He was in the library after luncheon when word was brought him that
the carriage was at the door for their drive; and when he entered the
hall he found Madame Grandoni bonneted and cloaked and awaiting the
descent of their friend. “You see I go with you. I’m always there,” she
remarked jovially. “The Princess has me with her to take care of her,
and this is how I do it. Besides, I never miss my drive.”
“You’re different from me; this will be the first I’ve ever had in my
life.” He could establish that distinction without bitterness, because
he was too pleased with his prospect to believe the old lady’s presence
could spoil it. He had nothing to say to the Princess that she mightn’t
hear. He didn’t dislike her for coming even after she had said to him
in answer to his own announcement, speaking rather more sententiously
than her wont: “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve not spent your life
in carriages. They’ve nothing to do with your trade.”
“Fortunately not,” he answered. “I should have made a ridiculous
coachman.”
The Princess appeared and they mounted into a great square barouche,
an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle with a green body, a faded
hammer-cloth and a rumble where the footman sat (their hostess
mentioned that it had been let with the house), which rolled
ponderously and smoothly along the winding avenue and through the
gilded park-gates that were surmounted with an immense escutcheon. The
progress of this apparently mismatched trio had a high respectability,
and that is one of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion intensely
memorable. There might still be greater joys in store for him—he was
by this time quite at sea and could recognise no shores—but he should
never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and
comprehensive, but little was said while it lasted. “I shall show you
the whole country: it’s exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the heart.”
Of so much as this his entertainer had informed him at the start; and
she added with all her foreignness and with a light allusive nod at
the rich humanised landscape: “_Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre._”
For the rest she sat there fronting him in quiet fairness and under
her softly-swaying lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she
noticed his eyes rest; allowing them when the carriage passed anything
particularly charming to meet his own; smiling as if she enjoyed the
whole affair very nearly as much as he; and now and then calling his
attention to some prospect, some picturesque detail, by three words
of a cadence as soft as a hand-stroke. Madame Grandoni dozed most of
the time, her chin resting on the rather mangy ermine tippet in which
she had enveloped herself; expanding into consciousness at moments,
however, to greet the scenery with comfortable confused ejaculations in
the first language that came into her head. If Hyacinth was uplifted
during these delightful hours he at least measured his vertiginous
eminence, and it kept him quite solemnly still, as with the fear that
a wrong movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain
to fall on the play. This was especially the case when his sensibility
swung back from the objects that sprang up by the way, every one
of which was a rich image of something he had longed for, to the
most beautiful woman in England, who sat there, well before him, as
completely for his benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to paint
her portrait. More than once he saw everything through a strange mist;
his eyes were full of tears.
That evening they sat in the drawing-room after dinner, as the Princess
had promised or, as he was inclined to consider it, threatened him.
The force of the threat was in his prevision that the ladies would
make themselves fine and that in contrast with the setting and company
he should feel dingier than ever; having already on his back the one
approach to a “cut” coat he possessed and being unable to exchange it
for a garment of the pattern that civilised people (so much he knew, if
he couldn’t emulate them) put on about eight o’clock. The ladies when
they came to dinner looked festal indeed; but he was able to make the
reflexion that he was more pleased to be dressed as he was dressed,
meanly and unsuitably as it was, than he should have been to present
such a figure as Madame Grandoni, in whose toggery there was something
comical. He was coming more and more round to the sense that if the
Princess didn’t mind his poorness of every sort he had no call to mind
it himself. His present position wasn’t of his seeking—it had been
forced on him; it wasn’t the fruit of a disposition to push. How little
the Princess minded—how much indeed she enjoyed the consciousness
that in having him about her in that manner she was playing a trick
on society, the false and conventional society she had sounded and
she despised—was manifest from the way she had introduced him to the
group they found awaiting them in the hall on the return from their
drive: four ladies, a mother and three daughters, who had come over to
call from Broome, a place some five miles off. Broome was also a great
house, as he gathered, and Lady Marchant, the mother, was the wife of a
county magnate. She explained that they had come in on the persuasion
of the butler, who had represented the return of the Princess as
imminent, and had then administered tea without waiting for this event.
The evening had drawn in chill; there was a fire in the hall and they
all sat near it, round the tea-table, under the great roof that rose
to the top of the house. Hyacinth conversed mainly with one of the
daughters, a very fine girl with a straight back and long arms, whose
neck was encircled so tightly with a fur boa that, to look a little to
one side, she was obliged to move her whole body. She had a handsome
inanimate face, over which the firelight played without making it more
lively, a beautiful voice and the occasional command of a few short
words. She asked Hyacinth with what pack he hunted and whether he went
in much for tennis, and she ate three muffins.
