BOOK FIRST (continued 2)

When therefore this young lady reappeared with all the signs of accomplished survival she couldn’t fail to ask herself whether, under a specious seeming, the phenomenon didn’t simply represent the triumph of vice. She was alarmed, but she would have given her silver thimble to know the girl’s history, and between her shock and her curiosity she passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt the familiar mysterious creature to be playing with her; revenging herself for former animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a prying little spinster who could now make no figure beside her. If it was not the triumph of vice it was at least the triumph of impertinence, as well as of youth, health and a greater acquaintance with the art of dress than Miss Pynsent could boast, for all her ridiculous signboards. She perceived, or she believed she perceived, that Millicent wanted to scare her, to make her think she had come after Hyacinth, that she wished to get hold of him and somehow mislead and tempt him. I should be sorry to impute to Miss Henning any motive more complicated than the desire to amuse herself, of a Saturday afternoon, by a ramble her vigorous legs had no occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed that with her shrewd guess of this estimate of her as a ravening wolf and of her early playmate as an unspotted lamb she laughed out, in Miss Pynsent’s anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly and without deigning to explain. But what indeed had she come for if she hadn’t come for Hyacinth? It was not for the love of the dressmaker’s pretty ways. She remembered the boy and some of their tender passages, and in the wantonness of her full-blown freedom—her attachment also to any tolerable pretext for wandering through the streets of London and gazing into shop-windows—had said to herself she might dedicate an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, might revisit the scenes of her childhood. She considered that her childhood had ended with the departure of her family from Lomax Place. If the tenants of that scarce-dissimulated slum had never learned what their banished fellows were to go through she herself had at least retained a deep impression of those horrible intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone downhill, to the very bottom; and in her humbler moments Millicent sometimes wondered what lucky star had checked her own descent and indeed enabled her to mount the slope again. In her humbler moments, I say, for as a general thing she was provided with an explanation of any good fortune that might befall her. What was more natural than that a girl should achieve miracles when she was at once so handsome and so clever? Millicent thought with compassion of the young persons whom a niggardly fate had endowed with only one of these advantages. She was good-natured, but she had no idea of gratifying Miss Pynsent’s curiosity: it seemed to her quite a sufficient kindness to stimulate it.

She told the dressmaker she had a high position at a great haberdasher’s in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace; she was in the department for jackets and mantles; she put on all these articles to show them off to the customers, and on her person they appeared to such advantage that nothing she took up ever failed to go off. Miss Pynsent could imagine from this how highly her services were prized. She had had a splendid offer from another establishment, an immense one in Oxford Street, and was just thinking if she should accept it. “We have to be beautifully dressed, but I don’t care, because I like to look nice,” she remarked to her hostess, who at the end of half an hour, very grave behind the clumsy glasses she had been obliged to wear of late years, seemed still not to know what to make of her. On the subject of her parents, of her history during the interval that was to be accounted for, the girl was large and vague, and Miss Pynsent saw that the domestic circle had not even a shadow of sanctity for her. She stood on her own feet—stood very firm. Her staying so long, her remaining over the half-hour, proved she had come for Hyacinth, since poor Amanda gave her as little information as was decent, told her nothing that would encourage or attract. She simply mentioned that Mr. Robinson (she was careful to speak of him in that manner) had given his attention to bookbinding and had served an apprenticeship in a house where they turned out the best work of that kind that was to be found in London.

“A bookbindery? Laws!” said Miss Henning. “Do you mean they get them up for the shops? Well, I always thought he would have something to do with books.” Then she added: “But I didn’t think he would ever follow a trade.”

“A trade?” cried Miss Pynsent. “You should hear Mr. Robinson speak of it. He considers it too lovely, quite one of the fine arts.”

Millicent smiled as if she knew how people often considered things, and remarked that very likely it was tidy comfortable work, but she couldn’t believe there was much to be seen in it. “Perhaps you’ll say there’s more than there is here,” she went on, finding at last an effect of irritation, or reprehension, an implication of aggressive respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker’s sitting for so many years in her close brown little den with the foggy familiarities of Lomax Place on the other side of the pane. Millicent liked to think she herself was strong, yet she was not strong enough for that.

This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very cruel; but she reflected it was natural one should be insulted if one talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner of a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference between them she was right in feeling it to be in her favour. Miss Pynsent’s “cut,” as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and in the application of gimp and the matching of colours she was not absolutely to be trusted; but morally she had the best taste in the world. “I haven’t so much work as I used to have, if that’s what you mean. My eyes are not so good and my health has failed with advancing years.”

I know not to what extent Millicent was touched by the dignity of this admission, but she replied without embarrassment that what Miss Pynsent wanted was a smart young assistant, some nice girl of a “tasty” turn who would brighten up the business and give her new ideas. “I can see you’ve got the same old ones, always: I can tell that by the way you’ve stuck the braid on that dress”; and she directed a poke of her neat little umbrella at the drapery in the dressmaker’s lap. She continued to patronise and exasperate her, and to offer her consolation and encouragement with the heaviest hand that had ever been applied to Miss Pynsent’s sensitive surface. Poor Amanda ended by gazing at her as if she had been a public performer of some kind, a ballad-singer or a conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself whether the creature could be (in her own mind) the “nice girl” who was to regild the tarnished sign. Miss Pynsent had had assistants in the past—she had even once, for a few months, had a “forewoman”; and some of these damsels had been precious specimens, whose misdemeanours lived vividly in her memory. Never, all the same, in her worst hour of delusion, had she trusted her interests to such an exponent of the latest thing as this. She was quickly reassured as to Millicent’s own views, perceiving more and more that she was a tremendous highflyer, who required a much larger field of action than the musty bower she now honoured, goodness only knew why, with her presence. Miss Pynsent held her tongue as she always did when the sorrow of her life had been touched, the thought of the slow, inexorable decline on which she had entered that day, nearly ten years before, when her hesitations and scruples resolved themselves into a hideous mistake. The deep conviction of error on this unspeakably important occasion had ached and throbbed within her ever since like an incurable disease. She had sown in her boy’s mind the seeds of shame and rancour; she had made him conscious of his stigma, of his exquisitely vulnerable spot, and condemned him to know that for him the sun would never shine as it shone for most others. By the time he was sixteen years old she had learned—or believed she had learned—the judgement he had passed on her, and at that period she had lived through a series of horrible months, an ordeal in which every element of her old prosperity perished. She cried her eyes out, on coming to a sense of her blunder, so blinded and weakened herself with weeping that she might for a while have believed she should never be able to touch a needle again. She lost all interest in her work, and that play of invention which had always been her pride deserted her, together with the reputation of keeping the tidiest lodgings in Lomax Place. A couple of commercial gentlemen and a Welsh plumber of religious tendencies who for several years had made her establishment their home withdrew their patronage on the ground that the airing of her beds was not what it used to be, and disseminated cruelly this injurious legend. She ceased to notice or to care how sleeves were worn, and on the question of flounces and gores her mind was a blank. She fell into a grievous debility and then into a long, low, languid fever, during which Hyacinth tended her with a devotion that only made the wrong she had done him seem sharper, and that determined in Mr. Vetch, so soon as she was able to hold up her head a little, the impulse to come and sit with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She re-established to a certain extent, after a time, her connexion, so far as the letting of her rooms was concerned (from the other department of her activity the tide had ebbed apparently for ever); but nothing was the same again, and she knew it was the beginning of the end. So it had gone on, and she watched the end approach; she felt it very near indeed when a child she had seen playing in the gutters came to flaunt it over her in silk and lace. She gave a low, inaudible sigh of relief as Millicent at last got up and stood there, smoothing the glossy cylinder of her umbrella.

“Mind you give my love to Hyacinth,” the girl said with an assurance which showed all her insensibility to tacit protests. “I don’t care if you do guess that if I’ve stopped so long it was in the hope he would be dropping in to his tea. You can tell him I sat an hour, on purpose, if you like; there’s no shame in my wanting to see my childhood’s sweetheart. He may know I call him that!” Millicent continued with her showroom laugh, as Miss Pynsent judged it to be; conferring these permissions, successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do give him my best love and tell him I hope he’ll come and see me. I see you won’t tell him anything. I don’t know what you’re afraid of; but I’ll leave my card for him, all the same.” She drew forth a little bright-coloured pocket-book, and it was with amazement that Miss Pynsent saw her extract from it a morsel of engraved pasteboard—so monstrous did it seem that one of the squalid little Hennings should have lived to display this emblem of social consideration. Millicent enjoyed the effect she produced as she laid the card on the table, and gave another ringing peal of mirth at the sight of her hostess’s half-hungry, half-astonished look. “What do you think I want to do with him? I could swallow him at a single bite!” she cried.

