BOOK FIRST (continued 3)

“Here’s a go!” this young man exclaimed to the other guest. “You told me your name, but I’ve clean forgotten it.” Then when Hyacinth had pronounced it again he said to his sister: “That won’t tell you much; there are bushels of Robinsons in the north. But you’ll like him, he’s all right; I met him at the Poupins.” “Puppin” would represent the sound by which he designated the French bookbinder, and that was the name by which Hyacinth always heard him called at Crookenden’s. Hyacinth knew how much nearer to the right thing he himself came.

“Your name, like mine, represents a flower,” said the little woman in the bed. “Mine is Rose Muniment and her ladyship’s is Aurora Langrish. That means the morning or the dawn; it’s the most beautiful of all, don’t you think?” Rose Muniment addressed this question to Hyacinth while Lady Aurora gazed at her shyly and mutely and as if admiring her manner, her self-possession and flow of conversation. Her brother lighted one of the visitor’s candles and the girl went on without waiting for Hyacinth’s response. “Isn’t it right she should be called the dawn when she brings light where she goes? The Puppins are the charming foreigners I’ve told you about,” she explained to her friend.

“Oh, it’s so pleasant knowing a few foreigners!” Lady Aurora exclaimed with a spasm of expression. “They’re often so very fresh.”

“Mr. Robinson’s a sort of foreigner and he’s very fresh,” said Paul Muniment. “He meets Mr. Puppin quite on his own ground. If I had his gift of tongues it would bring me on.”

“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I feel the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked finely, becoming conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora toward him; so that he wondered what he could go on to say to keep at that level. This was the first time he had encountered socially a member of that aristocracy to which he had now for a good while known it was Miss Pynsent’s theory that he belonged; and the occasion was interesting in spite of the lady’s appearing to have so few of the qualities of her caste. She was about thirty years of age; her nose was large and, in spite of the sudden retreat of her chin, her face long and lean. She had the manner of extreme near-sightedness; her front teeth projected from her upper gums, which she revealed when she smiled, and her fair hair, in tangled silky skeins (Rose Muniment thought it too lovely), drooped over her pink cheeks. Her clothes looked as if she had worn them a good deal in the rain, and the note of a certain disrepair in her apparel was given by a hole in one of her black gloves, through which a white finger gleamed. She was plain and diffident and she might have been poor; but in the fine grain and sloping, shrinking slimness of her whole person, the delicacy of her curious features and a kind of cultivated quality in her sweet, vague, civil expression, there was a suggestion of race, of long transmission, of an organism that had resulted from fortunate touch after touch. She was not a common woman; she was one of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth didn’t define her in this manner to himself, but he received from her the impression that if she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was not) aristocracies were yet complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked that there were many delightful books in French, and he proclaimed it a torment to know that (as he did very well) when you saw no way to getting hold of them. This led Lady Aurora to say after a moment’s hesitation that she had a good lot of her own and that if he liked she should be most happy to lend them to him. Hyacinth thanked her—thanked her even too much, and felt both the kindness and the brilliant promise of the offer (he knew the exasperation of having volumes in his hands, for external treatment, which he couldn’t take home at night, having tried that method surreptitiously during his first weeks at old Crook’s and come very near being sacked in consequence) while he wondered how such a system could be put into practice; whether she would expect him to call at her house and wait in the hall till the books were sent out to him. Rose Muniment exclaimed that that was her ladyship all over—always wanting to make up to people for being less lucky than herself: she would take the shoes off her feet for any one that might take a fancy to them. At this the visitor declared that she would stop coming to see her if the girl caught her up that way for everything; and Rosy, without heeding the remonstrance, explained to Hyacinth that she thought it the least she could do to give what she had. She was so ashamed of being rich that she wondered the lower classes didn’t break into Inglefield and take possession of all the treasures in the Italian room. She was a tremendous socialist; she was worse than any one—she was worse even than Paul.

“I wonder if she’s worse than me,” Hyacinth returned at a venture, not understanding the allusions to Inglefield and the Italian room, which Miss Muniment made as if she knew all about these places. After learning more of the world he remembered this tone of Muniment’s sister—he was to have plenty of observation of it on other occasions—as that of a person in the habit of visiting the nobility at their country-seats; she talked about Inglefield as if she had stayed there.

“Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!” exclaimed the master of the scene, who had been sitting silent and sidewise in a chair that was too narrow for him, his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been entertaining an angel unawares?”

Hyacinth made out he was chaffing him, but he knew the way to face that sort of thing was to exaggerate one’s meaning. “You didn’t know I was advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about me. I think I go about as far as any one.”

“I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,” Paul Muniment said with an air of derision which showed him he wouldn’t put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same time that it revealed to him how he had come within an ace of posturing.

“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something that will take your head off if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so well in French.”

“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried Rosy in perfect good faith and clasping her hands for expectation.

The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration. “I should like so very much to know—it would be so interesting—if you don’t mind—how far exactly you do go.” She threw back her head very far and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more adapted to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.

This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for he was far from being ready with an impressive formula. He replied, however, with a candour in which he tried as far as possible to sink his vagueness: “Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I see my way to conclusions from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin would shrink. Poupin, at any rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.”

“I should like so much to know Madame,” Lady Aurora murmured as if politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.

“Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,” said Muniment; “you can easily look over his head! He has a sweet assortment of phrases—they’re really pretty things to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All the same he warms one up; he has a spark of the sacred fire. The principal conclusion Mr. Robinson sees his way to,” he added to Lady Aurora, “is that your father ought to have his head chopped off and carried on a pike.”

“Ah yes, the French Revolution.”

“Lord, I don’t know anything about your father, my lady!” Hyacinth interposed.

“Didn’t you ever hear of the Earl of Inglefield?” cried Rose Muniment.

“He’s one of the best,” said Lady Aurora as if she were pleading for him.

“Very likely, but he’s a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and a park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we’re bundled together into this sort of kennel.” Hyacinth admired the young man’s consistency till he saw he was amusing himself; after which he still admired the way he could mix that up with the tremendous opinions it must have been certain he entertained. In his own imagination he associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young chemical expert, at the same time that he was planning far ahead, seemed capable of turning revolutionists themselves into ridicule even for the entertainment of the revolutionised.

“Well, I’ve told you often enough that I don’t go with you at all,” said Rose Muniment, whose recumbency appeared not in the least to interfere with her universal participation. “You’ll make a tremendous mistake if you try to turn everything round. There ought to be differences, and high and low, and there always will be, true as ever I lie here. I think it’s against everything, pulling down them that’s above.”

“Everything points to great changes in this country, but if once our Rosy’s against them how can you be sure? That’s the only thing that makes me doubt,” her brother went on, looking at her with a placidity which showed the habit of indulgence.

“Well, I may be ill, but I ain’t buried, and if I’m content with my position—such a position as it is—surely other folk might be with theirs. Her ladyship may think I’m as good as her if she takes that notion; but she’ll have a deal to do to make me believe it.”

