Hyacinth and his companion took their seats with extreme promptitude
before the curtain rose on _The Pearl of Paraguay_. Thanks to
Millicent’s eagerness not to be late they encountered the discomfort
which had constituted her main objection to going into the pit:
they waited for twenty minutes at the door of the theatre, in a
tight, stolid crowd, before the official hour of opening. Millicent,
bareheaded and powerfully laced, presented a splendid appearance
and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a youthful, ingenuous pride of
possession in every respect save a tendency, while ingress was denied
them, to make her neighbours feel her elbows and to comment loudly and
sarcastically on the situation. It was more clear to him even than it
had been before that she was a young lady who in public places might
easily need a champion or an apologist. Hyacinth knew there was only
one way to apologise for a “female” when the female was attached very
closely and heavily to one’s arm, and was reminded afresh of how little
constitutional aversion Miss Henning had to a row. He had an idea she
might think his own taste ran even too little in that direction, and
entertained visions of violent confused scenes in which he should in
some way distinguish himself: he scarcely knew in what way and imagined
himself more easily routing some hulking adversary by an exquisite
application of the retort courteous than by flying at him with a pair
of very small fists.
By the time they had reached their places in the balcony she was rather
flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in season
for the rising of the curtain on the farce preceding the melodrama
and which the pair had had no intention of losing. At this stage a
more genial agitation took possession of her and she surrendered her
sympathies to the horse-play of the traditional prelude. Hyacinth found
it less amusing, but the theatre, in any conditions, was full of sweet
deception for him. His imagination projected itself lovingly across
the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered
accessories, losing itself so effectually in the fictive world that
the end of the piece, however long or however short, brought with
it something of the alarm of a stoppage of his personal life. It was
impossible to be more friendly to the dramatic illusion. Millicent, as
the audience thickened, rejoiced more largely and loudly, held herself
as a lady, surveyed the place as if she knew all about it, leaned back
and leaned forward, fanned herself with majesty, gave her opinion upon
the appearance and coiffure of every woman within sight, abounded
in question and conjecture and produced from her pocket a little
paper of peppermint-drops of which under cruel threats she compelled
Hyacinth to partake. She followed with attention, though not always
with success, the complicated adventures of the Pearl of Paraguay
through scenes luxuriantly tropical, in which the male characters wore
sombreros and stilettos and the ladies either danced the cachucha or
fled from licentious pursuit; but her eyes wandered intermittently
to the occupants of the boxes and stalls, concerning several of whom
she had theories which she imparted to Hyacinth, while the play went
on, greatly to his discomfiture, he being unable to conceive of such
levity. She had the pretension of knowing who every one was; not
individually and by name, but as regards their exact social station,
the quarter of London in which they lived and the amount of money they
were prepared to spend in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace.
She had seen the whole town pass through her establishment there,
and though Hyacinth, from his infancy, had been watching it at his
own point of view, his companion made him feel all the characteristic
points he had missed. Her interpretations differed from his largely
in being so very bold and irreverent. Miss Henning’s observation of
the London world had not been of a nature to impress her with its high
moral tone, and she had a free off-hand cynicism which imposed itself.
She thought most ladies hypocrites and had in all ways a low opinion
of her own sex, which more than once before this she had justified to
Hyacinth by narrating observations of a surprising kind gathered during
her career as a shop-girl. There was a pleasing inconsequence therefore
in her being moved to tears in the third act of the play, when the
Pearl of Paraguay, dishevelled and distracted, dragging herself on
her knees, implored the stern hidalgo her father to believe in her
innocence in spite of circumstances appearing to condemn her—a midnight
meeting with the wicked hero in the grove of cocoanuts. It was at this
crisis none the less that she asked Hyacinth who his friends were in
the principal box on the left of the stage and let him know that a
gentleman seated there had been watching him at intervals for the past
half-hour.
“Watching _me_! I like that! When I want to be watched I take you with
me.”
“Of course he has looked at me,” Millicent answered as if she had no
interest in denying that. “But you’re the one he wants to get hold of.”
“To get hold of!”
“Yes, you ninny: don’t hang back. He may make your fortune.”
