So is mine. But it depends on how you understand it. Quietness, I mean, in the midst of a tumult.”

“You have rare ideas about tumults. They are not good in themselves.”

The Princess considered this a moment; then she remarked, “I wonder if you are too prudent. I shouldn’t like that. If it is made an accusation against you that you have been—where we are going—shall you deny it?”

“With that prospect it would be simpler not to go at all, wouldn’t it?” Muniment inquired.

“Which prospect do you mean? That of being found out, or that of having to lie?”

“I suppose that if you lie you are not found out,” Muniment replied, humorously.

“You won’t take me seriously,” said the Princess. She spoke without irritation, without resentment, with a kind of resigned sadness. But there was a certain fineness of reproach in the tone in which she added, “I don’t believe you want to go at all.”

“Why else should I have come, especially if I don’t take you seriously?”

“That has never been a reason for a man’s not going to see a woman,” said the Princess. “It’s usually a reason in favour of it.”

Muniment turned his smiling eyes over the room, looking from one article of furniture to another: this was a way he had when he was engaged in a discussion, and it suggested not so much that he was reflecting on what his interlocutor said as that his thoughts were pursuing a cheerfully independent course. Presently he observed, “I don’t know that I quite understand what you mean by that question of taking a woman seriously.”

“Ah, you are very perfect,” murmured the Princess. “Don’t you consider that the changes you look for will be also for our benefit?”

“I don’t think they will alter your position.”

“If I didn’t hope for that, I wouldn’t do anything,” said the Princess.

“Oh, I have no doubt you’ll do a great deal.”

The young man’s companion was silent for some minutes, during which he also was content to say nothing. “I wonder you can find it in your conscience to work with me,” she observed at last.

“It isn’t in my conscience I find it,” said Muniment, laughing.

The maid-servant brought in the tea, and while the Princess was making a place for it on a little table beside her she exclaimed, “Well, I don’t care, for I think I have you in my power!”

“You have every one in your power,” returned Muniment.

“Every one is no one,” the Princess replied, rather dryly; and a moment later she said to him, “That extraordinary little sister of yours—surely you take her seriously?”

“I’m wonderful fond of her, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t think her position will ever be altered.”

“Are you alluding to her position in bed? If you consider that she will never recover her health,” the Princess said, “I am very sorry to hear it.”

“Oh, her health will do. I mean that she will continue to be, like all the most amiable women, just a kind of ornament to life.”

The Princess had already perceived that he pronounced amiable ‘emiable’; but she had accepted this peculiarity of her visitor in the spirit of imaginative transfigurement in which she had accepted several others. “To your life, of course. She can hardly be said to be an ornament to her own.”

“Her life and mine are all one.”

“She is certainly magnificent,” said the Princess. While he was drinking his tea she remarked to him that for a revolutionist he was certainly most extraordinary; and he inquired, in answer, whether it were not rather in keeping for revolutionists to be extraordinary. He drank three cups, declaring that his hostess’s decoction was fine; it was better, even, than Lady Aurora’s. This led him to observe, as he put down his third cup, looking round the room again, lovingly, almost covetously, “You’ve got everything so handy, I don’t see what interest you can have.”

“How do you mean, what interest?”

“In getting in so uncommon deep.”

On the instant the Princess’s expression flashed into pure passion. “Do you consider that I am in—really far?”

“Up to your neck, ma’am.”

“And do you think that il y va of my neck—I mean that it’s in danger?” she translated, eagerly.

“Oh, I understand your French. Well, I’ll look after you,” Muniment said.

“Remember, then, definitely, that I expect not to lie.”

“Not even for me?” Then Muniment added, in the same familiar tone, which was not rough nor wanting in respect, but only homely and direct, suggestive of growing acquaintance, “If I was your husband I would come and take you away.”

“Please don’t speak of my husband,” said the Princess, gravely. “You have no qualification for doing so; you know nothing whatever about him.”

“I know what Hyacinth has told me.”

“Oh, Hyacinth!” the Princess murmured, impatiently. There was another silence of some minutes, not disconnected, apparently, from this reference to the little bookbinder; but when Muniment spoke, after the interval, it was not to carry on the allusion—

“Of course you think me very plain, very rude.”

