Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as
he had scarce closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window
made him dress as quickly as a young man might who desired more than
ever that his appearance shouldn’t give strange ideas about him: an
old garden with parterres in curious figures and little intervals of
lawn that seemed to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green. At
one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick which looked down on
the other side into a canal, a moat, a quaint old pond (he hardly knew
what to call it) and from the same standpoint showed a considerable
part of the main body of the house—Hyacinth’s room belonging to a
wing that commanded the extensive irregular back—which was richly grey
wherever clear of the ivy and the other dense creepers, and everywhere
infinitely a picture: with a high-piled ancient russet roof broken
by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables
and windows on different lines, with all manner of antique patches
and protrusions and with a particularly fascinating architectural
excrescence where a wonderful clock-face was lodged, a clock-face
covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years
and the weather. He had never in his life been in the country—the
real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere
ravelled fringe of London—and there entered through his open casement
the breath of a world enchantingly new and after his recent feverish
hours unspeakably refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled
odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that
consisted for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were
tall quiet trees near by and afar off and everywhere; and the group
of objects that greeted his eyes evidently formed only a corner of
larger spaces and of a more complicated scene. There was a world to be
revealed to him: it lay waiting with the dew on it under his windows,
and he must go down and take of it such possession as he might.
On his arrival at ten o’clock the night before he had only got the
impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate;
of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly and of the glow
of several windows, suggesting indoor cheer, in a front that lifted
a range of vague grand effects into the starlight. It was much of a
relief to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration
of the lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow: the
delay would give him time to recover his balance and look about him.
This latter opportunity was offered first as he sat at supper in a vast
high hall with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South
Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should
be treated: too blank for that his conception of the way in which,
at a country-house, invidious distinctions might be made and shades
of importance marked; but it was plain the best had been ordered for
him. He was at all events abundantly content with his reception and
more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate—though his other
senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he ate, as it were,
without eating—and the grave automatic servant filled his glass with
a liquor that reminded him of some lines of Keats in the “Ode to a
Nightingale.” He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley (he
was vague about the seasons of this vocalist) and also if the butler
would attempt to talk to him, had ideas about him, knew or suspected
who he was and what: which after all there was no reason for his doing
save perhaps the aspect of the scant luggage attending the visitor from
Lomax Place. Mr. Withers, however (it was this name Hyacinth heard used
by the driver of his fly), had given no further symptom of sociability
than to ask him at what time he would be called in the morning; to
which our young man replied that he preferred not to be called at
all—he would get up by himself. The butler rejoined, “Very good, sir,”
while Hyacinth thought it probable he puzzled him a good deal and even
considered the question of giving him a precautionary glimpse of an
identity that might be later on less fortunately betrayed. The object
of this diplomacy was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed
with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing
for the simple reason that before he spoke he found himself liking
what he had feared. His impulse to deprecate services departed, he was
already aware there were none he should care to miss or was not quite
prepared for. He knew he had probably thanked Mr. Withers too much, but
he couldn’t help this—it was an irrepressible tendency and an error he
should doubtless always commit.
He had lain in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to ensure rest
that it was naturally responsible in some degree for his want of ease,
and in a large high room where long dressing-glasses emitted ghostly
glances even after the light was extinguished. Suspended on the walls
were many prints, mezzotints and old engravings which he supposed,
possibly without reason, to be of the finest and rarest. He got up
several times in the night, lighted his candle and walked about looking
at them. He looked at himself in one of the long glasses, and in a
place where everything was on such a scale it seemed to him more than
ever that Mademoiselle Vivier’s son, lacking all the social dimensions,
was scarce a perceptible person at all. As he came downstairs he
encountered housemaids with dusters and brooms, or perceived them
through open doors on their knees before fireplaces; and it was his
belief that they regarded him more boldly than if he had been a guest
of the usual kind. Such a reflexion as that, however, ceased to trouble
him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through the
park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in narrowing
circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled an hour in breathless
ecstasy, brushing the dew from the deep fern and bracken and the
rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant air and stopping
everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of some exquisite
impression. His whole walk was peopled with recognitions; he had been
dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects, such a
morning and such a chance. It was the last of April and everything
was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early air, were a blur
of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he revolved repeatedly,
catching every aspect and feeling every value, feasting on the whole
expression and wondering if the Princess would observe his proceedings
from a window and if they would be offensive to her. The house was
not hers, but only hired for three months, and it could flatter no
princely pride that he should be struck with it. There was something in
the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to
his eyes; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid
infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among
whom old age meant for the most part a grudged and degraded survival.
