The matter concerned him only indirectly, but 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 at twelve o’clock, in the foreign fashion—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 sort of summer edition of what was most
characteristic in the London air. 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 seemed to throw into high relief. They
remained there for nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of
her leaning to friendly interpretations, could not have told herself
what comfort it was to the depressed, embarrassed young man at her
side. She had nothing to say to him which could better his case, as he
bent his mournful gaze on a prospect which was 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. The old lady 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 behaved like a spoiled 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 judgment,
had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles! though one
of them was a powerful prelate), had been suspicious and jealous on
exactly the wrong occasions—occasions on which such ideas were a
gratuitous injury. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to
make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to a
ground where his wife was far too accomplished a woman not to obtain
the appearance of victory.
There was another reflection that Madame Grandoni made, 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 (mingled 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 come to that particular crisis, Christina’s
active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and
impatiences, could not have tolerated for long the simple dullness of
the Prince’s company. The old lady had said to him, on meeting him, “Of
course, what you want to know immediately 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 told me that she had 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 have made the mistake, as she considers it, of
approaching her again. We talked about you, last night, after your note
came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked, and Christina was good
enough to listen. At the end she said this (what I shall tell you) 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 is 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 alone!’ Those were your
wife’s remarkable words; they are 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 that they might form a wholesome admonition, but it was
now impressed upon her 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 which
was, after all, not a crime. How could the Prince occupy himself, what
interests could he create, and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he
possess? He was as ignorant as a fish, and as narrow as his hat-band.
His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the
insult, felt it more than saw it—felt that he could not plead
incapacity without putting the Princess largely in the right. He gazed
at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he
was going to burst into tears. But he said nothing—perhaps because he
was afraid of that—so that suffering silence, during which she gently
laid her hand upon his own, remained his only answer. He might
doubtless do so much he didn’t, that when Christina touched upon 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 become slightly clearer. But at last, abruptly, as if
he had not heard her, he inquired, appealingly, who the young man was
who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.
Madame Grandoni hesitated a moment. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”
“Her bookbinder? Do you mean her lover?”
“Prince, how can you dream she will 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,” the Prince added, as if the
declaration justified him.
“I told you the other day that she is making studies of the people—the
lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” Madame Grandoni could
not help laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her
mirth elicited no echo from her interlocutor.
“I have thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less
I understand. Would it be your idea that she is quite crazy? I must
tell you I don’t care if she is!”
“We are 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 is trying democracy and socialism.”
“_Santo Dio!_” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when
they see her bookbinder?”
“They haven’t seen him, and perhaps they won’t. But if they do, it
won’t matter, because here everything is forgiven. That a person should
be singular is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything
else.”
The Prince mused a while, and then he said, “How can she bear the dirt,
the bad smell?”
“I don’t know what you are 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 are full of gin; their faces 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?”
The old lady looked at him with a certain severity. “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
will 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 did not admit his error, and she doubted whether he even
perceived 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 is
better to conceal.”
“It all depends on whether you are afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I
admit that she is very strange, and when the entertainment of watching
her, to see how she will carry out some of her inspirations, is not
stronger than anything else, I lose all patience with her. When she
doesn’t fascinate she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself,
since you are here, and as I may not 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 it
seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom, then, of much that
she does is the fact that she is ashamed of having married you.”
“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.
“You may say that there can be nothing more eccentric than that. But
you know—or, if not, it isn’t for want of her having told you—that 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 never, for the rest of her
days, be serious enough to make up for it.”
“Yes, I know that 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,” said the old woman,
smiling. “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 are not, thank God! _Dio mio, Dio mio!_” groaned the Prince.
He seemed so exhausted by his reflections 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 which 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 to South Street (she wished him to come no farther) 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 is 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 is he that has occupied you most!”
Madame Grandoni exclaimed, with a sigh. “But in reality he is the last
one you need trouble about; he doesn’t count.”
“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 is 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.