“I think you’re much better than I, and I know very few people so good as you,” Lady Aurora brought out, blushing not for her opinions but for her timidity. It was easy to see that though she was original she would have liked to be even more original than she was. She was conscious, however, that such a declaration might appear rather gross to persons who didn’t see exactly how she meant it; so she added, as quickly as her hesitating manner permitted, to cover it up: “You know there’s one thing you ought to remember, à propos of revolutions and changes and all that sort of thing; I just mention it because we were talking of some of the dreadful things that were done in France. If there were to be a great disturbance in this country—and of course one hopes there won’t—it would be my impression that the people would behave in a different way altogether.”

“What people do you mean?” Hyacinth allowed himself to inquire.

“Oh, the upper class, the people who’ve got all the things.”

“We don’t call them the people,” observed Hyacinth, reflecting the next instant that his remark was a little primitive.

“I suppose you call them the wretches, the scoundrels!” Rose Muniment suggested, laughing merrily.

“All the things, but not all the brains,” her brother said.

“No indeed, aren’t they stupid?” exclaimed her ladyship. “All the same, I don’t think they’d all go abroad.”

“Go abroad?”

“I mean like the French nobles who emigrated so much. They’d stay at home and resist; they’d make more of a fight. I think they’d fight very hard.”

“I’m delighted to hear it, and I’m sure they’d win!” cried Rosy.

“They wouldn’t collapse, don’t you know,” Lady Aurora continued. “They’d struggle till they were beaten.”

“And you think they’d be beaten in the end?” Hyacinth asked.

“Oh dear, yes,” she replied with a familiar confidence at which he was greatly surprised. “But of course one hopes it won’t happen.”

“I infer from what you say that they talk it over a good deal among themselves, to settle the line they’ll take,” said Paul Muniment.

But Rosy intruded before Lady Aurora could answer. “I think it’s wicked to talk it over, and I’m sure we haven’t any business to talk it over here! When her ladyship says the aristocracy will make a fine stand I like to hear her say it and I think she speaks in a manner that becomes her own position. But there’s something else in her tone which, if I may be allowed to say so, I think a great mistake. If her ladyship expects, in case of the lower classes coming up in that odious manner, to be let off easily, for the sake of the concessions she may have made in advance, I’d just advise her to save herself the disappointment and the trouble. They won’t be a bit the wiser and they won’t either know or care. If they’re going to trample over their betters it isn’t on account of her having seemed to give up everything to us here that they’ll let her off. They’ll trample on her just the same as on the others, and they’ll say she has got to pay for her title and her grand relations and her fine appearance. Therefore I advise her not to waste her good-nature in trying to let herself down. When you’re up so high as that you’ve got to stay there; and if the powers above have made you a lady the best thing you can do is to hold up your head. I can promise your ladyship I would!”

The close logic of this speech and the quaint self-possession with which the little bedridden speaker delivered it struck Hyacinth as amazing and confirmed his idea that the brother and sister were a most extraordinary pair. It had a terrible effect on poor Lady Aurora, by whom so stern a lesson from so humble a quarter had evidently not been expected and who sought refuge from her confusion in a series of pleading gasps, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density, which was deliberate, and acute too, not seeing, or at any rate not heeding, that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister, inflicted a fresh humiliation in saying: “Rosy’s right, my lady. It’s no use trying to buy yourself off. You can’t do enough; your sacrifices don’t count. You spoil your fun now and you don’t get it made up to you later. To all you people nothing will ever be made up. Eat your pudding while you have it; you mayn’t have it long.”

Lady Aurora listened to him with her eyes on his face, and as they rested there Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of her expression. Afterwards he thought he could attach a meaning to it. She got up quickly when Muniment had ceased speaking; the movement suggested she had taken offence and he would have liked to show her he thought she had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance, not glancing at him for a moment. Then he saw he was mistaken and that if she had flushed considerably it was only with the excitement of pleasure, the enjoyment of such original talk and of seeing her friends at last as free and familiar as she wished them to be. “You’re the most delightful people—I wish every one could know you!” she broke out. “But I must really be going.” She went to the bed and bent over Rosy and kissed her.

“Paul will see you as far as you like on your way home,” this young woman remarked.

Lady Aurora protested, but Paul, without protesting in return, only took up his hat and smiled at her as if he knew his duty. On this her ladyship said: “Well, you may see me downstairs; I forgot it was so dark.”

“You must take her ladyship’s own candle and you must call a cab,” Rosy directed.

“Oh, I don’t go in cabs. I walk.”

“Well, you may go on the top of a ’bus if you like; you can’t help being superb,” Miss Muniment declared, watching her sympathetically.

“Superb? Oh mercy!” cried the poor devoted, grotesque lady, leaving the room with Paul, who told Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She neglected to take leave of our young man, and he asked himself what was to be hoped from that sort of people when even the best of them—those that wished to be agreeable to the demos—reverted inevitably to the supercilious. She had said no more about lending him her books.

IX

“She lives in Belgrave Square; she has ever so many brothers and sisters; one of her sisters is married to Lord Warmington,” Rose Muniment instantly began, not apparently in the least discomposed at being left alone with a strange young man in a room which was now half dark again, thanks to her brother’s having carried off the second and more brilliant candle. She was so interested for the time in telling Hyacinth the history of Lady Aurora that she appeared not to remember how little she knew about himself. Her ladyship had dedicated her life and her pocket-money to the poor and sick; she cared nothing for parties and races and dances and picnics and cards and life in great houses, the usual amusements of the aristocracy: she was like one of the saints of old come to life again out of a legend. She had made their acquaintance, Paul’s and hers, about a year before, through a friend of theirs, such a fine brave young woman, who was in Saint Thomas’s Hospital for a surgical operation. She had been laid up there for weeks during which Lady Aurora, always looking out for those who couldn’t help themselves, used to come and talk to her and read to her, till the end of her time in the ward, when the poor girl, parting with her kind friend, told her how she knew of another unfortunate creature (for whom there was no place there, because she was incurable) who would be mighty thankful for any little attention of that sort. She had given Lady Aurora the address in Audley Court and the very next day her ladyship had knocked at their door. It wasn’t because she was poor—though in all conscience they were pinched enough—but because she had so little satisfaction in her limbs. Lady Aurora came very often, for several months, without meeting Paul, because he was always at his work; but one day he came home early on purpose to find her, to thank her for her goodness, and also to see (Miss Muniment rather shyly intimated) if she were really so good as his extravagant little sister made her out. Rosy had a triumph after that: Paul had to admit that her ladyship was beyond anything that any one in his waking senses would believe. She seemed to want to give up everything to those who were below her and never to expect any thanks at all. And she wasn’t always preaching and showing you your duty; she wanted to talk to you sociable-like, as if you were just her own sister. And her own sisters were the highest in the land, and you might see her name in the newspapers the day they were presented to the Queen. Lady Aurora had been presented too, with feathers in her head and a long tail to her gown; but she had turned her back on it all with a kind of terror—a sort of shivering sinking state which she had often described to Miss Muniment. The day she had first seen Paul was the day they became so intimate, the three of them together—if she might apply such a word as that to such a peculiar connexion. The little woman, the little girl, as she lay there (Hyacinth scarce knew how to characterise her) told our young man a very great secret, in which he found himself too much interested to think of criticising so precipitate a confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had ever seen in the world, her ladyship thought Rosy’s Paul the very cleverest. And she had seen the greatest, the most famous, the brightest of every kind, for they all came to stay at Inglefield, thirty and forty of them at once. She had talked with them all and heard them say their best (and you could fancy how they would try to give it out at such a place as that, where there was nearly a mile of conservatories and a hundred wax candles were lighted at a time) and at the end of it all she had made the remark to herself—and she had made it to Rosy too—that there was none of them had such a head on his shoulders as the young man in Audley Court. Rosy wouldn’t spread such a rumour as that in the court itself, but she wanted every friend of her brother’s (and she could see Hyacinth was a real one by the way he listened) to know what was thought of him by them that had an experience of intellect. She didn’t wish to give it out that her ladyship had lowered herself in any manner to a person that earned his bread in a dirty shop (clever as he might be), but it was easy to see she minded what he said as if he had been a bishop—or more indeed, for she didn’t think much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his work before she had gone, and to-night Hyacinth could see for himself how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling, high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished, of a poor north-country home, bedecked with penny ornaments and related in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed estates. He spent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd, sharp, crippled, chattering sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far better than Pinnie or than Milly Henning) and who startled, puzzled and at the same time rather distressed him by the manner in which she referred herself to the most abject class—the class that prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter, in the presence of its betters. That was Pinnie’s attitude of course, but Hyacinth had long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian patience in her blood, and that though she had a tender soul she had not a truly high spirit. He was more entertained than afflicted, however, by Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered about; this was the first time he had heard it described with that degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually, almost morbidly conscious that the circle in which he lived was an infinitesimally small shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London, and his imagination plunged again and again into the flood that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter, happier vision—the vision of societies where, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked of art, literature and history. When Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject of Lady Aurora she became more quiet, asking as yet, however, no straight questions of her guest, whom she seemed to take very much for granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon again, and he added, to explain this wish: “You know you seem to me very curious people.”