In the favoured resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an
accumulation of dignity and honour.
A footman sought him out in the garden to tell him breakfast was
served. He had never thought of breakfast, and as he walked back to
the house attended by the inscrutable flunkey this offer appeared a
free extravagant gift, unexpected and romantic. He found he was to
breakfast alone and asked no questions, but when he had finished the
butler came in to say that the Princess would see him after luncheon
but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand the library
to be all at his service. “After luncheon”—that threw the hour he had
come for very far into the future, and it caused him some bewilderment
that she should think it worth while to invite him to stay with her
from Saturday evening to Monday morning only to let so much of his
visit elapse without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor
impatient; the impressions already crowding on him were in themselves
a sufficient reward, and what could one do better precisely in such a
house as that than wait for a wonderful lady? Mr. Withers conducted
him to the library and left him planted in the middle of it and
staring at the treasures he quickly and widely took in. It was an old
brown room of great extent—even the ceiling was brown, though there
were figures in it dimly gilt—where row upon row of finely-lettered
backs consciously appealed for recognition. A fire of logs crackled
in a great chimney, and there were alcoves with deep window-seats,
and arm-chairs such as he had never seen, luxurious, leather-covered,
with an adjustment for holding one’s volume; and a vast writing-table
before one of the windows, furnished with a perfect magazine of paper
and pens, inkstands and blotters, seals, stamps, candlesticks, reels
of twine, paper-weights, book-knives. He had never imagined so many
aids to correspondence and before he turned away had written a note
to Millicent in a hand even nobler than usual—his penmanship was very
minute, but at the same time wonderfully free and fair—largely for
the pleasure of seeing “Medley Hall” stamped in heraldic-looking red
characters at the top of his paper. In the course of an hour he had
ravaged the collection, taken down almost every book, wishing he could
keep it a week, and then put it back as quickly as his eye caught the
next, which glowed with a sharper challenge. He came upon rare bindings
and extracted precious hints—hints by which he felt himself perfectly
capable of profiting. Altogether his vision of true happiness at
this moment was that for a month or two he should be locked into the
treasure-house of Medley. He forgot the outer world and the morning
waned—the beautiful vernal Sunday—while he lingered there.
He was on the top of a ladder when he heard a voice remark, “I’m
afraid they’re very dusty; in this house, you know, it’s the dust of
centuries,” and, looking down, saw Madame Grandoni posted in the middle
of the room. He instantly prepared to descend and greet her, but she
exclaimed: “Stay, stay, if you’re not giddy; we can talk from here! I
only came in to show you we _are_ in the house and to tell you to keep
up your patience. The Princess will probably see you in a few hours.”
“I really hope so,” he returned from his perch, rather dismayed at the
“probably.”
“_Natürlich_,” said the old lady; “but people have come sometimes and
gone away without seeing her. It all depends on her mood.”
“Do you mean even when she has sent for them?”
“Oh, who can tell whether she has sent for them or not?”
“But she sent for me, you know,” Hyacinth declared, staring down and
struck with the odd effect of Madame Grandoni’s wig in that bird’s-eye
view.
“Oh yes, she sent for you, poor young man!” The old lady looked up at
him with a smile and they communicated a little in silence. Then she
added: “Captain Sholto has come like that more than once and has gone
away no better off.”
“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.
“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She
retraced her course while he watched her, and pushed it to, then
advanced into the room again with her superannuated, shuffling step,
walking as if her shoes were too big for her. Hyacinth, moreover,
descended the ladder. “There it is. She’s a _capricciosa_.”
“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked gravely.
“You seem her friend, yet you say things not favourable to her.”