“Well, if you’d like him to come and sit by you I’ll go and take a
walk in the Strand,” said Hyacinth, entering into the humour of the
occasion but not seeing from where he was placed any gentleman in the
box. Millicent explained that the mysterious observer had just altered
his position; he had gone to the back, which must have had considerable
depth. There were other persons there, out of sight; she and Hyacinth
were too much on the same side. One of them was a lady concealed by the
curtain; her arm, bare save for its bracelets, was visible at moments
on the cushioned ledge. Hyacinth saw it in effect reappear there, and
even while the piece proceeded regarded it with a certain interest;
but till the curtain fell at the end of the act there was no further
symptom that a gentleman wished to get hold of him.
“Now do you say it’s me he’s after?” Millicent asked abruptly, giving
him a sidelong dig while the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape
their instruments for the interlude.
“Of course; I’m only the pretext,” Hyacinth replied, after he had
looked a moment, in a manner which he flattered himself was a proof
of quick self-possession. The gentleman designated by his friend was
once more at the front and leaning forward with his arms on the edge.
Hyacinth saw he was looking straight at him, and our young man returned
his gaze—an effort not rendered the more easy by the fact that after an
instant he recognised him.
“Well, if he knows us he might give some sign, and if he doesn’t he
might leave us alone,” Millicent declared, abandoning the distinction
she had made between herself and her companion. She had no sooner
spoken than the gentleman complied with the first-mentioned of these
conditions; he smiled at Hyacinth across the house—he nodded to him
with unmistakable friendliness. Millicent, perceiving this, glanced
at the young man from Lomax Place and saw that the demonstration had
brought a deep colour to his cheek. He was blushing, flushing; whether
with pleasure or embarrassment didn’t immediately appear. “I say, I
say—is it one of your grand relations?” she promptly asked. “Well,
I can stare as well as him”; and she told Hyacinth it was a “shime”
to bring a young lady to the play when you hadn’t so much as an
opera-glass for her to look at the company. “Is he one of those lords
your aunt was always talking about in the Plice? Is he your uncle or
your grandfather or your first or second cousin? No, he’s too young for
your grandfather. What a pity I can’t see if he looks like you!”
At any other time Hyacinth would have thought these inquiries in
the worst possible taste, but now he was too much given up to other
reflexions. It pleased him that the gentleman in the box should
recognise and notice him, because even so small a fact as this was
an extension of his social existence; but it no less surprised and
puzzled him, producing altogether, in his easily-excited organism, an
agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the air
he had for Millicent was the sign. They had met three times, he and
his fellow-spectator; but they had met in quarters that, to Hyacinth’s
mind, would have made a furtive wink, a mere tremor of the eyelid,
a more judicious reference to the fact than so public a salutation.
Our friend would never have permitted himself to greet him first, and
this was not because the gentleman in the box belonged—conspicuously
as he did so—to a different walk of society. He was apparently a
man of forty, tall, lean and loose-jointed; he fell into lounging,
dawdling attitudes and even at a distance looked lazy. He had a long,
amused, contented face, unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his
brown hair, parted at the side, came forward on either temple in a
rich, well-brushed lock, after the fashion of the portraits of 1820.
Millicent had a glance of such range and keenness that she was able to
make out the details of his evening-dress, of which she appreciated the
“form”; to observe the character of his large hands; and to note that
he continually smiled at something, that his eyes were extraordinarily
light in colour and that in spite of the dark, well-marked brows
arching over them his fine skin never had produced and never would
produce a beard of any strength. Our young lady pronounced him mentally
a “swell” of the first magnitude and wondered more than ever where he
had picked up Hyacinth. Her companion seemed to echo her thought when
he exclaimed with a little surprised sigh, almost an exhalation of awe:
“Well, I had no idea he was one of that lot!”
“You might at least tell me his name, so that I shall know what to call
him when he comes round to speak to us,” the girl said, provoked at her
companion’s reserve.
“Comes round to speak to us—a chap like that!” Hyacinth echoed.
“Well, I’m sure if he had been your own brother he couldn’t have
grinned at you more! He may want to make my acquaintance after all; he
won’t be the first.”
The gentleman had once more retreated from sight, and there was that
amount of evidence of the intention she imputed to him. “I don’t think
I’m at all clear that I’ve a right to tell his name.” Hyacinth spoke
responsibly, yet with all disposition to magnify an incident which
deepened the brilliancy of the entertainment he had been able to offer
Miss Henning. “I met him in a place where he may not like to have it
known he goes.”
“Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your
political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from
Camberwell, Mr. Monument (what do you call him?), fills your head with
ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there
doesn’t look as if he’d be on your side.”
Hyacinth had indulged in this reflexion himself; but the only answer he
made to Millicent was: “Well then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!”
