The matter touched him but indirectly, yet it may concern the reader
more closely to know that before the visit to the Duke took place
Madame Grandoni granted to Prince Casamassima the private interview
she had promised him on that sad Sunday afternoon. She crept out
of South Street after breakfast—a repast which under the Princess’s
roof was served in the foreign fashion at twelve o’clock—crossed the
sultry solitude into which at such a season that precinct resolves
itself, and entered the Park, where the grass was already brown and a
warm, smoky haze prevailed, a tepid and tasteless _réchauffé_, as it
struck our old friend, of the typical London fog. The Prince met her
by appointment at the gate and they went and sat down together under
the trees beside the drive, amid a wilderness of empty chairs and with
nothing to distract their attention from an equestrian or two left over
from the cavalcades of a fortnight before and whose vain agitation in
the saddle the desolate scene threw into high relief. They remained
there nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning
to friendly interpretations, couldn’t have told herself what comfort
it was to her afflicted companion. She had nothing to say to him that
could better his case as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect not
after all perceptibly improved by its not being Sunday, and could only
feel that with her he must seem to himself to be nearer his wife—to
be touching something she had touched. She wished he would resign
himself more, but she was willing to minister to that thin illusion,
little as she approved of the manner in which he had conducted himself
at the time of the last sharp crisis in the remarkable history of his
relations with Christina. He had conducted himself after the fashion of
a spoiled child, a child with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had
been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess
an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had
acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she
cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had
been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as
to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been
showy. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to make good his
valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to ground where his
wife was far too accomplished a combatant not to obtain the appearance
of victory.
There was another reflexion for Madame Grandoni to make as her
interview with her dejected friend prolonged itself. She could make it
the more freely as, besides being naturally quick and appreciative, she
had always, during her Roman career, in the dear old days (mixed with
bitterness as they had been for her) lived with artists, archæologists,
ingenious strangers, people who abounded in good talk, threw out ideas
and played with them. It came over her that really, even if things
had not reached that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various,
ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have
tolerated long the simple deadly dulness of the Prince’s company. The
old lady had begun on meeting him: “Of course what you want to know at
once is whether she has sent you a message. No, my poor friend, I must
tell you the truth. I asked her for one, but she assures me she has
nothing whatever, of any kind, to say to you. She knew I was coming out
to see you—I haven’t done so _en cachette_. She doesn’t like it, but
she accepts the necessity for this once, since you’ve made the mistake,
as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked of you last
night after your note came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked in
my independent way and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end
she spoke briefly, with perfect calmness and the appearance of being
the most reasonable woman in the world. She didn’t ask me to repeat it
to you, but I do so because it’s the only substitute I can offer you
for a message. ‘I try to occupy my life, my mind, to create interests,
in the odious position in which I find myself; I endeavour to get out
of myself, my small personal disappointments and troubles, by the aid
of such poor faculties as I possess. There are things in the world more
interesting after all, and I hope to succeed in giving my attention
to them. It appears to me not too much to ask that the Prince on his
side should make the same conscientious effort—and leave me contentedly
alone!’ Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they’re all I have to
give you.”
After she had given them Madame Grandoni felt a pang of regret; the
Prince turned upon her a face so white, bewildered and wounded. It
had seemed to her they might form a wholesome admonition, but she now
saw that, as coming from his wife, they were cruel, and she herself
felt almost cruel for having repeated them. What they amounted to was
an exquisite taunt of his mediocrity—a mediocrity after all neither
a crime nor a design nor a preference. How could the Prince occupy
himself, what interests could he create and what faculties, gracious
heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as one of the dingy London
sheep browsing before them, and as contracted as his hat-band. His
expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult,
felt it more than saw it—felt he couldn’t plead incapacity without
putting his wife largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his
face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry right
out. But he said nothing—perhaps because he was afraid of that—so
that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand on his
own, remained his sole answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t
that when Christina touched on this she was unanswerable. The old lady
changed the subject: told him what a curious country England was in so
many ways; offered information as to their possible movements during
the summer and autumn, which within a day or two had taken more form.
But at last, as if he had not heard her, he broke out on the identity
of the young man who had come in the day he called, just as he was
going.
Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”
“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”
“Prince, how can you dream she’ll ever live with you again?” the old
lady asked in reply to this.
“Why then does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an
ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his
books, his bindings? I shouldn’t say this to _her_,” he added as if the
declaration justified him.
“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the
lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” She couldn’t help
laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth
elicited no echo.
“I’ve thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less I
understand. Would it be your idea that she’s quite crazy? I must tell
you I don’t care if she is!”
“We’re all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the
Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at
present she’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”
“_Santo Dio!_” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when
they see the bookbinder?”
“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t
matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be
extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is
all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”
The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean the young man you
saw at the house—I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first
time he had been there and that the Princess had only seen him once—if
you mean the little bookbinder he isn’t dirty, especially what _we_
should call. The people of that kind here are not like our dear Romans.
Every one has a sponge as big as your head; you can see them in the
shops.”
“They’re full of gin; their faces are awful, are purple,” said the
Prince; after which he immediately asked: “If she had only seen him
once how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?”
His friend looked at him a little sternly. “Believe at least what _I_
say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you spoiled your
affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if,
as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she
hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She’ll speak the truth
always.”
It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of
his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke.
But he didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw it. At any
rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal
to say for himself: “There are things it’s better to conceal.”
“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I
grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching
her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not
stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she
doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since
you’re here and I mayn’t see you again for a long time or perhaps ever
(at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!) I may as well give you the key
of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make her seem to you a
little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the
fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”
“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.
“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more
insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her
having told you—how the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of
her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her
doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can’t for the
rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”
“Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s
so serious now?”
“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” the old woman smiled.
“Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown
herself with passion into being ‘modern.’ That sums up the greatest
number of things that you and your family are not.”
“Yes, we’re not anything of that low sort, thank God! _Dio mio, Dio
mio!_” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions
that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her
crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk
about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that
whenever she was with Christina’s husband the current of conversation
made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering
these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having
at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with
him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about
the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied for the moment
with the minuteness he had been taught that in such a case courtesy
demanded; but by the time that at her request they had returned to
the gate nearest South Street (she wished him to come no further) he
had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way. “And who
and what then is this English captain? About him there’s a great deal
said.”
“This English captain?”
“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the
Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.
They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple
of predatory hansoms dashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought
that was coming, and at bottom it’s he who has occupied you most!”
Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last
one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”
“Why doesn’t he count?”
“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t
even think he does.”
“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”
“Perhaps that’s just the reason. When people give her a chance to
get tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate you needn’t
be any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, a
_factotum_, but he works without wages.”
“Isn’t he then in love with her?”
“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”
“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince lugubriously.
“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she
has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!”
“Oh the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events he sees her.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t see _him_!” laughed Madame Grandoni as she turned
away.