“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should
ever say to you. I’m rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I
ought to be particularly kind. But I’m not false. That’s not our German
nature. You’ll hear me some day. I _am_ the friend of the Princess; it
would be well enough if she never had a worse one! But I should like
to be yours too—what will you have? Perhaps it’s of no use. At any rate
here you are.”
“Yes, here I am decidedly!” Hyacinth uneasily laughed.
“And how long shall you stay? Pardon me if I ask that; it’s part of my
rudeness.”
“I shall stay till to-morrow morning. I must be at my work by noon.”
“That will do very well. Don’t you remember, the other time, how I told
you to remain faithful?”
“That was very good advice. But I think you exaggerate my danger.”
“So much the better,” said Madame Grandoni; “though now that I look
at you well I doubt it a little. I see you’re one of those types
that ladies like. I can be sure of that—I like you myself. At my
age—a hundred and twenty—can’t I say that? If the Princess were to
do so it would be different; remember that—that any flattery she may
ever offer you will be on her lips much less discreet. But perhaps
she will never have the chance; you may never come again. There are
people who have come only once. _Vedremo bene._ I must tell you that
I’m not in the least against a young man’s taking a holiday, a little
quiet recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued in her
disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take one
every five days; that’s no doubt too often. In Germany less often. In
this country I can’t understand if it’s an increase of effort: the
English Sunday’s so difficult! This one will in any case have been
beautiful for you. Be happy, make yourself comfortable; but go home
to-morrow!” And with this injunction Madame Grandoni took her way again
to the door while he went to open it for her. “I can say that because
it’s not my house. I’m only here like you. And sometimes I think I also
shall go to-morrow!”
“I imagine you’ve not, like me, your living to get every day. That’s
reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.
She paused in the doorway with her expressive, ugly, kindly little eyes
on his face. “I believe I’m nearly as poor as you. And I’ve not, like
you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I’m noble,” said the old lady,
shaking her wig.
“And I’m not!” Hyacinth deeply smiled.
“It’s better not to be lifted up high like our friend. It doesn’t give
happiness.”
“Not to one’s self possibly; but to others!” From where they stood he
looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted from
above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflexion of this
grandeur came into his appreciative eyes.
“Do you admire everything here very much—do you receive great
pleasure?” asked Madame Grandoni.
“Oh, so much—so much!”
She considered him a moment longer. “_Poverino!_” she murmured as she
turned away.
A couple of hours later the Princess sent for him and he was conducted
upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung with
pictures, and ushered into a large bright saloon which he afterwards
learned that his hostess used as a boudoir. The sound of music had come
to him outside the door, so that he was prepared to find her seated at
the piano, if not to see her continue to play after he appeared. Her
face was turned in the direction from which he entered, and she smiled
at him without lifting her hands from the keys while the servant, as if
he had just arrived, formally pronounced his name. The room, placed in
an angle of the house and lighted from two sides, was large and sunny,
upholstered in fresh gay chintz, furnished with all sorts of sofas and
low familiar seats and convenient little tables, most of these holding
great bowls of early flowers; littered over with books, newspapers,
magazines, photographs of celebrities slashed across by signatures,
and full of the marks of luxurious and rather indolent habitation.
Hyacinth stood there, not advancing very far, and the Princess, still
playing and smiling, nodded toward a seat near the piano. “Put yourself
there and listen to me.” He did so and she played a long time without
glancing at him. This left him the more free to rest his eyes on her
own face and person while she looked about the room, vaguely, absently,
but with an expression of quiet happiness, as if lost in her music,
soothed and pacified by it. A window near her was half-open and the
soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused
themselves and made the place cheerful and pure. The Princess struck
him as extraordinarily young and fair, and she seemed so slim and
simple, and so friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her
occupation nor offered him her hand, that he at last sank back in his
seat with the sense that all his uneasiness, his nervous tension, was
leaving him, and that he was safe in her kindness, in the free original
way with which she evidently would always treat him. This peculiar
manner, half consideration, half fellowship, seemed to him to have
already so mild and wise an intention. She played ever so movingly,
with different pieces succeeding each other; he had never listened to
music nor to a talent of that order. Two or three times she turned
her eyes on him, and then they shone with the wonderful expression
which was the essence of her beauty; that profuse mingled light which
seemed to belong to some everlasting summer and yet to suggest seasons
that were past and gone, some experience that was only an exquisite
memory. She asked him if he cared for music and then added, laughing,
that she ought to have made sure of this before; while he answered—he
had already told her so in South Street, but she appeared to have
forgotten—that he was awfully fond of it.
