Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as
he had scarcely closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window
made him dress as rapidly as a young man could do who desired more than
ever that his appearance should not give strange ideas about him: an
old garden, with parterres in curious figures, and little intervals of
lawn which appeared to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green.
At one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick, which looked
down on the other side into a canal, or moat, or quaint old pond; and
from the same standpoint there was also a view of a considerable part
of the main body of the house (Hyacinth’s room appeared to be in a wing
commanding the extensive, irregular back), which was richly gray
wherever it was not green with ivy and other dense creepers, and
everywhere infinitely like a picture, with a high-piled, ancient,
russet roof, broken by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all
manner of odd gables and windows on different lines and antique patches
and protrusions, and a particularly fascinating architectural
excrescence in which a wonderful clock-face was lodged—a clock-face
covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years
and the weather. Hyacinth had never in his life been in the country—the
real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere
ravelled fringe of London—and there entered through his open casement
the breath of a world enchantingly new and, after his recent feverish
hours, inexpressibly refreshing to him; a sense of sweet, sunny air and
mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and a kind of musical
silence, the greater part of which seemed to consist of the voices of
birds. There were tall, quiet trees near by, and afar off, and
everywhere; and the group of objects which greeted Hyacinth’s eyes
evidently formed only a corner of larger spaces and a more complicated
scene. There was a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting, with
the dew upon it, under his windows, and he must go down and take his
first steps in it.
The night before, at ten o’clock, when he arrived, he had only got the
impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate;
of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly; and of the glow
of several windows, suggesting in-door cheer, in a façade that lifted a
variety of vague pinnacles into the starlight. It was much of a relief
to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration of the
lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow; the delay
would give him time to recover his balance and look about him. This
latter opportunity was offered him first as he sat at supper in a vast
dining-room, with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South
Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should be
treated: there was too much vagueness in his conception of the way in
which, at a country-house, insidious distinctions might be made and
shades of importance illustrated; but it was plain that the best had
been ordered for him. He was, at all events, abundantly content with
his reception and more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate
(though his other senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he
ate, as it were, without eating), and the grave mechanical servant
filled his glass with a liquor that reminded him of some lines in
Keats—in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. He wondered whether he should hear
a nightingale at Medley (he knew nothing about the seasons of this
vocalist), and also whether the butler would attempt to talk to him,
had ideas about him, knew or suspected who he was and what; which,
after all, there was no reason for his doing, unless it might be the
poverty of the luggage that had been transported from Lomax Place. Mr
Withers, however (it was in this manner that Hyacinth heard him
addressed by the cabman who conveyed the visitor from the station),
gave no further symptom of sociability than to ask him at what time he
would be called in the morning; to which our young man replied that he
preferred not to be called at all—he would get up by himself. The
butler rejoined, “Very good, sir,” while Hyacinth thought it probable
that he puzzled him a good deal, and even considered the question of
giving him a glimpse of his identity, lest it should be revealed,
later, in a manner less graceful. The object of this anticipatory step,
in Hyacinth’s mind, was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed
with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing,
for the simple reason that before he spoke he found that he already
_was_ inured to being waited upon. His impulse to deprecate attentions
departed, and he became conscious that there were none he should care
to miss, or was not quite prepared for. He knew he probably thanked Mr
Withers too much, but he couldn’t help this—it was an irrepressible
tendency and an error he should doubtless always commit.
He lay in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to insure rest that
it was probably responsible in some degree for his restlessness, and in
a large, high room, where long dressing-glasses emitted ghostly glances
even after the light was extinguished. Suspended on the walls were many
prints, mezzotints and old engravings, which Hyacinth supposed,
possibly without reason, to be fine and rare. He got up several times
in the night, lighted his candle and walked about looking at them. He
looked at himself in one of the long glasses, and in a place where
everything was on such a scale it seemed to him more than ever that
Mademoiselle Vivier’s son was a tiny particle. As he came downstairs he
encountered housemaids, with dusters and brooms, or perceived them,
through open doors, on their knees before fireplaces; and it was his
belief that they regarded him more boldly than if he had been a guest
of the usual kind. Such a reflection as that, however, ceased to
trouble him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through
the park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in
narrowing circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled for an hour,
in a state of breathless ecstasy; brushing the dew from the deep fern
and bracken and the rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant
air, and stopping everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of
some exquisite impression. His whole walk was peopled with
recognitions; he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place
and such objects, such a morning and such a chance. It was the last of
April, and everything was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the
early air, were a blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he
revolved repeatedly; catching every point and tone, feasting on its
expression, and wondering whether the Princess would observe his
proceedings from the window, and whether, if she did, they would be
offensive to her. The house was not hers, but only hired for three
months, and it could flatter no princely pride that he should be struck
with it. There was something in the way the gray walls rose from the
green lawn that brought tears to his eyes; the spectacle of long
duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to
him; he had lived with people among whom old age meant, for the most
part, a grudged and degraded survival. In the majestic preservation of
Medley there was a kind of serenity of success, an accumulation of
dignity and honour.
