He was in the library, after luncheon, when word was brought to him
that the carriage was at the door, for their drive; and when he went
into the hall he found Madame Grandoni, bonneted and cloaked, awaiting
the descent of the Princess. “You see I go with you. I am always
there,” she remarked, jovially. “The Princess has me with her to take
care of her, and this is how I do it. Besides, I never miss my drive.”
“You are different from me; this will be the first I have ever had in
my life.” He could establish that distinction without bitterness,
because he was too pleased with his prospect to believe the old lady’s
presence could spoil it. He had nothing to say to the Princess that she
might not hear. He didn’t dislike her for coming, even after she had
said to him, in answer to his own announcement, speaking rather more
sententiously than was her wont, “It doesn’t surprise me that you have
not spent your life in carriages. They have nothing to do with your
trade.”
“Fortunately not,” he answered. “I should have made a ridiculous
coachman.”
The Princess appeared, and they mounted into a great square barouche,
an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle, with a green body, a faded
hammer-cloth and a rumble where the footman sat (the Princess mentioned
that it had been let with the house), which rolled ponderously and
smoothly along the winding avenue and through the gilded gates (they
were surmounted with an immense escutcheon) of the park. The progress
of this oddly composed trio had a high respectability, and that is one
of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion to be tremendously
memorable. There might still be greater joys in store for him—he was by
this time quite at sea, and could recognise no shores—but he would
never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and
comprehensive, but very little was said while it lasted. “I shall show
you the whole country: it is exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the
heart.” Of so much as this his hostess had informed him at the start;
and she added, in French, with a light, allusive nod at the rich,
humanised landscape, “_Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre_.” For the
rest, she sat there opposite to him, in quiet fairness, under her
softly-swaying, lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she
noticed that his eyes rested; allowing them, when the carriage passed
anything particularly charming, to meet his own; smiling as if she
enjoyed the whole affair very nearly as much as he; and now and then
calling his attention to some prospect, some picturesque detail, by
three words of which the cadence was sociable. Madame Grandoni dozed
most of the time, with her chin resting on rather a mangy ermine
tippet, in which she had enveloped herself; expanding into
consciousness at moments, however, to greet the scenery with
comfortable polyglot ejaculations. If Hyacinth was exalted, during
these delightful hours, he at least measured his exaltation, and it
kept him almost solemnly still, as if with the fear that a wrong
movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain to fall
upon the play. This was especially the case when his senses oscillated
back from the objects that sprang up by the way, every one of which was
a rich image of something he had longed for, to the most beautiful
woman in England, who sat there, close to him, as completely for his
benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to make her portrait. More
than once he saw everything through a mist; his eyes were full of
tears.
That evening they sat in the drawing-room after dinner, as the Princess
had promised, or, as he was inclined to consider it, threatened him.
The force of the threat was in his prevision that the ladies would make
themselves fine, and that in contrast with the setting and company he
should feel dingier than ever; having already on his back the only
tolerably decent coat he possessed, and being unable to exchange it for
a garment of the pattern that civilised people (so much he knew, if he
couldn’t emulate them) put on about eight o’clock. The ladies, when
they came to dinner, looked festal indeed; but Hyacinth was able to
make the reflection that he was more pleased to be dressed as he was
dressed, meanly and unsuitably as it was, than he should have been to
present such a figure as Madame Grandoni, in whose toggery there was
something comical. He was coming more and more round to the sense that
if the Princess didn’t mind his poorness, in every way, he had no call
to mind it himself. His present circumstances were not of his
seeking—they had been forced upon him; they were not the fruit of a
disposition to push. How little the Princess minded—how much, indeed,
she enjoyed the consciousness that in having him about her in that
manner she was playing a trick upon society, the false and conventional
society she had measured and despised—was manifest from the way she had
introduced him to the people they found awaiting them in the hall on
the return from their drive: four ladies, a mother and three daughters,
who had come over to call, from Broome, a place some five miles off.
Broome was also a great house, as he gathered, and Lady Marchant, the
mother, was the wife of a county magnate. She explained that they had
come in on the persuasion of the butler, who had represented the return
of the Princess as imminent, and who then had administered tea without
waiting for this event. The evening had drawn in chill; there was a
fire in the hall, and they all sat near it, round the tea-table, under
the great roof which rose to the top of the house. Hyacinth conversed
mainly with one of the daughters, a very fine girl with a straight back
and long arms, whose neck was encircled so tightly with a fur boa that,
to look a little to one side, she was obliged to move her whole body.
