Transcriber’s Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

THE PRINCESS
CASAMASSIMA

BY
HENRY JAMES

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1921

COPYRIGHT
First published in 1886

BOOK THIRD

XXII

Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as he had scarce closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window made him dress as quickly as a young man might who desired more than ever that his appearance shouldn’t give strange ideas about him: an old garden with parterres in curious figures and little intervals of lawn that seemed 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, a moat, a quaint old pond (he hardly knew what to call it) and from the same standpoint showed a considerable part of the main body of the house—Hyacinth’s room belonging to a wing that commanded the extensive irregular back—which was richly grey wherever clear of the ivy and the other dense creepers, and everywhere infinitely 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, with all manner of antique patches and protrusions and with a particularly fascinating architectural excrescence where a wonderful clock-face was lodged, a clock-face covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years and the weather. He 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 unspeakably refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that consisted for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were tall quiet trees near by and afar off and everywhere; and the group of objects that greeted his eyes evidently formed only a corner of larger spaces and of a more complicated scene. There was a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting with the dew on it under his windows, and he must go down and take of it such possession as he might.

On his arrival at ten o’clock the night before 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 indoor cheer, in a front that lifted a range of vague grand effects 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 first as he sat at supper in a vast high hall with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should be treated: too blank for that his conception of the way in which, at a country-house, invidious distinctions might be made and shades of importance marked; but it was plain 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 automatic servant filled his glass with a liquor that reminded him of some lines of Keats in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley (he was vague about the seasons of this vocalist) and also if 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 save perhaps the aspect of the scant luggage attending the visitor from Lomax Place. Mr. Withers, however (it was this name Hyacinth heard used by the driver of his fly), had given 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 he puzzled him a good deal and even considered the question of giving him a precautionary glimpse of an identity that might be later on less fortunately betrayed. The object of this diplomacy 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 himself liking what he had feared. His impulse to deprecate services departed, he was already aware there were none he should care to miss or was not quite prepared for. He knew he had 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 had lain in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to ensure rest that it was naturally responsible in some degree for his want of ease, 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 he supposed, possibly without reason, to be of the finest and rarest. 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, lacking all the social dimensions, was scarce a perceptible person at all. 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 reflexion 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 an hour in 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 aspect and feeling every value, feasting on the whole expression and wondering if the Princess would observe his proceedings from a window and if 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 grey 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 favoured resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour.

A footman sought him out in the garden to tell him breakfast was served. 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 asked no questions, but when he had finished the butler came in to say that the Princess would see him after luncheon but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand the library to be all at his service. “After luncheon”—that threw the hour he had come for very far into the future, and it caused him some bewilderment that she should think it worth while to invite him to stay with her from Saturday evening to Monday morning only to let so much of his visit elapse without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor impatient; the impressions already crowding on him were in themselves a sufficient reward, and what could one do better precisely in such a house as that than wait for a wonderful lady? Mr. Withers conducted him to the library and left him planted in the middle of it and staring at the treasures he quickly and widely took in. 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 consciously appealed for recognition. 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. He had never imagined so many aids to correspondence and before he turned away had written a note to Millicent in a hand even nobler 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 heraldic-looking red 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 then put it back as quickly as his eye caught the next, which glowed with a sharper challenge. He came upon rare bindings and extracted precious hints—hints by which he felt himself perfectly capable of profiting. Altogether his vision of true happiness at this moment was that for a month or two he should be locked into the treasure-house of 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’m afraid they’re very dusty; in this house, you know, it’s the dust of centuries,” and, looking down, saw Madame Grandoni posted in the middle of the room. He instantly prepared to descend and greet her, but she exclaimed: “Stay, stay, if you’re 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,” he returned from his perch, rather dismayed at the “probably.”

“Natürlich,” said the old lady; “but people have come sometimes and gone away without seeing her. It all depends on 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 and 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 communicated a little in silence. Then she added: “Captain Sholto has come like that more than once and has gone away no better off.”

“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.

