Mr. Vetch waited below till Lady Aurora should come down and give him
the news he was in suspense for. His mind was pretty well made up about
Pinnie. It had seemed to him the night before that death was written
in her face, and he judged it on the whole a very good moment for her
to lay down her earthly burden. He had reasons for believing that the
future couldn’t be sweet to her. As regards Hyacinth his mind was far
from being at ease; for though aware in a general way that he had taken
up with strange company, and though having flattered himself of old
that he should be pleased to see the boy act out his life and solve
the problem of his queer inheritance, he was worried by the absence of
full knowledge. He put out his pipe in anticipation of Lady Aurora’s
reappearance and without this consoler was more accessible still to
certain fears that had come to him in consequence of a recent talk, or
rather an attempt at a talk, with Eustache Poupin. It was through the
Frenchman that he had gathered the little he knew about the occasion
of Hyacinth’s strange and high “social” adventure. His vision of the
matter had been wholly inferential; for Hyacinth had made a mystery of
his absence to Pinnie, merely letting her know that there was a lady
in the case and that the best luggage he could muster and the best way
his shirts could be done up would still be far from good enough. Poupin
had seen Godfrey Sholto at the “Sun and Moon,” and it had come to him,
through Hyacinth, that a remarkable feminine influence in the Captain’s
life was conducive in some way to his presence in Bloomsbury—an
influence, moreover, by which Hyacinth himself, for good or for evil,
was in peril of being touched. Sholto was the young man’s visible
link with a society for which Lisson Grove could have no importance
in the scheme of the universe save as a short cut (too disagreeable
to be frequently used) out of Bayswater; therefore if Hyacinth left
town with a new hat and a pair of kid gloves it must have been to move
in the direction of that superior circle and in some degree at the
solicitation of the before-mentioned feminine influence. So much as
this the Frenchman suggested explicitly enough, as his manner was, to
the old fiddler; but his talk had a strain of other and rarer reference
which excited Mr. Vetch’s curiosity rather than satisfied it. They were
obscure, these deeper implications; they were evidently painful to the
speaker; they were confused and embarrassed and totally wanting in that
effect of high hand-polish which usually characterised the lightest
allusions of M. Poupin. It was the fiddler’s fancy that his friend had
something on his mind which he was not at liberty to impart, and that
it related to Hyacinth and might, for those who took an interest in the
singular lad, give ground for no small anxiety. Mr. Vetch, on his own
part, nursed this anxiety into a tolerably definite shape: he persuaded
himself that the Frenchman had been leading the boy too far in the
line of social criticism, had given him a push on some crooked path
where a slip would be a likely accident. When on a subsequent occasion,
with Poupin, he indulged in a hint of this suspicion, the bookbinder
flushed a good deal and declared that his conscience was pure. It was
one of his peculiarities that when his colour rose he looked angry,
and Mr. Vetch held that his displeasure was a proof that in spite of
his repudiations he had been unwise; though before they parted Eustache
gave this sign of softness that he shed tears of emotion of which the
source was not clear to the fiddler and which appeared in a general way
to be dedicated to Hyacinth. The interview had taken place in Lisson
Grove, where Madame Poupin, however, had not shown herself.
Altogether the old man was a prey to suppositions which led him to feel
how much he himself had outlived the democratic glow of his prime. He
had ended by accepting everything—though indeed he couldn’t swallow the
idea that a trick should be played upon Hyacinth; and even by taking
an interest in current politics, as to which of old he had held the
opinion—the opinion deep-based in the Poupins to-day—that they had
been invented on purpose to throw dust in the eyes of disinterested
reformers and to circumvent the social solution. He had renounced that
problem some time ago; there was no way to clear it up that didn’t seem
to make a bigger mess than the actual muddle of human affairs, which by
the time one had reached sixty-five might mostly cease to exasperate.
Mr. Vetch could still feel a certain sharpness on the subject of the
prayer-book and the bishops, and if at moments he was a little ashamed
of having accepted this world could reflect that at all events he
continued to repudiate every other. The idea of great changes, however,
took its place among the dreams of his youth; for what was any possible
change in the relations of men and women but a new combination of the
same elements? If the elements could be made different the thing would
be worth thinking of; but it was not only impossible to introduce any
new ones—no means had yet been discovered for getting rid of the old.