She had a handsome, inanimate face, over which the firelight played
without making it more lively, a beautiful voice, and the occasional
command of a few short words. She asked Hyacinth with what pack he
hunted, and whether he went in much for tennis, and she ate three
muffins.
Our young man perceived that Lady Marchant and her daughters had
already been at Medley, and even guessed that their reception by the
Princess, who probably thought them of a tiresome type, had not been
enthusiastic; and his imagination projected itself, further still, into
the motives which, in spite of this tepidity, must have led them, in
consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country, to come a
second time. The talk, in the firelight, while Hyacinth laboured,
rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion, on his hostess’s
part, was passing into his own blood), with his muffin-eating
beauty—the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate
tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd, evident
_parti-pris_ of the Princess’s to make poor Lady Marchant explain
everything. With great urbanity of manner, she professed complete
inability to understand the sense in which her visitor meant her thin
remarks; and Hyacinth was scarcely able to follow her here, he wondered
so what interest she could have in trying to appear dense. It was only
afterwards he learned that the Marchant family produced a very
peculiar, and at moments almost maddening, effect upon her nerves. He
asked himself what would happen to that member of it with whom he was
engaged if it should be revealed to her that she was conversing (how
little soever) with a beggarly London artisan; and though he was rather
pleased at her not having discovered his station (for he didn’t
attribute her brevity to this idea), he entertained a little the
question of its being perhaps his duty not to keep it hidden from her,
not to flourish in a cowardly disguise. What did she take him for—or,
rather, what didn’t she take him for—when she asked him if he hunted?
Perhaps that was because it was rather dark; if there had been more
light in the great vague hall she would have seen he was not one of
themselves. Hyacinth felt that by this time he had associated a good
deal with swells, but they had always known what he was and had been
able to elect how to treat him. This was the first occasion on which a
young gentlewoman had not been warned, and, as a consequence, he
appeared to pass muster. He determined not to unmask himself, on the
simple ground that he should by the same stroke betray the Princess. It
was quite open to her to lean over and say to Miss Marchant, “You know
he’s a wretched little bookbinder, earning a few shillings a week in a
horrid street in Soho. There are all kinds of low things—and I suspect
even something very horrible—connected with his birth. It seems to me I
ought to mention it.” He almost wished she would mention it, for the
sake of the strange, violent sensation of the thing, a curiosity
quivering within him to know what Miss Marchant would do at such a
pinch, and what chorus of ejaculations—or, what appalled, irremediable
silence—would rise to the painted roof. The responsibility, however,
was not his; he had entered a phase of his destiny where
responsibilities were suspended. Madame Grandoni’s tea had waked her
up; she came, at every crisis, to the rescue of the conversation, and
talked to the visitors about Rome, where they had once spent a winter,
describing with much drollery the manner in which the English families
she had seen there for nearly half a century (and had met, of an
evening, in the Roman world) inspected the ruins and monuments and
squeezed into the great ceremonies of the church. Clearly, the four
ladies didn’t know what to make of the Princess; but, though they
perhaps wondered if she were a paid companion, they were on firm ground
in the fact that the queer, familiar, fat person had been acquainted
with the Millingtons, the Bunburys and the Tripps.
After dinner (during which the Princess allowed herself a considerable
license of pleasantry on the subject of her recent visitors, declaring
that Hyacinth must positively go with her to return their call, and
must see their interior, their manner at home), Madame Grandoni sat
down to the piano, at Christina’s request, and played to her companions
for an hour. The spaces were large in the big drawing-room, and our
friends had placed themselves at a distance from each other. The old
lady’s music trickled forth discreetly into the pleasant dimness of the
candlelight; she knew dozens of Italian local airs, which sounded like
the forgotten tunes of a people, and she followed them by a series of
tender, plaintive German _Lieder_, awaking, without violence, the
echoes of the high, pompous apartment. It was the music of an old
woman, and seemed to quaver a little, as her singing might have done.
The Princess, buried in a deep chair, listened, behind her fan.
Hyacinth at least supposed she listened; at any rate, she never moved.
At last Madame Grandoni left the piano and came toward the young man.
She had taken up, on the way, a French book, in a pink cover, which she
nursed in the hollow of her arm, and she stood looking at Hyacinth.