“Certainly, you have not such a nice address as Hyacinth,” the Princess rejoined, not desiring, on her side, to evade the topic. “But that is given to very few,” she added; “and I don’t know that pretty manners are exactly what we are working for.”

“Ay, it won’t be very endearing when we cut down a few allowances,” said Muniment. “But I want to please you; I want to be as much as possible like Hyacinth,” he went on.

“That is not the way to please me. I don’t forgive him; he’s very silly.”

“Ah, don’t say that; he’s a little brick!” Muniment exclaimed.

“He’s a dear fellow, with extraordinary qualities, but so deplorably conventional.”

“Yes, talking about taking things seriously—he takes them seriously,” remarked Muniment.

“Has he ever told you his life?” asked the Princess.

“He hasn’t required to tell me. I’ve seen a good bit of it.”

“Yes, but I mean before you knew him.”

Muniment reflected a moment. “His birth, and his poor mother? I think it was Rosy told me about that.”

“And, pray, how did she know?”

“Ah, when you come to the way Rosy knows!” said Muniment, laughing. “She doesn’t like people in that predicament. She thinks we ought all to be finely born.”

“Then they agree, for so does poor Hyacinth.” The Princess hesitated an instant; then she said, as if with a quick effort, “I want to ask you something. Have you had a visit from Mr Vetch?”

“The old gentleman who fiddles? No, he has never done me that honour.”

“It was because I prevented him, then. I told him to leave it to me.”

“To leave what, now?” Muniment looked at her in placid perplexity.

“He is in great distress about Hyacinth—about the danger he runs. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Muniment replied, slowly. “But what does he know about it? I thought it was supposed to be a deadly secret.”

“So it is. He doesn’t know anything; he only suspects.”

“How do you know, then?”

The Princess hesitated again. “Oh, I’m like Rosy—I find out. Mr Vetch, as I suppose you are aware, has known Hyacinth all his life; he takes a most affectionate interest in him. He believes there is something hanging over him, and he wants it to be turned off, to be stopped.” The Princess paused at this, but her visitor made no response, and she continued: “He was going to see you, to beg you to do something, to interfere; he seemed to think that your power, in such a matter, would be very great; but, as I tell you, I requested him, as a particular favour to me, to let you alone.”

“What favour would it be to you?” Muniment asked.

“It would give me the satisfaction of feeling that you were not worried.”

Muniment appeared struck with the curious inadequacy of this explanation, considering what was at stake; he broke into a laugh and remarked, “That was considerate of you, beyond everything.”

“It was not meant as consideration for you; it was a piece of calculation.” The Princess, having made this announcement, gathered up her gloves and turned away, walking to the chimney-piece, where she stood a moment arranging her bonnet-ribbons in the mirror with which it was decorated. Muniment watched her with evident curiosity; in spite both of his inaccessibility to nervous agitation and of the sceptical theories he entertained about her, he was not proof against her general faculty of creating a feeling of suspense, a tension of interest, on the part of those who associated with her. He followed her movements, but plainly he didn’t follow her calculations, so that he could only listen more attentively when she inquired suddenly, “Do you know why I asked you to come and see me? Do you know why I went to see your sister? It was all a plan,” said the Princess.

“We hoped it was just an ordinary humane, social impulse,” the young man returned.

“It was humane, it was even social, but it was not ordinary. I wanted to save Hyacinth.”

“To save him?”

“I wanted to be able to talk with you just as I am talking now.”

“That was a fine idea!” Muniment exclaimed, ingenuously.

“I have an exceeding, a quite inexpressible, regard for him. I have no patience with some of his opinions, and that is why I permitted myself to say just now that he is silly. But, after all, the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don’t see why they should be what we hate them for. Hyacinth Robinson’s nature is singularly generous and his intelligence very fine, though there are some things that he muddles up. You just now expressed strongly your own regard for him; therefore we ought to be perfectly agreed. Agreed, I mean, about getting him out of his scrape.”