“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She retraced her course while he watched her, 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, moreover, descended the ladder. “There it is. She’s a capricciosa.”

“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked gravely. “You seem her friend, yet you say things not favourable to her.”

“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should ever say to you. I’m rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I ought to be particularly kind. But I’m not false. That’s not our German nature. You’ll 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’s of no use. At any rate here you are.”

“Yes, here I am decidedly!” Hyacinth uneasily laughed.

“And how long shall you stay? Pardon me if I ask that; it’s 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’re one of those types that ladies like. I can be sure of that—I like you myself. At my age—a hundred and twenty—can’t I 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’m not in the least against a young man’s taking a holiday, a little quiet recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued in her disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take one every five days; that’s no doubt too often. In Germany less often. In this country I can’t understand if it’s an increase of effort: the English Sunday’s so difficult! This one will 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 he went to open it for her. “I can say that because it’s not my house. I’m only here like you. And sometimes I think I also shall go to-morrow!”

“I imagine you’ve not, like me, your living to get every day. That’s reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.

She paused in the doorway with her expressive, ugly, kindly little eyes on his face. “I believe I’m nearly as poor as you. And I’ve not, like you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I’m noble,” said the old lady, shaking her wig.

“And I’m not!” Hyacinth deeply smiled.

“It’s better not to be lifted up high like our friend. It doesn’t give happiness.”

“Not to one’s self possibly; but to others!” From where they stood he looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted from above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflexion 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 him and he was conducted upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung with pictures, and ushered into a large bright saloon which he afterwards learned that his hostess used as a 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 without lifting her hands from the keys while the servant, as if he had just arrived, formally pronounced his name. 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 these holding great bowls of early flowers; littered over with books, newspapers, magazines, photographs of celebrities slashed across by 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.” He did so 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 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 so friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her occupation nor offered him her hand, that he at last sank back in his seat 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 to have already so mild and wise an intention. 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 on 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, but 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 all the forces of that power and depths of that mystery; of every element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and tone that contributed to charm. Therefore even if he had appreciated less the strange harmonies the Princess drew from her instrument and her genius 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 and as simply as a young girl. Before she ceased playing she asked him 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 him. “It’s probable that’s 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’ve never seen a park nor a garden nor any of the beauties of nature and that sort of thing?” The allusion was to something gravely stated in his letter when he answered the note by which she proposed to him to run down to Medley, and after he had assured her it was perfectly true she exclaimed: “I’m so glad—I’m so glad! I’ve never been able to show any one anything new and have always felt I should like it—especially with a fine sensitive mind. Then you will come and drive with me?” She spoke as if this would be a great favour.

That was the beginning of the communion—so strange considering their respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy, and it passed into some singular phases. The Princess had an extraordinary way of taking things for granted, of ignoring difficulties, of assuming that her preferences might be translated into fact. After her guest 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 regular 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 by M. Octave Feuillet (she should be so curious to know what he thought of it); to reappear later with dark hat and clear parasol, drawing on fresh loose gloves and offering 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 him; so she turned aside and took him through it, up and down and everywhere, even into the vast old-fashioned kitchen where they found 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 how it was in the same 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, sometimes confounded, were quite distinct) where a horrible figure at certain times made its appearance—a dwarfish ghost with an enormous head, a dispossessed eldest brother of long ago 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 if I’m religious or whether if I were my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m faithful to.” 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 he should find more comfortable.