Poor Amanda gave no second glance at the document on the table, though she had perceived it contained, in the corner, her visitor’s address, which Millicent had amused herself ingeniously with not mentioning: she only got up, laying down her work with an agitated hand, so that she should be able to see Miss Henning well out of the house. “You needn’t think I shall put myself out to keep him in the dark. I shall certainly tell him you’ve been here, and exactly how you strike me.”

“Of course you’ll say something nasty—like you used to when I was a child. You usually let me ’ave it then, you know!”

“Ah well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at this reminder of an acerbity which the girl’s present development caused to appear absurdly ineffectual, “you’re very different now, when I think what you’ve come from.”

“What I’ve come from?” Millicent threw back her head and opened her eyes very wide, while all her feathers and ribbons nodded. “Did you want me to stick fast in this low place for the rest of my days? You’ve had to stay in it yourself, so you might speak civilly of it.” She coloured and raised her voice and looked magnificent in her scorn. “And pray what have you come from yourself, and what has he come from—the mysterious ‘Mr. Robinson’ who used to be such a puzzle to the whole Plice? I thought perhaps I might clear it up, but you haven’t told me that yet!”

Miss Pynsent turned straight away, covering her ears with her hands. “I’ve nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried with a trembling voice.

V

It was in this way she failed either to see or to hear the opening of the door of the room, which obeyed a slow, apparently cautious impulse given it from the hall and revealed the figure of a young man standing there with a short pipe in his teeth. There was something in his face which immediately told Millicent Henning he had heard her last tones resound into the passage. He entered as if, young as he was, he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called upon to be headlong, and now evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s evident “match” might be. She recognised on the instant her old playmate, and without reflexion, confusion or diplomacy, in the fulness of her vulgarity and sociability, exclaimed at no lower pitch: “Gracious, Hyacinth Robinson, is that your form?”

Miss Pynsent turned round in a flash, but kept silent; then, very white and shaken, took up her work again and seated herself in her window. Hyacinth on his side stood staring—he blushed all over. He knew who she was but didn’t say so; he only asked in a voice which struck the girl as quite different from the old one—the one in which he used to tell her she was beastly tiresome—“Is it of me you were speaking just now?”

“When I asked where you had come from? That was because we ’eard you in the ’all,” said Millicent, smiling. “I suppose you’ve come from your work.”

“You used to live in the Place—you always wanted to kiss me,” the young man remarked with an effort not to show all the surprise and satisfaction he felt. “Didn’t she live in the Place, Pinnie?”

Pinnie, for all answer, fixed a pair of strange pleading eyes upon him, and Millicent broke out, with her recurrent laugh, in which the dressmaker had been right in discovering the note of affectation, “Do you want to know what you look like? You look for all the world like a little plastered-up Frenchman! Don’t he look like a funny little Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?” she went on as if she were on the best possible terms with the mistress of the establishment.

Hyacinth caught a light from that afflicted woman; he saw something in her face that he knew very well by this time and in the sight of which he always found an odd, perverse, unholy relish. It seemed to say that she prostrated herself, that she did penance in the dust, that she was his to trample upon, to spit upon. He did neither of these things, but she was constantly offering herself, and her permanent humility, her perpetual abjection, was a vague counter-irritant to the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever and which had often at night made him cry with rage in his little room under the roof. Pinnie meant this to-day as a matter of course, and could only especially mean it in the presence of Miss Henning’s remark about his looking like a Frenchman. He knew he looked like a Frenchman, he had often been told so before, and a large part of the time, often quite grandly, he felt like one—like one of those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle. He had picked up their language with the most extraordinary facility, by the aid of one of his mates, a refugee from Paris, in the workroom, and of a second-hand dog’s-eared dictionary bought for a shilling in the Brompton Road during one of his interminable, restless, melancholy, moody, yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it, he believed, by a natural impulse, caught the accent, the gesture, the movement of eyebrow and shoulder; so that on any occasion of his having to pass for a foreigner—there was no telling what might happen—he should certainly be able to do so to admiration, especially if he could borrow a blouse. He had never seen a blouse in his life, but he knew exactly the form and colour of such a garment and how it was worn. What the complications might be which should compel him to assume the disguise of a person of a social station lower still than his own he would not for the world have mentioned to you; but as they were very present to the mind of our imaginative, ingenious youth we shall catch a glimpse of them in the course of a further acquaintance with him. Actually, when there was no question of masquerading, it made him blush again that such a note should be struck by a loud, laughing, handsome girl who came back out of his past. There was more in Pinnie’s weak eyes now than her usual rueful profession; there was a dumb intimation, almost as pathetic as the other, that if he cared to let her off easily he wouldn’t detain their terrible visitor very long. He had no wish to do that; he kept the door open on purpose; he didn’t enjoy talking to girls under Pinnie’s eyes and could see that this one had every disposition to talk. So without responding to her observation about his appearance he said, not knowing exactly what to say: “Have you come back to live in the Place?”

“Heaven forbid I should ever do that!” cried Miss Henning with genuine emotion. “I must live near the establishment in which I’m employed.”

“And what establishment is that now?” the young man asked, gaining confidence and perceiving in detail how handsome she was. He hadn’t roamed about London for nothing, and he knew that when a girl had such looks a jocular tone of address, a pleasing freedom, was de rigueur; so he added: “Is it the Bull and Gate or the Elephant and Castle?”

“A public-house? Well, you haven’t got the politeness of a Frenchman at all events!” Her good-nature had come back to her perfectly, and her resentment of his imputation of her looking like a barmaid—a blowsy beauty who handled pewter—was tempered by her more and more curious consideration of Hyacinth’s form. He was exceedingly “rum,” but he had a stamp as sharp for her as that of a new coin and which also agreeably suggested value. Since he remembered so well that she had been fond of kissing him in their early days she would have liked to show herself prepared to repeat this graceful attention. But she reminded herself in time that her line should be religiously the ladylike, and she was content to exclaim simply: “I don’t care what a man looks like so long as he knows a lot. That’s the form I like!”

Miss Pynsent had promised herself the satisfaction of taking no further notice of her brilliant invader; but the temptation was great to expose her to Hyacinth, in mitigation of her brilliancy, by remarking sarcastically, according to opportunity, “Miss ’Enning wouldn’t live in Lomax Plice for the world. She thinks it too dreadfully low.”

“So it is; it’s a beastly hole,” said the young man.

The poor dressmaker’s little dart fell to the ground and Millicent exclaimed jovially, “Right you are!” while she directed to the object of her childhood’s admiration an expression of face that put him more and more at his ease.

“Don’t you suppose I know something?” he asked, planted before her with his little legs slightly apart and, with his hands behind him, making the open door waver to and fro.

“You? Oh, I don’t care a straw what you know!” she said; and he had at any rate a mind sufficiently enriched to see what she meant by that. If she meant he was so good-looking that he might pass on this score alone her judgement was conceivable, though many women would strongly have dissented from it. He was as small as he had announced from the first—he had never got his growth—and she could easily see that he was not what she at least would call strong. His bones were small, his chest was narrow, his complexion pale, his whole figure almost childishly slight; and Millicent noted afterwards that he had a very delicate hand—the hand, as she said to herself, of a gentleman. What she liked was his face and something jaunty and romantic, almost theatrical, in his whole little person. Miss Henning was not acquainted with any member of the dramatic profession, but she supposed vaguely that that was the way an actor would look in private life. Hyacinth’s features were perfect; his eyes, large and much divided, had as their usual expression a kind of witty, almost an impertinent, candour, and a small, soft, fair moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a way that made him appear to smile even when his heart was heavy. The waves of his dense fine hair clustered round a forehead which was high enough to suggest remarkable things, and Miss Henning had observed that when he first appeared he wore his little soft circular hat in a way that left these frontal locks very visible. He was dressed in an old brown velveteen jacket and wore exactly the bright-coloured necktie which Miss Pynsent’s quick fingers used of old to shape out of hoarded remnants of silk and muslin. He was shabby and work-stained, but an observant eye would have caught the hint of an “arrangement” in his dress (his appearance being plainly not a matter of indifference to himself), while a painter (not of the heroic) would have liked to make a sketch of him. There was something exotic in him, and yet, with his sharp young face, destitute of bloom but not of sweetness, and a certain conscious cockneyism that pervaded him, he was as strikingly as Millicent, in her own degree, a product of the London streets and the London air. He looked both ingenuous and slightly wasted, amused, amusing and indefinably sad. Women had always found him touching, but he made them—so they had repeatedly assured him—die of laughing.