Muniment had the air of a man who felt that he must consider a little before he assented to these successive propositions; it being a limitation of his intellect that he could not respond without understanding. After a moment he answered, referring to the Princess’s last remark, in which the others appeared to culminate, and at the same time shaking his head a little and smiling, “His scrape isn’t important.”

“You thought it was when you got him into it.”

“I thought it would give him pleasure,” said Muniment.

“That’s not a reason for letting people do what isn’t good for them.”

“I wasn’t thinking so much about what would be good for him as about what would be bad for some others. He can do as he likes.”

“That’s easy to say. They must be persuaded not to call upon him.”

“Persuade them, then, dear madam.”

“How can I persuade them? If I could, I wouldn’t have approached you. I have no influence, and even if I had my motives would be suspected. You are the one to interpose.”

“Shall I tell them he funks it?” Muniment asked.

“He doesn’t—he doesn’t!” exclaimed the Princess.

“On what ground, then, shall I put it?”

“Tell them he has changed his opinions.”

“Wouldn’t that be rather like denouncing him as a traitor, and doing it hypocritically?”

“Tell them then it’s simply my wish.”

“That won’t do you much good,” Muniment said, with his natural laugh.

“Will it put me in danger? That’s exactly what I want.”

“Yes; but as I understand you, you want to suffer for the people, not by them. You are very fond of Robinson; it couldn’t be otherwise,” the young man went on. “But you ought to remember that, in the line you have chosen, our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our shrinkings—” His voice had become low and grave, and he paused a little, while the Princess’s deep and lovely eyes, attaching themselves to his face, showed that in an instant she was affected by this unwonted adjuration. He spoke now as if he were taking her seriously. “All those things are as nothing, and must never weigh a feather beside our service.”

The Princess began to draw on her gloves. “You’re a most extraordinary man.”

“That’s what Rosy tells me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“Do Hyacinth’s job? Because it’s better to do my own.”

“And, pray, what is your own?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul Muniment, with perfect serenity and good-nature. “I expect to be instructed.”

“Have you taken an oath, like Hyacinth?”

“Ah, madam, the oaths I take I don’t tell,” said the young man, gravely.

“Oh, you . . .!” the Princess murmured, with an ambiguous cadence. She appeared to dismiss the question, but to suggest at the same time that he was very abnormal. This imputation was further conveyed by the next words she uttered: “And can you see a dear friend whirled away like that?”

At this, for the first time, Paul Muniment exhibited a certain irritation. “You had better leave my dear friend to me.”

The Princess, with her eyes still fixed upon him, gave a long, soft sigh. “Well, then, shall we go?”

Muniment took up his hat again, but he made no movement toward the door. “If you did me the honour to seek my acquaintance, to ask me to come and see you, only in order to say what you have just said about Hyacinth, perhaps we needn’t carry out the form of going to the place you proposed. Wasn’t this only your pretext?”

“I believe you are afraid!” the Princess exclaimed; but in spite of her exclamation the pair presently went out of the house. They quitted the door together, after having stood on the step for a moment, looking up and down, apparently for a cab. So far as the darkness, which was now complete, permitted the prospect to be scanned, there was no such vehicle within hail. They turned to the left, and after a walk of several minutes, during which they were engaged in small, dull by-streets, emerged upon a more populous way, where there were lighted shops and omnibuses and the evident chance of a hansom. Here they paused again, and very soon an empty hansom passed, and, at a sign, pulled up near them. Meanwhile, it should be recorded, they had been followed, at an interval, by a cautious figure, a person who, in Madeira Crescent, when they came out of the house, was stationed on the other side of the street, at a considerable distance. When they appeared he retreated a little, still however keeping them in sight. When they moved away he moved in the same direction, watching them but maintaining his distance. He drew nearer, seemingly because he could not control his eagerness, as they turned into Westbourne Grove, and during the minute they stood there he was exposed to recognition by the Princess if she had happened to turn her head. In the event of her having felt such an impulse she would have discovered, in the lamp-light, that her noble husband was hovering in her rear. But the Princess was otherwise occupied; she failed to see that at one moment he came so close as to suggest that he had an intention of addressing himself to the couple. The reader scarcely needs to be informed that his real intention was to satisfy himself as to the kind of person his wife was walking with. The time allowed him for this research was brief, especially as he had perceived, more rapidly than he sometimes perceived things, that they were looking for a vehicle and that with its assistance they would pass out of his range—a reflection which caused him to give half his attention to the business of hailing any second cab which should come that way. There are parts of London in which you may never see a cab at all, but there are none in which you may see only one; in accordance with which fortunate truth Prince Casamassima was able to wave his stick to good purpose as soon as the two objects of his pursuit had rattled away. Behind them now, in the gloom, he had no fear of being seen. In little more than an instant he had jumped into another hansom, the driver of which accompanied the usual exclamation of “All right, sir!” with a small, amused grunt, which the Prince thought eminently British, after he had hissed at him, over the hood, expressively, and in a manner by no means indicative of that nationality, the injunction, “Follow, follow, follow!”