At last they came out of the house together and while they went she explained, 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 her only two allusions as yet to her infatuation with the “cause”; but it fell very happily, for Hyacinth had not been unconscious of 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 tragi-comical to think of the Princess’s having retired to a private paradise to think out the problem of the slums. He listened therefore with great attention while she made all conscientiously the point that she had taken the house only for 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 too soon 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. One had to keep one’s things somewhere, and why wasn’t that as good a dépôt 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 any convenience. Hyacinth, for whom his three hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not been struck with its geographic remoteness, and he asked the Princess what she meant in such a connexion by her use of the word “wretched.” To this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, impossible in every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That’s the only reason I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me so sunk in luxury 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 saw 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 might have 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; it had straight walks bordered with old-fashioned homely flowers and enclosing 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 crowned 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, groups who drank tea while they sat on the floor. It also contained a straddling inlaid cabinet in which cups and saucers showed valuably through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf over a sofa which was not very comfortable, though it had cushions of faded tapestry that resembled samplers, stood 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 till she all ruefully remembered he had not had his luncheon. He protested that this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared she hadn’t dragged 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 at his waking. When he 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 gravely and kindly, as if considering an abstract idea, and then 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 reflexion 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 it might take a form less cursory than the words she had just uttered, a form that would make it embarrassing. She was less solemn, less explicit, than Madame Grandoni had been, but there was something in her light fine pressure and the particular tone of her mentioned preference 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 through the rain, in the 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 she directed the conversation; she seemed 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. He at all events, if he had been with the dukes—she didn’t call her associates dukes, but he was sure they were of that order—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 dreary,” she said; and Hyacinth turned this over, feeling 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 it dubbed grossly profligate, but he was rather disappointed in the bad account the Princess gave of it. She dropped the remark that she herself had no sort of conventional morality—she ought to have mentioned that before—yet had never been accused of being stupid. Perhaps he wouldn’t discover it, but most of the people she had had to do with thought her only too acute. The second allusion 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’ve been here now a year and a half and, as I tell you, I feel I’ve seen. It’s 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 the Roman world 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 vague after all in her animadversions and regaled him with no anecdotes—which indeed he rather missed—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 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’s 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’s 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’s that?”

“In Camberwell.”

“And who lives there?”

“A young woman I was calling on, who’s bedridden.”

“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lady Lydia Languish?—goes to see her?”

“Yes, very often.”

The Princess, with her eyes on him, had a pause. “Will you take me there?”

“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the man—the one who works for a big firm of wholesale chemists—that you’ll perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”

“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I’m sorry, you know,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth asked what she might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, only soon saying: “Perhaps she goes to see him.”

“Goes to see whom?”

“The young chemist—the brother.” She said this very seriously.

“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth returned, laughing. “But she’s a fine sort of woman.”

The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again wanted to know 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 you’ve encountered.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you don’t make an impression on me.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking you might be less fresh than I first thought.”

“Of course I don’t know what you first thought,” Hyacinth smiled.

“No; how should you?” the Princess strangely sighed.

XXIII

He was in the library after luncheon when word was brought him that the carriage was at the door for their drive; and when he entered the hall he found Madame Grandoni bonneted and cloaked and awaiting the descent of their friend. “You see I go with you. I’m 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’re different from me; this will be the first I’ve 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 mightn’t 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 her wont: “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve not spent your life in carriages. They’ve 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 (their hostess mentioned that it had been let with the house), which rolled ponderously and smoothly along the winding avenue and through the gilded park-gates that were surmounted with an immense escutcheon. The progress of this apparently mismatched trio had a high respectability, and that is one of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion intensely 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 should never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and comprehensive, but little was said while it lasted. “I shall show you the whole country: it’s exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the heart.” Of so much as this his entertainer had informed him at the start; and she added with all her foreignness and with a light allusive nod at the rich humanised landscape: “Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre.” For the rest she sat there fronting him in quiet fairness and under her softly-swaying lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she noticed his eyes rest; 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 a cadence as soft as a hand-stroke. Madame Grandoni dozed most of the time, her chin resting on the rather mangy ermine tippet in which she had enveloped herself; expanding into consciousness at moments, however, to greet the scenery with comfortable confused ejaculations in the first language that came into her head. If Hyacinth was uplifted during these delightful hours he at least measured his vertiginous eminence, and it kept him quite solemnly still, as with the fear that a wrong movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain to fall on the play. This was especially the case when his sensibility swung 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, well before him, as completely for his benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to paint her portrait. More than once he saw everything through a strange 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 one approach to a “cut” 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 he was able to make the reflexion 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 of every sort he had no call to mind it himself. His present position wasn’t of his seeking—it had been forced on him; it wasn’t 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 on society, the false and conventional society she had sounded and she despised—was manifest from the way she had introduced him to the group 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 had then 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 that 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 made out 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, on consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country, to come a second time. The talk in the firelight, while our youth 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 put poor Lady Marchant, as the phrase might be, through her paces. With great urbanity of manner she appealed for the explanation of everything, and especially of her ladyship’s own thin remarks and of the sense in which they had been meant; so that Hyacinth was scarce able to follow her, wondering 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 on 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 and “went in”? 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. He 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 choose how to treat him. This was the first time a young gentlewoman hadn’t 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 who earns 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 dim passage of his fate where responsibilities had dropped. 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 licence 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 multiplied mild 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, rousing 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 lifted voice might have done. The Princess, buried in a deep chair, listened behind her fan. Hyacinth at least supposed she listened, for she never moved. At last Madame Grandoni left the piano and came to 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 as she stood looking at him.

