He knew there was something out of the way as soon as he saw Lady
Aurora’s face look forth at him in answer to his tap while she held
the door ajar. What was she doing in Pinnie’s bedroom?—a very poor
place, into which the dressmaker, with her reverence, would never have
admitted a person of that quality unless things had got pretty bad. She
was solemn too and without her usual incoherent laugh; she had removed
her large hat, with its limp old-fashioned veil, and she raised her
finger to her lips. Hyacinth’s first alarm had been immediately after
he let himself into the house with his latch-key, as he always did, and
found the little room on the right of the passage, in which Pinnie had
lived ever since he remembered, fireless and untenanted. As soon as he
had paid the cabman who put down his portmanteau for him in the hall—he
was not used to paying cabmen and was conscious he gave too much,
but was too impatient in his sudden anxiety to care—he had hurried up
the vile staircase that seemed viler, even through his preoccupation,
than ever, and given the knock, accompanied by a call the least bit
tremulous, precipitately answered by Lady Aurora. She had drawn back
into the room a moment while he stared in his dismay; then she emerged
again, closing the door behind her—all with the air of enjoining him
to be terribly quiet. He felt suddenly so sick at the idea of having
lingered at Medley while there was distress in the wretched little
house to which he owed so much that he scarcely found strength for an
articulate question and obeyed mechanically the mute, urgent gesture by
which their noble visitor appealed to him to go downstairs with her.
It was only when they stood together in the deserted parlour—where
he noted as for the first time what an inelegant odour prevailed—that
he asked: “Is she dying—is she dead?” That was the least the strained
sadness looking out of Lady Aurora’s face appeared to announce.
“Dear Mr. Robinson, I’m so sorry for you. I wanted to write, but I
promised her I wouldn’t. She’s very ill, poor dear—we’re very anxious.
It began ten days ago and I suppose I _must_ tell you how much
she has gone down.” Lady Aurora spoke with more than all her usual
embarrassments and precautions—eagerly, yet as if it cost her much
pain: pausing a little after everything to see how he would take it,
then going on with a small propitiatory rush. He learned presently
what was the matter, what doctor she had sent for, and that if he
would wait a little before going into the room it would be so much
better; the invalid having sunk within half an hour into a doze of a
less agitated kind than she had had for some time, from which it would
be an immense pity to run the risk of waking her. The doctor gave her
the right things, as it seemed to her ladyship, but he admitted that
she had very little power of resistance. He was of course not a very
large practitioner, Mr. Buffery from round the corner, yet he seemed
really clever; and she herself had taken the liberty (as she confessed
to this she threw off one of her odd laughs and her colour rose) of
sending an elderly, respectable person—a decent nursing body known
to many doctors. She was out just then, she had to go once a day for
the air—“only when I come of course” Lady Aurora hastened to note.
Dear Miss Pynsent had had a cold hanging about her and had not taken
care of it. Hyacinth would know how plucky she was about that sort of
thing; she took so little interest in herself. “Of course a cold’s a
cold, whoever has it; isn’t it?” his friend asked as if superior to
the old discrimination against the power of the lowly to do justice
to such visitations. Ten days previous she had taken an additional
chill through falling asleep in her chair, at night, down there, and
letting the fire go out. “It would have been nothing if she had been
like you or me, you know,” his benefactress went on; “but as she was
then it made the difference. The day was horribly damp—the chill had
struck into the lungs and inflammation come on. Mr. Buffery says she
was impoverished, you know—so weak and low she had nothing to _go_ on.”
The next morning she had bad pains and a good deal of fever, yet had
got up. Poor Pinnie’s gracious ministrant didn’t make clear to Hyacinth
what time had elapsed before she came to the rescue, nor by what means
she had been notified, and he saw that she slurred this over, from
the admirable motive of wishing him not to feel that their patient had
suffered by his absence or called for him in vain. This indeed appeared
not to have been the case if Pinnie had opposed successfully his being
written to. “I came in very soon,” Lady Aurora only said—“it was such
a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything—if it wasn’t so
sad to see a person _need_ so little. She did want you to stay where
you were: she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr.
Robinson.”
“I don’t know what to say to you—you’re so extraordinarily good, so
angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and sickened by a strange,
unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he
had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to
which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother
struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the
presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—this
whole contrast cut him like a knife and made the ugly accident of his
absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you when you’re so
kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke out.
Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of
course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to
consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that
your visit should _not_ be cut short. When you should come of yourself
it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you’ve been, but
she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would
do you so much good.”
Hyacinth felt his eyes fill with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying! How
can she live when she’s like that?”
He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so
many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A
succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated
emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had
possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind
of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips
gently on his hand. So for a minute, while his tears flowed and she
said nothing, he felt her timid touch of consolation. At the end of the
minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said “we”
just before, and he asked her whom she meant.
“Oh Mr. Vetch, don’t you know? I’ve made his charming acquaintance;
it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then while for a space Hyacinth was
silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden
to the fiddler while _he_ was masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora
added: “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once at first to bring
his violin; she thought it would soothe her.”
