Hyacinth found, this winter, considerable occupation for his odd hours,
his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in hand the
books which he had promised himself, at Medley, to inclose in covers
worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life (these
brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight), and of
the confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she
should receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in
thinking that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand
as specimens of rare work, while connoisseurs bent their heads over
them, smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention
stirred itself, and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he
sat up late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this
time his skill was of a very high order. Old Crookenden recognised it
by raising the rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among
the traditions of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to
the end wore the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches,
Hyacinth learned accidentally that several books that he had given him
to do had been carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the
villa, where they were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden
circle who came to tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself, indeed, was
included in this company on a great occasion—invited to a musical party
where he made the acquaintance of half a dozen Miss Crookendens, an
acquaintance which consisted in his standing in a corner, behind
several broad-backed old ladies, and watching the rotation, at the
piano and the harp, of three or four of his master’s thick-fingered
daughters. “You know it’s a tremendously musical house,” said one of
the old ladies to another (she called it ‘’ouse’); but the principal
impression made upon him by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was
that it was wonderfully different from the Princess’s playing.
He knew that he was the only young man from the shop who had been
invited, not counting the foreman, who was sixty years old and wore a
wig which constituted in itself a kind of social position, besides
being accompanied by a little frightened, furtive wife, who closed her
eyes, as if in the presence of a blinding splendour, when Mrs
Crookenden spoke to her. The Poupins were not there—which, however, was
not a surprise to Hyacinth, who knew that (even if they had been asked,
which they were not) they had objections of principle to putting their
feet _chez les bourgeois_. They were not asked because, in spite of the
place Eustache had made for himself in the prosperity of the business,
it had come to be known that his wife was somehow not his wife (though
she was certainly no one’s else); and the evidence of this irregularity
was conceived to reside, vaguely, in the fact that she had never been
seen save in a camisole. There had doubtless been an apprehension that
if she had come to the villa she would not have come with the proper
number of hooks and eyes, though Hyacinth, on two or three occasions,
notably the night he took the pair to Mr Vetch’s theatre, had been
witness of the proportions to which she could reduce her figure when
she wished to give the impression of a lawful tie.
It was not clear to him how the distinction conferred upon him became
known in Soho, where, however, it excited no sharpness of
jealousy—Grugan, Roker, and Hotchkin being hardly more likely to envy a
person condemned to spend a genteel evening than they were to envy a
monkey performing antics on a barrel-organ: both forms of effort
indicated an urbanity painfully acquired. But Roker took his young
comrade’s breath half away with his elbow and remarked that he supposed
he saw the old man had spotted him for one of the darlings at home;
inquiring, furthermore, what would become in that case of the little
thing he took to France, the one to whom he had stood champagne and
lobster. This was the first allusion Hyacinth had heard made to the
idea that he might some day marry his master’s daughter, like the
virtuous apprentice of tradition; but the suggestion, somehow, was not
inspiring, even when he had thought of an incident or two which gave
colour to it. None of the Miss Crookendens spoke to him—they all had
large faces and short legs and a comical resemblance to that elderly
male with wide nostrils, their father, and, unlike the Miss Marchants,
at Medley, they knew who he was—but their mother, who had on her head
the plumage of a cockatoo, mingled with a structure of glass beads,
looked at him with an almost awful fixedness and asked him three
distinct times if he would have a glass of negus.
