The pink dressing-gown that Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose
Muniment became in Lomax Place a conspicuous object, supplying
poor Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great
occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora
after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She detailed this episode
minutely to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her
ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected.
The grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital
as something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by
shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons
of which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when
they’re out of town what can it be when they’re all there together and
everything’s out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted herself
to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the state of
Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she hadn’t been afraid to
appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been
so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to
me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who
had visions of a needle that positively flashed in the disinterested
service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship got all dragged
out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might be in tatters
for all they could do to help her, at the top of those dreadful stairs,
with that strange sick creature (she was too unnatural) thinking only
of her own finery and talking about her complexion. If she wanted
pink she should have pink; but to Pinnie there was something almost
unholy in it, like decking out a corpse or dressing up the cat. This
was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t be
other than difficult for her to enter into the importance her ladyship
appeared to attach to those pushing people. The girl was unfortunate
certainly, stuck up there like a puppy on a shelf, but in her
ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more in keeping while
they walked about under those tremendous gilded ceilings. Lady Aurora,
seeing how she was struck, showed her all over the house, carrying the
lamp herself and telling an old woman who was there—a “confidential”
housekeeper, a person with ribbons in her cap who would have pushed
Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do very
well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive stages
of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was terribly
long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured presence as
had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently because it
was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was dedicated to her
humble friend.
One day when Hyacinth came home Pinnie at once announced to him that
her ladyship had been there to look at it—to pass judgement before the
last touches were conferred. The dressmaker intimated that in such
a case as that her judgement was rather wild and she seemed to have
embarrassing ideas about pockets. Whatever could poor Miss Muniment
want of pockets and what had she to put in them? But Lady Aurora had
evidently found the garment far beyond anything she expected, and she
had been more affable than ever and had wanted to know about every one
in the “Plice”: not in a meddling, prying way, either, like some of
those condescending swells, but quite as if the poor people were the
high ones and she was afraid her curiosity might be “presumptious.” It
was in the same discreet spirit that she had invited Amanda to relate
her whole history and had expressed an interest in the career of her
young friend.
“She said you had charming manners,” Miss Pynsent hastened to remark;
“but on my life, Hyacinth Robinson, I never mentioned a scrap that
it could give you pain that any one should talk about.” There was an
heroic explicitness in this, on Pinnie’s part, for she knew in advance
just how Hyacinth would look at her—fixedly, silently, hopelessly, as
if she were still capable of tattling horribly (with the idea that her
revelations would increase her importance) and putting forward this
hollow theory of her supreme discretion to cover it up. His eyes seemed
to say it all: “How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you’re
lying? I’m very helpless, for I can’t prove that without applying to
the person to whom your incorrigible folly has probably led you to
brag, to throw out mysterious and tantalising hints. You know of course
that I’d never condescend to that.” Pinnie suffered acutely from this
imputation, yet exposed herself to it often, because she could never
deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting
Hyacinth know he was appreciated, admired and, for those “charming
manners” commended by Lady Aurora, even all but wondered at in so many
words; and this kind of interest always appeared to imply a suspicion
of his secret—something which, when he expressed to himself the sense
of it, he called, resenting it at once and finding a certain softness
in it, “a beastly _attendrissement_.” When Pinnie went on to say to him
that Lady Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet
having come to Belgrave Square for the famous books he reflected that
he must really wait upon her without more delay if he wished to keep up
his reputation as a man of the world; and meanwhile he considered much
the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life which had opened so
suddenly from one day to the other: a phase in which his society should
have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the obscurity of
his condition only an attraction the more. They were taking him up then
one after the other and were even taking up poor Pinnie as a means of
getting at him; so that he wondered with gaiety and irony if it meant
that his destiny was really seeking him out—that the aristocracy,
recognising a mysterious affinity (with that fineness of _flair_ for
which they were remarkable), were coming to him to save him the trouble
of coming to them.
It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening) and Lady
Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time
at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of “rising
from dinner” having always been, in his imagination, for some reason
or other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He was ignorant
of the fact that Lady Aurora’s principal meal consisted of a scrap
of fish and a cup of tea served on a little stand in the dismantled
breakfast-parlour. The door was opened for Hyacinth by the invidious
old lady whom Pinnie had described and who listened to his appeal,
conducted him through the house and ushered him into her ladyship’s
presence without the smallest relaxation of a pair of tightly-closed
lips. His good hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour
by the light of a couple of candles and apparently immersed in a
collection of crumpled papers and account-books. She was ciphering,
consulting memoranda, taking notes; she had had her head in her hands
and the silky entanglement of her hair resisted the rapid effort she
made to smooth herself down as she saw the little bookbinder come
in. The impression of her fingers remained in little rosy streaks on
her pink skin. She exclaimed instantly, “Oh, you’ve come about the
books—it’s so very kind of you”; and she hurried him off to another
room, to which, as she explained, she had had them brought down for
him to choose from. The effect of this precipitation was to make him
suppose at first that she might wish him to execute his errand as
quickly as possible and take himself off; but he presently noted that
her nervousness and her shyness were of an order that would always
give false ideas. She wanted him to stay, she wanted to talk with him
and she had rushed with him at the books in order to gain time and
composure for exercising some subtler art. Hyacinth, staying half an
hour, became more and more convinced that her ladyship was, as he had
ventured to pronounce her on the occasion of their last meeting, a
regular saint. He was privately a little disappointed in the books,
though he selected three or four, as many as he could carry, and
promised to come back for others: they denoted on Lady Aurora’s part
a limited acquaintance with French literature and even a certain
puerility of taste. There were several volumes of Lamartine and a set
of the spurious memoirs of the Marquise de Créqui; but for the rest
the little library consisted mainly of Marmontel and Madame de Genlis,
_Le Récit d’une Sœur_ and the tales of M. J. T. de Saint-Germain.
