Hyacinth and his companion took their seats with extreme promptitude
before the curtain rose upon 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 very tightly laced, presented a most splendid appearance
and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a certain 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
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 had 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 Millicent was
rather flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in
season for the rising of the curtain upon the farce which preceded 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, and lost itself so
effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however
long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like 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, during considerable periods,
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 from his own
point of view, his companion made him feel that he had missed a
thousand characteristic points, so different were most of her
interpretations from his, and so very bold and irreverent. Miss
Henning’s observation of human society 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 were hypocrites,
and had, in all ways, a low opinion of her own sex, which, more then
once, before this, she had justified to Hyacinth by narrating
observations of the most 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 the circumstances which seemed 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!” said the young man. “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 would 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 into the back of the box, which had
considerable depth. There were other persons in it, 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 play went on contemplated it with a
certain interest; but until 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, as the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape
their instruments for the interlude.
“Of course; I am 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 companion was
once more at the front, leaning forward, with his arms on the edge.
Hyacinth saw that 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 was not immediately apparent to her. “I
say, I say—is it one of your grand relations?” she promptly exclaimed.
“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
reflections. 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 also surprised and puzzled
him, and it produced, generally, in his easily-excited organism, an
agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the
appearance he presented to Millicent was the sign. They had met three
times, he and his fellow-spectator; but they had met under
circumstances which, 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. Hyacinth 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 and lean and
loose-jointed; he fell into lounging, dawdling attitudes, and even at a
distance he looked lazy. He had a long, smooth, amused, contented face,
unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his brown hair parted itself
evenly over his forehead, and came forward on either temple in a rich,
well-brushed lock which gave his countenance a certain analogy to
portraits of English gentlemen about the year 1820. Millicent Henning
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
appeared to be perpetually smiling, 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. 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 incommunicativeness.
“Comes round to speak to us—a chap like that!” Hyacinth exclaimed.
“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 as much
evidence as that of the intention Millicent attributed to him. “I don’t
think I’m at all clear that I have a right to tell his name,” he
remarked, with sincerity, but with a considerable disposition at the
same time 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 that 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 reflection 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, crumpled white shawl—a
stout, odd, foreign-looking woman, whose head apparently was surmounted
with a light-coloured wig. She had a placid, patient air and a round,
wrinkled face, in which, however, a small, bright eye 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 dare say 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’, she declared that in that case, if
he should come to see them, she wasn’t afraid. No wonder he wanted to
get out of _that_ box! The woman in the 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 that he
liked her appearance and thought her very handsome; 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 that she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for
his political friend and that she would be disappointed if he did not
come. This idea did not 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, 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 more positively
than in Millicent’s imagination come out of the stage-box to see him,
he would bring with him rare influences. This nervous presentiment,
lighting on our young man, was so keen that it constituted almost a
preparation; therefore, when at the end of a few minutes he became
aware that Millicent, with her head turned (her face was in his
direction), was taking the measure of some one who had come in behind
them, he felt that fate was 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 this young lady had performed with deliberation
the ceremony of taking his measure. The Captain had his hands in his
pockets, and wore a crush-hat, pushed a good deal backward. He laughed
at 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 moment, as if he were treating them rather too much as a pair
of children whom he had stolen upon, to startle; 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, as if Hyacinth had had at least
an equal experience of that part of the theatre.
“It’s hot here, too,” Millicent’s companion murmured. He had suddenly
become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his proximity to
the fierce chandelier, and he added 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 is 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 first. She sustained his glance with
composure, but with just enough of an expression of reserve to intimate
(what was perfectly true) that she was not in the habit of conversing
with gentlemen with whom she was not acquainted. 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, confronted with
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 he did not know what one could talk
about, at such short notice, to a person whom he immediately perceived
to be, in a most extensive, a really transcendent sense of the term, a
man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto did not 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 could
not, in the presence of a third person, allude to the matters they had
discussed at the ‘Sun and Moon’; nor could he suppose his visitor would
expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a man of humours and
whims, who was amusing 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 a little
embarrassed, now that he was completely launched in his attempt at
fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit a smile from
Millicent’s 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 is a very
different affair,” he said, again to Millicent, who this time replied,
“Oh yes, of course,” and considering afresh the old lady in the box,
reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that
she, at least, hadn’t seen.
“We have never been abroad,” said Hyacinth, candidly, looking 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; while Hyacinth remained uncertain as to exactly what he
referred to, and Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.
“They are 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 have the best
seats in the house,” said Captain Sholto. “I should like very much to
finish my evening beside you. The trouble is I have ladies—a pair of
them,” he went on, 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 is 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 turning pale; the
first impulse he could have, in connection 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 his—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in
a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to descend into her
box for a little while.
“She has a tremendous desire to talk with 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 said
that I must introduce you at any cost. I hope you don’t mind, for a
quarter of an hour. I ought perhaps to tell you that she is a person
who is 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 is really
very much in earnest: I don’t mean about wishing to see you—that goes
without saying—but about the whole matter that you and I care for. Then
I should add—it doesn’t spoil anything—that she is the most charming
woman in the world, simply! Honestly, my dear boy, she is 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
imperious 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 dodging and going
roundabout. Of course the lady in the box couldn’t be sincere; she
might think she was, though even that was questionable; but you
couldn’t really care for the cause that was exemplified in the little
back-room in Bloomsbury if 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 humour her. None the less, I must add, the whole proposal
continued to make things dance, to appear fictive, delusive; so that it
sounded, in comparison, like a note of reality when Millicent, who had
been looking from one of the men to the other, exclaimed—
“That’s all very well, but who is 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 indulgent of her alarm than
the manner in which Captain Sholto reassured her: “My dear young lady,
can you suppose I have been unmindful of that? I have been hoping that
after I have taken down our friend and introduced him you would 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 to the situation, and replied, “I am much
obliged to you, but I don’t know who you are.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you all about that!” the Captain exclaimed,
benevolently.
“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 have 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 upon 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 defer to some other occasion the honour of making the
acquaintance of your friend,” he added, to Captain Sholto.
“Ah, my dear fellow, we might manage it so easily now,” this gentleman
murmured, with evident disappointment. “It is 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 graces; then he
asked himself 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 eye 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
the crudity of this ejaculation, “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 nihilism,
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 would 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 disinterested charity, “Having been in the
army, you will 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 is 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 remarked to Millicent
that he would do just as she liked; he was determined not to let a
member of the bloated upper class suppose that 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 went on, 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 rejoined, with his
imperturbable pleasantness, 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.