“My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see you
again for the present, as, to take your early train, you will have left
the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to gentlemen
without it. I have looked after the Princess pretty well, all day, to
keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you, for a little. Take
the same care, I beg you. I must put myself into my dressing-gown; at
my age, at this hour, it is the only thing. What will you have? I hate
to be tight,” pursued Madame Grandoni, who appeared even in her
ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort successfully enough.
“Do not sit up late,” she added; “and do not keep him, Christina.
Remember that for an active young man like Mr Robinson, going every day
to his work, there is nothing more exhausting than such an unoccupied
life as ours. For what do we do, after all? His eyes are very heavy.
_Basta!_”
During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that
part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but
after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned
shield and rested her eyes for a while on Hyacinth. At last she said,
“Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something
to you that I can’t shout across the room.” Hyacinth instantly got up,
but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other,
they met half-way, before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood a
little, opening and closing her fan; then she remarked, “You must be
surprised at my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”
“No, indeed, I am not surprised at anything.”
“When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all,
become friends,” said the Princess.
“I hoped we were, already. Certainly, after the kindness you have shown
me, there is no service of friendship that you might ask of me—”
“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you are going to say,
and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do
me if, all the while, you think of me as a hollow-headed,
hollow-hearted trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and
oppressing you with her attentions? Perhaps you can think of me as—what
shall I call it?—as a kind of coquette.”
Hyacinth demurred. “That would be very conceited.”
“Surely, you have the right to be as conceited as you please, after the
advances I have made you! Pray, who has a better one? But you persist
in remaining humble, and that is very provoking.”
“It is not I that am provoking; it is life, and society, and all the
difficulties that surround us.”
“I am precisely of that opinion—that they are exasperating; that when I
appeal to you, frankly, candidly, disinterestedly—simply because I like
you, for no other reason in the world—to help me to disregard and
surmount these obstructions, to treat them with the contempt they
deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little, and make yourself
small, and try to edge out of the situation by pleading general
devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease to be
insignificant from the moment I have anything to do with you. My dear
fellow,” the Princess went on, in her free, audacious, fraternising
way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, “there are
people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of
obscurity.”
“What do you wish me to do?” Hyacinth asked, as quietly as he could.
If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his
lips, and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain
unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment,
he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant:
“I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends, in
general—all I ever asked of the best I have had. But none of them ever
did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has just
left us. She understood me long ago.”
“That’s all I, on my side, ask of you,” said Hyacinth, smiling. “Give
me time, give me time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.
“Dear Mr Hyacinth, I have given you mouths!—months since our first
meeting. And at present, haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been
intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans; I
know what I am saying. Don’t try to look stupid; you will never
succeed. I wished to leave you free to amuse yourself.”
“Oh, I have amused myself,” said Hyacinth.
“You would have been very fastidious if you hadn’t! However, that is
precisely, in the first place, what I wished you to come here for. To
observe the impression made by such a place as this on such a nature as
yours, introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure you,
quite worth my while. I have already given you a hint of how
extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having
seen—what shall I call them?—beautiful, delightful old things. I have
been watching you; I am frank enough to tell you that. I want you to
see more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed, with a sudden flicker of
passion. “And I want to talk with you about this matter, as well as
others. That will be for to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you are
going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little
imagination!”
Hyacinth shook his head, smiling. “I can’t stay!” He had an idea his
mind was made up.
She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching—it
was so sad, yet, as a rebuke, so gentle—in the tone in which she
replied, “You oughtn’t to force me to beg. It isn’t nice.”
He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed to
fall from under him, to liquefy. He remained a moment, looking on the
ground; then he said, “Princess, you have no idea—how should you
have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust
yourself. I have no money—I have no clothes.”
“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”
“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages; and I live on my wages
from day to day.”
“Let me, then, give you wages. You will work for me.”
“What do you mean—work for you?”
“You will bind all my books. I have ever so many foreign ones, in
paper.”
“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”
“No, I don’t imagine that. I will give you the wages now, and you can
do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then, if you
want anything, you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very
good shops; I have used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things
at this juncture; the Princess had that quickening effect upon him.
Among others, he thought of these two: first, that it was indelicate
(though such an opinion was not very strongly held either in
Pentonville or in Soho) to accept money from a woman; and second, that
it was still more indelicate to make such a woman as that go down on
her knees to him. But it took more than a minute for one of these
convictions to prevail over the other, and before that he had heard the
Princess continue, in the tone of mild, disinterested argument: “If we
believe in the coming democracy, if it seems to us right and just, and
we hold that in sweeping over the world the great wave will wash away a
myriad iniquities and cruelties, why not make some attempt, with our
own poor means—for one must begin somewhere—to carry out the spirit of
it in our lives and our manners? I want to do that. I try to do it—in
my relations with you, for instance. But you hang back; you are not
democratic!”