The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies
and superstitions and stupidities of man, and their position with
regard to each other at any given moment could be of interest only
to the grim, invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the
ages, bow-backed over the table. This laxity had come upon our fiddling
friend with the increase of his measurement round the waist and with
that of the little heap of half-crowns and half-sovereigns that had
accumulated in a tin box very stiffly padlocked which he kept under his
bed and the interwoven threads of sentiment and custom uniting him to
the dressmaker and her foster-son. If he was no longer pressing about
the demands he felt he should have a right to make of society, as he
had been in the days when his conversation scandalised Pinnie, so he
was now not pressing for Hyacinth either; reflecting that though indeed
the constituted powers might have to “count” with him it would be in
better taste for him not to be importunate about a settlement. What
he had come to fear for the interesting youth was that he should be
precipitated by crude agencies into depths where the deplorable might
not exclude the ridiculous. It may even be said that Mr. Vetch had a
secret project of settling a little on his behalf.
Lady Aurora peeped into the room, very noiselessly, nearly half an
hour after Hyacinth had left it, and let the fiddler know that she was
called to other duties but that the nurse had come back and the doctor
had promised to look in at five o’clock. She herself would return
in the evening, and meanwhile Hyacinth was with his aunt, who had
recognised him without a protest; indeed seemed intensely happy that
he should be near her again and lay there with closed eyes, very weak
and speechless, holding his hand. Her restlessness had passed and her
fever abated, but she had no pulse to speak of and Lady Aurora didn’t
disguise the fact that by any good judgement she was rapidly sinking.
Mr. Vetch had already accepted it and after her ladyship had quitted
him he lighted another philosophic pipe upon it, lingering on, till
the doctor came, in the dressmaker’s dismal, forsaken bower, where in
past years he had indulged in so many sociable droppings-in and hot
tumblers. The echo of all her little simple surprises and pointless
contradictions, her gasping reception of contemplative paradox,
seemed still to float in the air; but the place felt as relinquished
and bereft as if she were already beneath the sod. Pinnie had always
been a wonderful hand at “putting away”; the litter that testified
to her most elaborate efforts was often immense, but the reaction in
favour of an unspeckled carpet was greater still; and on the present
occasion, before taking to her bed, she had found strength to sweep and
set in order as tidily as if she had been sure the room would never
again know her care. Even to the old fiddler, who had not Hyacinth’s
sensibility to the scenery of life, it had the cold propriety of a
place arranged for interment. After the doctor had seen Pinnie that
afternoon there was no doubt left as to its soon being the stage of
dismal preliminaries.
Miss Pynsent, however, resisted her malady for nearly a fortnight more,
during which Hyacinth was constantly in her room. He never went back
to old Crook’s, with whose establishment, through violent causes, his
relations seemed indefinitely suspended; and in fact for the rest of
the time that Pinnie demanded his care absented himself but twice from
Lomax Place during more than a few minutes. On one of these occasions
he travelled over to Audley Court and spent an hour there; on the other
he met Millicent Henning by previous understanding and took a walk with
her on the Embankment. He tried to find an hour to go and thank Madame
Poupin for a sympathetic offering, many times repeated, of _tisane_
concocted after a receipt thought supreme by the couple in Lisson Grove
(though little appreciated in the neighbourhood generally); but he
was obliged to acknowledge her kindness only by a respectful letter,
which he composed with some trouble, though much elation, in the French
tongue, peculiarly favourable, as he believed, to little courtesies
of this kind. Lady Aurora came again and again to the darkened house,
where she diffused her beneficent influence in nightly watches, in
the most modern sanative suggestions, in conversations with Hyacinth
more ingeniously addressed than her fluttered embarrassments might
have betrayed to the purpose of diverting his mind, and in tea-makings
(there was a great deal of this liquid consumed on the premises during
Pinnie’s illness) after a system more enlightened than the usual
fashion of Pentonville. She was the bearer of several messages and of
a good deal of medical advice from Rose Muniment, whose interest in the
dressmaker’s case irritated Hyacinth by its fine courage, which even at
second-hand was still extravagant: she appeared very nearly as resigned
to the troubles of others as she was to her own.