“I think you had better shut the door,” said Miss Pynsent, meaning that he had better shut their departing visitor out.

“Did you come here on purpose to see us?” he went on, not heeding this injunction, of which he divined the spirit, and wishing the girl would take her leave so that he might go out again with her. He should like talking with her much better away from Pinnie, who evidently was ready to stick a bodkin into her for reasons he perfectly understood. He had seen plenty of them before, Pinnie’s reasons, even where girls were concerned who were not nearly so good-looking as this one. She was always in a fearful “funk” about their getting hold of him and persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station. His station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself and inquired of Miss Pynsent what it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly enough, wondering how in the world he could marry “beneath” it. He would never marry at all—to that his mind was absolutely made up; he would never hand on to another the burden that had made his own young spirit so intolerably sore, the inheritance that had darkened the whole threshold of his manhood. All the more reason why he should have his compensation; why, if the soft society of women was to be enjoyed on other terms, he should cultivate it with a bold free mind.

“I thought I’d just give a look at the old shop; I had an engagement not far off,” Millicent said. “But I wouldn’t have believed any one who had told me I should find you just where I left you.”

“We needed you to look after us!” Miss Pynsent irrepressibly exclaimed.

“Oh, you’re such a rattling swell yourself!” Hyacinth observed without heeding the dressmaker.

“None of your ‘rattling’ impudence! I’m as good a girl as there is in London.” And to corroborate this Miss Henning went on: “If you were to offer to see me a part of the way home I’d tell you I don’t knock about that way with gentlemen.”

“I’ll go with you as far as you like,” Hyacinth replied simply, as if he knew how to treat that sort of speech.

“Well, it’s only because I knew you as a baby!” And they went out together, Hyacinth careful not to look at poor Pinnie at all (he felt her glaring whitely and tearfully at him out of her dim corner—it had by this time grown too dusky to work without a lamp) and his companion giving her a cruelly familiar nod of farewell over her shoulder.

It was a long walk from Lomax Place to the quarter of the town in which (to be near the haberdashers of the Buckingham Palace Road) Miss Henning occupied a modest back room; but the influences of the hour were such as to make the excursion very agreeable to our young man, who liked the streets at all times, but especially at nightfall in the autumn, of a Saturday, when in the vulgar districts the smaller shops and open-air industries were doubly active, and big clumsy torches flared and smoked over hand-carts and costermongers’ barrows drawn up in the gutters. Hyacinth had roamed through the great city since he was an urchin, but his imagination had never ceased to be stirred by the preparations for Sunday that went on in the evening among the toilers and spinners, his brothers and sisters, and he lost himself in all the quickened crowding and pushing and staring at lighted windows and chaffering at the stalls of fishmongers and hucksters. He liked the people who looked as if they had got their week’s wage and were prepared to lay it out discreetly; and even those whose use of it would plainly be extravagant and intemperate; and, best of all, those who evidently hadn’t received it at all and who wandered about disinterestedly and vaguely, their hands in empty pockets, watching others make their bargains and fill their satchels, or staring at the striated sides of bacon, at the golden cubes and triangles of cheese, at the graceful festoons of sausage, in the most brilliant of the windows. He liked the reflexion of the lamps on the wet pavements, the feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter fog blurred and suffused the whole place, made it seem bigger and more crowded, produced halos and dim radiations, trickles, and evaporations on the plates of glass. He moved in the midst of these impressions this evening, but he enjoyed them in silence, with an attention taken up mainly by his companion, and pleased to be already so intimate with a young lady whom people turned round to look at. She herself affected to speak of the rush and crush of the week’s end with disgust: she said she liked the streets, but liked the respectable ones; she couldn’t abide the smell of fish, which the whole place seemed full of, so that she hoped they would soon get into the Edgeware Road, toward which they tended and which was a proper street for a lady. To Hyacinth she appeared to have no connexion with the long-haired little girl who, in Lomax Place, years before, was always hugging a smutty doll and courting his society; she was a stranger, a new acquaintance, and he observed her in suspense, wondering by what transitions she had reached her present pitch.

She enlightened him but little on this point, though she talked a great deal on a variety of subjects and mentioned to him her habits, her aspirations, her likes and dislikes—which last were as emphatic as the giggles of a person tickled. She was tremendously particular, difficult to please, he could see that; and she assured him she never put up with anything a moment after she had ceased to care for it. Especially was she particular about gentlemen’s society, and she made it plain that a young fellow who wanted to have anything to say to her must be in receipt of wages amounting at the least to fifty shillings a week. Hyacinth assured her he didn’t earn that as yet, and she remarked again that she made an exception for him because she knew all about him (or if not all at least a great deal) and he could see that her good-nature was equal to her beauty. She made such an exception that when, after they were moving down the Edgeware Road (which had still the brightness of late closing, but with more nobleness), he proposed she should enter a coffee-house with him and “take something” (he could hardly tell himself afterwards what brought him to this point) she acceded without a demur—without a demur even on the ground of his slender earnings. Slender as they were he had them in his pocket (they had been destined in some degree for Pinnie) and therefore felt equal to the occasion. Millicent partook profusely of tea and bread and butter, with a relish of raspberry jam, and thought the place most comfortable, though he himself, after finding himself ensconced, was visited by doubts of its propriety, suggested, among several things, by photographs, on the walls, of young ladies in tights. He himself was hungry, he had not yet had his tea, but he was too excited, too preoccupied to eat; the situation made him restless and gave him thrills; it seemed the beginning of something new and rare. He had never yet “stood” even a glass of beer to a girl of Millicent’s stamp—a girl who rustled and glittered and smelt of musk—and if she should turn out as jolly a specimen of the sex as she seemed it might make a great difference in his leisure hours, in his evenings, in which he had often felt a likeness to great square blackboards uninscribed with a stroke of chalk. That it would also make a difference in his savings (he was under a pledge to Pinnie and to Mr. Vetch to put by something every week) it didn’t concern him for the moment to reflect; and indeed, though he thought it odious and insufferable to be poor, the ways and means of ceasing to be so had hitherto left his fancy unstirred. He knew what Millicent’s age must be, but felt her nevertheless older, much older, than himself—she seemed to know so much about London and about life; and this made it still more of a sensation to be entertaining her like a young swell. He thought of it too in connexion with the question of the character of the establishment; if this character was what it easily might be she would perceive it as soon as he, and very likely it would be a part of the general initiation she had given him an impression of that she wouldn’t mind so long as the tea was strong and the bread and butter thick. She described to him what had passed between Miss Pynsent and herself (she didn’t call her Pinnie, and he was glad, for he wouldn’t have liked it) before he came in, and let him know that she should never dare to come to the place again, as his mother would tear her eyes out. Then she checked herself. “But of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I keep forgetting.”

Hyacinth had, as he supposed, from far back cultivated a manner with which he could meet allusions of this kind: he had had first and last so many opportunities to practise it. Therefore he looked at his companion very steadily while he said: “My mother died many years ago; she was a great invalid. But Pinnie has been awfully good to me.”

“My mother’s dead too”—Miss Henning was prompt, as if “capping” it. “She died very suddenly. I daresay you remember her in the Plice.” Then, while Hyacinth disengaged from the past the obscure figure of Mrs. Henning, of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him as cross and dirty, the girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment, “But I’ve had no Pinnie.”

“You look as if you could take care of yourself.”

“Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked what had become of Mr. Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was your mamma he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss Pynsent’s young man.”

“He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth returned. “He’s our best friend—or supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle, as he used to do.”

Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she observed, “I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.”

“At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t play any instrument.”