“Laws, I hope _she_ ain’t one of the aristocracy!” Millicent exclaimed
with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes
Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in
the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible—not the one
who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an
ancient personage muffled in a voluminous and crumpled white shawl—a
stout, odd, foreign-looking woman with a fair, nodding, wiggy head. She
had a placid, patient air and a round wrinkled face in which, however,
a pair of small bright eyes moved quickly enough. Her rather soiled
white gloves were too large for her, and round her head, horizontally
arranged as if to keep her wig in its place, she wore a narrow band
of tinsel decorated in the middle of the forehead by a jewel which
the rest of her appearance would lead the spectator to suppose false.
“Is the old woman his mother? Where did she dig up her clothes? They
look as if she had hired them for the evening. Does _she_ come to your
wonderful club too? I daresay she cuts it fine, don’t she?” Millicent
went on; and when Hyacinth suggested sportively that the old lady
might be not the gentleman’s mother but his wife or his fancy of the
moment she declared that in that case, were he to come to see them, she
shouldn’t fear for herself. No wonder he wanted to get out of _that_
box! The party in the wig—and what a wig!—was sitting there on purpose
to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly honoured by
the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended he quite liked her
appearance and admired in her a charm of her own; he offered to bet
another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be
some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To
this Millicent replied with an air of experience that she had never
thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion
could see she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his
strange clubmate and that she would be disappointed if he didn’t come.
This idea didn’t make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was occupied with
another side of the business; and if he offered sportive suggestions
it was because he was really excited, was dazzled, by an incident
of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the larger
relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being patronised by
a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new experience—a sensation
for which he was always ready to exchange any present boon; and he was
convinced that if the gentleman with whom he had conversed in a small
occult back room in Bloomsbury as Captain Godfrey Sholto—the Captain
had given him his card—had in more positive fashion than by Millicent’s
supposing it come out of the stage-box to see him, he would bring with
him rare influences. His view of this possibility made suspense akin to
preparation; therefore when at the end of a few minutes he became aware
that his young woman, with her head turned, was taking the measure
of some one who had come in behind them, he felt fate to be doing for
him by way of a change as much as could be expected. He got up in his
place, but not too soon to see that Captain Sholto had been standing
there a moment in contemplation of Millicent and that she on her side
had performed with deliberation the ceremony of appraising him. The
Captain had his hands in his pockets and wore his crush-hat pushed a
good deal back. He laughed to the young couple in the balcony in the
friendliest way, as if he had known them both for years, and Millicent
could see on a nearer view that he was a fine distinguished easy genial
gentleman, at least six feet high in spite of a habit or an affectation
of carrying himself in a casual relaxed familiar manner. Hyacinth felt
a little, after the first, as if he were treating them rather too much
as a pair of children on whom he had stolen to startle them; but this
impression was speedily removed by the air with which he said, laying
his hand on our hero’s shoulder as he stood in the little passage at
the end of the bench where the holders of Mr. Vetch’s order occupied
the first seats: “My dear fellow, I really thought I must come round
and speak to you. My spirits are all gone with this brute of a play.
And those boxes are fearfully stuffy, you know,” he added—quite as
if Hyacinth had had at least an equal experience of that part of the
theatre.
“It’s hot enough here too,” Millicent’s companion returned. He had
suddenly become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his
proximity to the fierce chandelier, and he mentioned that the plot of
the play certainly was unnatural, though he thought the piece rather
well acted.
“Oh, it’s the good old stodgy British tradition. This is the only place
where you find it still, and even here it can’t last much longer; it
can’t survive old Baskerville and Mrs. Ruffler. ’Gad, how old they are!