XL

An hour after the Princess had left the house with Paul Muniment, Madame Grandoni came down to supper, a meal of which she partook, in gloomy solitude, in the little back parlour. She had pushed away her plate, and sat motionless, staring at the crumpled cloth, with her hands folded on the edge of the table, when she became aware that a gentleman had been ushered into the drawing-room and was standing before the fire in an attitude of discreet expectancy. At the same moment the maid-servant approached the old lady, remarking with bated breath, “The Prince, the Prince, mum! It’s you he ’ave asked for, mum!” Upon this, Madame Grandoni called out to the visitor from her place, addressed him as her poor illustrious friend and bade him come and give her his arm. He obeyed with solemn alacrity, and conducted her into the front room, near the fire. He helped her to arrange herself in her arm-chair and to gather her shawl about her; then he seated himself near her and remained with his dismal eyes bent upon her. After a moment she said, “Tell me something about Rome. The grass in the Villa Borghese must already be thick with flowers.”

“I would have brought you some, if I had thought,” he answered. Then he turned his gaze about the room. “Yes, you may well ask, in such a black little hole as this. My wife should not live here,” he added.

“Ah, my dear friend, for all that she’s your wife!” the old woman exclaimed.

The Prince sprang up in sudden, passionate agitation, and then she saw that the rigid quietness with which he had come into the room and greeted her was only an effort of his good manners. He was really trembling with excitement. “It is true—it is true! She has lovers—she has lovers!” he broke out. “I have seen it with my eyes, and I have come here to know!”

“I don’t know what you have seen, but your coming here to know will not have helped you much. Besides, if you have seen, you know for yourself. At any rate, I have ceased to be able to tell you.”

“You are afraid—you are afraid!” cried the visitor, with a wild accusatory gesture.

Madame Grandoni looked up at him with slow speculation. “Sit down and be tranquil, very tranquil. I have ceased to pay attention—I take no heed.”

“Well, I do, then,” said the Prince, subsiding a little. “Don’t you know she has gone out to a house, in a horrible quarter, with a man?”

“I think it highly probable, dear Prince.”

“And who is he? That’s what I want to discover.”

“How can I tell you? I haven’t seen him.”

He looked at her a moment, with his distended eyes. “Dear lady, is that kind to me, when I have counted on you?”

“Oh, I am not kind any more; it’s not a question of that. I am angry—as angry, almost, as you.”

“Then why don’t you watch her, eh?”

“It’s not with her I am angry. It’s with myself,” said Madame Grandoni, meditatively.

“For becoming so indifferent, do you mean?”

“On the contrary, for staying in the house.”

“Thank God, you are still here, or I couldn’t have come. But what a lodging for the Princess!” the visitor exclaimed. “She might at least live in a manner befitting.”

“Eh, the last time you were in London you thought it was too costly!” she cried.

He hesitated a moment. “Whatever she does is wrong. Is it because it’s so bad that you must go?” he went on.

“It is foolish—foolish—foolish,” said Madame Grandoni, slowly, impressively.

“Foolish, chè, chè! He was in the house nearly an hour, this one.”

“In the house? In what house?”

“Here, where you sit. I saw him go in, and when he came out it was after a long time, with her.”