A footman sought him out, in the garden, to tell him that breakfast was
ready. He had never thought of breakfast, and as he walked back to the
house, attended by the inscrutable flunkey, this offer appeared a free,
extravagant gift, unexpected and romantic. He found he was to breakfast
alone, and he asked no questions; but when he had finished the butler
came in and informed him that the Princess would see him after
luncheon, but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand that
the library was entirely at his service. ‘After luncheon’—that threw
the hour he had come for very far into the future, and it caused him
some confusion of mind that the Princess should think it worth while to
invite him to stay at her house from Saturday evening to Monday morning
if it had been her purpose that so much of his visit should elapse
without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor impatient; the
impressions that had already crowded upon him were in themselves a
sufficient reward, and what could one do better, precisely, in such a
house as that, than wait for a princess? The butler showed him the way
to the library, and left him planted in the middle of it, staring at
the treasures that he instantly perceived it contained. It was an old
brown room, of great extent—even the ceiling was brown, though there
were figures in it dimly gilt—where row upon row of finely-lettered
backs returned his discriminating professional gaze. A fire of logs
crackled in a great chimney, and there were alcoves with deep
window-seats, and arm-chairs such as he had never seen, luxurious,
leather-covered, with an adjustment for holding one’s volume; and a
vast writing-table, before one of the windows, furnished with a perfect
magazine of paper and pens, inkstands and blotters, seals, stamps,
candlesticks, reels of twine, paper-weights, book-knives. Hyacinth had
never imagined so many aids to correspondence, and before he turned
away he had written a note to Millicent, in a hand even more beautiful
than usual—his penmanship was very minute, but at the same time
wonderfully free and fair—largely for the pleasure of seeing ‘Medley
Hall’ stamped in crimson, heraldic-looking characters at the top of his
paper. In the course of an hour he had ravaged the collection, taken
down almost every book, wishing he could keep it a week, and put it
back quickly, as his eye caught the next, which appeared even more
desirable. He discovered many rare bindings, and gathered several ideas
from an inspection of them—ideas which he felt himself perfectly
capable of reproducing. Altogether, his vision of true happiness, at
that moment, was that, for a month or two, he should be locked into the
library at Medley. He forgot the outer world, and the morning waned—the
beautiful vernal Sunday—while he lingered there.
He was on the top of a ladder when he heard a voice remark, “I am
afraid they are very dusty; in this house, you know, it is the dust of
centuries;” and, looking down, he saw Madame Grandoni stationed in the
middle of the room. He instantly prepared to descend, to make her his
salutation, when she exclaimed, “Stay, stay, if you are not giddy; we
can talk from here! I only came in to show you we _are_ in the house,
and to tell you to keep up your patience. The Princess will probably
see you in a few hours.”
“I really hope so,” said Hyacinth, from his perch, rather dismayed at
the ‘probably’.
“_Natürlich_,” the old lady rejoined; “but people have come, sometimes,
and gone away without seeing her. It all depends upon her mood.”
“Do you mean even when she has sent for them?”
“Oh, who can tell whether she has sent for them or not?”
“But she sent for me, you know,” Hyacinth declared, staring down—struck
with the odd effect of Madame Grandoni’s wig in that bird’s-eye view.
“Oh yes, she sent for you, poor young man!” The old lady looked up at
him with a smile, and they remained a moment exchanging a silent
scrutiny. Then she added, “Captain Sholto has come, like that, more
than once; and he has gone away no better off.”
“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.
“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She took
her way back to it (she had left it open) and pushed it to; then
advanced into the room again, with her superannuated, shuffling step,
walking as if her shoes were too big for her. Hyacinth meanwhile
descended the ladder. “_Ecco!_ She’s a _capricciosa_,” said the old
lady.