I remember her, long past her prime, when I used to be taken to the
play, as a boy, in the Christmas holidays. Between them they must be
something like a hundred and eighty, eh? I believe one’s supposed to
cry a good deal about the middle,” Captain Sholto continued in the same
friendly familiar encouraging way, addressing himself to Millicent,
upon whom indeed his eyes had rested almost uninterruptedly from the
start. She sustained his glance with composure, but with just enough
of emphasised reserve to intimate (what was perfectly true) that she
was not in the habit of conversing with gentlemen with whom she was
unacquainted. She turned away her face at this (she had already given
the visitor the benefit of a good deal of it) and left him, as in the
little passage he leaned against the parapet of the balcony with his
back to the stage, facing toward Hyacinth, who was now wondering, with
rather more vivid a sense of the relations of things, what he had come
for. He wanted to do him honour in return for his civility, but didn’t
know what one could talk of at such short notice to a person whom
he immediately perceived to be, and the more finely that it was all
unaggressively, a man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto
didn’t take the play seriously, so that he felt himself warned off
that topic, on which otherwise he might have had much to say. On the
other hand he couldn’t in the presence of a third person allude to the
matters they had discussed at the “Sun and Moon”; nor might he suppose
his visitor would expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a
man of humours and whims, disposed to amuse himself with everything,
including esoteric socialism and a little bookbinder who had so much
more of the gentleman about him than one would expect. Captain Sholto
may have been slightly embarrassed, now that he was completely launched
in his attempt at fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit
a smile from Millicent’s rare respectability; but he left to Hyacinth
the burden of no initiative and went on to say that it was just this
prospect of the dying-out of the old British tradition that had brought
him to-night. He was with a friend, a lady who had lived much abroad,
who had never seen anything of the kind and who liked everything that
was characteristic. “You know the foreign school of acting’s a very
different affair,” he said again to Millicent, who this time replied
“Oh yes, of course,” and, considering afresh the old woman in the box,
reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that
she at least hadn’t seen.
“We’ve never been abroad,” Hyacinth candidly said while he looked into
his friend’s curious light-coloured eyes, the palest in tint he had
ever encountered.
“Oh well, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about that!” Captain Sholto
replied; on which Hyacinth remained uncertain of his reference and
Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.
“They’re making a tremendous row on the stage. I should think it would
be very bad in those boxes.” There was a banging and thumping behind
the curtain, the sound of heavy scenery pushed about.
“Oh yes, it’s much better here every way. I think you’ve the best seats
in the house,” said their visitor. “I should like very much to finish
my evening beside you. The trouble is I’ve ladies—a pair of them,”
he pursued as if he were seriously considering this possibility. Then
laying his hand again on Hyacinth’s shoulder he smiled at him a moment
and indulged in a still greater burst of frankness. “My dear fellow,
that’s just what, as a partial reason, has brought me up here to see
you. One of my ladies has a great desire to make your acquaintance!”
“To make my acquaintance?” Hyacinth felt himself turn pale; the
first impulse he could have in connexion with such an announcement
as that—and it lay far down in the depths of the unspeakable—was
a conjecture that it had something to do with his parentage on his
father’s side. Captain Sholto’s smooth bright face, irradiating such
unexpected advances, seemed for an instant to swim before him. The
Captain went on to say that he had told the lady of the talks they had
had, that she was immensely interested in such matters—“You know what
I mean, she really is”—and that as a consequence of what he had said
she had begged him to come and ask—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in
a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to look in at her if
he didn’t mind.
“She has a tremendous desire to meet some one who looks at the whole
business from your standpoint, don’t you see? And in her position she
scarcely ever has a chance, she doesn’t come across them—to her great
annoyance. So when I spotted you to-night she immediately declared
I must introduce you at any cost. I hope you don’t mind just for a
quarter of an hour. I ought perhaps to tell you that she’s a person
used to having nothing refused her. ‘Go up and bring him down,’ you
know, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. She’s really
very much in earnest: I don’t mean about wishing to see you—that goes
without saying—but about our whole job, yours and mine. Then I should
add—it doesn’t spoil anything—that she’s the most charming woman in the
world, simply! Honestly, my dear boy, she’s perhaps the most remarkable
woman in Europe.”
So Captain Sholto delivered himself, with the highest naturalness
and plausibility, and Hyacinth, listening, felt that he himself ought
perhaps to resent the idea of being served up for the entertainment
of capricious not to say presumptuous triflers, but that somehow he
didn’t, and that it was more worthy of the part he aspired to play
in life to meet such occasions calmly and urbanely than to take
the trouble of avoidance. Of course the lady in the box couldn’t be
sincere; she might think she was, though even that was questionable;
but you didn’t really care for the cause exemplified in the guarded
back room in Bloomsbury when you came to the theatre in that style. It
was Captain Sholto’s style as well, but it had been by no means clear
to Hyacinth hitherto that _he_ really cared. All the same this was no
time for going into the question of the lady’s sincerity, and at the
end of sixty seconds our young man had made up his mind that he could
afford to indulge her. None the less, I must add, the whole proposal
continued to make things dance, to appear fictive and phantasmagoric;
so that it sounded in comparison like a note of reality when Millicent,
who had been turning from one of the men to the other, exclaimed—
“That’s all very well, but who’s to look after _me_?” Her assumption of
the majestic had broken down and this was the cry of nature.