“And where were you, meanwhile?”

Again Prince Casamassima hesitated. “I was on the other side of the street. When they came out I followed them. It was more than an hour ago.”

“Was it for that you came to London?”

“Ah, what I came for! To put myself in hell!”

“You had better go back to Rome,” said Madame Grandoni.

“Of course I will go back, but if you will tell me who this one is! How can you be ignorant, dear friend, when he comes freely in and out of the house where I have to watch, at the door, for a moment that I can snatch? He was not the same as the other.”

“As the other?”

“Doubtless there are fifty! I mean the little one whom I met in the other house, that Sunday afternoon.”

“I sit in my room almost always now,” said the old woman. “I only come down to eat.”

“Dear lady, it would be better if you would sit here,” the Prince remarked.

“Better for whom?”

“I mean that if you did not withdraw yourself you could at least answer my questions.”

“Ah, but I have not the slightest desire to answer them,” Madame Grandoni replied. “You must remember that I am not here as your spy.”

“No,” said the Prince, in a tone of extreme and simple melancholy. “If you had given me more information I should not have been obliged to come here myself. I arrived in London only this morning, and this evening I spent two hours walking up and down opposite the house, like a groom waiting for his master to come back from a ride. I wanted a personal impression. It was so that I saw him come in. He is not a gentleman—not even like some of the strange ones here.”

“I think he is Scotch,” remarked Madame Grandoni.

“Ah, then, you have seen him?”

“No, but I have heard him. He speaks very loud—the floors of this house are not built as we build in Italy—and his voice is the same that I have heard in the people of that country. Besides, she has told me—some things. He is a chemist’s assistant.”

“A chemist’s assistant? Santo Dio! And the other one, a year ago—more than a year ago—was a bookbinder.”

“Oh, the bookbinder!” murmured Madame Grandoni.

“And does she associate with no people of good? Has she no other society?”

“For me to tell you more, Prince, you must wait till I am free,” said the old lady.

“How do you mean, free?”

“I must choose. I must either go away—and then I can tell you what I have seen—or if I stay here I must hold my tongue.”

“But if you go away you will have seen nothing,” the Prince objected.

“Ah, plenty as it is—more than I ever expected to!”

The Prince clasped his hands together in tremulous suppliance; but at the same time he smiled, as if to conciliate, to corrupt. “Dearest friend, you torment my curiosity. If you will tell me this, I will never ask you anything more. Where did they go? For the love of God, what is that house?”

“I know nothing of their houses,” she returned, with an impatient shrug.

“Then there are others—there are many?” She made no answer, but sat brooding, with her chin in her protrusive kerchief. Her visitor presently continued, in a soft, earnest tone, with his beautiful Italian distinctness, as if his lips cut and carved the sound, while his fine fingers quivered into quick, emphasising gestures, “The street is small and black, but it is like all the streets. It has no importance; it is at the end of an endless imbroglio. They drove for twenty minutes; then they stopped their cab and got out. They went together on foot some minutes more. There were many turns; they seemed to know them well. For me it was very difficult—of course I also got out; I had to stay so far behind—close against the houses. Chiffinch Street, N.E.—that was the name,” the Prince continued, pronouncing the word with difficulty; “and the house is number 32—I looked at that after they went in. It’s a very bad house—worse than this; but it has no sign of a chemist, and there are no shops in the street. They rang the bell—only once, though they waited a long time; it seemed to me, at least, that they did not touch it again. It was several minutes before the door was opened; and that was a bad time for me, because as they stood there they looked up and down. Fortunately you know the air of this place! I saw no light in the house—not even after they went in. Who let them enter I couldn’t tell. I waited nearly half an hour, to see how long they would stay and what they would do on coming out; then, at last, my impatience brought me here, for to know she was absent made me hope I might see you. While I was there two persons went in—two men, together, smoking, who looked like artisti (I didn’t see them near), but no one came out. I could see they took their cigars—and you can fancy what tobacco!—into the presence of the Princess. Formerly,” pursued Madame Grandoni’s visitor, with a touching attempt at a jocular treatment of this point, “she never tolerated smoking—never mine, at least. The street is very quiet—very few people pass. Now what is the house? Is it where that man lives?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

He had been encouraged by her consenting, in spite of her first protests, to listen to him—he could see she was listening; and he was still more encouraged when, after a moment, she answered his question by a question of her own: “Did you cross the river to go there? I know that he lives over the water.”