Miss Muniment didn’t in the least repudiate the imputation. “Oh yes, I daresay we seem very curious. I think we’re generally thought so; especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.” And she laughed till her bed creaked again.

“Perhaps it’s lucky you’re ill; perhaps if you had your health you’d be all over the place,” Hyacinth suggested. And he went on candidly: “I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.”

“I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you had known my father and mother.”

“Were they such a rare lot?”

“I think you’d say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the mines, where the filthy coal’s dug out. That’s where my father came from—he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He never had a day’s schooling in his life, but he climbed up out of his black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of the pits and the awfulness too. My father had no great figure, but she was magnificent—the finest woman in the country and the bravest and the best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was as black as the coal he worked in: I know I’m just his pattern, barring that he did have his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. Yet between him and my mother, for grand high intelligence, there wasn’t much to choose. But what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father had even less of that than I, for with me it’s only the body that can’t stand up, and with him it was the very nature. He invented, for use in machine-shops, a mechanical improvement—a new kind of beam-fixing, whatever that is—and he sold it at Bradford for fifteen pounds: I mean the whole right and profit of it and every hope and comfort of his family. He was always straying and my mother was always bringing him back. She had plenty to do, with me a puny ailing brat from the moment I opened my eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came home, or only came a loose bloody bundle of clothes. He had fallen into a gravel-pit, he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my brother won’t ever touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and that I’ve only a drop once a week or so in the way of a strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more. If she could but have come to us before my mother went—that would have been a saving! I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept us decent—if such a useless little mess as me can be said to be decent. At any rate she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She went to the wash-tub, and she might have been a queen as she stood there with her bare arms in the foul linen and her long hair braided on her head. She was terrible handsome, but he’d have been a bold man that had taken on himself to tell her so. And it was from her we got our education—she was determined we should rise above the common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go into such things, but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book. She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t, and her idea for us was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You can see for yourself that that’s what has come of it. How he got it’s more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s head wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t had a head himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow poster on a wall or a time-table at a railway station than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad—picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing—only that I’d have made a poor feast—and just lay that really grand character on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rose Muniment in conclusion; “but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had jolly good brains at least to give us.”

Hyacinth listened to this eloquence—the clearest statement of anything he had ever heard made by a woman—with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment talked of brains made him feel this; she pronounced the word as if she were distributing prizes for intellectual eminence from off a platform. No doubt the weak inventor and the strong worker had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence on her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the chord of melancholy aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made for his life to have had some rich warm presence like that in it.

“Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired after a little.

The eyes of his hostess glittered at him. “If you ever quarrel with him you’ll see whose side I shall take.”

“Ah, before that I shall make you like me.”

“That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I shall fling you over!”

“Why then do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the people are to come up?”

“Because I think he’ll get over them.”

“Never—never!” cried Hyacinth. “I’ve only known him an hour or two, but I deny that with all my strength.”

“Is that the way you’re going to make me like you—contradicting me so?” Miss Muniment asked with familiar archness.

“What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.”

“I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you’re not if you want all the great people pulled down and the most dreadful scenes enacted.”

“Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for the groaning, toiling millions—those who have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time?”

Hyacinth asked this question with considerable heat, but the effect of it was to send his companion off into a new ring of laughter. “You say that just like a man my brother described to me three days ago, a little man at some club whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way he raved and stamped. I don’t mean that you do either, but you use almost the same words as him.” Hyacinth scarce knew what to make of this allusion or of the picture offered him of Paul Muniment casting ridicule on those who spoke in the name of the down-trodden. But Rosy went on before he had time to do more than reflect that there would evidently be great things to learn about her brother: “I haven’t the least objection to seeing the people improved, but I don’t want to see the aristocracy lowered an inch. I like so much to look at it up there.”

“You ought to know my Aunt Pinnie—she’s just such another benighted idolater!” Hyacinth returned.

“Oh, you’re making me like you very fast! And pray who’s your Aunt Pinnie?”

“She’s a dressmaker and a charming little woman. I should like her to come and see you.”

“I’m afraid I’m not in her line—I never had on a dress in my life. But, as a charming woman, I should be delighted to see her,” Miss Muniment hastened to add.

“I’ll bring her some day,” he said; and then he went on rather incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it a shame her sharpness should be enlisted on the wrong side. “Don’t you want, for yourself, a better place to live in?”

She jerked herself up and for a moment he thought she would jump out of her bed at him. “A better place than this? Pray how could there be a better place? Every one thinks it’s lovely; you should see our view by daylight—you should see everything I’ve got. Perhaps you’re used to something very fine, but Lady Aurora says that in all Belgrave Square there isn’t such a cosy little room. If you think I’m not perfectly content you’re very much mistaken!”

Such an attitude could only exasperate him, and his exasperation made him indifferent to the mistake of his having appeared to sniff at Miss Muniment’s quarters. Pinnie herself, submissive as she was, had spared him that sort of displeasure; she groaned over the dinginess of Lomax Place sufficiently to remind him that she had not been absolutely stultified by misery. “Don’t you sometimes make your brother very cross?” he asked, smiling, of his present entertainer.

“Cross? I don’t know what you take us for! I never saw him lose his temper in his life.”

“He must be a rum customer! Doesn’t he really care for—for what we were talking about?”