“I don’t mean in the orchestra, you gaby! You’d look very nice in a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table and her shoulders lifted, an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go through life in his own character; but he checked himself with the reflexion that this was exactly what he was apparently destined not to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle; he was to be every day and every hour an actor. Suddenly and with the utmost irrelevance Miss Henning inquired: “Is Miss Pynsent some relation? What gave her any right over you?”

Hyacinth had an answer ready for this question; he had determined to say as he had several times said before: “Miss Pynsent’s an old friend of my family. My mother was very fond of her and she was very fond of my mother.” He repeated the formula now, looking at the girl with the same inscrutable calmness, as he fancied; though a remark more to his taste would have been that his mother was none of her business. But she was too handsome for such risks, and she presented her large fair face to him across the table with an air of solicitation to be cosy and comfortable. There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would be the cure ultimately; that in return for something he might drop, syllable by syllable, into some listening ear that would be attached to some kissable cheek, certain other words would be spoken to him which would make his pain for ever less sharp. But what woman could he trust, what ear would be both safe and happily enough attached? How much didn’t he already ask? The answer was not in this loud fresh laughing creature, whose sympathy couldn’t have the fineness he was looking for, since her curiosity was vulgar. Hyacinth objected to the vulgar as much as Miss Pynsent herself; in this respect she had long since discovered that he was after her own heart. He had not at any rate now taken up the subject of Mrs. Henning’s death; he felt himself incapable of researches into that lady and had no desire for knowledge of Millicent’s relationships. Moreover he always suffered, to sickness, when people began to hover about the question of his origin, the reasons why Pinnie had had the care of him from a baby. Mrs. Henning had been repulsive, but at least her daughter could speak of her. “Mr. Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved out of 17 three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t stand the other people in the house; there was a man who played the accordeon.”

Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote, though wanting to know why people should like Mr. Vetch’s fiddle any better. Then she added: “And I think that while he was about it he might have put you into something better than a bookbinder’s.”

“He wasn’t obliged to put me into anything. It’s a very good place.”

“All the same, it isn’t where I should have looked to find you,” the girl declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to offer him tribute as of resentment at having miscalculated.

“Where should you have looked to find me? In the House of Commons? It’s a pity you couldn’t have told me in advance what you would have liked me to be.”

She faced him over her cup while she drank in ladylike sips. “Do you know what they used to say in the Plice? That your father was a lord.”

“Very likely. That’s the kind of rot they talk in that precious hole,” the young man said without blenching.

“Well, perhaps he was,” Millicent ventured.

“He may have been a prime-minister for all the good it has done me.”

“Fancy your talking as if you didn’t know!” said Millicent.

“Finish your tea—don’t mind how I talk.”

“Well, you ’ave got a temper!” she archly retorted. “I should have thought you’d be a clerk at a banker’s.”

“Do they select them for their tempers?”

“You know what I mean. You used to be too clever to follow a trade.”

“Well, I’m not clever enough to live on air.”

“You might be, really, for all the tea you drink! Why didn’t you go in for some high profession?”

“How was I to go in? Who the devil was to help me?” Hyacinth asked with a certain vibration.

“Haven’t you got any relations?” said Millicent after a moment.

“What are you doing? Are you trying to make me swagger?”

When he spoke sharply she only laughed, not in the least ruffled, and by the way she looked at him seemed to like the effect. “Well, I’m sorry you’re only a journeyman,” she went on as she pushed away her cup.

“So am I,” Hyacinth answered; but he called for the bill as if he had been an employer of labour. Then while they waited he remarked to his companion that he didn’t believe she had an idea of what his work was and how charming it could be. “Yes, I get up books for the shops,” he said when she had asserted that she perfectly understood. “But the art of the binder’s an exquisite art.”

“So Miss Pynsent told me. She said you had some samples at home. I should like to see them.”

“You wouldn’t know how good they are,” he finely smiled.

He expected she would exclaim in answer that he was an impudent wretch, and for a moment she seemed on the point of doing so. But the words changed on her lips and she replied almost tenderly: “That’s just the way you used to speak to me years ago in the Plice.”

“I don’t care about that. I hate all that time.”

“Oh, so do I, if you come to that,” said Millicent as if she could rise to any breadth of view. With which she returned to her idea that he had not done himself justice. “You used always to have your nose in something or other. I never thought you’d work with your ’ands.”

This seemed to irritate him, and, having paid the bill and given threepence, ostentatiously, to the young woman with a languid manner and hair of an unnatural yellow who had waited on them, he said: “You may depend upon it I shan’t do it an hour longer than I can help.”

“What will you do then?”

“Oh, you’ll see some day.” In the street, after they had begun to walk again, he went on: “You speak as if I could have my pick. What was an obscure little beggar to do, buried in a squalid corner of London under a million of idiots? I had no help, no influence, no acquaintance of any kind with professional people, and no means of getting at them. I had to do something; I couldn’t go on living on Pinnie. Thank God I help her now a little. I took what I could get.” He spoke as if he had been touched by the imputation of having derogated.

Millicent seemed to imply that he defended himself successfully when she said: “You express yourself like a reg’lar gentleman”—a speech to which he made no response. But he began to talk again afterwards, and, the evening having definitely set in, his companion took his arm for the rest of the way home. By the time he reached her door he had confided to her that in secret he wrote—quite as for publication; he was haunted with the dream of literary distinction. This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with the agreeable incoherence that characterised her, that she didn’t care anything for a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she thought families and that sort of rot were about played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave his origin alone; and while they lingered in front of her house before she went in he broke out:

“I’ve no doubt you’re a jolly girl, and I’m very happy to have seen you again. But you’ve awfully little tact.”

“I have little tact? You should see me work off an old jacket!”

He was silent a little, standing before her with his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good job you’re so lovely.”

Millicent didn’t blush at this compliment, and probably didn’t understand all it conveyed, but she looked into his eyes a while, with all the smile that showed her teeth, and then came back more inconsequently than ever. “Come now, who are you?”

“Who am I? I’m a wretched little ‘forwarder’ in the shop.”

“I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” she competently cried. Then she let him know she couldn’t ask him in, as she made it a point not to receive gentlemen, but she didn’t mind if she took another walk with him and she didn’t care if she met him somewhere—if it were handy enough. As she lived so far from Lomax Place she didn’t care if she met him half-way. So in the dusky by-street in Pimlico, before separating, they took a casual tryst; the most interesting, the young man felt, that had yet been—he could scarcely call it granted him.

VI

One day shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin, absent, had failed to send the explanation customary in case of illness or domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place whose non-appearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better unexplained, was in fact an implication of moral feebleness; but as a general thing Mr. Crookenden’s establishment was a haunt of punctuality and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary Frenchman, an ardent stoic, a cold conspirator and an exquisite artist, who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of his acquaintance and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation! Hyacinth had had plenty of that and had endeared himself to the passionate refugee by the solemnity and candour of his attention. Poupin had come to England after the Commune of 1871, to escape the reprisals of the government of M. Thiers, and had remained there in spite of amnesties and rehabilitations. He was a Republican of the old-fashioned sort, of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic, infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality and inexhaustibly surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in the land of his exile. He had a marked claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem and gratitude, for he had been his parrain, his protector at the bindery. When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s young charge to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had accidentally made acquaintance, that he found it.