“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked, gravely.
“You seem to be her friend, yet you say things that are not favourable
to her.”
“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should
ever say to you. I am rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I
ought to be particularly kind. But I am not false. It is not our German
nature. You will hear me some day. I _am_ the friend of the Princess;
it would be well enough if she never had a worse one! But I should like
to be yours, too—what will you have? Perhaps it is of no use. At any
rate, here you are.”
“Yes, here I am, decidedly!” Hyacinth laughed, uneasily.
“And how long shall you stay? Excuse me if I ask that; it is part of my
rudeness.”
“I shall stay till to-morrow morning. I must be at my work by noon.”
“That will do very well. Don’t you remember, the other time, how I told
you to remain faithful?”
“That was very good advice. But I think you exaggerate my danger.”
“So much the better,” said Madame Grandoni; “though now that I look at
you well I doubt it a little. I see you are one of those types that
ladies like. I can be sure of that, because I like you myself. At my
age—a hundred and twenty—can I not say that? If the Princess were to do
so, it would be different; remember that—that any flattery she may ever
offer you will be on her lips much less discreet. But perhaps she will
never have the chance; you may never come again. There are people who
have come only once. _Vedremo bene_. I must tell you that I am not in
the least against a young man taking a holiday, a little quiet
recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued, in her
disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take it every
five days; that is, no doubt, too often. In Germany, less often. In
this country, I cannot understand whether it is an increase of effort:
the English Sunday is so difficult! This one will, however, in any
case, have been beautiful for you. Be happy, make yourself comfortable;
but go home to-morrow!” And with this injunction Madame Grandoni took
her way again to the door, while Hyacinth went to open it for her. “I
can say that, because it is not my house. I am only here like you. And
sometimes I think I also shall go to-morrow!”
“I imagine you have not, like me, your living to get, every day. That
is reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.
She paused in the doorway, with her expressive, ugly, kindly little
eyes on his face. “I believe I am nearly as poor as you. And I have
not, like you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I am noble,” said the
old lady, shaking her wig.
“And I am not!” Hyacinth rejoined, smiling.
“It is better not to be lifted up high, like our friend. It does not
give happiness.”
“Not to one’s self, possibly; but to others!” From where they stood,
Hyacinth looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted
from above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflection of
this grandeur came into his appreciative eyes.
“Do you admire everything here very much—do you receive great
pleasure?” asked Madame Grandoni.
“Oh, so much—so much!”
She considered him a moment longer. “_Poverino!_” she murmured, as she
turned away.
A couple of hours later the Princess sent for Hyacinth, and he was
conducted upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung
with pictures, and ushered into a kind of bright drawing-room, which he
afterwards learned that his hostess regarded as her boudoir. The sound
of music had come to him outside the door, so that he was prepared to
find her seated at the piano, if not to see her continue to play after
he appeared. Her face was turned in the direction from which he
entered, and she smiled at him while the servant, as if he had just
arrived, formally pronounced his name, without lifting her hands from
the keys. The room, placed in an angle of the house and lighted from
two sides, was large and sunny, upholstered in fresh, gay chintz,
furnished with all sorts of sofas and low, familiar seats and
convenient little tables, most of them holding great bowls of early
flowers, littered over with books, newspapers, magazines, photographs
of celebrities, with their signatures, and full of the marks of
luxurious and rather indolent habitation. Hyacinth stood there, not
advancing very far, and the Princess, still playing and smiling, nodded
toward a seat near the piano. “Put yourself there and listen to me.”
Hyacinth obeyed, and she played a long time without glancing at him.
This left him the more free to rest his eyes on her own face and
person, while she looked about the room, vaguely, absently, but with an
expression of quiet happiness, as if she were lost in her music,
soothed and pacified by it. A window near her was half open, and the
soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused
themselves, and made the place cheerful and pure. The Princess struck
him as extraordinarily young and fair, and she seemed so slim and
simple, and friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her
occupation nor offered him her hand, that he sank back in his seat at
last, with the sense that all his uneasiness, his nervous tension, was
leaving him, and that he was safe in her kindness, in the free,
original way with which she evidently would always treat him. This
peculiar manner—half consideration, half fellowship—seemed to him
already to have the sweetness of familiarity. She played ever so
movingly, with different pieces succeeding each other; he had never
listened to music, nor to a talent, of that order. Two or three times
she turned her eyes upon him, and then they shone with the wonderful
expression which was the essence of her beauty; that profuse, mingled
light which seemed to belong to some everlasting summer, and yet to
suggest seasons that were past and gone, some experience that was only
an exquisite memory. She asked him if he cared for music, and then
added, laughing, that she ought to have made sure of this before; while
he answered—he had already told her so in South Street; she appeared to
have forgotten—that he was awfully fond of it.