For a space Rosy was silent; then she replied: “What my brother really cares for—well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me.”

Hyacinth stared. “But isn’t he tremendously deep in—” What should he call the mystery?

“Deep in what?”

“Well, in what’s going on beneath the surface. Doesn’t he belong to important things?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to—you may ask him!” cried Rosy, who laughed gaily again as the opening door re-admitted the subject of their conversation. “You must have crossed the water with her ladyship,” she pursued. “I wonder who enjoyed their walk most.”

“She’s a handy old girl and she has a goodish stride,” said the young man.

“I think she’s in love with you simply, Mr. Muniment.”

“Really, my dear, for an admirer of the aristocracy you allow yourself a licence,” Paul scoffed, smiling at Hyacinth.

Hyacinth got up, feeling that really he had paid a long visit; his curiosity was far from satisfied, but there was a limit to the time one should spend in a young lady’s sleeping apartment. “Perhaps she is; why not?” he struck out.

“Perhaps she is then; she’s daft enough for anything.”

“There have been fine folks before who have patted the people on the back and pretended to enter into their life,” Hyacinth said. “Is she only playing with that idea or is she in earnest?”

“In earnest—in terrible deadly earnest, my dear fellow! I think she must be rather crowded out at home.”

“Crowded out of Inglefield? Why, there’s room for three hundred!” Rosy broke in.

“Well, if that’s the kind of mob that’s in possession, no wonder she prefers Camberwell. We must be kind to the poor lady,” Paul added in a tone that Hyacinth noticed. He attributed a remarkable meaning to it; it seemed to say that people such as he were now so sure of their game that they could afford to be magnanimous; or else it expressed a prevision of the doom that hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had got on together, and the girl replied that Mr. Robinson had made himself most agreeable. “Then you must tell me all about him after he goes, for you know I don’t know him much myself,” said her brother.

“Oh yes, I’ll tell you everything—you know how I like describing.”

Hyacinth found himself amused at the young lady’s account of his efforts to please her, the fact being that he had only listened to her own eager discourse without opening his mouth; but Paul, whether or no guessing the truth, said to him all pertinently: “It’s very wonderful—she can describe things she has never seen. And they’re just like the reality.”

“There’s nothing I’ve never seen,” Rosy declared. “That’s the advantage of my lying here in such a manner. I see everything in the world.”

“You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings—his secret societies and his revolutionary clubs. You put that aside when I asked you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t ask her that sort of thing,” said Paul, lowering at Hyacinth with a fierce frown—an expression he perceived in a moment to be facetiously assumed.

“What am I to do then, since you won’t tell me anything definite yourself?”

“It will be definite enough when you get hanged for it!” Rosy exclaimed mockingly.

“Why do you want to poke your head into ugly black holes?” Muniment asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder and shaking it gently.

“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” our young man gravely demanded.

“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!” Paul cried in not unkindly derision to his sister. “You must have got that precious phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that the party you want to belong to?” he went on with his clear eyes ranging over his diminutive friend.

“If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,” Hyacinth candidly pleaded, rejoicing all the while to feel himself in such a relation. It was his view of himself, and not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never sue for a favour; but now he felt that in any connexion with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This rare man he could go on his knees to without a sense of humiliation.

“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul pursued, refusing to be serious.

“Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure they are coming in to make a search for your papers,” Miss Muniment lucidly interposed.

“The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up and dance.”

“What did you ask me to come home with you for?” Hyacinth demanded as he twirled his hat. It was an effort for a moment to keep the tears from his eyes; he saw himself forced to put such a different construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy impression that Muniment had divined in him a possible associate of a high type in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of things, whereas it now came over him that the real use he had been put to was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service, every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man justified at the present juncture the high estimate Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question would have been he invented straight off a better one and said at random, smiling and not knowing exactly what his visitor had meant:

“What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you’d be afraid.”

What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally vague; but he answered quickly enough: “I think you’ve only to try me to see.”

“I’m sure that if you introduce him to some of your low wicked friends he’ll be quite satisfied after he has looked round a bit,” Miss Muniment remarked irrepressibly.

“Those are just the kind of people I want to know,” Hyacinth rang out.

His sincerity appeared to touch his friend. “Well, I see you’re a good ’un. Just meet me some night.”

“Where, where?” asked Hyacinth eagerly.

“Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away from her.” And Muniment led him good-humouredly out.

X

Several months after Hyacinth had made his acquaintance, Millicent Henning remarked that it was high time our hero should take her to some first-class place of amusement. He proposed hereupon the Canterbury Music Hall; at which she tossed her head and affirmed that when a young lady had done for a young man what she had done for him the least he could do was to give her an evening at some theatre in the Strand. Hyacinth would have been a good deal at a loss to say exactly what she had done for him, but it was familiar to him by this time that she regarded him as under great obligations. From the day she had come to look him up in Lomax Place she had taken a position, largely, in his life, and he had seen poor Pinnie’s wan countenance grow several degrees more blank. Amanda Pynsent’s forebodings had been answered to the letter; the flaring cometary creature had become a fixed star. She had never spoken to him of Millicent but once, several weeks after her interview with the girl; and this had not been in a tone of rebuke, for she had divested herself for ever of any maternal prerogative. Tearful, tremulous, deferential inquiry was now her only weapon, and nothing could be more humble and circumspect than the manner in which she made use of it. He was never at home of an evening, at present, and he had mysterious ways of spending his Sundays, with which church-going had nothing to do. The time had been when often, after tea, he sat near the lamp with the dressmaker and, while her fingers flew, read out to her the works of Dickens and of Scott; happy hours of vain semblance that he had forgotten the wrong she had done him, so that she could almost forget it herself. But now he gulped down his tea so fast that he hardly took off his hat while he sat there, and Pinnie, with her quick eye for all matters of costume, noticed that he wore it still more gracefully askew than usual, cocking it with a victorious exalted air. He hummed to himself; he fingered his moustache; he looked out of window when there was nothing to look at; he seemed preoccupied, launched in intellectual excursions, half anxious and half in spirits. During the whole winter Miss Pynsent explained everything by four words murmured beneath her breath: “That beastly forward jade!” On the single occasion, however, on which she had sought relief from her agitation in an appeal to Hyacinth she didn’t trust herself to designate the girl by epithet or title.

“There’s only one thing I want to know,” she said to him in a manner which might have seemed casual if in her silence, knowing her as well as he did, he had not already perceived the implication of her thought. “Does she expect you to marry her, dearest?”

“Does who expect me? I should like to see the woman who does!”

“Of course you know who I mean. The one that came after you—and picked you right up—from the other end of London.” And at the remembrance of that insufferable scene poor Pinnie flamed for a moment. “Aren’t there plenty of vulgar fellows in that low part where she lives without her ravaging over here? Why can’t she stick to her own beat, I should like to know?” Hyacinth had flushed at the question, and she had seen something in his face to make her change her tone. “Just promise me this, my precious child: that if you get into any sort of mess with that piece you’ll immediately confide it to your poor old Pinnie.”

“My poor old Pinnie sometimes makes me quite sick,” he remarked for answer. “What sort of a mess do you suppose I shall get into?”

