Paul Muniment took a match out of his pocket and lighted it on the sole
of his shoe; after which he applied it to a tallow candle which stood
in a tin receptacle on the low mantel-shelf. This enabled Hyacinth
to perceive a narrow bed in a corner and a small object stretched
upon it—an object revealed to him mainly by the bright fixedness of a
pair of large eyes, of which the whites were sharply contrasted with
the dark pupil and which gazed at him across a counterpane of gaudy
patchwork. The brown room seemed crowded with heterogeneous objects
and presented moreover, thanks to a multitude of small prints, both
plain and coloured, fastened all over the walls, a highly-decorated
appearance. The little person in the corner had the air of having gone
to bed in a picture-gallery, and as soon as Hyacinth became aware of
this his impression deepened that Paul Muniment and his sister were
very wonderful people. Lady Aurora hovered before him with an odd
drooping, swaying erectness, and she laughed a good deal, vaguely and
shyly, as for the awkwardness of her being found still on the premises.
“Rosy, girl, I’ve brought you a visitor,” Hyacinth’s guide soon said.
“This young man has walked all the way from Lisson Grove to make your
acquaintance.” Rosy continued to look at the visitor from over her
counterpane, and he felt slightly embarrassed, for he had never yet
been presented to a young lady in her position. “You mustn’t mind her
being in bed—she’s always in bed,” her brother went on. “She’s in bed
just the same as a little slippery trout’s in the water.”
“Dear me, if I didn’t receive company because I was in bed, there
wouldn’t be much use, would there, Lady Aurora?”
Rosy put this question in a light, gay tone, with a dart of shining
eyes at her companion, who replied at once with still greater hilarity
and in a voice which struck Hyacinth as strange and affected: “Oh
mercy, no; it seems quite the natural place!” Then she added: “And it’s
such a lovely bed, such a comfortable bed!”
“Indeed it is, when your ladyship makes it up,” said Rosy; while
Hyacinth wondered at this strange phenomenon of a peer’s daughter (for
he knew she must be that) performing the functions of a housemaid.
“I say now, you haven’t been doing that again to-day?” Muniment asked,
punching the mattress of the invalid with a vigorous hand.
“Pray, who would if I didn’t?” Lady Aurora inquired. “It only takes a
minute if one knows how.” Her manner was jocosely apologetic and she
seemed to plead guilty to having been absurd; in the dim light Hyacinth
thought he saw her blush as if she were much embarrassed. In spite of
her blushing her appearance and manner suggested to him a personage in
a comedy. She sounded the letter _r_ as a _w_.
“I can do it beautifully. I often do it, when Mrs. Major doesn’t come
up,” Paul Muniment said, continuing to thump his sister’s couch in an
appreciative but somewhat subversive manner.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt whatever!” Lady Aurora exclaimed quickly. “Mrs.
Major must have so very much to do.”
“Not in the making-up of beds, I’m afraid; there are only two or three,
down there, for so many,” the young man returned loudly and with a kind
of inconsequent cheerfulness.
“Yes, I’ve thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be room
for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time with all gravity.
“There’s not much room for a family of that sort anywhere—thirteen
people of all ages and sizes,” her host observed. “The world’s pretty
big, but there doesn’t seem room.”
“We’re also thirteen at home,” Lady Aurora hastened to mention. “We’re
also rather crowded.”
“Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy demanded from her dusky
nook.
“I don’t know about Inglefield. I’m so much in town.” Hyacinth could
see that Inglefield was a subject she wished to turn off, and to do so
she added: “We too are of all ages and sizes.”
“Well, it’s fortunate you’re not all _your_ size!” Paul Muniment
declared with a freedom at which Hyacinth was rather shocked and which
led him to suspect that though his new friend was a very fine fellow
a delicate tact was not his main characteristic. Later he explained
this by the fact that he was rural and provincial and had not had,
like himself, the benefit of the life of a capital; and later still he
wished to know what, after all, such a character as that had to do with
tact or with compliments, and why its work in the world was not most
properly performed by the simple exercise of a rude manly strength.
At this familiar allusion to her stature Lady Aurora turned hither and
thither a little confusedly; Hyacinth saw her high, lean figure almost
rock in the dim little room. Her commotion carried her to the door, and
with ejaculations of which it was difficult to guess the meaning she
was about to depart when Rosy detained her, having evidently much more
social art than Paul. “Don’t you see it’s only because her ladyship’s
standing up that she’s so, you gawk? _We’re_ not thirteen, at any rate,
and we’ve got all the furniture we want, so there’s a chair for every
one. Do be seated again, Lady Aurora, and help me to entertain this
gentleman. I don’t know your name, sir; perhaps my brother will mention
it when he has collected his wits. I’m very glad to see you, though I
don’t see you very well. Why shouldn’t we light one of her ladyship’s
candles? It’s very different to that common thing.”
