Hyacinth found, that winter, considerable occupation for his odd
hours, his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in
hand the books he had promised himself at Medley to enclose in covers
worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life—these
brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight—and of the
confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she should
receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in thinking
that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand as
specimens of rare work, connoisseurs bending charmed heads over them,
smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention stirred
itself and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he sat up
late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this time his
skill was of a very high order. Old Crook recognised it by raising the
rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among the traditions
of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to the end wore
the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches, our young man
learned accidentally that several books he had given him to do had been
carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the villa, where they
were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden circle who came to
tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself indeed was included in this company
on a great occasion—invited to a musical party where he made the
acquaintance of half-a-dozen Miss Crookendens, an acquaintance which
consisted in his standing in a corner behind several broad-backed old
ladies and watching the rotation, at the piano and the harp, of three
or four of his employer’s thick-fingered daughters. “You know it’s
a tremendously musical house,” said one of the old ladies to another
(she called it “’ouse”); but the principal impression made upon him
by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was that it was wonderfully
different from the Princess’s playing.
He knew he was the only young man from the shop who had been invited,
not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a wig
which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides being
accompanied by a little, frightened, furtive wife who closed her eyes,
as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs. Crookenden
spoke to her. The Poupins were not there; which, however, was not a
surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that—even if they had been asked, which
they were not—they had objections of principle to putting their feet
_chez les bourgeois_. They were not asked because, in spite of the
place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business,
it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife—though
she was certainly no one’s else; and the evidence of this irregularity
was conceived to reside vaguely in the fact that she had never been
seen save in the laxity of a camisole. There had doubtless been an
apprehension that if she had come to the villa she would not have come
with the proper number of hooks and eyes—albeit Hyacinth, on two or
three occasions, notably the night he took the pair to Mr. Vetch’s
theatre, had been witness of the proportions to which she could reduce
her figure when wishing to give the impression of a lawful tie.
It was not clear to him how the distinction conferred on him
became known in Soho, where, however, it excited no sharpness of
jealousy—Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin being hardly more likely to envy
a person condemned to spend a genteel evening than they were to envy
a monkey performing antics on a barrel-organ: both forms of effort
indicated an urbanity painfully acquired. But Roker took his young
comrade’s breath half away with his elbow while remarking that he
supposed he saw the old man had spotted him for one of the darlings at
home—and while inquiring furthermore what would become in that case
of the little thing he took to France, the one to whom he had stood
champagne and lobster. This was the first allusion Hyacinth had heard
made to the idea that he might some day marry his master’s daughter,
like the virtuous apprentice of tradition; but the suggestion somehow
was not inspiring even when he had thought of an incident or two which
gave colour to it. None of the Miss Crookendens spoke to him—they
all had large faces and short legs and a comical resemblance to that
elderly male with wide nostrils their father, and, unlike the Miss
Marchants at Medley, they knew who he was; but their mother, who had on
her head the plumage of a cockatoo mingled with a structure of glass
beads, looked at him with an almost awful fixedness of charity and
asked him three distinct times if he would have a glass of negus.
He had much difficulty in getting his books from the Princess; for when
he reminded her of the promise she had given at Medley to make over to
him as many volumes as he should require she answered that everything
was changed since then, that she was completely _dépouillée_, that
she had now no pretension to have a library, and that in fine he had
much better leave the matter alone. He was welcome to any books in the
house, but, as he could see for himself, these were cheap editions, on
which it would be foolish to expend such work as his. He asked Madame
Grandoni to help him—to tell him at least if there were not some good
volumes among the things the Princess had sent to be warehoused; it
being known to him, through casual admissions of her own, that she had
allowed her maid to save certain articles from the wreck and pack them
away at the Pantechnicon. This had all been Assunta’s work—the woman
had begged so hard for a few reservations, a loaf of bread for their
old days; but the Princess herself had washed her hands of the job.
“_Che, che_, there are boxes, I’m sure, in that place, with a little
of everything,” the old lady had said in answer to his inquiry; and
Hyacinth had conferred with Assunta, who took a sympathetic, talkative,
Italian interest in his undertaking and promised to fish out for him
any block of printed matter that should remain. She arrived at his
lodging one evening, in a cab, with an armful of pretty books, and
when he asked her where they had come from waved her forefinger in
front of her nose after a fashion at once evasive and expressive. He
brought each volume to the Princess as it was finished, but her manner
of receiving it was to shake her head over it with a kind, sad smile.
“It’s beautiful, I’m sure, but I’ve lost my sense for such things.