He had much difficulty in getting his books from the Princess; for when
he reminded her of the promise she had given him at Medley to make over
to him as many volumes as he should require, she answered that
everything was changed since then, that she was completely
_dépouillée_, that she had now no pretension to have a library, and
that, in fine, he had much better leave the matter alone. He was
welcome to any books that were in the house, but, as he could see for
himself, these were cheap editions, on which it would be foolish to
expend such work as his. He asked Madame Grandoni to help him—to tell
him, at least, whether there were not some good volumes among the
things the Princess had sent to be warehoused; it being known to him,
through casual admissions of her own, that she had allowed her maid to
save certain articles from the wreck and pack them away at the
Pantechnicon. This had all been Assunta’s work, the woman had begged so
hard for a few reservations—a loaf of bread for their old days; but the
Princess herself had washed her hands of the business. “_Chè, chè_,
there are boxes, I am sure, in that place, with a little of
everything,” said the old lady, in answer to his inquiry; and Hyacinth
conferred with Assunta, who took a sympathetic, talkative, Italian
interest in his undertaking and promised to fish out for him whatever
worthy volumes should remain. She came to his lodging, one evening, in
a cab, with an armful of pretty books, and when he asked her where they
had come from waved her forefinger in front of her nose, in a manner
both mysterious and expressive. He brought each volume to the Princess,
as it was finished; but her manner of receiving it was to shake her
head over it with a kind, sad smile. “It’s beautiful, I am sure, but I
have lost my sense for such things. Besides, you must always remember
what you once told me, that a woman, even the most cultivated, is
incapable of feeling the difference between a bad binding and a good. I
remember your once saying that fine ladies had brought shoemaker’s
bindings to your shop, and wished them imitated. Certainly those are
not the differences I most feel. My dear fellow, such things have
ceased to speak to me; they are doubtless charming, but they leave me
cold. What will you have? One can’t serve God and mammon.” Her thoughts
were fixed on far other matters than the delight of dainty covers, and
she evidently considered that in caring so much for them Hyacinth
resembled the mad emperor who fiddled in the flames of Rome. European
society, to her mind, was in flames, and no frivolous occupation could
give the measure of the emotion with which she watched them. It
produced occasionally demonstrations of hilarity, of joy and hope, but
these always took some form connected with the life of the people. It
was the people she had gone to see, when she accompanied Hyacinth to a
music-hall in the Edgware Road; and all her excursions and pastimes,
this winter, were prompted by her interest in the classes on whose
behalf the revolution was to be wrought.
To ask himself whether she were in earnest was now an old story to him,
and, indeed, the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased
to have any practical relevancy. It was just as she was, superficial or
profound, that she held him, and she was, at any rate, sufficiently
animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences, actual and
possible. Some of these might be serious, even if she herself were not,
and there were times when Hyacinth was much visited by the apprehension
of them. On the Sundays that she had gone with him into the darkest
places, the most fetid holes, in London, she had always taken money
with her, in considerable quantities, and always left it behind. She
said, very naturally, that one couldn’t go and stare at people, for an
impression, without paying them, and she gave alms right and left,
indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgment, as simply as the abbess
of some beggar-haunted convent, or a lady-bountiful of the
superstitious, unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted
to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes
thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity
should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles
of economical science; partly because she was not a woman to be
directed and regulated—she could take other people’s ideas, but she
could never take their way. Besides, what did it matter? To himself,
what did it matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or
into wrong ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The
Princess was an embodied passion—she was not a system; and her
behaviour, after all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to
relieving others. And then misery was sown so thick in her path that
wherever her money was dropped it fell into some trembling palm. He
wondered that she should still have so much cash to dispose of, until
she explained to him that she came by it through putting her personal
expenditure on a rigid footing. What she gave away was her savings, the
margin she had succeeded in creating; and now that she had tasted of
the satisfaction of making little hoards for such a purpose she
regarded her other years, with their idleness and waste, their merely
personal motives, as a long, stupid sleep of the conscience. To do
something for others was not only so much more human, but so much more
amusing!