Hyacinth had been seized the day after his return from Medley with
a sharp desire to do something enterprising and superior on Pinnie’s
behalf. He felt the pressure of an angry sense that she was dying of
her poor career, of her uneffaced remorse for the trick she had played
him in his boyhood—as if he hadn’t long ago and indeed at the time
forgiven it, judging it to have been the highest wisdom!—of something
basely helpless in the attitude of her acquaintance. He wanted to
do something that should prove to himself he had got the very best
opinion about the invalid it was possible to have: so he insisted
that Mr. Buffery should consult with a West End doctor if the West
End doctor would consent to meet Mr. Buffery. An oracle not averse to
this condescension was discovered through Lady Aurora’s agency—she
had not brought him of her own movement because on the one hand she
hesitated to impose on the little household in Lomax Place the expense
of such a visit, and on the other, with all her narrow personal
economies for the sake of her charities, had not the means to meet it
herself; and in prevision of the great man’s fee Hyacinth applied to
Mr. Vetch, as he had applied before, for a loan. The great man came
and was wonderfully civil to Mr. Buffery, whose conduct of the case
he pronounced judicious; he remained several minutes in the house,
gazing at Hyacinth over his spectacles—he seemed rather more concerned
about him than about the patient—and with almost the whole of the Place
turning out to stare at his chariot. After all he consented to accept
no fee. He put the question aside with a gesture full of urbanity—a
course disappointing and displeasing to Hyacinth, who felt in a manner
cheated of the full effect of the fine thing he had wished to do for
Pinnie; though when he said as much or something like it to Mr. Vetch
the caustic fiddler greeted the observation with a face of amusement
which, considering the situation, verged on the unseemly.
Hyacinth at any rate had done the best he could, and the fashionable
doctor had left directions which foreshadowed commerce with an
expensive chemist in Bond Street—a prospect by which our young man
was to some extent consoled. Poor Pinnie’s decline, however, was
not arrested, and one evening more than a week after his return from
Medley, as he sat with her alone, it struck him that her mild spirit
must already have passed. The respectable nurse had moved away to
supper, and by the aid of the staircase a perceptible odour of fizzling
bacon indicated that a more cheerful state of things prevailed in
the lower regions. Hyacinth couldn’t make out if his old friend were
asleep or awake; he believed she had not lost consciousness, yet for
more than an hour she had given no sign of life. At last she put out
her hand as if aware he was near her and wished to feel for him, and
murmured: “Why did she come? I didn’t want to see her.” In a moment,
as she went on, he perceived to whom she was alluding: her mind had
travelled back through all the years to the dreadful day—she had
described every incident of it to him—when Mrs. Bowerbank had invaded
her quiet life and startled her sensitive conscience with a message
from the prison. “She sat there so long—so long. She was so very large
and I was so frightened. She moaned and moaned and cried—too dreadful.
I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t help it!” Her thought wandered from Mrs.
Bowerbank in the discomposed show-room, enthroned on the yellow sofa,
to the tragic creature at Milbank, whose accents again, for the hour,
lived in her ears; and mixed with this mingled vision was still the
haunting sense that she herself might have acted differently. That
had been cleared up in the past, so far as Hyacinth’s intention was
concerned; but what was most alive in Pinnie at the present hour was
the passion of repentance, of still further expiation. It sickened
him that she should believe these things were still necessary, and he
leaned over her and talked tenderly, said everything he could think of
to soothe her. He told her not to think of that dismal far-off time,
which had ceased long ago to have any consequences for either of them;
to consider only the future, when she should be quite strong again and
he would look after her and keep her all to himself and take care of
her better, far better than he had ever done before. He had thought of
many things while he sat with Pinnie watching the shadows made by the
night-lamp—high, imposing shadows of objects low and mean—and among
them he had followed with an imagination that went further in that
direction than ever before the probable consequences of his not having
been adopted in his babyhood by the dressmaker. The workhouse and the
gutter, ignorance and cold, filth and tatters, nights of huddling under
bridges and in doorways, vermin, starvation and blows, possibly even
the vigorous efflorescence of an inherited disposition to crime—these
things, which he saw with unprecedented vividness, suggested themselves
as his natural portion. Intimacies with a princess, visits to fine old
country-houses, intelligent consideration, even, of the best means of
inflicting a scare on the classes of privilege, would in that case not
have been within his compass; and that Pinnie should have rescued him
from such a destiny and put these luxuries within his reach represented
almost a grand position as opposed to a foul, if he could only have the
magnanimity to take it so.