Hyacinth thought Miss Muniment very charming; he had begun to make her
out better by this time, and he watched her small wan, pointed face,
framed on the pillow by thick black hair. She was a diminutive dark
person, pale and wasted with a lifelong infirmity; Hyacinth thought her
manner denoted high accomplishment—he judged it impossible to tell her
age. Lady Aurora pleaded that she ought to have gone, long since; but
she seated herself nevertheless on the chair that Paul pushed toward
her.
“Here’s a go!” this young man exclaimed to the other guest. “You told
me your name, but I’ve clean forgotten it.” Then when Hyacinth had
pronounced it again he said to his sister: “That won’t tell you much;
there are bushels of Robinsons in the north. But you’ll like him,
he’s all right; I met him at the Poupins.” “Puppin” would represent
the sound by which he designated the French bookbinder, and that was
the name by which Hyacinth always heard him called at Crookenden’s.
Hyacinth knew how much nearer to the right thing he himself came.
“Your name, like mine, represents a flower,” said the little woman in
the bed. “Mine is Rose Muniment and her ladyship’s is Aurora Langrish.
That means the morning or the dawn; it’s the most beautiful of all,
don’t you think?” Rose Muniment addressed this question to Hyacinth
while Lady Aurora gazed at her shyly and mutely and as if admiring
her manner, her self-possession and flow of conversation. Her brother
lighted one of the visitor’s candles and the girl went on without
waiting for Hyacinth’s response. “Isn’t it right she should be called
the dawn when she brings light where she goes? The Puppins are the
charming foreigners I’ve told you about,” she explained to her friend.
“Oh, it’s so pleasant knowing a few foreigners!” Lady Aurora exclaimed
with a spasm of expression. “They’re often so very fresh.”
“Mr. Robinson’s a sort of foreigner and he’s very fresh,” said Paul
Muniment. “He meets Mr. Puppin quite on his own ground. If I had his
gift of tongues it would bring me on.”
“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I
feel the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked finely, becoming
conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora toward
him; so that he wondered what he could go on to say to keep at that
level. This was the first time he had encountered socially a member of
that aristocracy to which he had now for a good while known it was Miss
Pynsent’s theory that he belonged; and the occasion was interesting in
spite of the lady’s appearing to have so few of the qualities of her
caste. She was about thirty years of age; her nose was large and, in
spite of the sudden retreat of her chin, her face long and lean. She
had the manner of extreme near-sightedness; her front teeth projected
from her upper gums, which she revealed when she smiled, and her fair
hair, in tangled silky skeins (Rose Muniment thought it too lovely),
drooped over her pink cheeks. Her clothes looked as if she had worn
them a good deal in the rain, and the note of a certain disrepair in
her apparel was given by a hole in one of her black gloves, through
which a white finger gleamed. She was plain and diffident and she might
have been poor; but in the fine grain and sloping, shrinking slimness
of her whole person, the delicacy of her curious features and a kind
of cultivated quality in her sweet, vague, civil expression, there was
a suggestion of race, of long transmission, of an organism that had
resulted from fortunate touch after touch. She was not a common woman;
she was one of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth didn’t define
her in this manner to himself, but he received from her the impression
that if she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was
not) aristocracies were yet complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked
that there were many delightful books in French, and he proclaimed
it a torment to know that (as he did very well) when you saw no way
to getting hold of them. This led Lady Aurora to say after a moment’s
hesitation that she had a good lot of her own and that if he liked she
should be most happy to lend them to him. Hyacinth thanked her—thanked
her even too much, and felt both the kindness and the brilliant promise
of the offer (he knew the exasperation of having volumes in his hands,
for external treatment, which he couldn’t take home at night, having
tried that method surreptitiously during his first weeks at old Crook’s
and come very near being sacked in consequence) while he wondered how
such a system could be put into practice; whether she would expect him
to call at her house and wait in the hall till the books were sent
out to him. Rose Muniment exclaimed that that was her ladyship all
over—always wanting to make up to people for being less lucky than
herself: she would take the shoes off her feet for any one that might
take a fancy to them. At this the visitor declared that she would stop
coming to see her if the girl caught her up that way for everything;
and Rosy, without heeding the remonstrance, explained to Hyacinth that
she thought it the least she could do to give what she had. She was so
ashamed of being rich that she wondered the lower classes didn’t break
into Inglefield and take possession of all the treasures in the Italian
room. She was a tremendous socialist; she was worse than any one—she
was worse even than Paul.