She made strange acquaintances, under Hyacinth’s conduct; she listened
to extraordinary stories, and formed theories about them, and about the
persons who narrated them to her, which were often still more
extraordinary. She took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex,
attempted to establish social relations with them, and was the cause of
infinite agitation to the gentleman who lived near her in the Crescent,
who was always smoking at the window, and who reminded Hyacinth of Mr
Micawber. She received visits that were a scandal to the Crescent, and
Hyacinth neglected his affairs, whatever they were, to see what
tatterdemalion would next turn up at her door. This intercourse, it is
true, took a more fruitful form as her intimacy with Lady Aurora
deepened; her ladyship practised discriminations which she brought the
Princess to recognise, and before the winter was over Hyacinth’s
services in the slums were found unnecessary. He gave way with relief,
with delight, to Lady Aurora, for he had not in the least understood
his behaviour for the previous four months, nor taken himself seriously
as a _cicerone_. He had plunged into a sea of barbarism without having
any civilising energy to put forth. He was conscious that the people
were miserable—more conscious, it often seemed to him, than they
themselves were; so frequently was he struck with their brutal
insensibility, a grossness impervious to the taste of better things or
to any desire for them. He knew it so well that the repetition of
contact could add no vividness to the conviction; it rather smothered
and befogged his impression, peopled it with contradictions and
difficulties, a violence of reaction, a sense of the inevitable and
insurmountable. In these hours the poverty and ignorance of the
multitude seemed so vast and preponderant, and so much the law of life,
that those who had managed to escape from the black gulf were only the
happy few, people of resource as well as children of luck; they
inspired in some degree the interest and sympathy that one should feel
for survivors and victors, those who have come safely out of a
shipwreck or a battle. What was most in Hyacinth’s mind was the idea,
of which every pulsation of the general life of his time was a
syllable, that the flood of democracy was rising over the world; that
it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; that, whatever
it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom a
magnificent energy; and that it might be trusted to look after its own.
When democracy should have its way everywhere, it would be its fault
(whose else?) if want and suffering and crime should continue to be
ingredients of the human lot. With his mixed, divided nature, his
conflicting sympathies, his eternal habit of swinging from one view to
another, Hyacinth regarded this prospect, in different moods, with
different kinds of emotion. In spite of the example Eustache Poupin
gave him of the reconcilement of disparities, he was afraid the
democracy wouldn’t care for perfect bindings or for the finest sort of
conversation. The Princess gave up these things in proportion as she
advanced in the direction she had so audaciously chosen; and if the
Princess could give them up it would take very transcendent natures to
stick to them. At the same time there was joy, exultation, in the
thought of surrendering one’s self to the wave of revolt, of floating
in the tremendous tide, of feeling one’s self lifted and tossed,
carried higher on the sun-touched crests of billows than one could ever
be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own. That vision could deepen to a
kind of ecstasy; make it indifferent whether one’s ultimate fate, in
such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to be submerged in
bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on resisting cliffs. Hyacinth
felt that, whether his personal sympathy should rest finally with the
victors or the vanquished, the victorious force was colossal and would
require no testimony from the irresolute.
The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations,
and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach
importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either
cause, but they were important for himself, if only because they would
rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual
laceration of the rebound. There was no peace for him between the two
currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate,
plebeian mother and that of his long-descended, supercivilised sire.
They continued to toss him from one side to the other; they arrayed him
in intolerable defiances and revenges against himself. He had a high
ambition: he wanted neither more nor less than to get hold of the truth
and wear it in his heart. He believed, with the candour of youth, that
it is brilliant and clear-cut, like a royal diamond; but in whatever
direction he turned in the effort to find it, he seemed to know that
behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face. The
thought of his mother had filled him, originally, with the vague,
clumsy fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but
since the problem had become more complex by the fact that many things
in the world as it was constituted grew intensely dear to him, he had
tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human countenance
for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and
recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation.
To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea had a kind of
shame in it, as an act of treachery would have had; for he could almost
hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct of a
gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of fanatics
and cads. He had got over thinking that it would not have become his
father to talk of what was proper to gentlemen, and making the mental
reflection that from him, at least, the biggest cad in London could not
have deserved less consideration. He had worked himself round to
allowances, to interpretations, to such hypotheses as the evidence in
the _Times_, read in the British Museum on that never-to-be-forgotten
afternoon, did not exclude; though they had been frequent enough, and
too frequent, his hours of hot resentment against the man who had
attached to him the stigma he was to carry for ever, he threw himself,
in other conditions, and with a certain success, into the effort to
find condonations, excuses, for him. It was comparatively easy for him
to accept himself as the son of a terribly light Frenchwoman; there
seemed a deeper obloquy even than that in his having for his other
parent a nobleman altogether wanting in nobleness. He was too poor to
afford it. Sometimes, in his imagination, he sacrificed one to the
other, throwing over Lord Frederick much the oftener; sometimes, when
the theory failed that his father would have done great things for him
if he had lived, or the assumption broke down that he had been
Florentine Vivier’s only lover, he cursed and disowned them alike;
sometimes he arrived at conceptions which presented them side by side,
looking at him with eyes infinitely sad but quite unashamed—eyes which
seemed to tell him that they had been hideously unfortunate but had not
been base. Of course his worst moments now, as they had always been the
worst, were those in which his grounds for thinking that Lord Frederick
had really been his father perversely fell away from him. It must be
added that they always passed, for the mixture that he felt himself so
tormentingly, so insolubly, to be could be accounted for in no other
manner.