“Well, suppose she does come it over you that you promised to marry her?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. She doesn’t want to marry any one—the way she sees it.”

“Then how the dickens does she see it?”

“Do you imagine I’d tell a lady’s secrets?” the young man returned.

“Oh laws, if she was a lady I shouldn’t be afraid!” said Pinnie.

“Every woman’s a lady when she has placed herself under one’s protection,” Hyacinth declared with his little manner of a man of the great world.

“Under your protection? Oh I say!” cried Pinnie, staring. “And pray who’s to protect you?”

As soon as she had said this she repented, because it seemed just the sort of exclamation that would have made Hyacinth bite her head off. One of the things she loved him for, however, was that he gave you touching surprises in this line, had sudden inconsistencies of temper that were all for your advantage. He was by no means always mild when he ought to have been, but he was sometimes heavenly when he needn’t have been at all. At such moments Pinnie wanted to kiss him and had often tried to make Mr. Vetch understand what fascinating traits of character she was always noting in their young friend. This particular one was rather difficult to describe, and Mr. Vetch never would admit that he understood, or that he had observed anything that seemed to correspond to the dressmaker’s somewhat confused psychological sketch. It was a comfort to her in these days, and almost the only one she had, that she was sure Anastasius Vetch understood a good deal more than he felt bound to acknowledge. He was always up to his old game of being a great deal cleverer than cleverness itself required; and it consoled her present weak, pinched feeling to know that, though he still talked of the boy as if it would be a pity to take him too seriously, that wasn’t the way he thought of him. He also took him seriously and had even a certain sense of duty in regard to him. Miss Pynsent went so far as to say to herself that the fiddler probably had savings and that no one had ever known of any one else belonging to him. She wouldn’t have mentioned it to Hyacinth for the world, for fear of leading up to a disappointment; but she had visions of a foolscap sheet folded away in some queer little bachelor’s box (she couldn’t fancy what men kept in such places) on which the youth’s name would have been written down in very big letters before a solicitor.

“Oh, I’m unprotected in the nature of things,” he replied, smiling at his too scrupulous companion. Then he added: “At any rate, it isn’t from that girl any danger will come to me.”

“I can’t think why you like her,” Pinnie remarked as if she had spent on the question treasures of impartiality.

“It’s jolly to hear one woman on the subject of another,” Hyacinth said. “You’re kind and good and yet you’re ready—!” He gave a sigh as for long experience.

“Well, what am I ready to do? I’m not ready to see you gobbled up before my eyes!”

“You needn’t be afraid. She won’t drag me to the altar.”

“And pray doesn’t she think you good enough—for one of the beautiful ’Ennings?”

“You don’t understand, my poor Pinnie,” he wearily pleaded. “I sometimes think there isn’t a single thing in life that you understand. One of these days she’ll marry an alderman.”

“An alderman—that creature?”

“An alderman or a banker or a bishop or some of that bloated kind. She doesn’t want to end her career to-day—she wants to begin it.”

“Well, I wish she’d take you later!” the dressmaker returned.

Hyacinth said nothing for a little, but then broke out: “What are you afraid of? Look here, we had better clear this up once for all. Are you afraid of my marrying a girl out of a shop?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” cried Pinnie with conciliatory eagerness. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk!”

“Do you think I’d marry any one who would marry me?” Hyacinth went on. “The kind of girl who’d look at me is the kind of girl I’d never look at.” He struck Pinnie as having thought it all out; which didn’t surprise her, as she had been familiar from his youth with his way of following things up. But she was always delighted when he made a remark that showed he was conscious of being of fine clay—flashed out an allusion to his not being what he seemed. He was not what he seemed, but even with Pinnie’s valuable assistance he had not succeeded in representing to himself very definitely what he was. She had placed at his disposal for this purpose a passionate idealism which, employed in some case where it could have consequences, might have been termed profligate and which yet never cost her a scruple or a compunction.

“I’m sure a princess might look at you and be none the worse!” she declared in her delight at this assurance, more positive than any she had yet received, that he was safe from the worse danger. This the dressmaker considered to be the chance of his marrying some person of her own base order. Still it came over her that his taste might be lowered, and before the subject was dropped, on the present occasion, she said that of course he must be quite aware of all that was wanting to such a girl as Millicent ’Enning—who visibly wasn’t worth any struggle for her aspirate.

“Oh, I don’t bother about what’s wanting to her. I’m content with what she has.”

“Content, dearest—how do you mean?” the little dressmaker quavered. “Content to make an intimate friend of her?”

“It’s impossible I should discuss these matters with you,” Hyacinth grandly enough replied.

“Of course I see that. But I should think she’d bore you sometimes,” Miss Pynsent threw off cunningly.

“She does, I assure you, to extinction!”

“Then why do you spend every evening with her?”

“Where should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly public-house—or at the Italian opera?” His association with Miss Henning was not so close as that, but nevertheless he wouldn’t take the trouble to prove to poor Pinnie that he enjoyed her society only two or three times a week; that on other evenings he simply strolled about the streets (this boyish habit clung to him) and that he had even occasionally the resource of going to the Poupins’ or of gossiping and smoking a pipe at some open house-door, when the night was not cold, with a fellow-mechanic. Later in the winter, after he had made Paul Muniment’s acquaintance, the aspect of his life changed considerably, though Millicent continued to be exceedingly mixed up with it. He hated the taste of liquor and still more the taste of the places where it was sold; besides which the types of misery and vice that one was liable to see collected in them frightened and harrowed him, made him ask himself questions that pierced the deeper because they were met by no answer. It was both a blessing and a drawback to him that the delicate, charming character of the work he did at old Crook’s, under Eustache Poupin’s influence, was a kind of education of the taste, trained him in the finest discriminations, in the recognition of the rare and the hatred of the cheap. This made the brutal, garish, stodgy decoration of public-houses, with their deluge of gaslight, their glittering brass and pewter, their lumpish woodwork and false colours, detestable to him. He had been still very young when the “gin-palace” ceased to convey to him an idea of the palatial.