“Ah, no, it was not in that part. I tried to ask the cabman who brought me back to explain to me what it is called; but I couldn’t make him understand. They have heavy minds,” the Prince declared. Then he pursued, drawing a little closer to his hostess: “But what were they doing there? Why did she go with him?”

“They are plotting. There!” said Madame Grandoni.

“You mean a secret society, a band of revolutionists and murderers? Capisco bene—that is not new to me. But perhaps they only pretend it’s for that,” added the Prince.

“Only pretend? Why should they pretend? That is not Christina’s way.”

“There are other possibilities,” the Prince observed.

“Oh, of course, when your wife goes away with strange men, in the dark, to far-away houses, you can think anything you like, and I have nothing to say to your thoughts. I have my own, but they are my own affair, and I shall not undertake to defend Christina, for she is indefensible. When she does the things she does, she provokes, she invites, the worst construction; there let it rest, save for this one remark, which I will content myself with making: if she were a licentious woman she would not behave as she does now, she would not expose herself to irresistible interpretations; the appearance of everything would be good and proper. I simply tell you what I believe. If I believed that what she is doing concerned you alone, I should say nothing about it—at least sitting here. But it concerns others, it concerns every one, so I will open my mouth at last. She has gone to that house to break up society.”

“To break it up, yes, as she has wanted before?”

“Oh, more than before! She is very much entangled. She has relations with people who are watched by the police. She has not told me, but I have perceived it by simply living with her.”

Prince Casamassima stared. “And is she watched by the police?”

“I can’t tell you; it is very possible—except that the police here is not like that of other countries.”

“It is more stupid,” said the Prince. He gazed at Madame Grandoni with a flush of shame on his face. “Will she bring us to that scandal? It would be the worst of all.”

“There is one chance—the chance that she will get tired of it,” the old lady remarked. “Only the scandal may come before that.”

“Dear friend, she is the devil,” said the Prince, solemnly.

“No, she is not the devil, because she wishes to do good.”

“What good did she ever wish to do to me?” the Italian demanded, with glowing eyes.

Madame Grandoni shook her head very sadly. “You can do no good, of any kind, to each other. Each on your own side, you must be quiet.”

“How can I be quiet when I hear of such infamies?” Prince Casamassima got up, in his violence, and, in a tone which caused his companion to burst into a short, incongruous laugh as soon as she heard the words, exclaimed, “She shall not break up society!”

“No, she will bore herself before the trick is played. Make up your mind to that.”

“That is what I expected to find—that the caprice was over. She has passed through so many follies.”

“Give her time—give her time,” replied Madame Grandoni.

“Time to drag my name into an assize-court? Those people are robbers, incendiaries, murderers!”

“You can say nothing to me about them that I haven’t said to her.”

“And how does she defend herself?”

“Defend herself? Did you ever hear Christina do that?” Madame Grandoni asked. “The only thing she says to me is, ‘Don’t be afraid; I promise you by all that’s sacred that you shan’t suffer.’ She speaks as if she had it all in her hands. That is very well. No doubt I’m a selfish old woman, but, after all, one has a heart for others.”

“And so have I, I think I may pretend,” said the Prince. “You tell me to give her time, and it is certain that she will take it, whether I give it or not. But I can at least stop giving her money. By heaven, it’s my duty, as an honest man.”

“She tells me that as it is you don’t give her much.”

“Much, dear lady? It depends on what you call so. It’s enough to make all these scoundrels flock around her.”

“They are not all scoundrels, any more than she is. That is the strange part of it,” said the old woman, with a weary sigh.

“But this fellow, the chemist—to-night—what do you call him?”

“She has spoken to me of him as a most estimable young man.”

“But she thinks it’s estimable to blow us all up,” the Prince returned. “Doesn’t he take her money?”