The sense of the beauty of women had been given to our young man in a
high degree; it was a faculty that made him conscious, to adoration, of
every element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and
tone, that contributed to charm. Even, therefore, if he had appreciated
less the deep harmonies the Princess drew from the piano, there would
have been no lack of interest in his situation, in such an opportunity
to watch her admirable outline and movement, the noble form of her head
and face, the gathered-up glories of her hair, the living, flower-like
freshness which had no need to turn from the light. She was dressed in
fair colours, as simply as a young girl. Before she ceased playing she
asked Hyacinth what he would like to do in the afternoon: would he have
any objection to taking a drive with her? It was very possible he might
enjoy the country. She seemed not to attend to his answer, which was
covered by the sound of the piano; but if she had done so it would have
left her very little doubt as to the reality of his inclination. She
remained gazing at the cornice of the room, while her hands wandered to
and fro; then suddenly she stopped, got up and came toward her
companion. “It is probable that is the most I shall ever bore you; you
know the worst. Would you very kindly close the piano?” He complied
with her request, and she went to another part of the room and sank
into an arm-chair. When he approached her again she said, “Is it really
true that you have never seen a park, nor a garden, nor any of the
beauties of nature, and that sort of thing?” She was alluding to
something he had said in his letter, when he answered the note by which
she proposed to him to run down to Medley; and after he assured her
that it was perfectly true she exclaimed, “I’m so glad—I’m so glad! I
have never been able to show any one anything new, and I have always
thought I should like it so—especially to a sensitive nature. Then you
_will_ come and drive with me?” She asked this as if it would be a
great favour.
That was the beginning of the communion—so singular, considering their
respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy; and it
passed into some very remarkable phases. The Princess had the most
extraordinary way of taking things for granted, of ignoring
difficulties, of assuming that her preferences might be translated into
fact. After Hyacinth had remained with her ten minutes longer—a period
mainly occupied with her exclamations of delight at his having seen so
little of the sort of thing of which Medley consisted (Where should he
have seen it, gracious heaven? he asked himself); after she had rested,
thus briefly, from her exertions at the piano, she proposed that they
should go out-of-doors together. She was an immense walker—she wanted
her walk. She left him for a short time, giving him the last number of
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ to entertain himself withal, and calling
his attention, in particular, to a story of M. Octave Feuillet (she
should be so curious to know what he thought of it); and reappeared
with her hat and parasol, drawing on her long gloves, and presenting
herself to our young man, at that moment, as a sudden incarnation of
the heroine of M. Feuillet’s novel, in which he had instantly become
immersed. On their way downstairs it occurred to her that he had not
yet seen the house and that it would be amusing for her to show it to
him; so she turned aside and took him through it, up and down and
everywhere, even into the vast, old-fashioned kitchen, where there was
a small, red-faced man in a white jacket and apron and a white cap (he
removed the latter ornament to salute the little bookbinder), with whom
his companion spoke Italian, which Hyacinth understood sufficiently to
perceive that she addressed her cook in the second person singular, as
if he had been a feudal retainer. He remembered that was the way the
three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys. The Princess explained that
the gentleman in the white cap was a delightful creature (she couldn’t
endure English servants, though she was obliged to have two or three),
who would make her plenty of risottos and polentas—she had quite the
palate of a contadina. She showed Hyacinth everything: the queer
transmogrified corner that had once been a chapel; the secret stairway
which had served in the persecutions of the Catholics (the owners of
Medley were, like the Princess herself, of the old persuasion); the
musicians’ gallery, over the hall; the tapestried room, which people
came from a distance to see; and the haunted chamber (the two were
sometimes confounded, but they were quite distinct), where a dreadful
individual at certain times made his appearance—a dwarfish ghost, with
an enormous head, a dispossessed brother, of long ago (the eldest), who
had passed for an idiot, which he wasn’t, and had somehow been made
away with. The Princess offered her visitor the privilege of sleeping
in this apartment, declaring, however, that nothing would induce _her_
even to enter it alone, she being a benighted creature, consumed with
abject superstitions. “I don’t know whether I am religious, and
whether, if I were, my religion would be superstitious, but my
superstitions are certainly religious.” She made her young friend pass
through the drawing-room very cursorily, remarking that they should see
it again: it was rather stupid—drawing-rooms in English country-houses
were always stupid; indeed, if it would amuse him, they would sit there
after dinner. Madame Grandoni and she usually sat upstairs, but they
would do anything that he should find more comfortable.