Nothing could have been pleasanter and more charitable to her alarm
than the manner in which Captain Sholto reassured her. “My dear young
lady, can you suppose I’ve been unmindful of that? I’ve been hoping
that after I’ve taken down our friend and introduced him you might
allow me to come back and in his absence occupy his seat.”
Hyacinth was preoccupied with the idea of meeting the most remarkable
woman in Europe; but at this juncture he looked at Millicent Henning
with some curiosity. She rose grandly to the occasion. “I’m much
obliged to you, but I don’t know who you are.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you all about that!” the Captain benevolently cried.
“Of course I should introduce you,” said Hyacinth, and he mentioned to
Miss Henning the name of his distinguished acquaintance.
“In the army?” the young lady inquired as if she must have every
guarantee of social position.
“Yes—not in the navy! I’ve left the army, but it always sticks to one.”
“Mr. Robinson, is it your intention to leave me?” Millicent asked in a
tone of the highest propriety.
Hyacinth’s imagination had taken such a flight that the idea of what
he owed to the beautiful girl who had placed herself under his care
for the evening had somehow effaced itself. Her words put it before him
in a manner that threw him quickly and consciously back on his honour;
yet there was something in the way she uttered them that made him look
at her harder still before he replied: “Oh dear, no—of course it would
never do. I must put off to some other opportunity the honour of making
the acquaintance of your friend,” he added to their visitor.
“Ah, my dear fellow, we might manage it so easily now,” this
gentleman murmured with evident disappointment. “It’s not as if
Miss—a—Miss—a—were to be alone.”
It flashed upon Hyacinth that the root of the project might be a desire
of Captain Sholto to insinuate himself into Millicent’s good graces;
then he wondered why the most remarkable woman in Europe should lend
herself to that design, consenting even to receive a visit from a
little bookbinder for the sake of furthering it. Perhaps after all she
was not the most remarkable; still, even at a lower estimate, of what
advantage could such a complication be to her? To Hyacinth’s surprise
Millicent’s face made acknowledgment of his implied renunciation; and
she said to Captain Sholto as if she were considering the matter very
impartially: “Might one know the name of the lady who sent you?”
“The Princess Casamassima.”
“Laws!” cried Millicent Henning. And then quickly, as if to cover up
this crudity: “And might one also know what it is, as you say, that she
wants to talk to him about?”
“About the lower orders, the rising democracy, the spread of ideas and
all that.”
“The lower orders? Does she think we belong to them?” the girl demanded
with a strange provoking laugh.
Captain Sholto was certainly the readiest of men. “If she could see you
she’d think you one of the first ladies in the land.”
“She’ll never see me!” Millicent replied in a manner which made it
plain that she at least was not to be whistled for.
Being whistled for by a princess presented itself to Hyacinth as an
indignity endured gracefully enough by the heroes of several French
novels in which he had found a thrilling interest; nevertheless he said
incorruptibly to the Captain, who hovered there like a Mephistopheles
converted to inscrutable good: “Having been in the army you’ll know
that one can’t desert one’s post.”
The Captain, for the third time, laid his hand on his young friend’s
shoulder, and for a minute his smile rested in silence on Millicent
Henning. “If I tell you simply I want to talk with this young lady,
that certainly won’t help me particularly, and there’s no reason why
it should. Therefore I’ll tell you the whole truth: I want to talk
with her about _you_!” And he patted Hyacinth in a way which conveyed
at once that this idea must surely commend him to the young man’s
companion and that he himself liked him infinitely.
Hyacinth was conscious of the endearment, but he put before Millicent
that he would do just as she liked; he was determined not to let a
member of a justly-doomed patriciate suppose he held any daughter of
the people cheap. “Oh, I don’t care if you go,” said Miss Henning. “You
had better hurry—the curtain’s going to rise.”
“That’s charming of you! I’ll rejoin you in three minutes!” Captain
Sholto exclaimed.
He passed his hand into Hyacinth’s arm, and as our hero lingered still,
a little uneasy and questioning Millicent always with his eyes, the
girl spoke with her bright boldness: “That kind of princess—I should
like to hear all about her.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you that too,” the Captain returned with his perfect
ease as he led his young friend away. It must be confessed that
Hyacinth also rather wondered what kind of princess she was, and his
suspense on this point made his heart beat fast when, after traversing
steep staircases and winding corridors, they reached the small door of
the stage-box.