When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr. Vetch made him a present of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume had important consequences for Hyacinth. Anastasius Vetch was a poor man, and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but when once in a way he tasted it he liked the sensation to be pure. No man knew better the difference between the common and the rare, or was more capable of appreciating a book which opened well—of which the margin was not hideously chopped and of which the lettering on the back was sharp. It was only such a book that he could bring himself to offer even to a poor little devil whom a fifth-rate dressmaker (he knew Pinnie was fifth-rate) had rescued from the workhouse. So when it became a question of fitting the great Elizabethan with a new coat—a coat of full morocco discreetly, delicately gilt—he went with his little cloth-bound volume, a Pickering, straight to Mr. Crookenden, whom every one who knew anything about the matter knew to be a prince of binders, though they also knew that his work, limited in quantity, was mainly done for a particular bookseller and only through the latter’s agency. Anastasius Vetch had no idea of paying the bookseller’s commission, and though he could be lavish (for him) when he made a present, he was capable of taking an immense deal of trouble to save sixpence. He made his way into Mr. Crookenden’s workshop, which was situated in a small superannuated square in Soho and where the proposal of so slender a job was received at first with chilling calm. Mr. Vetch, however, insisted; he explained with irresistible frankness the motive of his errand: the desire to obtain the best possible binding for the least possible money. He made his conception of the best possible binding so vivid, so exemplary, that the master of the shop at last confessed to that disinterested sympathy which, in favouring conditions, establishes itself between the artist and the connoisseur. Mr. Vetch’s little book was put in hand as a particular service to an eccentric gentleman whose visit had been a smile-stirring interlude (for the circle of listening workmen) in a merely mechanical day; and when he went back three weeks later to see if the job were done he had the pleasure of finding that his injunctions, punctually complied with, had even been bettered. The work had been accomplished with a perfection of skill which made him ask whom he was to thank for it (he had been told that one man should do the whole of it) and in this manner he made the acquaintance of the most brilliant craftsman in the establishment, the incorruptible, the imaginative, the unerring Eustache Poupin.

In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be banal M. Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments in morocco, russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens with which, for the love of the thing itself, he had amused his leisure hours and which he should be happy to show his interlocutor if the latter would do him the honour to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr. Vetch made a note of the address and, for the love of the thing itself, went one Sunday afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this occasion he made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady with a bristling moustache, the white cap of an ouvrière, a knowledge of her husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable of English save the words “What you think, what you think?” which she introduced with indefatigable frequency. He also discovered that his new acquaintance had been a political proscript and that he regarded the iniquitous fabric of Church and State with an eye scarcely more reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was an aggressive socialist, which Anastasius Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of being a mere scoffer at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist and a collectivist and a perfectionist and a visionary; he believed the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks and cover the globe with boulevards, radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit in groups at little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee (not tea, par exemple!) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr. Vetch neither prefigured nor desired this organised beatitude; he was fond of his cup of tea and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal simplified; he thought it a much overrated system, but his heresies rubbed shoulders sociably with those of the little bookbinder, and his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelligent foreigner whose conversation gives wings to our heavy-footed culture. Poupin’s humanitary zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to discuss, which was much better than an unspeakable harmony. On several other Sunday afternoons the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they didn’t understand a word that was spoken and consoled themselves by hanging on the agitated fiddlestick of their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure failed to arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies, lacked female society, and Mr. Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favourable a specimen till she began to go wrong) adopted his suggestion in the hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose appearance would doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally had done) the fine taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder and his wife a bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the relaxed, and was haunted long afterwards by the memory of the lady’s camisole in some hideous print, her uncorseted overflow and her carpet slippers.

The acquaintance, none the less, was sealed three months later by a supper, one Sunday night, in Lisson Grove, to which Mr. Vetch brought his fiddle, at which Amanda presented to her hosts her adoptive son, and which also revealed to her that Madame Poupin could dress a Michaelmas goose if she couldn’t dress a fat Frenchwoman. This lady confided to the fiddler that she thought Miss Pynsent exceedingly comme il faut—dans le genre anglais; and neither Amanda nor Hyacinth had ever passed an evening of such splendour. It took its place, in the boy’s recollection, beside the visit, years before, to Mr. Vetch’s theatre. He drank in the remarks exchanged between that gentleman and M. Poupin. M. Poupin showed him his bindings, the most precious trophies of his skill, and it seemed to Hyacinth that on the spot he was initiated into a fascinating mystery. He handled the books for half an hour; Anastasius Vetch watched him without giving any particular sign. When therefore, presently, Miss Pynsent consulted her friend for the twentieth time on the subject of Hyacinth’s “career”—she spoke as if she were hesitating between the diplomatic service, the army and the church—the fiddler replied with promptitude: “Make him, if you can, what the Frenchman is.” At the mention of a handicraft poor Pinnie always looked very solemn, yet when Mr. Vetch asked her if she were prepared to send the boy to one of the universities, or to pay the premium required for his being articled to a solicitor, or to make favour on his behalf with a bank director or a merchant prince, or, yet again, to provide him with a comfortable home while he should woo the muse and await the laurels of literature—when, I say, he put the case before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity she only sighed and said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds, which, as he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance for evermore to take out of the bank. The fiddler had in fact declared to her in a manner not to be mistaken that if she should divest herself, on the boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old age, he would wash his hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of success for Hyacinth was vague save on one point, as regards which she was passionately, fiercely firm: she was perfectly determined he should never go into a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a costermonger than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a grocer’s or giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would rather, she declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker or a tailor.

A stationer in a neighbouring street had affixed to his window a written notice that he was in want of a smart errand-boy, and Pinnie, on hearing of it, had presented Hyacinth to his consideration. The stationer was a dreadful bullying man with a patch over his eye, who seemed to think the boy would be richly remunerated with three shillings a week; a contemptible measure, as it seemed to the dressmaker, of his rare abilities and acquirements. His schooling had been desultory, precarious, and had had a certain continuity mainly in his early years, while he was under the care of an old lady who combined with the functions of pew-opener at a neighbouring church the manipulation, in the Place itself, where she resided with her sister, a monthly nurse, of such pupils as could be spared (in their families) from the more urgent exercise of holding the baby and fetching the beer. Later, for a twelvemonth, Pinnie had paid five shillings a week for him at an “Academy” in a genteel part of Islington, where there was an “instructor in the foreign languages,” a platform for oratory and a high social standard, but where Hyacinth suffered from the fact that almost all his mates were the sons of dealers in edible articles—pastry-cooks, grocers and fishmongers—and in this capacity subjected him to pangs and ignominious contrasts by bringing to school, for their exclusive consumption or for exchange and barter, various buns, oranges, spices and marine animals, which the boy, with his hands in his empty pockets and the sense of a savourless home in his heart, was obliged to see devoured without his participation. Miss Pynsent would not have pretended he was highly educated in the technical sense of the word, but she believed that at fifteen he had read almost every book in the world. The limits of his reading had been in fact only the limits of his opportunity. Mr. Vetch, who talked with him more and more as he grew older, knew this, and lent him every volume he possessed or could pick up for the purpose. Reading was his extravagance, while the absence of any direct contact with a library represented for him mainly the hard shock of the real; the shock, that is, he could most easily complain of. Mr. Vetch believed him subtly intelligent, and therefore thought it a woeful pity that he couldn’t have furtherance in some liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still that a youth with that expression in his eyes should be condemned to measure tape or cut slices of cheese. He himself had no influence he could bring into play, no connexion with the great world of capital or the market of labour. That is he touched these mighty institutions at but one very small point—a point which, such as it was, he kept well in mind.

When Pinnie replied to the stationer round the corner, after he had mentioned the “terms” on which he was prepared to receive applications from errand-boys, that, thank her stars, she hadn’t sunk so low as that—so low as to sell her darling into slavery for three shillings a week—he felt that she only gave more florid expression to his own sentiment. Of course if Hyacinth didn’t begin by carrying parcels he couldn’t hope to be promoted, through the more refined nimbleness of tying them up, to a position as accountant or manager; but both the fiddler and his friend—Miss Pynsent indeed only in the last resort—resigned themselves to the forfeiture of this prospect. Mr. Vetch saw clearly that a charming handicraft was a finer thing than a vulgar “business,” and one day after his acquaintance with Eustache Poupin had gone a considerable length he inquired of the fervid Frenchman if there were a chance of the lad’s obtaining a footing, under his own wing, in Mr. Crookenden’s workshop. There could be no better place for him to acquire a knowledge of the most elegant of the mechanical arts; and to be received into such an establishment and at the instance of such an artist would be a real start in life. M. Poupin meditated, and that evening confided his meditations to the companion who reduplicated all his thoughts and understood him better even than he understood himself. The pair had no children and had felt the deficiency; moreover they had heard from Mr. Vetch the dolorous tale of the boy’s entrance into life. He was one of the disinherited, one of the expropriated, one of the exceptionally interesting; and moreover he was one of themselves, a child, as it were, of the inexhaustible France, an offshoot of the sacred race. It is not the most authenticated point in this veracious history, but there is strong reason to believe that tears were shed that night, in Lisson Grove, over poor Hyacinth Robinson. In a day or two M. Poupin replied to the fiddler that he had now been several years in le vieux “Crook’s” employ; that during that time he had done work for him which he would have had bien du mal to get done by another, and had never asked for an indulgence, an allowance, a remission, an augmentation. It was time, if only for the dignity of the thing, he should ask for something, and he would make their little friend the subject of his demand. “La société lui doit bien cela,” he remarked afterwards, when, Mr. Crookenden proving dryly hospitable and the arrangement being formally complete, Mr. Vetch thanked him in his kindly, casual, bashful English way. He was paternal when Hyacinth began to occupy a place in the malodorous chambers in Soho; he took him in hand, made him a disciple, the recipient of a precious tradition, discovered in him a susceptibility to philosophic, to cosmic, as well as to technic truth. He taught him French and socialism, encouraged him to spend his evenings in Lisson Grove, invited him to regard Madame Poupin as a second, or rather as a third, mother, and in short made a very considerable mark on the boy’s mind. He fostered and drew out the latent Gallicism of his nature, and by the time he was twenty Hyacinth, who had completely assimilated his influence, regarded him with a mixture of veneration and amusement. M. Poupin was the person who consoled him most when he was miserable; and he was very often miserable.