“I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble
him,” said Hyacinth.
Apparently there had been a certain dryness in his tone, which was the
cause of her ladyship’s venturing to reply after an hesitation: “Do
let him come, Mr. Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder if you know
that—that he has a great affection for you.”
“The more fool he; I’ve always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth
declared, colouring.
The way Lady Aurora spoke proved to him later that she now definitely
did know his secret, or one of those mysteries rather; for at the rate
things had been going for the last few months he was making a regular
collection. She knew the smaller secret—not of course the greater; she
had decidedly been illuminated by Pinnie’s divagations. At the moment
he made that reflexion, however, he was almost startled to perceive
how completely he had ceased to resent such betrayals and how little
it suddenly seemed to signify that the innocent source of them was
about to be quenched. The sense of his larger treasure of experience
swallowed up that particular anxiety, making him ask himself what it
mattered, for the little time now left him, that people should exchange
allusions, below their breath, to the hidden mark he now bore. The day
came quickly when he believed, and yet didn’t care, that it had been in
that manner immensely talked about.
After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first
moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale
parlour sunk in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing
Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much of late in
the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker,
in taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious
discipline. What was most vivid to him in the deserted field of her
unsuccessful industry was the changed vision with which he had come
back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the same,
and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in the
impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a
dismal _chiaroscuro_—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of
his own little life; yet the eyes with which he looked at it had new
terms of comparison. He had known the scene for hideous and sordid,
but its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he
couldn’t believe that for years he had accepted and even a little
revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service his experience
of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have assimilated
that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for himself; but
with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement could one
come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising?
Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle and the
room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from
the muddy street where the shallow defensive areas were a narrow slit.
No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, no wonder her small underfed
organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her
limited, stinted life, the patient humdrum effort of her needle and
scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing
to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn,
the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he
heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened
by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the
solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a particularly
lamentable, conscious squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes
that didn’t match, though of an equal antiquity and intimately emulous
in the facility with which they dropped off. He had not heard Mr.
Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper;
but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not
to make the door creak, their neighbour came into the parlour. The
fiddler said nothing to him at first; they only looked at each other
for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he
knew the worst about Pinnie: but what was further in his eyes, which
had an expression considerably different from any hitherto seen in
them, defined itself to our hero only little by little.
“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth at
last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but
he thought the question fair. None the less he expected a sarcastic
answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr.
Vetch replied—
“I assure you that no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever
did more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you
back, and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I
balanced one thing against the other. It was very difficult.”
“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest
are dying they’re usually sent for.”
The visitor gave a strange argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and
Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to
Hyacinth it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties
of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr. Vetch’s old age
was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley
had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy,
this case was exceptional,” the fiddler returned. “Your visit had a
character of importance.”
“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you
anything.”
“No certainly, you’ve never told me much. But if, as is probable,
you’ve seen that kind lady who’s now upstairs you’ll have learned
that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed.
She threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back.
You know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As at this Hyacinth turned
away with a gesture of irritation Mr. Vetch went on: “No doubt she’s
absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t now cast any disrespect
on it. I assure you that if she had been here alone, suffering,
sinking, without a creature to tend her and nothing before her but to
die in a corner like a starved cat, she would still have faced that
fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel
scenes.”
Hyacinth turned it miserably over. “Of course I know what you mean.
But she spun her delusion—she always did all of them—out of nothing.
I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of
scenes. I told her when I went out of town very little more than I told
you.”
“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been at any rate enough. She
has made up her mind that you’ve formed a connexion by means of which
you’ll come somehow or other into your own. She has done nothing but
talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the
aristocracy; and nothing’s simpler than that the person—very exalted,
as she believes—with whom you’ve been to stay should undertake your
business with her friends.”
“Oh well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of
that entertainment.”
“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added: “My
dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”
“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth returned. “I’ll tell her
my great relations have adopted me and that I’ve come back in the
character of Lord Robinson.”
“She’ll need nothing more to die happy,” said Mr. Vetch.
Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend
a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition,
this worthy explaining that he came over like that to see how she was
half-a-dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended
upon the pair while our youth awaited some sign from Lady Aurora that
he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked
out of the window as if the view were a chart of all the grey past;
and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with
his hands in his pockets. At last Mr. Vetch observed without taking his
pipe out of his lips or looking round: “I think you might be a little
more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”
Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment all sincerely
what his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of
an effort to conceal anything he could possibly tell—there were some
things of course he couldn’t: on the contrary his life seemed to him
particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious comment.
It was at this moment he first noticed a certain difference; there was
a tone in Mr. Vetch’s voice he seemed never to have felt before—an
absence of that note which had made him say in other days that the
impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It was
as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate,
in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part,
his having grown older or more important, or even grown simply more
surpassingly odd. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s
old neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his
being a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so
perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr. Vetch in a mind familiar
now for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not
favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience in
Hyacinth’s breast was soon corrected by one of the sudden reactions
or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim.