Our young man made out that Lady Marchant and her daughters had
already been at Medley, and even guessed that their reception by the
Princess, who probably thought them of a tiresome type, had not been
enthusiastic; and his imagination projected itself further still,
into the motives which, in spite of this tepidity, must have led
them, on consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country,
to come a second time. The talk in the firelight, while our youth
laboured rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion on his
hostess’s part was passing into his own blood) with his muffin-eating
beauty—the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate
tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd evident
_parti-pris_ of the Princess’s to put poor Lady Marchant, as the phrase
might be, through her paces. With great urbanity of manner she appealed
for the explanation of everything, and especially of her ladyship’s own
thin remarks and of the sense in which they had been meant; so that
Hyacinth was scarce able to follow her, wondering what interest she
could have in trying to appear dense. It was only afterwards he learned
that the Marchant family produced a very peculiar and at moments almost
maddening effect on her nerves. He asked himself what would happen to
that member of it with whom he was engaged if it should be revealed to
her that she was conversing (how little soever) with a beggarly London
artisan; and though he was rather pleased at her not having discovered
his station (for he didn’t attribute her brevity to this idea) he
entertained a little the question of its being perhaps his duty not
to keep it hidden from her, not to flourish in a cowardly disguise.
What did she take him for—or rather what didn’t she take him for—when
she asked him if he hunted and “went in”? Perhaps that was because it
was rather dark; if there had been more light in the great vague hall
she would have seen he was not one of themselves. He felt that by this
time he had associated a good deal with swells, but they had always
known what he was and had been able to choose how to treat him. This
was the first time a young gentlewoman hadn’t been warned, and as a
consequence he appeared to pass muster. He determined not to unmask
himself, on the simple ground that he should by the same stroke betray
the Princess. It was quite open to _her_ to lean over and say to Miss
Marchant: “You know he’s a wretched little bookbinder who earns a few
shillings a week in a horrid street in Soho. There are all kinds of
low things—and I suspect even something very horrible—connected with
his birth. It seems to me I ought to mention it.” He almost wished
she would mention it for the sake of the strange violent sensation
of the thing, a curiosity quivering within him to know what Miss
Marchant would do at such a pinch and what chorus of ejaculations—or
what appalled irremediable silence—would rise to the painted roof. The
responsibility, however, was not his; he had entered a dim passage
of his fate where responsibilities had dropped. Madame Grandoni’s
tea had waked her up; she came at every crisis to the rescue of the
conversation and talked to the visitors about Rome, where they had once
spent a winter, describing with much drollery the manner in which the
English families she had seen there for nearly half a century (and had
met of an evening in the Roman world) inspected the ruins and monuments
and squeezed into the great ceremonies of the Church. Clearly the
four ladies didn’t know what to make of the Princess; but, though they
perhaps wondered if she were a paid companion, they were on firm ground
in the fact that the queer, familiar, fat person had been acquainted
with the Millingtons, the Bunburys and the Tripps.
After dinner (during which the Princess allowed herself a considerable
licence of pleasantry on the subject of her recent visitors, declaring
that Hyacinth must positively go with her to return their call and must
see their interior, their manner at home) Madame Grandoni sat down to
the piano at Christina’s request and played to her companions for an
hour. The spaces were large in the big drawing-room, and our friends
had placed themselves at a distance from each other. The old lady’s
music trickled forth discreetly into the multiplied mild candlelight;
she knew dozens of Italian local airs, which sounded like the forgotten
tunes of a people, and she followed them by a series of tender,
plaintive German _Lieder_, rousing without violence the echoes of the
high pompous apartment. It was the music of an old woman and seemed
to quaver a little as her lifted voice might have done. The Princess,
buried in a deep chair, listened behind her fan. Hyacinth at least
supposed she listened, for she never moved. At last Madame Grandoni
left the piano and came to the young man. She had taken up on the way
a French book in a pink cover which she nursed in the hollow of her arm
as she stood looking at him.
“My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see
you again for the present, as, to take your early train, you’ll have
left the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to
gentlemen without it. I’ve looked after the Princess pretty well,
all day, to keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you for a
little. Take the same care, I earnestly beg you. I must put myself
into my dressing-gown; at my age, at this hour, it’s the only thing.