His staying away from his work was so rare that, in the afternoon, before he went home, Hyacinth walked to Lisson Grove to see what ailed him. He found his friend in bed with a plaster on his chest and Madame Poupin making tisane over the fire. The Frenchman took his indisposition solemnly but resignedly, like a man who believed that all illness was owing to the imperfect organisation of society, and lay covered up to his chin with a red cotton handkerchief bound round his head. Near his bed sat a visitor, a young man unknown to Hyacinth. Hyacinth naturally had never been to Paris, but he always supposed that the intérieur of his friends in Lisson Grove gave rather a vivid idea of that city. The two small rooms constituting their establishment contained a great many mirrors as well as little portraits (old-fashioned prints) of revolutionary heroes. The chimney-piece in the bedroom was muffled in some red drapery which appeared to Hyacinth extraordinarily magnificent; the principal ornament of the salon was a group of small and highly-decorated cups, on a tray, accompanied by gilt bottles and glasses, the latter still more diminutive—the whole intended for black coffee and liqueurs. There was no carpet on the floor, but rugs and mats of various shapes and sizes disposed themselves at the feet of the chairs and sofas; and in the sitting-room, where stood a wonderful gilt clock of the Empire, surmounted with a “subject” representing Virtue receiving a crown of laurel from the hands of Faith, Madame Poupin, with the aid of a tiny stove, a handful of charcoal and two or three saucepans, carried on a triumphant cuisine. On the windows were curtains of white muslin much fluted and frilled and tied with pink ribbon.

VII

“I’m suffering extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected,” Poupin remarked, speaking French and rolling toward Hyacinth his salient, excited-looking eyes, which always had the same declamatory, reclamatory, proclamatory, the same universally inaugurative expression, whatever his occupation or his topic. Hyacinth had seated himself near his friend’s pillow, opposite the strange young man, who had been accommodated with a chair at the foot of the bed.

“Ah yes; with their filthy politics the situation of the pauvre monde is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed from the fire. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”

“It will go on till the measure of their imbecility, their infamy, is full. It will go on till the day of justice, till the reintegration of the despoiled and disinherited, is ushered in with a force that will shake the globe.”

“Oh, we always see things go on; we never see them change,” said Madame Poupin, making a very cheerful clatter with a big spoon in a saucepan.

“We may not see it, but they’ll see it,” her husband returned. “But what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It’s before my eyes in its radiant reality, especially as I lie here—the revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification.”

Hyacinth ceased to pay attention, not because he had a differing opinion about what M. Poupin called the avènement of the disinherited, but, on the contrary, precisely on account of his familiarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his French friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of chronic spiritual inflammation. For them the social question was always in order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited always present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their vivacity, their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction and prophecy they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when the social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs, which would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of his brothers and sisters in misery. They, however, were perpetually in the breach, and perpetually consistent with themselves and, what is more, with each other. Hyacinth had heard that the institution of marriage in France was lightly considered, but he was struck with the closeness and intimacy of the union in Lisson Grove, the passionate identity of interest: especially on the day when M. Poupin informed him, in a moment of extreme but not indiscreet expansion, that the lady was his wife only in a spiritual, affectional sense. There were hypocritical concessions and debasing superstitions of which this exalted pair had wholly disapproved. Hyacinth knew their vocabulary by heart and could have said everything, in the same words, that on any given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say. He knew that “they,” in their phraseology, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the world but the people—though who, exactly, in their length and breadth, the people were was less definitely established. He himself was of this sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and so of course were his French friends, and so was Pinnie, and so were most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in old Crook’s shop. But was old Crook himself, who wore an apron rather dirtier than the rest of them and was a master-hand at “forwarding,” yet who, on the other side, was the occupant of a villa all but detached, at Putney, with a wife known to have secret aspirations toward a page in buttons? Above all was Mr. Vetch, who earned a weekly wage, and not a large one, with his fiddle, but who had mysterious affinities of another sort, reminiscences of a phase in which he smoked cigars, had a hat-box and used cabs—besides visiting Boulogne? Anastasius Vetch had interfered in his life, atrociously, at a terrible crisis; but Hyacinth, who strove to cultivate justice in his own conduct, believed he had acted conscientiously, and tried to esteem him, the more so as the fiddler evidently felt he had something to make up to him for and had ever treated him with marked benevolence. He believed in short that Mr. Vetch took a sincere interest in him and if he should meddle again would meddle in a different way: he used to see him sometimes look at him with the kindest eyes. It would make a difference therefore if he were of the people or not, inasmuch as on the day of the great revenge it would only be the people who should be saved. It was for the people the world was made: whoever was not of them was against them; and all others were cumberers, usurpers, exploiters, accapareurs, as M. Poupin used to say. Hyacinth had once put the question directly to Mr. Vetch, who looked at him a while through the fumes of his eternal pipe and then said: “Do you think I’m an aristocrat?”

“I didn’t know but you were a bourgeois,” the young man answered.

“No, I’m neither. I’m a Bohemian.”

“With your evening dress, every night?”

“My dear boy,” said the fiddler, “those are the most confirmed.”

Hyacinth was only half satisfied with this, for it was by no means definite to him that Bohemians were also to be saved; if he could be sure perhaps he would become one himself. Yet he never suspected Mr. Vetch of being a governmental agent, though Eustache Poupin had told him that there were a great many who looked a good deal like that: not of course with any purpose of incriminating the fiddler, whom he had trusted from the first and continued to trust. The governmental agent in extraordinary disguises, the wondrous mouchard of M. Poupin’s view, became a very familiar type to Hyacinth, and though he had never caught one of the infamous brotherhood in the act there were plenty of persons to whom, on the very face of the matter, he had no hesitation in attributing the character. There was nothing of the Bohemian, at any rate, about the Poupins, whom Hyacinth had now known long enough not to be surprised at the way they combined the socialistic passion, a red-hot impatience for the general rectification, with an extraordinary decency of life and a worship of proper work. The Frenchman spoke habitually as if the great swindle practised upon the people were too impudent to be endured a moment longer, and yet he found patience for the most exquisite “tooling” and took a book in hand with the deliberation of one who should believe that everything was immutably constituted. Hyacinth knew what he thought of priests and theologies, but he had the religion of conscientious craftsmanship and he reduced the boy, on his side, to a kind of prostration before his delicate wonder-working fingers. “What will you have? J’ai la main parisienne,” M. Poupin would reply modestly when Hyacinth’s admiration broke out; and he was good enough, after he had seen a few specimens of what our hero could do, to inform him that he had the same happy conformation. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be a good workman, il n’y a que ça”; and his own life was practically governed by this conviction. He delighted in the use of his hands and his tools and the exercise of his taste, which was faultless, and Hyacinth could easily imagine how it must torment him to spend a day on his back. He ended by perceiving, however, that consolation was on this occasion in some degree conveyed by the presence of the young man who sat at the foot of the bed and with whom M. Poupin exhibited such signs of acquaintance as to make our hero wonder why he had not seen him before, nor even heard of him.