Besides, you must always remember what you once told me, that a woman,
even the most cultivated, is incapable of feeling the difference
between a bad binding and a good. I remember your once saying that fine
ladies had brought cobbled leather to your shop and wished it imitated.
Certainly those are not the differences I most feel. My dear fellow,
such things have ceased to speak to me; they’re doubtless charming,
but they leave me cold. What will you have? One can’t serve God and
Mammon.” Her thoughts were fixed on far other things than the delight
of dainty covers, and she evidently considered that in caring so much
for them Hyacinth resembled the mad emperor who fiddled in the flames
of Rome. European society, to her mind, was in flames, and no frivolous
occupation could give the measure of the emotion with which she watched
them. It produced occasionally demonstrations of hilarity, of joy and
hope, but these always took some form connected with the life of the
people. It was the people she had gone to see when she accompanied
Hyacinth to a music hall in the Edgeware Road, and all her excursions
and pastimes this winter were prompted by her interest in the classes
on whose behalf the fundamental change was to be wrought.
To ask himself if she were in earnest was now an old story to him,
and indeed the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased
to have any high importance. It was just as she was, superficial or
profound, that she held him, and she was at any rate sufficiently
animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences actual
and possible. Some of these might be serious even if she herself
were shallow, and there were times when he was much visited by the
apprehension of them. On the Sundays when she had gone with him into
the darkest places, the most fetid holes in London, she had always
taken money with her in considerable quantities and had always left
it behind. She said very naturally that one couldn’t go and stare at
people for an impression without paying them, and she gave alms right
and left, indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgement, as simply as
the abbess of some beggar-haunted convent or a lady-bountiful of the
superstitious unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted
to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes
thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity
should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles
of economic science: partly because she wasn’t a woman to be directed
and regulated—she could take other people’s meanings but could never
take their forms. Besides, what did it matter? To himself what did it
matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or into wrong
ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The Princess
was an embodied passion—she was not a system: and her behaviour, after
all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to relieving others.
And then misery was sown so thick in her path that wherever her money
was dropped it fell into some clutching palm. He wondered she should
still have so much cash to dispose of till she explained that she came
by it through putting her personal expenditure on a rigid footing.
What she gave away was her savings, the margin she had succeeded in
creating; and now that she had tasted of the satisfaction of making
little hoards for such a purpose she regarded her other years, with
their idleness and waste, their merely personal motives, as a long,
stupid sleep of the conscience. To do something for others was not only
so much more human—it was so much more amusing!
She made strange acquaintances under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened
to extraordinary stories and formed theories about them, and about
the persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more
extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex,
attempted to establish social relations with them and was the cause of
infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent,
who was always smoking at the window and who reminded our hero of Mr.
Micawber. She received visits that were a scandal to the Crescent,
and Hyacinth neglected his affairs, whatever they were, to see what
tatterdemalion would next turn up at her door. This intercourse, it
is true, took a more fruitful form as her intimacy with Lady Aurora
deepened; her ladyship practised discriminations which she brought the
Princess to recognise, and before the winter was over Mr. Robinson’s
services in the slums were found unnecessary. He gave way with relief,
with delight, to Lady Aurora, for he had himself not in the least
grasped the principle of his behaviour for the previous four months
nor taken himself seriously as a _cicerone_. He had plunged into a sea
of barbarism without having any civilising energy to put forth. He was
aware the people were direfully wretched—more aware, it often seemed
to him, than they themselves were; so frequently was he struck with
their brutal insensibility, a grossness proof against the taste of
better things and against any desire for them. He knew it so well that
the repetition of contact could add no vividness to the conviction;
it rather smothered and befogged his impression, peopled it with
contradictions and difficulties, a violence of reaction, a sense of
the inevitable and insurmountable. In these hours the poverty and
ignorance of the multitude seemed so vast and preponderant, and so much
the law of life, that those who had managed to escape from the black
gulf were only the happy few, spirits of resource as well as children
of luck: they inspired in some degree the interest and sympathy that
one should feel for survivors and victors, those who have come safely
out of a shipwreck or a battle. What was most in Hyacinth’s mind was
the idea, of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was
a syllable, that the flood of democracy was rising over the world;
that it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; that,
whatever it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom
a magnificent energy; and that it might be trusted to look after its
own. When this high, healing, uplifting tide should cover the world
and float in the new era, it would be its own fault (whose else?) if
want and suffering and crime should continue to be ingredients of the
human lot. With his mixed, divided nature, his conflicting sympathies,
his eternal habit of swinging from one view to another, he regarded the
prospect in different moods with different intensities. In spite of the
example Eustache Poupin gave him of the reconcilement of disparities,
he was afraid the democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings or for
the finer sorts of conversation. The Princess gave up these things in
proportion as she advanced in the direction she had so audaciously
chosen; and if the Princess could give them up it would take very
transcendent natures to stick to them. At the same time there was joy
and exultation in the thought of surrendering one’s self to the wash
of the wave, of being carried higher on the sun-touched crests of wild
billows than one could ever be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own.