Her eyes were open and fixed on him, but the sharp ray the little
dressmaker used to direct into Lomax Place as she plied her needle
at the window had completely left them. “Not there—what should I do
there?” she inquired very softly. “Not with the great—the great—” and
her voice failed.
“The great what? What do you mean?”
“You know—you know,” she went on, making another effort. “Haven’t you
been with them? Haven’t they received you?”
“Ah they won’t separate us, Pinnie; they won’t come between us as much
as that,” said Hyacinth; and he sank to his knees by her bed.
“_You_ must be separate—that makes me happier. I knew they’d find you
at last.”
“Poor Pinnie, poor Pinnie,” murmured the young man.
“It was only for that—now I’m going,” she sighed.
“If you’ll stay with me you needn’t fear,” he smiled at her.
“Oh what would _they_ think?” she quavered.
“I like you best,” he insisted.
“You’ve had me always. Now it’s their turn; they’ve waited.”
“Yes indeed they’ve waited!” Hyacinth said.
“But they’ll make it up; they’ll make up everything!” the poor woman
panted. Then she added: “I couldn’t, couldn’t help it!”—which was the
last flicker of her strength. She gave no further sign of consciousness
and four days later ceased to breathe. Hyacinth was with her and Lady
Aurora, but neither could recognise the moment.
Hyacinth and Mr. Vetch carried her bier with the help of Eustache
Poupin and Paul Muniment. Lady Aurora was at the funeral and Madame
Poupin as well and twenty neighbours from Lomax Place; but the most
distinguished member—in appearance at least—of the group of mourners
was Millicent Henning, the grave yet brilliant beauty of whose
countenance, the high propriety of whose demeanour and the fine taste
and general style of whose rich black “costume” excited no little
attention. Mr. Vetch had his idea; he had been nursing it ever since
Hyacinth’s return from Medley, and three days after Pinnie had been
consigned to the earth he broached it to his young friend. The funeral
had been on a Friday and Hyacinth had mentioned that he should return
to old Crook’s on Monday morning. This was Sunday night and he had
been out for a walk neither with Millicent Henning nor with Paul
Muniment, but alone, after the manner of old days. When he came in he
found the fiddler waiting for him and snuffing a tallow candle in the
blighted show-room. He had three or four little papers in his hand,
which exhibited some jottings of his pencil, and Hyacinth guessed,
what was the truth but not all the truth, that he had come to speak
to him about business. Pinnie had left a little will, of which she had
appointed her old friend executor; this fact had already become known
to our hero, who thought such an arrangement highly natural. Mr. Vetch
informed him of the purport of this simple and judicious document and
mentioned that he had been looking into the dressmaker’s “affairs.”