I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial
degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the
Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were a
constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in any
view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and
December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster
and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamp-light and
tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his
heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London
had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered
away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which was
most his own lay round him under her pall, like an immeasurable
breathing monster, he felt, with a vague excitement, as he had felt
before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest
expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened,
but it was filled, again, by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and
strange blurred reflections and emanations into a sky without stars. He
suspended, as it were, his small sensibility in the midst of it, and it
quivered there with joy and hope and ambition, as well as with the
effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with
deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and
the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations
with the mistress of it were more organised than they had been in his
first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she
cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity,
it was better, at least, for Hyacinth. It made her more near and him
more free; and if there had been a danger of her nature seeming really
to take the tone of the vulgar things about her, he would only have had
to remember her as she was at Medley to restore the perspective. In
truth, her beauty always appeared to have the setting that best became
it; her fairness made the element in which she lived and, among the
meanest accessories, constituted a kind of splendour. Nature had
multiplied the difficulties in the way of her successfully representing
herself as having properties in common with the horrible populace of
London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his night-walks to
Paddington, or homeward; the populace of London were scattered upon his
path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised
to high participations. There were nights when every one he met
appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by
figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular,
were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled,
obscene. ‘What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but
annihilation?’ he asked himself, as he went his way; and he wondered
what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet
overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a
ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul
Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such
abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the
shame; for the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause
as well as the effect.
It did not occur to Hyacinth that the Princess had withdrawn her
confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still
further the condition of the poor, she placed herself in the hands of
Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had
too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her
knowledge, and her capacity to answer any question it could come into
the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness
of his own desultory and superficial attitude toward the great
question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira
Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve, and toward
which his steps could direct themselves, with an unalloyed sense of
security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the
time, in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that
doubtless did not literally characterise the scene. His relations with
the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the
world of fable; they were as natural as anything else (everything in
life was queer enough); he had by this time assimilated them, as it
were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. ‘Of
each’—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now
involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe
was, simply, very fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome
he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat
together like very old friends, whom long pauses, during which they
simply looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, could not make
uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part
of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a
great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times
almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken
for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy,
humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamp-light, and
interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences, all turning to
the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her
present existence that she was picnicking; but all the accidents of the
business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her
steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the
way she played with the cat, or looked after the fire, or folded Madame
Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all, in the inveteracy with which
she spent her evenings at home, never dining out nor going to parties,
ignorant of the dissipations of the town. There was something in the
isolation of the room, when the kettle was on the hob and he had given
his wet umbrella to the maid and the Princess made him sit in a certain
place near the fire, the better to dry his shoes—there was something
that evoked the idea of the _vie de province_, as he had read about it
in French works. The French term came to him because it represented
more the especial note of the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the
facility, of talk. She expressed herself often in the French tongue
itself; she could borrow that convenience, for certain shades of
meaning, though she had told Hyacinth that she didn’t like the people
to whom it was native. Certainly, the quality of her conversation was
not provincial; it was singularly free and unrestricted; there was
nothing one mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say
herself. She had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional
danger-posts. Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see
it—with which, in any direction, intellectually, she could fling open
her windows. There was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of
liberty and humility—in seeing a creature capable, socially, of
immeasurable flights sit dove-like, with folded wings.