That vision could deepen to ecstasy; make it indifferent if one’s
ultimate fate, in such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to
be submerged in bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on immovable
rocks. Hyacinth felt that, whether his personal sympathy should rest
finally with the victors or the vanquished, the victorious force
was potentially infinite and would require no testimony from the
irresolute.
The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations,
and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach
importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either
cause, but they were important for himself—if only because they would
rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual, sore
shock of the rebound. There was no peace for him between the two
currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate,
plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, supercivilised sire.
They continued to toss him from one side to the other; they arrayed
him in intolerable defiances and revenges against himself. He had a
high ambition: he wanted neither more nor less than to get hold of
the truth and wear it in his heart. He believed with the candour of
youth that it is brilliant and clear-cut, like a royal diamond; but
to whatever quarter he turned in the effort to find it he seemed to
know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded
face. The thought of his mother had filled him with the vague, clumsy
fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but since
the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things in
the world as it was constituted were to grow intensely dear to him
he had tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human
countenance for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and
recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation.
To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea was the
source of shame, as an act of treachery would have been; for he could
almost hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct
of a gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of
fanatics and cads. He had quite got over holding that it would not have
become his father to talk of what was proper to gentlemen, got over
making the mental reflexion that from such a worthy’s son at least the
biggest cad in London could not have deserved less consideration. He
had worked himself round to allowances, to interpretations, to such
hypotheses as the evidence in the _Times_, read in the British Museum
on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, did not exclude. Though they
had been frequent enough, and too frequent, his hours of hot resentment
against the man who had attached to him the stigma he was to carry for
ever, he threw himself, in other conditions and with a certain success,
into the effort to find filial condonations and excuses. It was
comparatively easy for him to accept himself as the son of a terribly
light Frenchwoman; there seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his
having for his other parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness.
He was absolutely too poor to afford it. Sometimes, in imagination, he
sacrificed one of the authors of his being to the other, throwing over
Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when the theory failed that
his father would have done great things for him if he had lived, or the
assumption broke down that he had been Florentine Vivier’s only lover,
he cursed and disowned them alike; sometimes he arrived at conceptions
which presented them side by side, looking at him with eyes infinitely
sad but quite unashamed—eyes that seemed to tell him they had been
surpassingly unfortunate but had not been base. Of course his worst
moments now, as they had always been the worst, were those in which
his grounds for holding that Lord Frederick had really been his father
viciously fell away from him. It must be added that they always passed
off, since the mixture in his tormenting, his incorrigible pulses could
be accounted for by no other dream.
I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial
degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the
Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were
a constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in
any view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and
December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster
and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamplight and
tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his
heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London
had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered
away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which
was most his own lay round him under her pall like an immeasurable
breathing monster he felt with a vague excitement, as he had felt
before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest
expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened,
but it was filled again by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams
and strange, blurred reflexions and emanations into a sky without
stars. He suspended, so to say, his small sensibility in the midst of
it, to quiver there with joy and hope and ambition as well as with
the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed
with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the
dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and
his relations with its mistress were more organised than they had
been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the
cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present
simplicity, it was better at least for poor Mr. Robinson. It made
her more near and him more free; and if there had been a danger of
her nature’s seeming really to take the tone of the vulgar things
about her he would only have had to remember her as she was at Medley
to restore the perspective. Her beauty always appeared in truth to
have the setting that best became it; her fairness made the element
in which she lived and, among the meanest accessories, constituted
a kind of splendour. Nature had emphasised the difficult, the
deterrent, for her establishing properties in common with the horrible
populace of London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his
night-walks to Paddington or homeward; the populace of London were
scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they
could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when
every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth and he found
himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and
girls in particular were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice,
brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what
alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he
wondered what fate there could be in the great scheme of things for a
planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled
against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich,
as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich who allowed such
abominations to flourish, that made no difference and only shifted the
shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the
cause as well as the effect.
It didn’t occur to our young man that the Princess had withdrawn
her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still
further the condition of the poor, she had placed herself in the hands
of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he
had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her
knowledge and her capacity to answer any question it could come into
the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness
of his own desultory and superficial view of the great question. It was
enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot
round which his thoughts could revolve and toward which his steps could
direct themselves with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege.
