BOOK FIFTH

XXXVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One night, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual, Hyacinth met the pilgrim from Belgrave Square just leaving the house. She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad news. She said, “Oh how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague laugh, but she went her way without stopping to talk. Three minutes later he mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her, and this lady replied: “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner. You’d have assisted at a scene.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean your famous pledge to ‘act’ on demand? Oh that will never come to anything.”

“Why won’t it come to anything?”

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

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

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

“I think you mean I won’t do it. I’ve offered at least. Isn’t that a title?”

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

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

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

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

“You do go too far,” he none the less said to her the evening Lady Aurora had passed him at the door.

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

“Do you mean her ladyship’s a coward?”

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

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

“We’re all afraid of some things and brave about others,” his friend pursued.

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

His companion looked at him but wouldn’t take this up. “There’s one particular in which she would be very brave. She’d marry her friend—your friend—Mr. Muniment.”

“Marry him, do you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXIX

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

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

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

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

“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against my big brother.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How the devil am I to rub her?” Muniment quaintly asked. “You know a good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,” he pursued with a face that gave no sign of seeing a reason in what she said. “Your mind’s too poetical—as full of sounding strings and silver chords as some old, elegant harp. There’s nothing in the world I should care for that her ladyship would be willing to do for me.”

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

“I shouldn’t care a hang for that. Besides, if I was to lay it before her she’d never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for that—for you.”

“Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!” cried Rosy with high cheer.

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

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

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

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

Paul gave no sign of any inward judgement passed on Rosy’s conception of the delicate course or of a superior policy; perhaps indeed, for it is perfectly possible, her question didn’t strike him as having a mixture of motives. He only said with a small, pleasant, patient sigh: “I don’t want the dear old girl’s money.”

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

“If I did there’d be much more of it,” he quietly returned.

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

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

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

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

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

“Her place at Inglefield certainly,” he answered as lucidly as if his sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.

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

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

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

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

She flinched a moment, then said serenely: “Oh I don’t care for that!”

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

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

“To keep me off?”

“To interpose with the Princess—and in a sense to interfere against her. To be nice to her and conciliate her, so she mayn’t take you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing’s going to happen—nothing’s going to happen,” Paul remarked simply.

Her rejoinder to this was to say in a moment: “You’ve a different tone since you’ve taken up the Princess.”

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

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

“What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?” Paul demanded.

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

“What on earth have I ever done to show it?” he asked as with amusement.

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

“I admit it for you with all my heart!” the young man promptly laughed.

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

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

“Oh you do, you do!”

“For all that you don’t like it.”

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

“How do you mean, what she does?”

“She makes Lady Aurora suffer.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, you do look genteel,” she said with high complacency. “No wonder she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,” she explained. “You never went to any such expense for her ladyship.”

“My dear, the Princess is worth it, she’s worth it.” Which appeared at last on his part all seriously spoken.

“Will she help you very much?” Rosy demanded, as at the touch of it, with a strange, sudden transition to eagerness.

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

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

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

“Oh I know they’ll look after me.” And she sank back on her pillow with an air of agreeable security.

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

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

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

Her eyes kindled at his praise and as she rested them on his own she brought out: “Ah I pity the poor Princess too, you know!”

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

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

He stopped a moment with his hand on the latch of the door and said gravely, almost sententiously: “She’s not only handsome, handsome as a picture, but she’s uncommon sharp and has taking ways beyond anything ever known.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re terribly careful,” said the Princess.

“Careful of you—yes.”

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

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

“Surely, Mr. Muniment. Don’t you?”

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

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

“My pleasure’s in keeping very cool,” Muniment said.

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

“You’ve rare ideas about tumults. They’re not good in themselves.”

The Princess considered this a moment. “I wonder if you’re too prudent. I shouldn’t like that. If it’s made an accusation against you that you’ve been—where we’re going—shall you deny it?”

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

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

“I suppose that if you lie well enough you’re not found out.” And he spoke again as for amusement.

“You won’t take me seriously,” said the Princess—and without irritation, without resentment, with accepted, intelligent sadness. Yet there was a fineness of reproach in the tone in which she added: “I don’t believe you want to go at all.”

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

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

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

“Ah you’re very perfect!” she lightly wailed. “Don’t you consider that the changes you look for will be also for our benefit?”

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

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

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

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

“It isn’t in my conscience I find it,” he laughed.

The maid-servant brought in the tea, and while his hostess made a place for it on a table beside her she returned: “Well, I don’t care, for I think I have you in my power.”

“You’ve every one in your power,” Paul declared.