For this unfortunate but remarkably-organised youth every displeasure or gratification of the visual sense coloured his whole mind, and though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, nothing in life had such an interest or such a price for him as his impressions and reflexions. They came from everything he touched, they made him vibrate, kept him thrilled and throbbing, for most of his waking consciousness, and they constituted as yet the principal events and stages of his career. Fortunately they were often an immense amusement. Everything in the field of observation suggested this or that; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had in a word more news of life, as he might have called it, than he knew what to do with—felt sometimes as he could have imagined an overwhelmed man of business to whom the post brought too many letters. The man of business indeed could keep a secretary, but what secretary could have cleared up for Hyacinth some of the strange communications of life? He liked to talk about these things, but it was only a few here and there he could discuss with Milly. He allowed Miss Pynsent to imagine that his hours of leisure were almost exclusively dedicated to this young lady, because, as he said to himself, if he were to account to her for every evening in the week it would make no difference—she would stick to her suspicion; and he referred this perversity to the general weight of misconception under which he at this crude period of his growth held it was his lot to languish. It didn’t matter if one was a little more or a little less misunderstood. He might indeed have remembered it mattered to Pinnie, who, after her first relief at hearing him express himself so properly on the subject of a matrimonial connexion with Miss Henning, allowed her faded, kind, weak face little by little to lengthen out to its old solemnity. This came back as the days went on, for it wasn’t much comfort that he didn’t want to marry the young woman in Pimlico when he allowed himself to be held as tight as if he did. For the present, however, she simply said, “Oh well, if you see her as she is I don’t care what you do”—a sentiment implying a certain moral recklessness on the part of the good little dressmaker. She was irreproachable herself, but she had lived more than fifty years in a world of wickedness; like so many London women of her class and kind she had little sentimental softness for her own sex, whose general “paying” seemed the simplest and most natural arrangement; and she judged it quite a minor evil that Millicent should be left lamenting if only Hyacinth might get out of the scrape. Between a young person who had taken a gross risk and a premature, lowering marriage for her beloved little boy she very well knew which she preferred. It should be added that her view of Millicent’s power to look after herself was such as to make it absurd to pity her in advance. Pinnie thought Hyacinth the cleverest young man in the, or at least in their, world, but her state of mind implied that the young lady in Pimlico was cleverer. Her ability, at any rate, was of a kind that precluded the knowledge of suffering, whereas Hyacinth’s was somehow fairly founded on it.

By the time he had enjoyed for three months the acquaintance of the brother and sister in Audley Court the whole complexion of his life seemed changed; it was pervaded by an element of romance which overshadowed, though by no means eclipsing, the brilliant figure of Miss Henning. It was pitched in a higher key altogether and appeared to command a view of horizons equally fresh and vast. Millicent therefore shared her dominion without knowing exactly what it was that drew her old playfellow off and without indeed demanding of him an account she was not on her own side prepared to give. Hyacinth was, in the language of the circle in which she moved, her personal fancy, and she was content to fill as regards himself the same eminent and somewhat irresponsible position. She had the assurance that she was a beneficent friend: fond of him and careful of him as an elder sister might be; warning him as no one else could do against the dangers of the town; putting that stiff common sense, of which she was convinced that she possessed an extraordinary supply, at the service of his incurable verdancy; looking after him generally as no one, poor child, had ever done. Millicent made light of the dingy dressmaker in this view of her friend’s meagre little past (she thought Pinnie no better than a starved cat) and enjoyed herself immensely in the character of guide and philosopher. She felt that character never so high as when she pushed the young man with a robust elbow or said to him, “Well, you are a sharp ’un, you are!” Her theory of herself, as we know, was that she was the “best sort” in the world, as well as one of the greatest beauties and quickest wits, and there could be no better proof of her kindness of heart than her disinterested affection for a snippet of a bookbinder. Her sociability was certainly immense, and so were her vanity, her grossness, her presumption, her appetite for beer, for buns, for entertainment of every kind. She represented for Hyacinth during this period the eternal feminine, and his taste, considering he was fastidious, will be wondered at; the judgement will be that she didn’t represent it very favourably.

It may easily be believed that he criticised his inclination even while he gave himself up to it, and that he often wondered he should find so much to attract in a girl in whom he found so much to condemn. She was vulgar, clumsy and grotesquely ignorant; her conceit was proportionate and she hadn’t a grain of tact or of quick perception. And yet there was something so elementally free in her, by his loose measure, she carried with such an air the advantages she did possess, that her figure constantly mingled itself even with those bright visions hovering before him after Paul Muniment had opened a queerly-placed but far-reaching window. She was bold and generous and incalculable, and if she was coarse she was neither false nor cruel. She laughed with the laugh of the people and if you hit her hard enough would cry with their tears. When he himself was not letting his imagination wander among the haunts of the aristocracy and stretching it in the shadow of an ancestral beech to read the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes he was occupied with contemplations of a very different kind; he was absorbed in the struggles and sufferings of the millions whose life flowed in the same current as his and who, though they constantly excited his disgust and made him shrink and turn away, had the power to chain his sympathy, to raise it to passion, to convince him for the time at least that real success in the world would be to do something with them and for them. All this, strange to say, was never so vivid as in Millicent’s company—which is a proof of his fantastic, erratic way of seeing things. She had no such ideas about herself; they were almost the only ideas she didn’t have. She had no theories about redeeming or uplifting the people; she simply loathed them, for being so dirty, with the outspoken violence of one who had known poverty and the strange bedfellows it makes in a very different degree from Hyacinth, brought up (with Pinnie to put sugar in his tea and let him never want for neckties) like a regular little swell.

Millicent, to hear her talk, only asked to keep her skirts clear and marry some respectable tea-merchant. But for our hero she was magnificently plebeian, in the sense that implied loud recklessness of danger and the qualities that shine forth in a row. She summed up the sociable humorous ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and as much as any of this their ideal of something smug and prosperous, where washed hands and oiled hair and plates in rows on dressers and stuffed birds under glass and family photographs of a quite similar effect would symbolise success. She was none the less plucky for being at bottom a shameless Philistine, ambitious of a front garden with rockwork; and she presented the plebeian character in none the less plastic a form. Having the history of the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends, Hyacinth could easily see her (if there should ever be barricades in the streets of London) with a red cap of liberty on her head and her white throat bared so that she should be able to shout the louder the Marseillaise of that hour, whatever it might be. If the festival of the Goddess of Reason should ever be enacted in the British Capital—and Hyacinth could consider such possibilities without a smile, so much was it a part of the little religion he had to remember always that there was no knowing what might happen—if this solemnity, I say, should be revived in Hyde Park, who was better designated than Miss Henning to figure in a grand statuesque manner as the heroine of the occasion? It was plain she had laid her inconsequent admirer under a peculiar spell, since he could associate her with such scenes as that while she consumed beer and buns at his expense. If she had a weakness it was for prawns; and she had, all winter, a plan for his taking her down to Gravesend, where this luxury was cheap and abundant, when the fine long days should arrive. She was never so frank and facetious as when she dwelt on the details of a project of this kind; and then Hyacinth was reminded afresh that it was an immense good fortune for him she was so handsome. If she had been ugly he couldn’t have listened to her; but the rare bloom and grand style of her person glorified even her accent, interfused her cockney genius with prismatic hues, gave her a large and constant impunity.

XI

She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their commerce had been condemned for the most part to go forward in the streets, the wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in their perpetual obscurity and in which everything was covered with damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning. Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation and was still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops, before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the articles she shouldn’t mind having put up for her. He invariably pronounced the objects of her selection hideous and made no scruple to assure her she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing he could say to her affronted her so much, for her pretensions in the way of a cultivated judgement were boundless. Had not indeed her natural aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace (there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn and made the point that there was nothing in it from top to bottom that a real artist would look at. She inquired with answering derision if this were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was fascinated as much as she was provoked by his attitude of being difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among the smartest things. She had given herself out originally as very knowing, but he could make her gape with doubts. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed at nightfall) she stared and bruised him with her elbow, declaring that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she couldn’t rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his judgement and was angry at not finding herself as positive as any one. Then he would reply that it was no use attempting to tell her; she wouldn’t understand and had better continue to admire the insipid productions of an age that had lost the sense of fineness—a phrase she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of it on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.