The sense of the beauty of women had been given to our young man in
a high degree; it was a faculty that made him conscious to adoration
of all the forces of that power and depths of that mystery; of every
element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and tone
that contributed to charm. Therefore even if he had appreciated less
the strange harmonies the Princess drew from her instrument and her
genius there would have been no lack of interest in his situation, in
such an opportunity to watch her admirable outline and movement, the
noble form of her head and face, the gathered-up glories of her hair,
the living flower-like freshness which had no need to turn from the
light. She was dressed in fair colours and as simply as a young girl.
Before she ceased playing she asked him what he would like to do in
the afternoon: would he have any objection to taking a drive with her?
It was very possible he might enjoy the country. She seemed not to
attend to his answer, which was covered by the sound of the piano; but
if she had done so it would have left her very little doubt as to the
reality of his inclination. She remained gazing at the cornice of the
room while her hands wandered to and fro; then suddenly she stopped,
got up and came toward him. “It’s probable that’s the most I shall ever
bore you. You know the worst. Would you very kindly close the piano?”
He complied with her request and she went to another part of the room
and sank into an arm-chair. When he approached her again she said:
“Is it really true that you’ve never seen a park nor a garden nor any
of the beauties of nature and that sort of thing?” The allusion was
to something gravely stated in his letter when he answered the note
by which she proposed to him to run down to Medley, and after he had
assured her it was perfectly true she exclaimed: “I’m so glad—I’m so
glad! I’ve never been able to show any one anything new and have always
felt I should like it—especially with a fine sensitive mind. Then you
_will_ come and drive with me?” She spoke as if this would be a great
favour.
That was the beginning of the communion—so strange considering their
respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy, and it
passed into some singular phases. The Princess had an extraordinary way
of taking things for granted, of ignoring difficulties, of assuming
that her preferences might be translated into fact. After her guest
had remained with her ten minutes longer—a period mainly occupied with
her exclamations of delight at his having seen so little of the sort of
thing of which Medley consisted (Where should he have seen it, gracious
heaven? he asked himself); after she had rested thus briefly from her
exertions at the piano she proposed that they should go out-of-doors
together. She was an immense walker—she wanted her regular walk. She
left him for a short time, giving him the last number of the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_ to entertain himself withal and calling his attention in
particular to a story by M. Octave Feuillet (she should be so curious
to know what he thought of it); to reappear later with dark hat and
clear parasol, drawing on fresh loose gloves and offering herself to
our young man at that moment as a sudden incarnation of the heroine
of M. Feuillet’s novel, in which he had instantly become immersed.
On their way downstairs it occurred to her that he had not yet seen
the house and that it would be amusing for her to show it him; so she
turned aside and took him through it, up and down and everywhere,
even into the vast old-fashioned kitchen where they found a small
red-faced man in a white jacket and apron and a white cap (he removed
the latter ornament to salute the little bookbinder) with whom his
companion spoke Italian, which Hyacinth understood sufficiently to
perceive that she addressed her cook in the second person singular,
as if he had been a feudal retainer. He remembered how it was in the
same way the three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys. The Princess
explained that the gentleman in the white cap was a delightful creature
(she couldn’t endure English servants, though she was obliged to have
two or three) who would make her plenty of risottos and polentas—she
had quite the palate of a contadina. She showed Hyacinth everything:
the queer transmogrified corner that had once been a chapel; the
secret stairway which had served in the persecutions of the Catholics
(the owners of Medley were, like the Princess herself, of the old
persuasion); the musicians’ gallery over the hall; the tapestried
room which people came from a distance to see; and the haunted chamber
(the two, sometimes confounded, were quite distinct) where a horrible
figure at certain times made its appearance—a dwarfish ghost with an
enormous head, a dispossessed eldest brother of long ago who had passed
for an idiot, which he wasn’t, and had somehow been made away with.