At last they went out of the house together, and as they did so she
explained, as if she wished to justify herself against the imputation
of extravagance, that, though the place doubtless struck him as
absurdly large for a couple of quiet women, and the whole thing was not
in the least what she would have preferred, yet it was all far cheaper
than he probably imagined; she would never have looked at it if it
hadn’t been cheap. It must appear to him so preposterous for a woman to
associate herself with the great uprising of the poor and yet live in
palatial halls—a place with forty or fifty rooms. This was one of only
two allusions she made that day to her democratic sympathies; but it
fell very happily, for Hyacinth had been reflecting precisely upon the
anomaly she mentioned. It had been present to him all day; it added
much to the way life practised on his sense of the tragic-comical to
think of the Princess’s having retired to that magnificent residence in
order to concentrate her mind upon the London slums. He listened,
therefore, with great attention while she related that she had taken
the house for only three months, in any case, because she wanted to
rest, after a winter of visiting and living in public (as the English
spent their lives, with all their celebrated worship of the ‘home’),
and yet didn’t wish as yet to return to town—though she was obliged to
confess that she had still the place in South Street on her hands,
thanks to her deciding unexpectedly to go on with it rather than move
out her things. But one had to keep one’s things somewhere, and why
wasn’t that as good a receptacle as another? Medley was not what she
would have chosen if she had been left to herself; but she had not been
left to herself—she never was; she had been bullied into taking it by
the owners, whom she had met somewhere and who had made up to her
immensely, persuading her that she might really have it for nothing—for
no more than she would give for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old
parsonage embowered in clematis, which were really what she had been
looking for. Besides it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so
far from town, which it was always difficult to let, or to get a price
for; and then it was a wretched house for living in. Hyacinth, for whom
his three hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not
been struck with its geographical remoteness, and he asked the Princess
what she meant, in such a connection, by using the word ‘wretched’. To
this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, inconvenient in
every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That is the only reason
I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me more luxurious than I
am, or that I throw away money. Never, never!” Hyacinth had no standard
by which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for
her, and he perceived that though she judged him as a creature still
open to every initiation, whose _naïveté_ would entertain her, it was
also her fancy to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she
might have had the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance
of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and
everything lay before him but the reason she had for playing it.
One of the gardens at Medley took the young man’s heart beyond the
others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a
great training of apricots and plums, and straight walks, bordered with
old-fashioned homely flowers, inclosing immense squares where other
fruit-trees stood upright and mint and lavender floated in the air. In
the southern quarter it overhung a small, disused canal, and here a
high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad and
covered with fine turf; so that the top of it, looking down at the
canal, made a magnificent grassy terrace, than which, on a summer’s
day, there could be no more delightful place for strolling up and down
with a companion—all the more that, at either end, was a curious
pavilion, in the manner of a tea-house, which completed the scene in an
old-world sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or
shower. One of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and
superfluous flower-pots; the other was covered, inside, with a queer
Chinese paper, representing ever so many times over a group of people
with faces like blind kittens, having tea while they sat on the floor.
It also contained a big, clumsy inlaid cabinet, in which cups and
saucers showed themselves through doors of greenish glass, together
with a carved cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf, over
a sofa, not very comfortable though it had cushions of faded tapestry,
which looked like samplers, was a row of novels, out of date and out of
print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only
there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves, mixed with
some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness.