“I wonder if she’s worse than me,” Hyacinth returned at a venture,
not understanding the allusions to Inglefield and the Italian room,
which Miss Muniment made as if she knew all about these places. After
learning more of the world he remembered this tone of Muniment’s
sister—he was to have plenty of observation of it on other occasions—as
that of a person in the habit of visiting the nobility at their
country-seats; she talked about Inglefield as if she had stayed there.
“Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!” exclaimed the master of
the scene, who had been sitting silent and sidewise in a chair that
was too narrow for him, his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been
entertaining an angel unawares?”
Hyacinth made out he was chaffing him, but he knew the way to face that
sort of thing was to exaggerate one’s meaning. “You didn’t know I was
advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about me. I think
I go about as far as any one.”
“I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,”
Paul Muniment said with an air of derision which showed him he wouldn’t
put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same time that
it revealed to him how he had come within an ace of posturing.
“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something that will take
your head off if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so
well in French.”
“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried
Rosy in perfect good faith and clasping her hands for expectation.
The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the
consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the
words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now
that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration.
“I should like so very much to know—it would be so interesting—if you
don’t mind—how far exactly you do go.” She threw back her head very far
and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more adapted
to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.
This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for he was far
from being ready with an impressive formula. He replied, however, with
a candour in which he tried as far as possible to sink his vagueness:
“Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I see my way to conclusions
from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin would shrink. Poupin, at any
rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.”
“I should like so much to know Madame,” Lady Aurora murmured as if
politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.
“Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,” said Muniment; “you can easily look over his
head! He has a sweet assortment of phrases—they’re really pretty things
to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years.
It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All the
same he warms one up; he has a spark of the sacred fire. The principal
conclusion Mr. Robinson sees his way to,” he added to Lady Aurora, “is
that your father ought to have his head chopped off and carried on a
pike.”
“Ah yes, the French Revolution.”
“Lord, I don’t know anything about your father, my lady!” Hyacinth
interposed.
“Didn’t you ever hear of the Earl of Inglefield?” cried Rose Muniment.
“He’s one of the best,” said Lady Aurora as if she were pleading for
him.
“Very likely, but he’s a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and
a park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we’re bundled
together into this sort of kennel.” Hyacinth admired the young man’s
consistency till he saw he was amusing himself; after which he still
admired the way he could mix that up with the tremendous opinions
it must have been certain he entertained. In his own imagination he
associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young
chemical expert, at the same time that he was planning far ahead,
seemed capable of turning revolutionists themselves into ridicule even
for the entertainment of the revolutionised.
“Well, I’ve told you often enough that I don’t go with you at all,”
said Rose Muniment, whose recumbency appeared not in the least to
interfere with her universal participation. “You’ll make a tremendous
mistake if you try to turn everything round. There ought to be
differences, and high and low, and there always will be, true as ever
I lie here. I think it’s against everything, pulling down them that’s
above.”
“Everything points to great changes in this country, but if once our
Rosy’s against them how can you be sure? That’s the only thing that
makes me doubt,” her brother went on, looking at her with a placidity
which showed the habit of indulgence.
“Well, I may be ill, but I ain’t buried, and if I’m content with my
position—such a position as it is—surely other folk might be with
theirs. Her ladyship may think I’m as good as her if she takes that
notion; but she’ll have a deal to do to make me believe it.”
“I think you’re much better than I, and I know very few people so good
as you,” Lady Aurora brought out, blushing not for her opinions but for
her timidity. It was easy to see that though she was original she would
have liked to be even more original than she was. She was conscious,
however, that such a declaration might appear rather gross to persons
who didn’t see exactly how she meant it; so she added, as quickly as
her hesitating manner permitted, to cover it up: “You know there’s one
thing you ought to remember, _à propos_ of revolutions and changes and
all that sort of thing; I just mention it because we were talking of
some of the dreadful things that were done in France. If there were to
be a great disturbance in this country—and of course one hopes there
won’t—it would be my impression that the people would behave in a
different way altogether.”
“What people do you mean?” Hyacinth allowed himself to inquire.