The picture of it hung before him half the time in colours to which
the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless didn’t literally
characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since
ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as
natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by
this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable
part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for
there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that
the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. The
quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights
was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends whom
long pauses, during which they merely looked at each other with kind,
acquainted eyes, couldn’t make uncomfortable. Not that the element of
silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed
only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side
of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess,
so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse
of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn
curtains and shaded lamplight, interfused with domestic embarrassments
and confidences that all turned to the jocular, the Princess was
incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was
picnicking, but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents.
There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way
she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat
or looked after the fire or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl;
above all in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home,
never dining out nor going to parties, ignorant of the dissipations of
the town. There was something in the isolation of the room when the
kettle was on the hob and he had given his wet umbrella to the maid
and his friend had made him sit in a certain place near the fire, the
better to dry his shoes—there was something that evoked the idea of
the _vie de province_ he had read about in French fiction. The French
term came to him because it represented more the especial note of
the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the facility, of talk. She
expressed herself often in the French tongue itself; she could borrow
that convenience for certain shades of meaning, though she had told
Hyacinth she had her own intenser Latin view of the people to whom it
was native. Certainly the strain of her discourse was not provincial;
her talk was singularly free and unabashed; there was nothing one
mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say herself. She
had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional danger-posts.
Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see it—with which in
any direction, intellectually, she could fling open her windows. There
was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility—in
seeing a creature capable socially of immeasurable flights sit
dove-like and with folded wings.
The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent—her
days, like his own, were filled with work, so that she came in the
evening—and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived
at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous
interest to each other, each rejoicing that the other was not a bit
different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would
give her up—all nice people did very soon; but to the acuteness of
our hero’s observation the end of her ladyship’s almost breathless
enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was bewildered but was fascinated;
she thought her foreign friend not only the most distinguished, the
most startling, the most edifying and the most original person in the
world, but the most amusing and the most delightful to have tea with.
As for that personage herself her sentiment about Lady Aurora was the
same Hyacinth’s had been: she held her a saint, the first she had ever
seen, and the purest specimen conceivable; as good in her way as Saint
Francis of Assisi, as tender and quaint and transparent, of a spirit of
charity as sublime. She felt that when one met a human flower as fresh
as that in the dusty ways of the world one should pluck it and wear it;
and she was always inhaling Lady Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her
and holding her hand. The spinster was frightened at her generosity, at
the way her imagination embroidered; she wanted to convince her—as the
Princess did on her own side—that such exaggerations destroyed their
unfortunate subject. The Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way
she put them on and wore them, in the economies she practised in order
to have money for charity and the ingenuity with which these slender
resources were made to go far—in the very manner in which she spoke,
a kind of startled simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these
particulars; to learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her
bonnets at the same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves,
to ask in the same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has
got a ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a
French milliner and that if there was anything in the world she loathed
it was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected
by the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as
she was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her
friend.
One night, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual,
Hyacinth met the pilgrim from Belgrave Square just leaving the house.
She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared
flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece
of bad news. She said, “Oh how do you do?” with her customary quick,
vague laugh, but she went her way without stopping to talk. Three
minutes later he mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her,
and this lady replied: “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner.
You’d have assisted at a scene.”
“At a scene?” he repeated, not understanding what violence could have
taken place between mutual adorers.
“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well
meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I’m going too far.”
“I imagine you tell her things you don’t tell me,” Hyacinth said.
“Oh you, my dear fellow!” his hostess murmured. She spoke
absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady
Aurora and as if the futility of telling things to Mr. Robinson had
become a commonplace.
There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace
with her “views” being quite extinct. The tone they now for the most
part took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging
commiseration for lunacy on the one hand and pusillanimity on the
other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went
fantastic lengths in the way of reaction, a point where it was their
habit and their amusement to hurl all manner of denunciation at each
other’s head. They had given up serious discussion altogether and when
not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities
I have mentioned, talked for a compromise of matters as to which it
couldn’t occur to them to differ. There were evenings when she did
nothing but relate her life and all she had seen of humanity, from
her earliest years, in a variety of countries. If evil appearances
seemed mainly to have been presented to her view this didn’t diminish
the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her power, the
greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light mimetic, dramatic
evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him hang on
her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign courts—he
delighted to know how monarchs lived and conversed—there was often
for hours together nothing to indicate that she would have liked
to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of one.