On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess until she
suddenly remembered that he had not had his luncheon. He protested that
this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared that
she had not asked him down to Medley to starve him and that he must go
back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way, through
the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk. She
explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock, in the
foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was so foreign
he might like that better, and in this case, on the morrow, they would
breakfast together. He could have coffee, and anything else he wanted,
brought to his room when he woke up. When Hyacinth had sufficiently
composed himself, in the presence of this latter image—he thought he
saw a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside—he mentioned
that really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in
London. There was a train at nine o’clock; he hoped she didn’t mind his
taking it. She looked at him a moment, gravely and kindly, as if she
were considering an abstract idea, and then she said, “Oh yes, I mind
it very much. Not to-morrow—some other day.” He made no rejoinder, and
the Princess spoke of something else; that is, his rejoinder was
private, and consisted of the reflection that he _would_ leave Medley
in the morning, whatever she might say. He simply couldn’t afford to
stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And then Madame Grandoni thought it
so important; for though the old lady was obscure she was decidedly
impressive. The Princess’s protest, however, was to be reckoned with;
he felt that it might take a form less cursory than the words she had
just uttered, which would make it embarrassing. She was less solemn,
less explicit, than Madame Grandoni had been, but there was something
in her slight seriousness and the delicate way in which she signified a
sort of command that seemed to tell him his liberty was going—the
liberty he had managed to keep (till the other day, when he gave
Hoffendahl a mortgage on it), and the possession of which had in some
degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This made him uneasy;
what would become of him if he should add another servitude to the one
he had undertaken, at the end of that long, anxious cab-drive in the
rain, in that dim back-bedroom of a house as to whose whereabouts he
was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel, all
visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and Poupin and
Schinkel—how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them at the
present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the
pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter, at least, if they could
have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!
As to this, Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess
touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and
conclusions she had gathered, since their former meeting. It was to
such matters as these that she directed the conversation; she appeared
to wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her
continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended
sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked
of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted, as
before, that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed he was
edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he didn’t
know what she was talking about. At all events, if _he_ had been with
the dukes (she didn’t call her associates dukes, but Hyacinth was sure
they were of that order), he would have got more satisfaction from
them. She appeared, on the whole, to judge the English world severely;
to think poorly of its wit, and even worse of its morals. “You know
people oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dull,” she said; and Hyacinth
turned this over, feeling that he certainly had not yet caught the
point of view of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of
bores. He had sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing that it was
fabulously profligate, but he was rather disappointed in the bad
account the Princess gave of it. She remarked that she herself was very
corrupt—she ought to have mentioned that before—but she had never been
accused of being stupid. Perhaps he would discover it, but most of the
people she had had to do with thought her only too lively. The second
allusion that she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and hers)
was when she said, “I determined to see it”—she was speaking still of
English society—“to learn for myself what it really is, before we blow
it up. I have been here now a year and a half, and, as I tell you, I
feel that I have seen. It is the old régime again, the rottenness and
extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which
the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a
reproduction of Roman society in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic,
depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and
scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are
the barbarians, you know.” The Princess was pretty general, after all,
in her animadversions, and regaled him with no anecdotes (he rather
missed them) that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed.
She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador. By
way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t be
true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she had
let him know that she liked him to speak in the manner of the people),
inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them—a noble lady—who was one
of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible
to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she
asked, “Whom do you mean—a noble lady?”
“I suppose there is no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.”
“I don’t know her. Is she nice?”
“I like her ever so much.”
“Is she pretty, clever?”
“She isn’t pretty, but she is very uncommon,” said Hyacinth.
“How did you make her acquaintance?” As he hesitated, she went on, “Did
you bind some books for her?”
“No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.”
“Where is that?”
“In Camberwell.”
“And who lives there?”
“A young woman I was calling on, who is bedridden.”
“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lydia Languish?—goes
to see her?”
“Yes, very often.”
The Princess was silent a moment, looking at him. “Will you take me
there?”
“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the
chemist’s assistant you will perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”
“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I am
sorry,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth inquired what she
might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, and
presently remarked, “Perhaps she goes to see him.”
“Goes to see whom?”
“The chemist’s assistant—the brother.” She said this very seriously.
“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth rejoined, laughing. “But she is a fine
sort of woman.”
The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again asked her for
what—for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied, “No; I
mean for my not being the first—what is it you call them?—noble lady
that you have encountered.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you
don’t make an impression on me.”
“I was not thinking of that. I was thinking that you might be less
fresh than I thought.”
“Of course I don’t know what you thought,” said Hyacinth, smiling.
“No; how should you?”