What will you have? I hate to be tight,” pursued Madame Grandoni, who
appeared even in her ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort
successfully enough. “Don’t sit up late,” she added, “and don’t
keep him, Christina. Remember that for an active young man like Mr.
Robinson, going every day to his work, there’s nothing more exhausting
than such an unoccupied life as ours. For what do we do after all? His
eyes are very heavy. _Basta!_”
During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that
part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but
after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned
shield and rested her eyes a while on Hyacinth. At last she said:
“Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something
to you that I can’t shout across the room.” He immediately got up,
but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other,
they met half-way and before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood
opening and closing her fan, then she began: “You must be surprised at
my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”
“No indeed: I’m not now surprised at anything.”
“When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all,
become friends,” said the Princess.
“I hoped we were already. Certainly after the kindness you’ve shown me
there’s no service of friendship you might ask of me——!”
“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you’re going to say,
and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do
me if all the while you think of me as a hollow-headed, hollow-hearted
trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and oppressing you with
clumsy attentions? Perhaps you believe me a bad, bold, ravening flirt.”
“Capable of wanting to flirt with _me_?” Hyacinth demurred. “I should
be very conceited.”
“Surely you’ve the right to be as conceited as you please after the
advances I’ve made you! Pray who has a better one? But you persist in
remaining humble, and that’s very provoking.”
“It’s not I who am provoking; it’s life and society and all the
difficulties that surround us.”
“I’m precisely of that opinion—that they’re exasperating; that when
I appeal to you frankly, candidly, disinterestedly—simply because I
like you, for no other reason in the world—to help me to disregard
and surmount these conventions and absurdities, to treat them with the
contempt they deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little and
make yourself small and try to edge out of the situation by pleading
general devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease
to be insignificant from the moment I’ve anything to do with you. My
dear fellow,” the Princess went on in her free, audacious, fraternising
way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, “there are
people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of
obscurity.”
“What do you wish me then to do?” Hyacinth asked as quietly as he could.
If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his
lips and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain
unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment,
he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant:
“I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends in
general—all I ever asked of the best I’ve ever had. But none of them
ever did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has
just left us. She understood me long ago.”
“That’s all I on my side ask of you,” said Hyacinth with a smile, as to
attest presence of mind, that might have come from some flushed young
captive under cross-examination for his life. “Give _me_ time, give
_me_ time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.
“Dear Mr. Hyacinth, I’ve given you months!—months since our first
meeting. And at present haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been
intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans—I
know what I’m saying. Don’t try to look stupid; with your beautiful
intelligent face you’ll never succeed. I wished to leave you free to
amuse yourself.”
“Oh, I’ve amused myself,” said Hyacinth.
“You’d have been very fastidious if you hadn’t. However, that’s
precisely in the first place what I wished you to come here for. To
observe the impression made by such a house as this on such a nature
as yours introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure
you, quite worth my while. I’ve already given you a hint of how
extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having
seen—what shall I call them?—beautiful, delightful old things. I’ve
been watching you; I’m frank enough to tell you that. I want you to see
more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed with a sudden emphasis that,
had he heard her use it to another, he would have taken for a passion
of tenderness. “And I want to talk with you about this matter as well
as others. That will be for to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you’re
going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little
imagination!”
He shook his head with a pale grin and had an idea his mind was made
up. “I can’t stay.”
She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching—it
was so sad, yet as a rebuke so gentle—in the tone in which she replied:
“You oughtn’t make me too abject. It isn’t nice.”
He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed
to fall from under him and crumble. He remained a moment looking on
the ground. “Princess,” he then said, “you’ve no idea—how should you
have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust
yourself. I’ve no money—I’ve no clothes.”
“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”
“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages. I live on my wages from
day to day.”
“Let me then give you wages. You’ll work for me.”
“What do you mean—work for you?”
“You’ll bind all my books. I’ve ever so many foreign ones in paper.”
“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”
“No, I don’t imagine that. I’ll give you the wages now, and you can
do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then if you
want anything you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very
good shops; I’ve used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things
at this juncture; she had that quickening effect on him. Among others
he thought of these two: first that it was indelicate (though such an
opinion was not very strongly held either in Pentonville or in Soho) to
accept money from a woman; and second that it was still more indelicate
to make such a woman as that go down on her knees to him. But it took
more than a minute for one of these convictions to prevail over the
other, and before that he had heard his friend continue in the tone of
mild, disinterested argument: “If we believe in the coming democracy,
if it seems to us right and just and we hold that in sweeping over the
world the great wave will wash away a myriad iniquities and cruelties,
why not make some attempt with our own poor means—for one must begin
somewhere—to carry out the spirit of it in our lives and our manners? I
want to do that. I try to do it—in my relations with you for instance.