The Princess offered her visitor the privilege of sleeping in this
apartment, declaring however that nothing would induce her even to
enter it alone, she being a benighted creature, consumed with abject
superstitions. “I don’t know if I’m religious or whether if I were
my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m
faithful to.” She made her young friend pass through the drawing-room
very cursorily, remarking that they should see it again: it was rather
stupid—drawing-rooms in English country-houses were always stupid;
indeed if it would amuse him they would sit there after dinner. Madame
Grandoni and she usually sat upstairs, but they would do anything he
should find more comfortable.
At last they came out of the house together and while they went she
explained, to justify herself against the imputation of extravagance,
that, though the place doubtless struck him as absurdly large for a
couple of quiet women and the whole thing was not in the least what
she would have preferred, yet it was all far cheaper than he probably
imagined; she would never have looked at it if it hadn’t been cheap.
It must appear to him so preposterous for a woman to associate herself
with the great uprising of the poor and yet live in palatial halls—a
place with forty or fifty rooms. This was one of her only two allusions
as yet to her infatuation with the “cause”; but it fell very happily,
for Hyacinth had not been unconscious of the anomaly she mentioned.
It had been present to him all day; it added much to the way life
practised on his sense of the tragi-comical to think of the Princess’s
having retired to a private paradise to think out the problem of the
slums. He listened therefore with great attention while she made all
conscientiously the point that she had taken the house only for three
months in any case, because she wanted to rest after a winter of
visiting and living in public (as the English spent their lives, with
all their celebrated worship of the “home”) and yet didn’t wish too
soon to return to town; though she was obliged to confess that she had
still the place in South Street on her hands, thanks to her deciding
unexpectedly to go on with it rather than move out her things. One had
to keep one’s things somewhere, and why wasn’t that as good a _dépôt_
as another? Medley was not what she would have chosen if she had been
left to herself; but she had not been left to herself—she never was;
she had been bullied into taking it by the owners, whom she had met
somewhere and who had made up to her immensely, persuading her that
she might really have it for nothing, for no more than she would give
for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old parsonage embowered in
clematis, which were really what she had been looking for. Besides,
it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so far from town, which
it was always difficult to let or to get a price for; and then it was
a wretched house for any convenience. Hyacinth, for whom his three
hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not been
struck with its geographic remoteness, and he asked the Princess what
she meant in such a connexion by her use of the word “wretched.” To
this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, impossible in
every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That’s the only reason
I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me so sunk in luxury or
that I throw away money. Never, never!” Hyacinth had no standard by
which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for her,
and he saw that though she judged him as a creature still open to every
initiation, whose _naïveté_ would entertain her, it was also her fancy
to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she might have had
the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance of the part
she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay
before him but the reason she might have for playing it.
One of the gardens at Medley took the young man’s heart beyond the
others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a
great training of apricots and plums; it had straight walks bordered
with old-fashioned homely flowers and enclosing immense squares where
other fruit-trees stood upright and mint and lavender floated in the
air. In the southern quarter it overhung a small disused canal, and
here a high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad
and covered with fine turf; so that the top of it, looking down at the
canal, made a magnificent grassy terrace, than which on a summer’s day
there could be no more delightful place for strolling up and down with
a companion—all the more that at either end was a curious pavilion,
in the manner of a tea-house, which crowned the scene in an old-world
sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or shower. One
of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and superfluous
flower-pots; the other was covered inside with a queer Chinese paper
representing ever so many times over a group of people with faces like
blind kittens, groups who drank tea while they sat on the floor. It
also contained a straddling inlaid cabinet in which cups and saucers
showed valuably through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved
cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf over a sofa which
was not very comfortable, though it had cushions of faded tapestry
that resembled samplers, stood a row of novels out of date and out of
print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only
there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves mixed with
some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness.
On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess till she
all ruefully remembered he had not had his luncheon. He protested
that this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared
she hadn’t dragged him down to Medley to starve him and that he must
go back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way,
through the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk.
She explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock,
in the foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was
so foreign he might like that better, and in this case on the morrow
they would breakfast together. He could have coffee and anything else
he wanted brought to his room at his waking. When he had sufficiently
composed himself in the presence of this latter image—he thought he saw
a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside—he mentioned that
really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in London.