“What do you mean by force that will shake the globe?” the young man inquired, leaning back in his chair with raised arms and his interlocked hands, behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had spoken French, which he always preferred to do, the insular tongue being an immense tribulation to him; but his visitor spoke English, and Hyacinth immediately took in that there was nothing French about him—M. Poupin could never tell him he had la main parisienne.

“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.

“And in this country, I hope, in their coal-bins. La-la, we shall find them even there,” his wife remarked.

“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would have thought so if you had been there.”

“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here ten years ago,” the young man returned. He saw Hyacinth was watching him and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that added to our hero’s interest.

“Pardon, pardon, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out laughing; whereupon his host declared with a dignity which even his recumbent position didn’t abate that it was really frivolous of him to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.

“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man good-naturedly, lowering his arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets while he stretched his long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”

“Oh the trial will be on a great scale—soyez tranquille! It will be one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”

Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with him, could see he was remarkable, and felt slightly aggrieved that he should be a stranger: that is that he should be apparently a familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought his young friend from Lomax Place worthy up to this time to be made acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other chair discovered these reflexions in Hyacinth’s face, but after a moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly diffident way, a way our hero liked: “And do you know too?”

“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth in wonder.

“Oh, if you did you would!” the young man exclaimed and laughed again. Such a rejoinder from any one else would have irritated our sensitive hero, but it only made him more curious about his interlocutor, whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.

“Mon ami, you ought to present ces messieurs,” Madame Poupin remarked.

“Ah ça, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband cried without heeding her. Then he went on in a different tone: “M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, un enfant très-doué, in whom I take a tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping big one! Isn’t it so, mon petit?”

This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly: “Oh, I only want them to let me alone!”

“He’s very young,” said Eustache Poupin.

“He’s the person we have seen in this country whom we like best,” his wife added.

“Perhaps you’re French,” suggested the strange young man.

The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it was as if a listening stillness had fallen. He found it a difficult pass, partly because there was something exciting and embarrassing in the attention of the other visitor, and partly because he had never yet had to decide that important question. He didn’t really know if he were French or were English, or which of the two he should prefer to be. His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumed her in a place and among a people she must have execrated—all this made him French; yet he was conscious at the same time of qualities that didn’t mix with it. He had spun to the last fineness, long ago, a legend about his mother, built it up slowly, adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and broodings, when his cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were times when it wavered and faded, when it ceased to console him and he ceased to trust it. He had had a father too, and his father had suffered as well, and had fallen under a blow, and had paid with his life; and him also he felt in his spirit and his senses, when the effort to think it out didn’t simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging still even while they baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any rate he seemed rooted in the place where his wretched parents had expiated, and he knew nothing of any other. Moreover when old Poupin said “M. Hyacinthe,” as he had often done before, he didn’t altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser. Our young friend was under a cloud and a stigma, but he was not yet prepared to admit he was ridiculous. “Oh, I daresay I ain’t anything,” he replied in a moment.

“En v’là des bêtises!” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say you’re not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”

“We all have an account to settle, don’t you know?” said the strange young man.

He evidently meant this to be encouraging to Hyacinth, whose quick desire to avert M. Poupin’s allusions had not been lost on him; but our hero could see that he himself would be sure to be one of the first to be paid. He would make society bankrupt, but he would be paid. He was tall and fair and good-natured looking, but you couldn’t tell—or at least Hyacinth couldn’t—if he were handsome or ugly, with his large head and square forehead, his thick, straight hair, his heavy mouth and rather vulgar nose, his admirably clear steady eyes, light-coloured and set very deep; for despite a want of fineness in some of its parts his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution, spoke somehow, as if it had showed you his soul drawing deep and even breaths, of a state of moral health. He was dressed as a workman in his Sunday toggery, having evidently put on his best to call in Lisson Grove, where he was to meet a lady, and wearing in particular a necktie which was both cheap and pretentious and of which Hyacinth, who noticed everything of that kind, observed the crude false blue. He had very big shoes—the shoes almost of a country labourer—and spoke with a provincial accent which Hyacinth believed to be that of Lancashire. This didn’t suggest cleverness, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from feeling sure he was the reverse of stupid, that he probably indeed had a large easy brain quite as some people had big strong fists. Our little hero had a great desire to know superior persons, and he interested himself on the spot in this quiet stranger whose gravity, by any fine balance, showed, like that of a precious metal, in the small piece as well as in the big. He had the complexion of a ploughboy and the glance of a commander-in-chief, and might have been a distinguished young savant in the disguise of an artisan. The disguise would have been very complete, for he had several brown stains on his fingers. Hyacinth’s curiosity on this occasion was both excited and gratified; for after two or three allusions, which he didn’t understand, had been made to a certain place where Poupin and their friend had met and expected to meet again, Madame Poupin exclaimed that it was a shame not to take in M. Hyacinthe, who, she would answer for it, had in him the making of one of the pure.

“All in good time, in good time, ma bonne,” the worthy invalid replied. “M. Hyacinthe knows I count on him, whether or no I make him an interne to-day or only wait a little longer.”

“What do you mean by an interne?” Hyacinth asked.

“Mon Dieu, what shall I say!”—and Eustache Poupin stared at him solemnly from his pillow. “You’re very sympathetic, but I’m afraid you’re too young.”

“One is never too young to contribute one’s obole,” said Madame Poupin.

“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other guest, but not as if he thought it probable.

“Is it a plot—a conspiracy?” Hyacinth broke out.

“He asks that as if he were asking if it’s a plum-pudding,” said M. Poupin. “It isn’t good to eat, and we don’t do it for our amusement. It’s terribly serious, my child.”

“It’s a group of workers to which he and I and a good many others belong. There’s no harm in telling him that,” the young man went on.

“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she’s quite in the old ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her tisane.

Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you’ve some plan, something to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told me,” he remarked in a moment to Poupin.

The latter merely viewed him a little as if he were a pleasing object and then said to the strange young man: “He’s a little jealous of you. But there’s no harm in that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We’ll tell you his history some other day; it will make you feel that he belongs to us of necessity. It’s an accident that he hasn’t met you here before.”

“How could ces messieurs have met when M. Paul never comes? He doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.

“Well, you see I’ve my little sister at home to take care of when I ain’t at the works,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”

“A lady—a real lady?”

“Oh yes, every inch,” smiled M. Paul.

“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that because you’ve the désagrément of being poor? It seems to be the custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame Poupin continued. “I should like to see one of ces dames—the real ones—coming in to sit with me!”

“Oh, you’re not a cripple; you’ve got the use of your legs!”

“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.

“This lady looks after several others in our court and she reads to my sister.”

“Oh, well, you’re patient, you other English.”

“We shall never do anything without that,” said M. Paul with undisturbed good-humour.

“You’re perfectly right; you can’t say that too often. It will be a tremendous job and only the strong will prevail,” his host murmured a little wearily, turning his eyes to Madame Poupin, who approached slowly, holding the tisane in rather a full bowl and tasting it again and yet again as she came.

Hyacinth had been watching his fellow-visitor with deepening interest; a fact of which M. Paul apparently became aware, for he volunteered presently, giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we ought to know each other. I’m sure I’ve nothing against it. I like to know folk if they’re likely to be worth it.”

Hyacinth was too pleased with this even to take it up; it seemed to him for a moment that he couldn’t touch it gracefully enough. But he said with sufficient eagerness: “Will you tell me all about your plot?”

“Oh, it’s no plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.” And with his mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M. Paul certainly had not much the appearance of a conspirator.

“Isn’t it a new era?” asked Hyacinth, rather disappointed.

“Well, I don’t know; it’s just a taking of a stand on two or three points.”

“Ah bien, voilà du propre; between us we’ve thrown him into a fever!” cried Madame Poupin, who had put down her bowl on a table near her husband’s bed and was bending over him with her hand on his forehead. Her patient was flushed, he had closed his eyes, and it was evident there had been more than enough conversation. Madame Poupin announced as much, with the addition that if the young men wished to make acquaintance they must do it outside; their friend must be perfectly quiet. They accordingly withdrew with apologies and promises to return for further news on the morrow, and two minutes later Hyacinth found himself standing face to face with his companion on the pavement in front of M. Poupin’s residence, under a street-lamp which struggled ineffectually with the brown winter dusk.

“Is that your name, M. Paul?” he asked as he looked up at him.