“Every one’s no one,” she answered rather dryly; and a moment later she said to him: “That extraordinary little sister of yours—surely you take her seriously?”

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

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

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

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

“Her life and mine are all one.”

“She’s a prodigious person”—the Princess dismissed her. But while he drank his tea she remarked that for a revolutionist he was certainly prodigious as well; and he wanted to know in answer if it weren’t rather in keeping for revolutionists to be revolutionary. He drank three cups, declaring his hostess’s decoction rare; it was better even than Lady Aurora’s. This led him to observe as he put down his third cup, looking round the room again lovingly, almost covetously: “You’ve got everything so handy I don’t see what interest you can have.”

“How do you mean, what interest?”

“In getting in so uncommon deep.”

The light in her face flashed on the instant into pure passion. “Do you consider that I’m in—really far?”

“Up to your neck, ma’am.”

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

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

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

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

“Please don’t speak of my husband,” she returned gravely. “You’ve no qualification for doing so. You know nothing whatever about him.”

“I know what Hyacinth has told me.”

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

“Of course you think me very plain and coarse.”

“Certainly you’ve not such a nice address as Hyacinth”—the Princess had no wish, on her side, to evade the topic. “But that’s given to very few,” she added; “and I don’t know that pretty manners are exactly what we’re working for.”

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

“That’s not the way to please me. I don’t forgive him—he’s very foolish.”

“Ah don’t say that; he’s a fine little flute!” Paul protested.

“He’s a delightful nature, with extraordinary qualities. But he’s deplorably conventional.”

“Yes, if you talk about taking things seriously—he takes them so,” Muniment again agreed.

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

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

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

Paul thought. “His birth and his poor mother? I think it was Rosy told me all that.”

“And pray how did she know?”

“Ah when you come to the way Rosy knows——!” He gave that up. “She doesn’t like people in such a box at all. She thinks we ought all to be grandly born.”

“Then they agree, for so does poor Hyacinth.” The Princess had a pause, after which, as with a deep effort: “I want to ask you something. Have you had a visit from Mr. Vetch?”

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

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

“To leave what now?” And Paul looked out in placid perplexity.

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

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Muniment answered slowly. “But where does he come in? I thought it was supposed to be a grand secret.”

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

“How do you know then?”

She had another wait. “Oh I’m like Rosy—I find out. Mr. Vetch, as I suppose you’re aware, has been near Hyacinth all his life; he takes a most affectionate interest in him. He believes there’s something hanging over him and wants it to be made impossible.” She paused afresh, but her visitor made no response and she continued: “He was going to see you, to beg you to do something, to interfere; he seemed to suppose your power in such a matter would be very great. But as I tell you, I requested him—a particular favour to me—to let you alone.”

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

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

He appeared struck with the curious inadequacy of this explanation, considering what was at stake; so that he confessed to almost rude amusement. “That was considerate of you beyond everything.”

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

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

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

“To save him?”

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

“That was a fine idea!” Paul candidly cried.

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

Muniment had the air of a man feeling he must consider a little before assenting to these successive propositions; it being a limitation of his intellect that he couldn’t respond without understanding. After a moment he answered, referring to his hostess’s last remark, in which the others appeared to culminate, and at the same time shaking his head with a rise of his strong eyebrows: “His scrape isn’t important.”

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

“I thought it would give him pleasure.”

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

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

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

“Persuade them then, dear madam.”

“How can I persuade them?” she cried. “If I could do that I wouldn’t have approached you. I’ve no influence, and even if I had it my motives would be suspected. You’re the one to come in.”

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

“He doesn’t—he doesn’t!” she declared.

“On what ground then shall I put it?”

“Tell them he has changed his opinions.”

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

“Tell them then it’s simply my wish.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s what Rosy tells me.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

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

“And pray what is your own?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul Muniment with perfect equanimity. “I expect to be instructed.”

“Have you taken an oath like Hyacinth?”

“Ah madam, the oaths I take I don’t tell,” he gravely returned.

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

At this, for the first time, her visitor showed impatience. “You had better leave my dear friend to me.”

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

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

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

XL

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old woman looked up at him with slow speculation. “Sit down and be quiet, very quiet. I’ve ceased to pay attention—I take no heed.”

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

“I think it highly probable, dear Prince.”

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

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

He looked at her with eyes of anguish. “Dear lady, is that kind to me when I’ve counted on you?”

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

“Then why don’t you watch her, eh?”

“It’s not with her I’m angry. It’s with myself,” said Madame Grandoni, all in thought.