“Oh, the upper class, the people who’ve got all the things.”
“We don’t call them the _people_,” observed Hyacinth, reflecting the
next instant that his remark was a little primitive.
“I suppose you call them the wretches, the scoundrels!” Rose Muniment
suggested, laughing merrily.
“All the things, but not all the brains,” her brother said.
“No indeed, aren’t they stupid?” exclaimed her ladyship. “All the same,
I don’t think they’d all go abroad.”
“Go abroad?”
“I mean like the French nobles who emigrated so much. They’d stay at
home and resist; they’d make more of a fight. I think they’d fight very
hard.”
“I’m delighted to hear it, and I’m sure they’d win!” cried Rosy.
“They wouldn’t collapse, don’t you know,” Lady Aurora continued.
“They’d struggle till they were beaten.”
“And you think they’d be beaten in the end?” Hyacinth asked.
“Oh dear, yes,” she replied with a familiar confidence at which he was
greatly surprised. “But of course one hopes it won’t happen.”
“I infer from what you say that they talk it over a good deal among
themselves, to settle the line they’ll take,” said Paul Muniment.
But Rosy intruded before Lady Aurora could answer. “I think it’s wicked
to talk it over, and I’m sure we haven’t any business to talk it over
here! When her ladyship says the aristocracy will make a fine stand I
like to hear her say it and I think she speaks in a manner that becomes
her own position. But there’s something else in her tone which, if
I may be allowed to say so, I think a great mistake. If her ladyship
expects, in case of the lower classes coming up in that odious manner,
to be let off easily, for the sake of the concessions she may have made
in advance, I’d just advise her to save herself the disappointment
and the trouble. They won’t be a bit the wiser and they won’t either
know or care. If they’re going to trample over their betters it isn’t
on account of her having seemed to give up everything to us here that
they’ll let _her_ off. They’ll trample on her just the same as on the
others, and they’ll say she has got to pay for her title and her grand
relations and her fine appearance. Therefore I advise her not to waste
her good-nature in trying to let herself down. When you’re up so high
as that you’ve got to stay there; and if the powers above have made you
a lady the best thing you can do is to hold up your head. I can promise
your ladyship _I_ would!”
The close logic of this speech and the quaint self-possession with
which the little bedridden speaker delivered it struck Hyacinth as
amazing and confirmed his idea that the brother and sister were a
most extraordinary pair. It had a terrible effect on poor Lady Aurora,
by whom so stern a lesson from so humble a quarter had evidently not
been expected and who sought refuge from her confusion in a series of
pleading gasps, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density, which
was deliberate, and acute too, not seeing, or at any rate not heeding,
that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister, inflicted a fresh
humiliation in saying: “Rosy’s right, my lady. It’s no use trying to
buy yourself off. You can’t do enough; your sacrifices don’t count.
You spoil your fun now and you don’t get it made up to you later. To
all you people nothing will ever be made up. Eat your pudding while you
have it; you mayn’t have it long.”
Lady Aurora listened to him with her eyes on his face, and as they
rested there Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of her expression.
Afterwards he thought he could attach a meaning to it. She got up
quickly when Muniment had ceased speaking; the movement suggested she
had taken offence and he would have liked to show her he thought she
had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance, not glancing
at him for a moment. Then he saw he was mistaken and that if she had
flushed considerably it was only with the excitement of pleasure, the
enjoyment of such original talk and of seeing her friends at last as
free and familiar as she wished them to be. “You’re the most delightful
people—I wish every one could know you!” she broke out. “But I must
really be going.” She went to the bed and bent over Rosy and kissed
her.
“Paul will see you as far as you like on your way home,” this young
woman remarked.
Lady Aurora protested, but Paul, without protesting in return, only
took up his hat and smiled at her as if he knew his duty. On this her
ladyship said: “Well, you may see me downstairs; I forgot it was so
dark.”
“You must take her ladyship’s own candle and you must call a cab,” Rosy
directed.
“Oh, I don’t go in cabs. I walk.”
“Well, you may go on the top of a ’bus if you like; you can’t help
being superb,” Miss Muniment declared, watching her sympathetically.
“Superb? Oh mercy!” cried the poor devoted, grotesque lady, leaving
the room with Paul, who told Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She
neglected to take leave of our young man, and he asked himself what was
to be hoped from that sort of people when even the best of them—those
that wished to be agreeable to the _demos_—reverted inevitably to the
supercilious. She had said no more about lending him her books.