Nevertheless his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to what
she was really doing in such holes and in what queer penalties she
might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to know
by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He did so
but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the validity of
his warrant; but on an occasion when she had challenged him he replied,
smiling and hesitating: “Well, I must say it seems to me that from what
I’ve told you it ought to strike you I’ve rather a title.”
“You mean your famous pledge to ‘act’ on demand? Oh that will never
come to anything.”
“Why won’t it come to anything?”
“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a
novel.”
“_Vous me rendez la vie!_” Hyacinth said theatrically.
“You won’t have to do it,” she went on.
“I think you mean I won’t do it. I’ve offered at least. Isn’t that a
title?”
“Well then you won’t do it,” said the Princess; after which they looked
at each other a couple of minutes in silence.
“You will, I think, at the pace you’re going,” the young man resumed.
“What do you know about the pace? You’re not worthy to know!”
He did know, however; that is he knew her to be in communication with
strange birds of passage, to have, or to believe she had, irons on the
fire, to hold in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in great
movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch her
askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and had
only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now dismally
acute, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame
Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the
police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising
papers; of being dragged herself, as an accomplice in direful plots,
into a court of justice, possibly into a prison. “If she would only
burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she
groaned to Hyacinth in her helpless gloom. He could only guess what
it might be she kept; asking himself if she were seriously entangled,
were being really exploited by plausible outlaws, predatory adventurers
who counted on her getting frightened at a given moment and offering
hush-money to be allowed to slip out—out of a complicity which they
themselves of course would never have taken seriously; or were merely
coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap sensations,
discussing preliminaries that could have no second stage. It would
have been easy for him to smile at her impression that she was “in
it,” and to conclude that even the cleverest women fail to know
when they are futile, had not the vibration remained which had been
imparted to his nerves two years before and of which he had spoken to
his hostess at Medley—the sense, vividly kindled and never quenched,
that the forces secretly arrayed against the present social order were
pervasive and universal, in the air one breathed, in the ground one
trod, in the hand of an acquaintance that one might touch or the eye
of a stranger that might rest a moment on one’s own. They were above,
below, within, without, in every contact and combination of life; and
it was no disproof of them to say it was too odd they should lurk in a
particular, improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely
their strength, and they would doubtless have still queerer features to
show than this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when
she most flattered herself she was.
“You do go too far,” he none the less said to her the evening Lady
Aurora had passed him at the door.
To which she answered: “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How
else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman’s an
angel, yet isn’t in the least in it,” she added in a moment. She would
give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when he pressed her
she asked if he had brought the copy of Browning he had promised the
last time. If he had he was to sit down and read it to her. In such a
case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to insist; he was glad enough
not to talk about the everlasting nightmare. He took _Men and Women_
from his pocket and read aloud for twenty minutes; but on his making
some remark on one of the poems at the end of this time he noted that
his companion had paid no attention. When he charged her with this
levity she only replied, looking at him musingly: “How _can_ one, after
all, go too far? That’s the word of cowards.”
“Do you mean her ladyship’s a coward?”
“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions.
The way the English can go half-way to a thing and then stick in the
middle!” the Princess exclaimed impatiently.
“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me
Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”
“We’re all afraid of some things and brave about others,” his friend
pursued.
“The thing Lady Aurora’s most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,”
Hyacinth returned.
His companion looked at him but wouldn’t take this up. “There’s
one particular in which she would be very brave. She’d marry her
friend—your friend—Mr. Muniment.”
“Marry him, do you think?”
“What else pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks
on.”
“And what would Belgrave Square and Inglefield and all the rest of it
say?”
“What do they say already and how much does it make her swerve?
She’d do it in a moment, and it would be fine to see it, it would be
magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle at
the idea of any great, free stroke.
“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the
middle,” Hyacinth declared.
“Ah it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion.
When it’s a question of that the English, to do them justice, don’t
stick!”
This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth,
and he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung
associate should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her
name, and the few habits of gentility that survived in her life,
of making herself a scandal, a fable and a nine days’ wonder, for
Muniment’s sake: the young chemical expert being, to his mind, as we
know, exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures
and renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what opinions
Muniment himself might hold on the subject of a union with a young
woman who should have come out of her class for him. He would marry
some day, evidently, because he would do all the natural, human,
productive things; but for the present he had business on hand which
would be likely to pass first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give
evidence of this—he didn’t think people could really come out of their
class; he believed the stamp of one’s origin ineffaceable and that the
best thing one can do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could
easily imagine how it would put him out to be mixed up closely with
a person who, like Lady Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She
can’t marry him unless he asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he
reflected.
“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess thoughtfully.