When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a view of strengthening the tie that united him to his childhood’s friend; but the effect followed on Millicent’s side and the girl was proud to think herself in possession of a young man whose knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea it might be to her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the same time, when, in consideration for instance of a jeweller’s gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for five minutes in perfect silence and she delivered herself according to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing the perverse sentiments that made it impossible for him to speak. She could long for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing them and say it was a “regular shime”; draw brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous inductions, to some other topic equally intimate and personal. The sense of privation with her was often extremely acute; but she could always put her finger on the remedy. With her fellow-sufferer the case was very different; the remedy for him was terribly vague and inaccessible. He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled on him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflexion, in which he felt how in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and how a sordid struggle in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would involve.

In such hours the great roaring indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition; and then its vulgarest ornaments, the windows of third-rate jewellers, the young man in a white tie and a crush-hat who dandled by on his way to a dinner-party in a hansom that nearly ran over one—these familiar phenomena became symbolic, insolent, defiant, took on themselves to make him smart with the sense that he was above all out of it. He felt, moreover, that there was neither consolation nor refutation in saying to himself that the immense majority of mankind were out of it with him and appeared to put up well enough with the annoyance. That was their own affair; he knew nothing of their reasons or their resignation, and if they chose neither to rebel nor to compare he at least, among the disinherited, would keep up the standard. When these fits were on our young man his brothers of the people fared, collectively, very ill at his hands; their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only acknowledgment one owed them was for the completeness of the illustration. Everything which in a great city could touch the sentient faculty of a youth on whom nothing was lost ministered to his conviction that there was no possible good fortune in life of too “quiet” an order for him to appreciate—no privilege, no opportunity, no luxury to which he mightn’t do full justice. It was not so much that he wanted to enjoy as that he wanted to know; his desire wasn’t to be pampered but to be initiated. Sometimes of a Saturday in the long evenings of June and July he made his way into Hyde Park at the hour when the throng of carriages, of riders, of brilliant pedestrians was thickest; and though lately, on two or three of these occasions, he had been accompanied by Miss Henning, whose criticism of the scene was rich and distinct, a tremendous little drama had taken place privately on the stage of his inner consciousness. He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place. In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the “bloated” as they passed didn’t so much as rest their eyes on for a quarter of a second. They looked at Millicent, who was safe to be looked at anywhere and was one of the handsomest girls in any company, but they only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity fencing the “likes” of him off from social recognition.

And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a jealousy that couldn’t be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the result of an intense admiration for what he had missed. There were individuals whom he followed with his eyes, with his thoughts, sometimes even with his steps; they seemed to tell him what it was to be the flower of a high civilisation. At moments he was aghast when he reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work underground for the enthronement of the democracy and yet continue to enjoy in however platonic a manner a spectacle which rested on a hideous social inequality. He must either suffer with the people as he had suffered before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple. Hyacinth thought himself obliged at present to have reasons for his feelings; his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at his reasons whenever he produced them, but appeared to expect him nevertheless to have them ready on demand, and Hyacinth had ever a desire to do what he expected. There were times when he said to himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided to the point of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him in different ways; for hadn’t he an extraordinarily mingled current in his blood, and from the time he could remember wasn’t there one half of him always either playing tricks on the other or getting snubs and pinches from it?

That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying explanation had supplied him first and last with a hundred different theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed had sickened and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was still only a child—on the memorable day that had transformed the whole face of his future. It was one January afternoon when he had come in from a walk. She was seated at her lamp, as usual, with her work, and had begun to tell him of a letter one of the lodgers had got describing the manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop at Nottingham had been rifled by burglars. He had listened to her story, standing in front of her, and then by way of response had suddenly said to her: “Who was that awful woman you took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face as she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant after so many years—this strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which she had repeated “That awful woman?”

“That woman in the prison years ago—how old was I?—who was dying and who kissed me so, as I’ve never been kissed, as I never shall be again! Who was she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it had lasted a week; it was to leave her spent and sore for ever after, and before it was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she had retracted the falsehoods with which she had previously tried to put the boy off, and had made at last a confession and a report which he was satisfied to believe as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have told you why the crisis had occurred on such a day, why his question had broken out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly; that the haunting wonder which now, as he looked back, appeared to fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have crept up to the air. It was only of course little by little that he had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness; little by little that he had reconstructed his antecedents, taken the measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the courage to disinter from the Times in the reading-room of the British Museum a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a cause célèbre; his resolution in sitting under that splendid dome and, with his head bent to hide his hot eyes, going through every syllable of the ghastly record, had been an achievement of comparatively recent years. There were certain things Pinnie knew that appalled him; and there were others, as to which he would have given his hand to have some light, that it made his heart ache supremely to find she was honestly ignorant of. He scarce understood what sort of favour Mr. Vetch wished to make with him (as a compensation for the precious part he had played in the business years before) when the fiddler permitted himself to pass judgement on the family of the wretched young nobleman for not having provided in some manner for the infant child of his assassin. Why should they have provided when it was evident they had refused absolutely to recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie had to admit this under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she couldn’t pretend with any show of evidence that Lord Whiteroy and the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them still living) had at the time of the trial given any symptom of believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the established facts (few as they were and poor and hideous) he regarded himself immutably as the son of the recreant and sacrificed Lord Frederick.

He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people—all Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father, his gun in his hand, had fallen in the blood-stained streets of Paris on a barricade; but on the other side it took an English aristocrat to account for him, though a poor specimen apparently had to suffice. This, with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the reflexion that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the reflexion that he was a gentleman. He was conscious he didn’t hate the image of his father as he might have been expected to do; and he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a penalty. It was in the exaction of that penalty that the moral proof for him resided; his mother wouldn’t have armed herself on account of any injury less cruel than the passage of which her miserable baby was the living sign. She had avenged herself because she had been thrown over, and the bitterness of that wrong had been in the fact that he, hopeless brat, lay there in her lap. He was the one properly to have been sacrificed: that remark our young man often made to himself. That his judgement of the whole question was passionate and personal and took little account of any disturbing conflict of evidence is proved by the importance he attached for instance to the name by which his mother had told poor Pinnie (when this excellent creature consented to take him) that she wished him to be called. Hyacinth had been the name of her father, a republican clockmaker, the martyr of his opinions, whose memory she professed to worship; and when Lord Frederick had insinuated himself into her confidence he had had reasons for preferring to be known as plain Mr. Robinson—reasons, however, into which, in spite of the light thrown upon them at the trial, it was difficult after so many years to enter.