There were certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and
consistent realists of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long
desired to put his hand; but evidently none of them had ever stumbled
into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple
of Balzac’s novels, which by ill luck happened to be just those our
young man had read more than once.
There was nevertheless something very agreeable to him in the moments
he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals,
monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he
had seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and
Lady Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a
sense of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of prohibitory
presences. She spoke again of the poor people in the south of London
and of the Muniments in particular; evidently the only fault she
had to find with these latter was that they were not poor enough—not
sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which she could
step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished she would
talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was that, like
Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He didn’t mind,
with the poor, going into questions of their state—it even gave him
at times a strange savage satisfaction; but he saw that in discussing
them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less: the rich
couldn’t consider poverty in the light of experience. Their mistakes
and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of
want and dirt when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less
irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this deficient
perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness it would be a
queer enough business when he should come to pretending to hold the
candlestick for the Princess Casamassima.
His present hostess said no word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed
she must have wished to place him on the footing on which people don’t
express approbation or surprise at the decency or good-breeding of
each other’s relatives. He saw how she would always treat him as a
gentleman and that even if he should be basely ungrateful she would
never call his attention to the fact that she had done so. He shouldn’t
have occasion to say to her, as he had said to the Princess, that she
regarded him as a curious animal; and it gave him at once the sense
of learning more about life, a sense always delightful to him, to
perceive there were such different ways (which implied still a good
many more) of being a lady of rank. The manner in which Lady Aurora
appeared to wish to confer with him on the great problems of pauperism
and reform might have implied he was a benevolent nobleman (of the type
of Lord Shaftesbury) who had endowed many charities and was noted,
in philanthropic schemes, for the breadth of his views. It was not
less present to him that Pinnie might have tattled, put forward his
claims to high consanguinity, than it had been when the dressmaker
herself descanted on her ladyship’s condescensions; but he remembered
now that he too had only just escaped being asinine when, the other
day, he flashed out an allusion to his accursed origin. At all events
he was much touched by the delicacy with which the earl’s daughter
comported herself, simply assuming that he was “one of themselves”;
and he reflected that if she did know his history (he was sure he might
pass twenty years in her society without discovering if she did) this
shade of courtesy, this natural tact, coexisting even with extreme
awkwardness, illustrated that “best breeding” which he had seen alluded
to in novels portraying the aristocracy. The only remark on Lady
Aurora’s part that savoured in the least of looking down at him from a
height was when she said cheerfully and encouragingly: “I suppose one
of these days you’ll be setting up in business for yourself.” This was
not so cruelly patronising that he couldn’t reply with a smile equally
free from any sort of impertinence: “Oh dear, no, I shall never do
that. I should make a great mess of any attempt to carry on a business.
I’ve no turn at all for that sort of thing.”
Lady Aurora looked a little surprised. “Oh, I see; you don’t like—you
don’t like—!” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say he didn’t like
the idea of going in to that extent for a trade; but he stopped her in
time from imputing to him a sentiment so foolish and declared what he
meant to be simply that his one faculty was the faculty of doing his
little piece of work, whatever it was, of liking to do it skilfully
and prettily, and of liking still better to get his money for it when
done. His conception of “business” or of rising in the world didn’t
go beyond that. “Oh yes, I can fancy!” her ladyship exclaimed; but she
looked at him a moment with eyes which showed that he puzzled her, that
she didn’t quite understand his tone. Before he left her she asked him
abruptly (nothing had led up to it) what he thought of Captain Sholto,
whom she had seen that other evening in Audley Court. Didn’t he think
him a very odd sort of person? Hyacinth confessed to this impression;
whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider
him decidedly vulgar?”
“How can I know?”
“You can know perfectly—as well as any one!” Then she added: “I think
it’s a pity they should form relations with any one of that kind.”
“They” of course meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person
who may be vulgar?”—Hyacinth regarded this solicitude as exquisite.
“But think of the people they know—think of those they’re surrounded
with—think of all Audley Court!”
“The poor, the unhappy, the labouring classes? Oh, I don’t call _them_
vulgar!” cried her ladyship with radiant eyes. The young man, lying
awake a good deal that night, laughed to himself, on his pillow, not
unkindly, at her fear that he and his friends would be contaminated by
the familiar of a princess. He even wondered if she wouldn’t find the
Princess herself a bit vulgar.