The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent (her
days, like his own, were filled with work, and she came in the
evening), and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived
at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous
interest to each other, and each rejoiced that the other was not a bit
different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would give
her up—all nice people did, very soon; but to Hyacinth the end of her
ladyship’s almost breathless enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was
bewildered, but she was fascinated; and she thought the Princess not
only the most distinguished, the most startling, the most edifying and
the most original person in the world, but the most amusing and the
most delightful to have tea with. As for the Princess, her sentiment
about Lady Aurora was the same that Hyacinth’s had been: she thought
her a saint, the first she had ever seen, and the purest specimen
conceivable; as good in her way as St Francis of Assisi, as tender and
naïve and transparent, of a spirit of charity as sublime. She held that
when one met a human flower as fresh as that in the dusty ways of the
world one should pluck it and wear it; and she was always inhaling Lady
Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her and holding her hand. The
spinster was frightened at her generosity, at the way her imagination
embroidered; she wanted to convince her (as the Princess did on her own
side) that such exaggerations destroyed their unfortunate subject. The
Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way she put them on and wore
them, in the economies she practised in order to have money for charity
and the ingenuity with which these slender resources were made to go
far, in the very manner in which she spoke, a kind of startled
simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these particulars; to
learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her bonnets at the
same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves, to ask, in the
same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has got a
ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a French
milliner, and that if there was anything in the world she loathed it
was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected by
the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as she
was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her
friend.
One evening, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual,
Hyacinth met Lady Aurora on the doorstep, leaving the house. She had a
different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and
even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad
news. She said, “Oh, how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague
laugh; but she went her way, without stopping to talk.
Hyacinth, on going in, mentioned to the Princess that he had
encountered her, and this lady replied, “It’s a pity you didn’t come a
little sooner. You would have assisted at a scene.”
“At a scene?” Hyacinth repeated, not understanding what violence could
have taken place between mutual adorers.
“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well
meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I am going too far.”
“I imagine you tell her things that you don’t tell me,” said Hyacinth.
“Oh, you, my dear fellow!” the Princess murmured. She spoke
absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady
Aurora, and as if the futility of telling things to Hyacinth had become
a commonplace.
There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace
with her ‘views’ being quite extinct. The tone they now, for the most
part, took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging
commiseration for insanity on the one hand and benightedness on the
other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went to
fantastic lengths in the way of reaction; and it was their habit and
their entertainment to hurl all manner of denunciation at each other’s
head. They had given up serious discussion altogether, and when they
were not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities
I have mentioned, they talked of matters as to which it could not occur
to them to differ. There were evenings when the Princess did nothing
but relate her life and all that she had seen of humanity, from her
earliest years, in a variety of countries. If the evil side of it
appeared mainly to have been presented to her view, this did not
diminish the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her
power, the greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light pictorial,
dramatic evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him
hang on her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign
courts (he delighted to know how sovereigns lived and conversed), there
was often, for hours together, nothing to indicate that she would have
liked to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of
one. Nevertheless, his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to
what she was really doing in the dark and in what queer consequences
she might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to
know by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He
did so but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the
validity of his warrant; but on one occasion, when she challenged him,
he replied, smiling and hesitating, “Well, I must say, it seems to me
that, from what I have told you, it ought to strike you that I have a
title.”
“You mean your famous engagement, your vow? Oh, that will never come to
anything.”
“Why won’t it come to anything?”
“It’s too absurd, it’s too vague. It’s like some silly humbug in a
novel.”
“_Vous me rendez la vie!_” said Hyacinth, theatrically.
“You won’t have to do it,” the Princess went on.
“I think you mean I won’t do it. I have offered, at least; isn’t that a
title?”
“Well, then, you won’t do it,” said the Princess; and they looked at
each other a couple of minutes in silence.
“You will, I think, at the pace you are going,” the young man resumed.
“What do you know about the pace? You are not worthy to know!”