There was a train at nine o’clock—he hoped she didn’t mind his taking
it. She looked at him gravely and kindly, as if considering an abstract
idea, and then said: “Oh yes, I mind it very much. Not to-morrow—some
other day.” He made no rejoinder and the Princess spoke of something
else; that is, his rejoinder was private and consisted of the reflexion
that he _would_ leave Medley in the morning, whatever she might say.
He simply couldn’t afford to stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And
then Madame Grandoni thought it so important; for though the old lady
was obscure she was decidedly impressive. The Princess’s protest,
however, was to be reckoned with; he felt it might take a form less
cursory than the words she had just uttered, a form that would make it
embarrassing. She was less solemn, less explicit, than Madame Grandoni
had been, but there was something in her light fine pressure and the
particular tone of her mentioned preference that seemed to tell him his
liberty was going—the liberty he had managed to keep (till the other
day when he gave Hoffendahl a mortgage on it) and the possession of
which had in some degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This
made him uneasy; what would become of him if he should add another
servitude to the one he had undertaken at the end of that long, anxious
cab-drive through the rain, in the back bedroom of a house as to whose
whereabouts he was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and
Schinkel, all visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and
Poupin and Schinkel—how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them
at the present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the
pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter at least, if they could
have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!
As to this Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess
touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and
conclusions she had gathered since their former meeting. It was to
such matters as these she directed the conversation; she seemed to
wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her
continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended
sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked
of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted
as before that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed
he was edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he
didn’t know what she was talking about. He at all events, if _he_ had
been with the dukes—she didn’t call her associates dukes, but he was
sure they were of that order—would have got more satisfaction from
them. She appeared on the whole to judge the English world severely; to
think poorly of its wit and even worse of its morals. “You know people
oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dreary,” she said; and Hyacinth turned
this over, feeling he certainly had not yet caught the point of view
of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of bores. He had
sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing it dubbed grossly profligate,
but he was rather disappointed in the bad account the Princess gave of
it. She dropped the remark that she herself had no sort of conventional
morality—she ought to have mentioned that before—yet had never been
accused of being stupid. Perhaps he wouldn’t discover it, but most
of the people she had had to do with thought her only too acute. The
second allusion she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and
hers) was when she said: “I determined to see it”—she was speaking
still of English society—“to learn for myself what it really is before
we blow it up. I’ve been here now a year and a half and, as I tell
you, I feel I’ve seen. It’s the old régime again, the rottenness and
extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which
the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a
reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic,
depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and
scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are
the barbarians, you know.” The Princess was pretty vague after all in
her animadversions and regaled him with no anecdotes—which indeed he
rather missed—that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed.
She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador.
By way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t
be true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she
had let him know she liked him to speak in the manner of the people)
inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them—a noble lady—who was one
of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible
to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she
asked: “Whom do you mean—a noble lady?”
“I suppose there’s no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.”
“I don’t know her. Is she nice?”
“I like her ever so much.”
“Is she pretty, clever?”
“She isn’t pretty, but she’s very uncommon,” said Hyacinth.
“How did you make her acquaintance?” As he hesitated she went on: “Did
you bind some books for her?”
“No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.”
“Where’s that?”
“In Camberwell.”
“And who lives there?”
“A young woman I was calling on, who’s bedridden.”
“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lady Lydia
Languish?—goes to see her?”
“Yes, very often.”
The Princess, with her eyes on him, had a pause. “Will you take me
there?”
“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the
man—the one who works for a big firm of wholesale chemists—that you’ll
perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”
“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I’m
sorry, you know,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth asked what
she might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, only
soon saying: “Perhaps she goes to see _him_.”
“Goes to see whom?”
“The young chemist—the brother.” She said this very seriously.
“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth returned, laughing. “But she’s a fine sort
of woman.”
The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again wanted to know
for what—for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied:
“No; I mean for my not being the first—what is it you call them?—noble
lady you’ve encountered.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you
don’t make an impression on me.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking you might be less fresh than
I first thought.”
“Of course I don’t know what you first thought,” Hyacinth smiled.
“No; how should you?” the Princess strangely sighed.