The Princess accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine
stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity enough (though he still
hesitated an instant, wondering whether the words would not offend her)
to say, with a smile, “I have been strongly warned against you.”
The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that. Of
course my proceedings—though, after all, I have done little enough as
yet—must appear most unnatural. _Che vuole?_ as Madame Grandoni says.”
A certain knot of light blue ribbon, which formed part of the trimming
of her dress, hung down, at her side, in the folds of it. On these
glossy loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and
he now took one of them up and carried it to his lips. “I will do all
the work for you that you will give me. If you give it on purpose, by
way of munificence, that is your own affair. I myself will estimate the
price. What decides me is that I shall do it so well; at least it shall
be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will
have been that reason. I have brought you a book—so you can see. I did
it for you last year, and went to South Street to give it to you, but
you had already gone.”
“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so
exclusively the calmness of relief at finding that he could be
reasonable, as well as that of a friendly desire to see the proof of
his talent, that he was surprised when she said, in the next breath,
irrelevantly, “Who was it warned you against me?”
He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the
plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady, and
reflecting that, as the likelihood was small that his friend in
Camberwell would ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her
plan of going there), no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in
London—Paul Muniment.”
“Paul Muniment?”
“I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.”
“The person who said something good? I forget what it was.”
“It was sure to be something good if he said it; he is very wise.”
“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about
me?”
“Oh, nothing, of course, except the little that I could tell him. He
only spoke on general grounds.”
“I like his name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he resembles
it, I think I should like him.”
“You would like him much better than me.”
“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I am determined to
keep hold of you, simply for what you can show me.” She paused a
moment, with her beautiful, intelligent eyes smiling into his own, and
then she continued, “On general grounds, _bien entendu_, your friend
was quite right to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I
have undertaken to make as small as possible. It is to reduce them to
nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as
I have done. What in the world is it I am trying to do but, by every
device that my ingenuity suggests, fill up the inconvenient gulf that
yawns between my position and yours? You know what I think of
‘positions’; I told you in London. For Heaven’s sake, let me feel that
I have—a little—succeeded!” Hyacinth satisfied her sufficiently to
enable her, five minutes later, apparently to entertain no further
doubt on the question of his staying over. On the contrary, she burst
into a sudden ebullition of laughter, exchanging her bright, lucid
insistence for one of her singular sallies. “You must absolutely go
with me to call on the Marchants; it will be too delightful to see you
there!”
As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room it occurred to him to
ask himself whether that was mainly what she was keeping him for—so
that he might help her to play one of her tricks on the good people at
Broome. He paced there, in the still candlelight, for a longer time
than he measured; until the butler came and stood in the doorway,
looking at him silently and fixedly, as if to let him know that he
interfered with the custom of the house. He had told the Princess that
what determined him was the thought of the manner in which he might
exercise his craft in her service; but this was only half the influence
that pressed him into forgetfulness of what he had most said to himself
when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of unprecedented introspection, he
wrote the letter by which he accepted the invitation to Medley. He
would go there (so he said) because a man must be gallant, especially
if he be a little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would
insist at every step upon knowing what he was in for. The change that
had taken place in him now, from one moment to another, was that he had
simply ceased to care what he was in for. All warnings, reflections,
considerations of verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the
possible, of the value of his independence, had become as nothing to
him. The cup of an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted
palace, a week of such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crookenden as
he had never dreamed of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of
novelty, of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without
drinking. He might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in
his mouth the taste of nectar. He went upstairs, under the eye of the
butler, and on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found
himself face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just
issued from her own apartment, the door of which stood open, near her;
she might have been hovering there in expectation of his footstep. She
had donned her dressing-gown, which appeared to give her every facility
for respiration, but she had not yet parted with her wig. She still had
her pink French book under her arm; and her fat little hands, tightly
locked together in front of her, formed the clasp of her generous
girdle.
“Do tell me it is positive, Mr Robinson!” she said, stopping short.
“What is positive, Madame Grandoni?”
“That you take the train in the morning.”
“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary,
it has been settled that I shall stay over. I am very sorry if it
distresses you—but _che vuole?_” Hyacinth added, smiling.
Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in
return; she only looked at him a moment, and then, shrugging her
shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.