“Oh bless you, no; that’s only her Frenchified way of putting it. My name is Paul, though—Paul Muniment.”

“And what’s your trade?” Hyacinth demanded with a jump into familiarity; for his friend seemed to have told him a great deal more than was usually conveyed in that item of information.

Paul Muniment looked down at him from above broad shoulders. “I work for a firm of wholesale chemists at Lambeth.”

“And where do you live?”

“I live over the water too; in the far south of London.”

“And are you going home now?”

“Oh yes, I’m going to toddle.”

“And may I toddle with you?”

Mr. Muniment considered him further and then gave a laugh. “I’ll carry you if you like.”

“Thank you; I expect I can walk as far as you,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, I admire your spirit and I daresay I shall like your company.”

There was something in his face, taken in connexion with the idea that he was concerned in the taking of a stand—it offered our quick youth the image of a rank of bristling bayonets—which made Hyacinth feel the desire to go with him till he dropped; and in a moment they started away together and took the direction Muniment had mentioned. They discoursed as they went, exchanging a great many opinions and anecdotes; but they reached the south-westerly court in which the young chemist lived with his infirm sister before he had told Hyacinth anything definite about the “points” of his reference or Hyacinth, on his side, had detailed the circumstances involved in his being, according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t wish to press, wouldn’t for the world have appeared indiscreet, and moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to Muniment, was not quite prepared as yet to be pressed himself. Therefore it failed to become very clear how his companion had made Poupin’s acquaintance and how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless was to a certain extent communicative, especially on the question of his living in a very poor little corner. He had his sister to keep—she could do nothing for herself; and he paid a low rent because she had to have doctors and doses and all sorts of little comforts. He spent a bob a week for her on flowers. It was better too when you got upstairs, and from the back windows you could see the dome of Saint Paul’s. Audley Court, with its pretty name, which reminded Hyacinth of Tennyson, proved to be a still dingier nook than Lomax Place; and it had the further drawback that you had to penetrate a narrow alley, a passage between high black walls, to enter it. At the door of one of the houses the young men paused, lingering a little, and then Muniment said: “I say, why shouldn’t you come up? I like you well enough for that, and you can see my sister; her name’s Rosy.” He spoke as if this would be a great privilege and added, for the joke, that Rosy enjoyed a call from a gentleman of all things. Hyacinth needed no urging, and he groped his way at his companion’s heels up a dark staircase which appeared to him—for they stopped only when they could go no further—the longest and steepest he had ever ascended. At the top Paul Muniment pushed open a door, but exclaimed “Hullo, have you gone to roost?” on perceiving the room on the threshold of which they stood to be unlighted.

“Oh dear, no; we’re sitting in the dark,” a small bright voice instantly replied. “Lady Aurora’s so kind; she’s here still.”

The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker was indistinguishable. “Well now, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment rejoined. “You’ll have a party then, for I’ve brought some one else. We’re poor, you know, but honest, and not afraid of showing up, and I daresay we can manage a candle.”

At this, in the dim firelight, Hyacinth saw a tall figure erect itself—a figure angular and slim, crowned with a large vague hat and a flowing umbrageous veil. This unknown person gave a singular laugh and said: “Oh I brought some candles; we could have had a light if we had wished.” Both the tone and the purport of the words announced to Hyacinth that they proceeded from Lady Aurora.

VIII

Paul Muniment took a match out of his pocket and lighted it on the sole of his shoe; after which he applied it to a tallow candle which stood in a tin receptacle on the low mantel-shelf. This enabled Hyacinth to perceive a narrow bed in a corner and a small object stretched upon it—an object revealed to him mainly by the bright fixedness of a pair of large eyes, of which the whites were sharply contrasted with the dark pupil and which gazed at him across a counterpane of gaudy patchwork. The brown room seemed crowded with heterogeneous objects and presented moreover, thanks to a multitude of small prints, both plain and coloured, fastened all over the walls, a highly-decorated appearance. The little person in the corner had the air of having gone to bed in a picture-gallery, and as soon as Hyacinth became aware of this his impression deepened that Paul Muniment and his sister were very wonderful people. Lady Aurora hovered before him with an odd drooping, swaying erectness, and she laughed a good deal, vaguely and shyly, as for the awkwardness of her being found still on the premises. “Rosy, girl, I’ve brought you a visitor,” Hyacinth’s guide soon said. “This young man has walked all the way from Lisson Grove to make your acquaintance.” Rosy continued to look at the visitor from over her counterpane, and he felt slightly embarrassed, for he had never yet been presented to a young lady in her position. “You mustn’t mind her being in bed—she’s always in bed,” her brother went on. “She’s in bed just the same as a little slippery trout’s in the water.”

“Dear me, if I didn’t receive company because I was in bed, there wouldn’t be much use, would there, Lady Aurora?”

Rosy put this question in a light, gay tone, with a dart of shining eyes at her companion, who replied at once with still greater hilarity and in a voice which struck Hyacinth as strange and affected: “Oh mercy, no; it seems quite the natural place!” Then she added: “And it’s such a lovely bed, such a comfortable bed!”

“Indeed it is, when your ladyship makes it up,” said Rosy; while Hyacinth wondered at this strange phenomenon of a peer’s daughter (for he knew she must be that) performing the functions of a housemaid.

“I say now, you haven’t been doing that again to-day?” Muniment asked, punching the mattress of the invalid with a vigorous hand.

“Pray, who would if I didn’t?” Lady Aurora inquired. “It only takes a minute if one knows how.” Her manner was jocosely apologetic and she seemed to plead guilty to having been absurd; in the dim light Hyacinth thought he saw her blush as if she were much embarrassed. In spite of her blushing her appearance and manner suggested to him a personage in a comedy. She sounded the letter r as a w.

“I can do it beautifully. I often do it, when Mrs. Major doesn’t come up,” Paul Muniment said, continuing to thump his sister’s couch in an appreciative but somewhat subversive manner.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt whatever!” Lady Aurora exclaimed quickly. “Mrs. Major must have so very much to do.”

“Not in the making-up of beds, I’m afraid; there are only two or three, down there, for so many,” the young man returned loudly and with a kind of inconsequent cheerfulness.

“Yes, I’ve thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be room for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time with all gravity.

“There’s not much room for a family of that sort anywhere—thirteen people of all ages and sizes,” her host observed. “The world’s pretty big, but there doesn’t seem room.”

“We’re also thirteen at home,” Lady Aurora hastened to mention. “We’re also rather crowded.”

“Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy demanded from her dusky nook.

“I don’t know about Inglefield. I’m so much in town.” Hyacinth could see that Inglefield was a subject she wished to turn off, and to do so she added: “We too are of all ages and sizes.”

“Well, it’s fortunate you’re not all your size!” Paul Muniment declared with a freedom at which Hyacinth was rather shocked and which led him to suspect that though his new friend was a very fine fellow a delicate tact was not his main characteristic. Later he explained this by the fact that he was rural and provincial and had not had, like himself, the benefit of the life of a capital; and later still he wished to know what, after all, such a character as that had to do with tact or with compliments, and why its work in the world was not most properly performed by the simple exercise of a rude manly strength.

At this familiar allusion to her stature Lady Aurora turned hither and thither a little confusedly; Hyacinth saw her high, lean figure almost rock in the dim little room. Her commotion carried her to the door, and with ejaculations of which it was difficult to guess the meaning she was about to depart when Rosy detained her, having evidently much more social art than Paul. “Don’t you see it’s only because her ladyship’s standing up that she’s so, you gawk? We’re not thirteen, at any rate, and we’ve got all the furniture we want, so there’s a chair for every one. Do be seated again, Lady Aurora, and help me to entertain this gentleman. I don’t know your name, sir; perhaps my brother will mention it when he has collected his wits. I’m very glad to see you, though I don’t see you very well. Why shouldn’t we light one of her ladyship’s candles? It’s very different to that common thing.”

Hyacinth thought Miss Muniment very charming; he had begun to make her out better by this time, and he watched her small wan, pointed face, framed on the pillow by thick black hair. She was a diminutive dark person, pale and wasted with a lifelong infirmity; Hyacinth thought her manner denoted high accomplishment—he judged it impossible to tell her age. Lady Aurora pleaded that she ought to have gone, long since; but she seated herself nevertheless on the chair that Paul pushed toward her.