But you hang ridiculously back. You’re really not a bit democratic!”
Her accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke;
nevertheless it left him lucidity (though he still hesitated
an instant, wondering if the words wouldn’t offend her) to say
straightforwardly enough: “I’ve been strongly warned against you.”
The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that.
Of course my proceedings—though after all I’ve done little enough as
yet—must appear most unnatural. _Che vuole?_ as Madame Grandoni says.”
A certain knot of light blue ribbon which formed part of the trimming
of her dress hung down at her side in the folds of it. On these glossy
loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and he now
took up one of them and carried it to his lips. “I’ll do all the work
for you that you’ll give me. If you give it on purpose and by way of
munificence that’s your own affair. I myself will estimate the price.
What decides me is that I shall do the job so well; certainly it shall
be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will
have been at least that reason. I’ve brought you a book—so you can see.
I did it for you last year and went to South Street to give it to you,
but you had already gone.”
“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so
exclusively the calmness of relief at finding he could be reasonable,
as well as a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he
was surprised when in the next breath she said irrelevantly: “Who was
it warned you against me?”
He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the
plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady and reflecting
how, as the likelihood was small that his friend in Camberwell would
ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her plan of going there)
no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in London—Paul Muniment.”
“Paul Muniment?”
“I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.”
“The person who said something good? I forget what it was.”
“It was sure to be something good if he said it. He’s awfully wise.”
“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about
me?”
“Oh nothing of course but the little I could tell him. He only spoke on
general grounds.”
“I like his odd name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he
resembles it I think I should like him.”
“You’d like him much better than me.”
“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I’m determined to
keep hold of you simply for what you can show me.” She paused a moment
with her beautiful deep eyes lighted as by possibilities that half
dazzled and half defied him; then again her wondrous words took it
up. “On general grounds, _bien entendu_, your friend was quite right
to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I’ve undertaken
to make as small as possible. It’s to reduce them to nothing that I
talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I’ve done.
What in the world is it I’m trying to do but by every clever trick
I can think of fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my
position and yours? You know what I make of ‘positions’—I told you in
London. For heaven’s sake let me feel that I’ve—a little—succeeded!” He
satisfied her sufficiently to enable her five minutes later apparently
to entertain no further doubt on the question of his staying over. On
the contrary she burst into a sudden explosion of laughter, replacing
her argumentative pressure by one of her singular sallies. “You must
absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants. It will be lovely to
see you there!”
As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room after she had a trifle
abruptly and, as struck him, almost unceremoniously and inconsequently
left him, it occurred to him to wonder if that was mainly what she
was keeping him for—so that he might help her to play one of her
tricks on the good people at Broome. He paced there in the still
candlelight for a longer time than he measured; until the butler came
and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently and fixedly as to
let him know that he interfered with the custom of the house. He had
told the Princess that what determined him was the thought of the
manner in which he might exercise his craft in her service; but this
was only half the influence that pressed him into forgetfulness of
what he had most said to himself when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of
unprecedented introspection, he wrote the letter by which he accepted
the invitation to Medley. He would go there, he reasoned, because a
man must be gallant, especially if he be a poor little bookbinder;
but after he should be there he would insist at every step on knowing
what he was in for. The change that had taken place in him now, from
one moment to another, was that he had simply ceased to wonder what
that mystery might be. All warnings, reflexions, considerations of
verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the possible, of the
value of his independence, had become as nothing to him. The cup of
an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted palace, a week of
such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crook as he had never dreamed
of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of romance, of reality,
of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without drinking. He
might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in his mouth
the taste of nectar. He went upstairs under the eye of the butler and
on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found himself
face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just issued from
her own apartment, the door of which stood open near her; she might
have been hovering there at watch for his footstep. She had donned her
dressing-gown, which seemed to give her all respiratory and other ease,
but had not yet parted with her wig. She still had her pink French book
under her arm, and her fat little hands, tightly locked together in
front of her, formed the clasp of her generous girdle.
“Do tell me it’s positive, Mr. Robinson!” she said as she stopped short.
“What’s positive, Madame Grandoni?”
“That you take the train in the morning.”
“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary
it has been settled I shall stay over. I’m very sorry if it distresses
you—but _che vuole_?” he heard himself almost “cheekily” risk.
Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in
return; she only looked at him hard a moment and then, shrugging her
shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.