He did know, however; that is, he knew that she was in communication
with foreign socialists and had, or believed she had, irons on the
fire—that she held in her hand some of the strings that are pulled in
great movements. She received letters that made Madame Grandoni watch
her askance, of which, though she knew nothing of their contents and
had only her general suspicions and her scent for disaster, now become
constant, the old woman had spoken more than once to Hyacinth. Madame
Grandoni had begun to have sombre visions of the interference of the
police: she was haunted with the idea of a search for compromising
papers; of being dragged, herself, as an accomplice in direful plots,
into a court of justice—possibly into a prison. “If she would only
burn—if she would only burn! But she keeps—I know she keeps!” she
groaned to Hyacinth, in her helpless gloom. Hyacinth could only guess
what it might be that she kept; asking himself whether she were
seriously entangled, were being exploited by revolutionary Bohemians,
predatory adventurers who counted on her getting frightened at a given
moment and offering hush-money to be allowed to slip out (out of a
complicity which they, of course, would never have taken seriously); or
were merely coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap
sensations, discussing preliminaries which, for her, could have no
second stage. It would have been easy for Hyacinth to smile at the
Princess’s impression that she was ‘in it’, and to conclude that even
the cleverest women do not know when they are superficial, had not the
vibration remained which had been imparted to his nerves two years
before, of which he had spoken to his hostess at Medley—the sense,
vividly kindled and never quenched, that the forces secretly arrayed
against the present social order were pervasive and universal, in the
air one breathed, in the ground one trod, in the hand of an
acquaintance that one might touch, or the eye of a stranger that might
rest a moment upon one’s own. They were above, below, within, without,
in every contact and combination of life; and it was no disproof of
them to say it was too odd that they should lurk in a particular
improbable form. To lurk in improbable forms was precisely their
strength, and they would doubtless exhibit much stranger incidents than
this of the Princess’s being a genuine participant even when she
flattered herself that she was.
“You do go too far,” Hyacinth said to her, the evening Lady Aurora had
passed him at the door.
To which she answered, “Of course I do—that’s exactly what I mean. How
else does one know one has gone far enough? That poor, dear woman!
She’s an angel, but she isn’t in the least in it,” she added, in a
moment. She would give him no further satisfaction on the subject; when
he pressed her she inquired whether he had brought the copy of Browning
that he had promised the last time. If he had, he was to sit down and
read it to her. In such a case as this Hyacinth had no disposition to
insist; he was glad enough not to talk about the everlasting nightmare.
He took _Men and Women_ from his pocket, and read aloud for half an
hour; but on his making some remark on one of the poems, at the end of
this time he perceived the Princess had been paying no attention. When
he charged her with this levity she only replied, looking at him
musingly, “How _can_ one, after all, go too far? That’s a word of
cowards.”
“Do you mean her ladyship is a coward?”
“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions.
The way the English can go half-way to a thing, and then stick in the
middle!” the Princess exclaimed, impatiently.
“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me
that Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”
“We are all afraid of some things, and brave about others,” the
Princess went on.
“The thing Lady Aurora is most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,”
Hyacinth remarked.
His companion looked at him, but she did not take this up. “There is
one particular in which she would be very brave. She would marry her
friend—your friend—Mr Muniment.”
“Marry him, do you think?”
“What else, pray?” the Princess asked. “She adores the ground he walks
on.”
“And what would Belgrave Square, and Inglefield, and all the rest of
it, say?”
“What do they say already, and how much does it make her swerve? She
would do it in a moment; and it would be fine to see it, it would be
magnificent,” said the Princess, kindling, as she was apt to kindle, at
the idea of any great freedom of action.
“That certainly wouldn’t be a case of what you call sticking in the
middle,” Hyacinth rejoined.
“Ah, it wouldn’t be a matter of logic; it would be a matter of passion.
When it’s a question of that, the English, to do them justice, don’t
stick!”
This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth, and
he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung friend
should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her name, and
the few habits of gentility that survived in her life, of making
herself a scandal, a fable, and a nine days’ wonder, for Muniment’s
sake; the young chemist’s assistant being, to his mind, as we know,
exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures and
renunciations easy. But it was less clear to him what ideas Muniment
might have on the subject of a union with a young woman who should have
come out of her class for him. He would marry some day, evidently,
because he would do all the natural, human, productive things; but for
the present he had business on hand which would be likely to pass
first. Besides—Hyacinth had seen him give evidence of this—he didn’t
think people could really come out of their class; he held that the
stamp of one’s origin is ineffaceable and that the best thing one can
do is to wear it and fight for it. Hyacinth could easily imagine how it
would put him out to be mixed up, closely, with a person who, like Lady
Aurora, was fighting on the wrong side. “She can’t marry him unless he
asks her, I suppose—and perhaps he won’t,” he reflected.
“Yes, perhaps he won’t,” said the Princess, thoughtfully.