“I don’t know what he takes. But there are some things—heaven forbid one should forget them! The misery of London is something fearful.”

“Che vuole? There is misery everywhere,” returned the Prince. “It is the will of God. Ci vuol’ pazienza! And in this country does no one give alms?”

“Every one, I believe. But it appears that it is not enough.”

The Prince said nothing for a moment; this statement of Madame Grandoni’s seemed to present difficulties. The solution, however, soon suggested itself; it was expressed in the inquiry, “What will you have in a country which has not the true faith?”

“Ah, the true faith is a great thing; but there is suffering even in countries that have it.”

“Evidentemente. But it helps suffering to be borne, and, later, it makes it up; whereas here—!” said the old lady’s visitor, with a melancholy smile. “If I may speak of myself, it is to me, in my circumstances, a support.”

“That is good,” said Madame Grandoni.

He stood before her, resting his eyes for a moment on the floor. “And the famous Cholto—Godfrey Gerald—does he come no more?”

“I haven’t seen him for months, and know nothing about him.”

“He doesn’t like the chemists and the bookbinders, eh?” asked the Prince.

“Ah, it was he who first brought them—to gratify your wife.”

“If they have turned him out, then, that is very well. Now, if only some one could turn them out!”

“Aspetta, aspetta!” said the old woman.

“That is very good advice, but to follow it isn’t amusing.” Then the Prince added, “You alluded, just now, as to something particular, to quel giovane, the young artisan whom I met in the other house. Is he also estimable, or has he paid the penalty of his crimes?”

“He has paid the penalty, but I don’t know of what. I have nothing bad to tell you of him, except that I think his star is on the wane.”

“Poverino!” the Prince exclaimed.

“That is exactly the manner in which I addressed him the first time I saw him. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I felt that it would happen somehow. It has happened through his changing his opinions. He has now the same idea as you—that ci vuol’ pazienza.”

The Prince listened with the same expression of wounded eagerness, the same parted lips and excited eyes, to every added fact that dropped from Madame Grandoni’s lips. “That, at least, is more honest. Then he doesn’t go to Chiffinch Street?”

“I don’t know about Chiffinch Street; but it would be my impression that he doesn’t go anywhere that Christina and the other one—the Scotchman—go together. But these are delicate matters,” the old woman pursued.

They seemed much to interest her interlocutor. “Do you mean that the Scotchman is—what shall I call it?—his successor?”

For a moment Madame Grandoni made no reply. “I think that this case is different. But I don’t understand; it was the other, the little one, that helped her to know the Scotchman.”

“And now they have quarrelled—about my wife? It is all tremendously edifying!” the Prince exclaimed.

“I can’t tell you, and shouldn’t have attempted it, only that Assunta talks to me.”

“I wish she would talk to me,” said the Prince, wistfully.

“Ah, my friend, if Christina were to find you getting at her servants!”

“How could it be worse for me than it is now? However, I don’t know why I speak as if I cared, for I don’t care any more. I have given her up. It is finished.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Madame Grandoni, gravely.

“You yourself made the distinction, perfectly. So long as she endeavoured only to injure me, and in my private capacity, I could condone, I could wait, I could hope. But since she has so recklessly thrown herself into the most criminal undertakings, since she lifts her hand with a determined purpose, as you tell me, against the most sacred institutions—it is too much; ah, yes, it is too much! She may go her way; she is no wife of mine. Not another penny of mine shall go into her pocket, and into that of the wretches who prey upon her, who have corrupted her.”

“Dear Prince, I think you are right. And yet I am sorry!” sighed the old woman, extending her hand for assistance to rise from her chair. “If she becomes really poor, it will be much more difficult for me to leave her. This is not poverty, and not even a good imitation of it, as she would like it to be. But what will be said of me if having remained with her through so much of her splendour, I turn away from her the moment she begins to want?”

“Dear lady, do you ask that to make me relent?” the Prince inquired, after an hesitation.

“Not in the least; for whatever is said and whatever you do, there is nothing for me in decency, at present, but to pack my trunk. Judge, by the way I have tattled.”