“For becoming so indifferent, do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

“It’s foolish—foolish—foolish,” said his friend, slowly and impressively.

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

“In the house? In what house?”

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

“And where were you meanwhile?”

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

“Was it for that you came to London?”

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

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

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

“As the other?”

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

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

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

“Better for whom?”

“I mean that if you didn’t withdraw yourself you could at least answer my questions.”

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

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

“I think he’s Scotch or Welsh,” Madame Grandoni explained.

“Ah then you have seen him?”

“No, but I’ve heard him. He speaks straight out (the floors of this house are not built as we build in Italy) and his voice is the same I’ve noticed in the people of the wild parts, where they ‘shoot.’ Besides, she has told me—some few things. He’s a chemist’s assistant.”

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

“Oh the bookbinder——!” the old woman wailed.

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

“For me to tell you more, Prince, you must wait till I’m free,” she pleaded.

“How do you mean, free?”

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

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

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

He clasped his hands as in strenuous suppliance but at the same time smiled as to conciliate, to corrupt. “Dearest friend, you torment my curiosity. If you’ll tell me this I’ll never ask you anything more. Where did they go? For the love of God, what is that house?”

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

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

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

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

“They think they’re conspiring. Ecco!” said Madame Grandoni.

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

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

“There are other possibilities,” he portentously observed.

“Oh of course when your wife goes off with strange, low men in the dark, goes off to des maisons louches, you can think anything you like and I’ve nothing to say to your thoughts. I’ve my own, but they’re my affair, and I shall not undertake to defend Christina, who’s indefensible. When she commits these follies she provokes, she invites, the worst construction; there let it rest save for this one remark which I will content myself with making. That is that if she were a real wretch, capable of all, she wouldn’t behave as she does now, she wouldn’t expose herself to the supposition; the appearance of everything would be good and proper. I simply tell you what I believe. If I believed that what she’s doing concerned you alone I should say nothing about it—at least sitting here. But it concerns others, it concerns every one, so I open my mouth at last. She has gone to that house to break up society.”

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

“Oh more than ever before! She’s very much entangled. She has relations with people who are watched by the police. She hasn’t told me, but I’ve grown sure of it by simply living with her.”

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

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

“It’s more stupid.” He gazed at his cold comforter with a flush of shame on his face. “Will she bring us to that scandal? It would be the worst of all.”

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

“Dear friend, she’s the Devil in person,” said the Prince woefully.

“No, she’s not the Devil, because she wishes to do good.”

“What good did she ever wish to do to me?” he asked with glowing eyes.

She shook her head with a gloom that matched his own. “You can do no good of any kind to each other. Each on your own side you must be quiet.”

“How can I be quiet when I hear of such infamies?” He got up in his violence and, after a fashion that caused his companion to burst into a short, incongruous laugh as soon as she heard the words, pronounced: “She shall not break up society!”

“No, she’ll bore herself to death before the coup is ripe. Make up your mind to that.”

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

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

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

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

“And how does she defend herself?”

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

“And so have I, I think I may pretend,” said the Prince. “You tell me to give her time, and it’s certain she’ll take it whether I give it or no. But I can at least stop giving her money. By heaven it’s my duty as an honest man.”

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

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

“They’re not all scoundrels any more than she’s all one. That’s the tiresome part of it!” she wearily sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s good,” she returned a little curtly.

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

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

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

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

“If they’ve turned him out then that’s very well. Now if only some one could turn them out!”

“Aspetta, aspetta!” said the old woman.

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

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

“Poverino!” the Prince exclaimed.

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

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

“I don’t know about Chiffinch Street, though it would be my impression that he doesn’t go to any place visited by Christina and the other one, by the Scotchman, together. But these are delicate matters,” the old woman pursued.

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

For a time she made no reply. “I imagine this case different. But I don’t understand; it was the other, the little one, who helped her to know the Scotchman.”

“And now they’ve quarrelled—about my wife? It’s all tremendously edifying!” the Prince wailed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear lady, do you ask that to make me relent?” the Prince uneasily quavered.

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

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

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

I know not what explanation of his inconsequence her guest would have given her if at that moment the door of the room hadn’t been pushed open to permit the entrance of Hyacinth Robinson. He stopped short on finding a stranger in the field, but before he had time to say anything the old lady addressed him rather shortly. “Ah you don’t fall well; the Princess isn’t at home.”

“That was mentioned to me, but I ventured to come in to see you as I’ve done before,” our young man replied. Then he added as to accommodate: “I beg many pardons. I was not told you were not alone.”

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

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