They consisted, poor Pinnie’s affairs, of the furniture of the house
in Lomax Place, of the obligation to pay the remainder of a quarter’s
rent and of a sum of money in the savings bank. Hyacinth was surprised
to learn that Pinnie’s economies had produced fruit at this late day
(things had gone so ill with her in recent years, and there had been
often such a want of money in the house) until Mr. Vetch explained to
him with eager clearness that he himself had watched over the little
hoard, accumulated during the period of her comparative prosperity,
with the stiff determination that it should be sacrificed only in
case of desperate stress. Work had become scarce with her but she
could still do it when it came, and the money was to be kept for the
very possible event of her turning helpless. Mercifully enough she
had not lived to see that day, and the sum in the bank had survived
her, though diminished by more than half. She had left no debts but
the matter of the house and those incurred during her illness. Of
course the fiddler had known—he hastened to give his young friend this
assurance—that Pinnie, had she become infirm, would have been able to
count absolutely upon _him_ for the equivalent, in her old age, of the
protection she had given him in his youth. But what if an accident had
overtaken Hyacinth? What if he had incurred some horrid penalty for
his revolutionary dabblings, which, little dangerous as they might be
to society, were quite capable, in a country where authority, though
good-natured, liked occasionally making an example, to put him on
the wrong side of a prison-wall? At any rate, for better or worse, by
pinching and scraping, she had saved a little, and of that little after
everything was paid off a fraction would still be left. Everything was
bequeathed to Hyacinth—everything but a couple of plated candlesticks
and the old “cheffonier” which had been so handsome in its day; these
Pinnie begged Mr. Vetch to accept in recognition of services beyond
all price. The furniture, everything he didn’t want for his own use,
Hyacinth could sell in a lump, and with the proceeds he could wipe
out old scores. The sum of money would remain to him; it amounted in
its reduced condition to about thirty-seven pounds. In mentioning this
figure Mr. Vetch appeared to imply that Hyacinth would be master of a
very pretty little fortune. Even to the young man himself, in spite of
his recent initiations, such a windfall seemed far from contemptible;
it represented sudden possibilities of still not returning to old
Crook’s. It represented them, that is, till he presently remembered
the various advances made him by the fiddler, and till he reflected
that by the time these had been repaid there would hardly be twenty
pounds left. That, however, was a far larger sum than he had ever had
in his pocket at once. He thanked the old man for his information and
remarked—and there was no hypocrisy in the speech—that he was too sorry
Pinnie had not given herself the benefit of the whole of the little
fund in her lifetime. To this her executor replied that it had yielded
her an interest far beyond any other investment, for he was persuaded
she had believed she should never live to enjoy it, and that this
faith had been rich to her in pictures, visions of the effect, for her
brilliant boy, of his “coming into” something handsome.
“What effect did she mean—do you mean?” Hyacinth asked. As soon as he
had spoken he felt he knew what the old man would say—it would be a
reference to Pinnie’s belief in his reunion with his “relations” and
to the facilities thirty-seven pounds would afford him for cutting
a figure among them; and for a moment Mr. Vetch looked at him as if
exactly that response were on his lips. At the end of the moment,
however, he replied quite differently.
“She hoped you’d go abroad and see the world.” The fiddler watched his
young friend and then added: “She had a particular wish you should go
to Paris.”
Hyacinth had turned pale at this suggestion and for a moment said
nothing. “Ah Paris!” he almost wailed at last.
“She would have liked you even to take a little run down to Italy.”
“Doubtless that would be jolly. But there’s a limit to what one can do
with twenty pounds.”
“How do you mean, with twenty pounds?” the old man asked, lifting his
eyebrows while the wrinkles in his forehead made deep shadows in the
candlelight.
“That’s about what will remain after I have settled my account with
you.”
“How do you mean, your account with me? I shan’t take any of your
money.”
Hyacinth’s eyes wandered over his interlocutor’s suggestive shabbiness.
“I don’t want to be beastly ungracious, but suppose _you_ should lose
your powers.”
“My dear boy, I shall have one of the resources that was open to
Pinnie. I shall look to you to be the support of my old age.”
“You may do so with perfect safety, except for that danger you just
mentioned—of my being imprisoned or hanged.”
“It’s precisely because I think the danger will be less if you go
abroad that I urge you to take this chance. You’ll see the world and
you’ll like it better. You’ll think society, even as it is, has some
good points,” said Mr. Vetch.
“I’ve never liked it better than the last few months.”
“Ah well, wait till you see Paris!”
“Oh, Paris, Paris,” Hyacinth repeated vaguely—and he stared into the
turbid flame of the candle as if making out the most brilliant scenes
there: an attitude, accent and expression which the fiddler interpreted
both as the vibration of a latent hereditary chord and a symptom of the
acute sense of opportunity.