In the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than
it said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had for years
a small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of
it, even his visible expression of ultimate parsimony and of having
ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more
for something else—these things became so many reasons for turning
round, going over to him, touching marks of an invincible fidelity,
the humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an
art after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the
species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting with fidgeted
from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the
same place for three months together.
“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to
know what I’ve been doing in the country? I should have first to know
myself,” Hyacinth decently pleaded.
“Have you enjoyed it very much?”
“Yes certainly, very much—not knowing anything about Pinnie. I’ve been
in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman.”
Mr. Vetch had turned round; he looked very impartial through the smoke
of his pipe. “Is she really a princess?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really’: I suppose all titles are great
rot. But every one seems agreed to call her so.”
“You know I’ve always liked to enter into your life, and to-day the
wish is stronger than ever,” the old man presently said, while he fixed
his eyes steadily on his companion’s.
Hyacinth returned his gaze a moment. “What makes you say that just now?”
The fiddler appeared to deliberate and at last replied: “Because you’re
in danger of losing the best friend you’ve ever had.”
“Be sure I feel it. But if I’ve got _you_——!” his companion added.
“Oh me! I’m very old and very tired of life.”
“I suppose that that’s what one arrives at. Well, if I can help you in
any way you must lean on me, you must make use of me.”
“That’s precisely what I was going to say to you,” said Mr. Vetch.
“Should you like any money?”
“Of course I should! But why should you offer it to me?”
“Because in saving it up little by little I’ve had you in mind.”
“Dear Mr. Vetch,” our young man returned, “you have me too much in
mind. I’m not worth it, please believe that; and for all sorts of
reasons. I should make money enough for any uses I have for it, or have
any right to have, if I stayed quietly in London and attended to my
work. As you know, I can earn a decent living.”
“Yes, I can see that. But if you stayed quietly in London what would
become of your princess?”
“Oh they can always manage, ladies in that position.”
“Hanged if I understand her position!” cried Mr. Vetch, but without
laughing. “You’ve been for three weeks without work and yet you look
uncommonly smart.”
“Well, my living, you see, has cost me nothing. When you stay with
great people you don’t pay your score,” Hyacinth explained with great
gentleness. “Moreover, the lady whose hospitality I’ve been enjoying
has made me a very handsome offer of work.”
“What kind of work?”
“The only kind I know. She’s going to send me a lot of books to do up
for her.”
“And to pay you fancy prices?”
“Oh no; I’m to fix the prices myself.”
“Are not transactions of that kind rather disagreeable—with a lady
whose hospitality one has been enjoying?” Mr. Vetch inquired.
“Exceedingly! That’s exactly why I shall do the books and then take no
money.”
“Your princess is rather clever!” the fiddler coldly laughed.
“Well, she can’t force me to take it if I won’t,” said Hyacinth.
“No; you must only let _me_ do that.”
“You’ve curious ideas about me,” the young man declared.
Mr. Vetch turned about to the window again, remarking that he had
curious ideas about everything. Then he added after an interval: “And
have you been making love to your great lady?”
He had expected a flash of impatience in reply to this appeal and was
rather surprised at the manner in which Hyacinth began: “How shall I
explain? It’s not a question of that sort.”
“Has she been making love to you then?”
“If you should ever see her you’d understand how absurd that
supposition is.”
“How shall I ever see her?” returned Mr. Vetch. “In the absence of that
privilege I think there’s something in my idea.”
“She looks quite over my head,” said Hyacinth simply. “It’s by no means
impossible you may see her. She wants to know my friends, to know the
people who live in the Place. And she would take a particular interest
in you on account of your opinions.”
“Ah I’ve no opinions now—none any more!” the old man broke out sadly.
“I only had them to frighten Pinnie.”
“She was easily frightened,” said Hyacinth.
“Yes, and easily reassured. Well, I like to know about your life,” his
neighbour sighed irrelevantly. “But take care the great lady doesn’t
lead you too far.”
“How do you mean, too far?”
“Isn’t she a conspiring socialist, a dabbler in plots and treasons?
Doesn’t she go in for a general rectification, as Eustache calls it?”
Hyacinth had a pause. “You should see the place—you should see what she
wears, what she eats and drinks.”
“Ah you mean that she’s inconsistent with her theories? My dear boy,
she’d be a droll woman if she weren’t. At any rate I’m glad of it.”
“Glad of it?” Hyacinth repeated.
“For you, I mean, when you stay with her; it’s more luxurious!” Mr.
Vetch exclaimed, turning round and smiling. At this moment a little rap
on the floor above, given by Lady Aurora, announced that Hyacinth might
at last come up and see Pinnie. Mr. Vetch listened and recognised it,
and it led him to say with considerable force: “_There’s_ a woman whose
theories and conduct do square!”
Hyacinth, on the threshold, leaving the room, stopped long enough to
meet it. “Well, when the day comes for my friend to give up—you’ll
see.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt there are things she’ll bring herself to
sacrifice,” the old man retorted. But Hyacinth was already out of
hearing.