Hyacinth had never known of Mr. Vetch’s saying more than once to Pinnie, “If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true why didn’t she make the child bear his real name instead of his false one?”—an inquiry which the dressmaker had answered, with some ingenuity, by remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, as one must suppose her unwilling to publish to every one his connexion with a crime that had been so much talked about. If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion it is needless to say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his judgement was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had been surrounded and of which he had never caught the meaning; they having seemed but a feature of the general fact of the poor woman’s professional life—so much cutting and trimming and shaping and embroidering, so much turning and altering and doing-up. When it came over him that she had for years made a fool of him to himself and to others he could have beaten her for grief and shame; and yet before he administered this rebuke he had to remember that she only chattered (though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter over which he spent nine-tenths of his own time in all gloomily brooding. When she tried to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on the glory of the Purvises and reminding him that he was related through them to half the aristocracy of England he felt her to be turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born. He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and his impracticability on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep dejection of her later years. If he had only let her idealise him a little to himself she would have felt she was making up by so much for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s kin in the newspaper, but he then always cast the sheet away. He had nothing to ask of them and wished to prove to himself that he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat) as completely as they ignored him. A thousand times yes, he was with the people and every possible vengeance of the people as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he was happy to feel he had blood in his veins that would account for the finest sensibilities.

He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand, Millicent Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box or a couple of stalls at ten bob apiece?” he asked of her on a note of that too uniform irony which formed the basis of almost all their talk. She had replied that she would content herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as such a position involved an expenditure still beyond his compass he waited one night on Mr. Vetch, to whom he had already more than once had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His relations with the caustic fiddler were of the oddest and much easier when put to the proof than in theory. Mr. Vetch had let him know—long before this and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost—the part he had played at the crisis of that question of her captive’s being taken to call on Mrs. Bowerbank; and Hyacinth, in the face of this information, had asked with some sublimity what the devil the fiddler had had to do with his private affairs. Their neighbour had replied that it was not as an affair of his but as an affair of Pinnie’s he had considered the matter; and our hero had afterwards let it drop, though he had never been formally reconciled to so officious a critic. Of course his feeling on this head had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr. Vetch had taken to get him a place with old Crook; and at the period of which I write it had long been familiar to him that the author of that benefit didn’t care a straw what he thought of his advice at the dark hour and in fact took a perverse pleasure in “following” the career of a youth put together of such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to be conscious that this projected attention was kindly; and to-day, at any rate, he would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not knowing the truth, horrible as it might be. His miserable mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of motive, and in the conditions that was a support. What he chiefly objected to in Mr. Vetch was the betrayed habit of still regarding him as extremely juvenile; he would have got on much better with a better recognition of his being already a man of the world. The obscure virtuoso knew an immense deal about society and seemed to know the more because he never swaggered—it was only little by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as if his chief boon in life was a private diverting commentary on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he gave considerable evidence of patience with this when he occasionally asked his fellow-resident in Lomax Place to lend him half-a-crown. Somehow circumstances had of old tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little bookbinder it also touched him; he had more than once solved the problem of deciding how to behave (when the fiddler exasperated him) by simply asking of him some substantial service. Mr. Vetch had never once refused. It was satisfactory to Hyacinth to remember as much when knocking at his door late, after allowing him time to come home from the theatre. He knew his habits: he never went straight to bed, but sat by his fire an hour, smoking his pipe, mixing a grog and reading some old book. Hyacinth could tell when to go up by the light in his window, which he could see from a court behind.

“Oh, I know I haven’t been to see you for a long time,” he said in response to the remark with which his neighbour greeted him; “and I may as well tell you immediately what has brought me at present—in addition to the desire to ask after your health. I want to take a young lady to the theatre.”

Mr. Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear he looked to our hero so plucked and blighted as on the spot to settle his claims in the event of a social liquidation; he too was unmistakably a creditor. “I’m afraid you find your young lady rather expensive.”

“I find everything expensive,” said Hyacinth as if to finish that subject.

“Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.”

“What do you mean by that?” the young man asked with a fine stare.

“Why, you told me in the autumn that you were just about to join a few.”

“A few? How many do you suppose?” But our friend checked himself. “Do you suppose if I had been serious I’d tell?”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” sighed Mr. Vetch. Then he went on: “You want to take her to my shop, eh?”

“I’m sorry to say she won’t go there. She wants something in the Strand: that’s a great point. She wants very much to see The Pearl of Paraguay. I don’t wish to pay anything, if possible; I’m sorry to say I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres and I’ve heard you say that you do each other little favours from place to place, à charge de revanche, it occurred to me you might be able to get me an order. The piece has been running a long time and most people (except poor devils like me) must have seen it: therefore there probably isn’t a rush.”

Mr. Vetch listened in silence and presently said: “Do you want a box?”

“Oh no; something more modest.”

“Why not a box?” asked the fiddler in a tone the youth knew.

“Because I haven’t the clothes people wear in that sort of place,—if you must have such a definite reason.”

“And your young lady—has she the clothes?”

“Oh, I daresay; she seems to have everything.”

“Where does she get ’em?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She belongs to a big shop; she has to be fine.”

“Won’t you have a pipe?” Mr. Vetch asked, pushing an old tobacco-pouch across the table; and while the young man helped himself he puffed a while in silence. “What will she do with you?” he finally asked.

“What will who do with me?”

“Your big beauty—Miss Henning. I know all about her from Pinnie.”

“Then you know what she’ll do with me!” Hyacinth returned with rather a scornful laugh.

“Yes, but, after all, it doesn’t very much matter.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, now the other thing—what do they call it? the Subterranean?—are you very deep in that?” the fiddler went on as if he had not heard him.

“Did Pinnie tell you also about that?”

“No, our friend Puppin has told me a good deal. He knows you’ve put your head into something. Besides, I see it,” said Mr. Vetch.

“How do you see it, pray?”

“You’ve got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you, that you’ve taken some oath on bloody bones, that you belong to some terrible gang. You seem to say to every one, ‘Slow torture won’t induce me to tell where it meets!’”

“You won’t get me an order then?” Hyacinth said in a moment.

“My dear boy, I offer you a box. I take the greatest interest in you.”

They smoked together a while and at last Hyacinth remarked: “It has nothing to do with the Subterranean.”

“Is it more terrible, more deadly secret?” his companion asked with extreme seriousness.

“I thought you pretended to be a radical,” Hyacinth returned.

“Well, so I am—of the old-fashioned, constitutional, milk-and-water, jog-trot sort. I’m not an exterminator.”

“We don’t know what we may be when the time comes,” Hyacinth observed more sententiously than he intended.

“Is the time coming then, my dear young friend?”

“I don’t think I’ve a right to give you any more of a warning than that,” smiled our hero.

“It’s very kind of you to do so much, I’m sure, and to rush in here at the small hours for the purpose. Meanwhile, in the few weeks or months or years, or whatever they are, that are left, you wish to crowd in all possible enjoyment with the young ladies: that’s a very natural inclination.” To which Mr. Vetch irrelevantly added: “Do you see many foreigners?”

“Yes, a good many.”

“And what do you think of them?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. I rather like Englishmen best.”

“Mr. Muniment for example?”

“I say, what do you know about him?” Hyacinth asked.

“I’ve seen him at the Puppins’. I know you and he are as thick as thieves.”

“He’ll distinguish himself some day very much,” said Hyacinth, who was perfectly willing and indeed very proud to be thought a close ally of a highly original man.

“Very likely—very likely. And what will he do with you?” the fiddler inquired.

Hyacinth got up; they looked at each other hard. “Do get me two good places in the second balcony.”

Mr. Vetch replied that he would do what he could, and three days afterwards he handed his young friend the coveted order. He accompanied it with the injunction, “You had better put in all the fun you can, you know!”