“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’ll have left the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to gentlemen without it. I’ve 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 earnestly beg you. I must put myself into my dressing-gown; at my age, at this hour, it’s 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. “Don’t sit up late,” she added, “and don’t keep him, Christina. Remember that for an active young man like Mr. Robinson, going every day to his work, there’s 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 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.” He immediately got up, but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other, they met half-way and before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood opening and closing her fan, then she began: “You must be surprised at my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”

“No indeed: I’m not now 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’ve shown me there’s no service of friendship you might ask of me——!”

“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you’re 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 clumsy attentions? Perhaps you believe me a bad, bold, ravening flirt.”

“Capable of wanting to flirt with me?” Hyacinth demurred. “I should be very conceited.”

“Surely you’ve the right to be as conceited as you please after the advances I’ve made you! Pray who has a better one? But you persist in remaining humble, and that’s very provoking.”

“It’s not I who am provoking; it’s life and society and all the difficulties that surround us.”

“I’m precisely of that opinion—that they’re 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 conventions and absurdities, 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’ve 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 then 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’ve ever 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 with a smile, as to attest presence of mind, that might have come from some flushed young captive under cross-examination for his life. “Give me time, give me time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.

“Dear Mr. Hyacinth, I’ve given you months!—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’m saying. Don’t try to look stupid; with your beautiful intelligent face you’ll never succeed. I wished to leave you free to amuse yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve amused myself,” said Hyacinth.

“You’d have been very fastidious if you hadn’t. However, that’s precisely in the first place what I wished you to come here for. To observe the impression made by such a house 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’ve 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’ve been watching you; I’m frank enough to tell you that. I want you to see more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed with a sudden emphasis that, had he heard her use it to another, he would have taken for a passion of tenderness. “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’re going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little imagination!”

He shook his head with a pale grin and had an idea his mind was made up. “I can’t stay.”

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 make me too abject. It isn’t nice.”

He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed to fall from under him and crumble. He remained a moment looking on the ground. “Princess,” he then said, “you’ve no idea—how should you have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust yourself. I’ve no money—I’ve no clothes.”

“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”

“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages. I live on my wages from day to day.”

“Let me then give you wages. You’ll work for me.”

“What do you mean—work for you?”

“You’ll bind all my books. I’ve ever so many foreign ones in paper.”

“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”

“No, I don’t imagine that. I’ll 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’ve used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things at this juncture; she had that quickening effect on 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 his friend 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 ridiculously back. You’re really not a bit democratic!”

Her accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity (though he still hesitated an instant, wondering if the words wouldn’t offend her) to say straightforwardly enough: “I’ve 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’ve 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 up one of them and carried it to his lips. “I’ll do all the work for you that you’ll give me. If you give it on purpose and by way of munificence that’s your own affair. I myself will estimate the price. What decides me is that I shall do the job so well; certainly it shall be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will have been at least that reason. I’ve 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 he could be reasonable, as well as a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he was surprised when in the next breath she said 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 how, 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’s awfully wise.”

“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about me?”

“Oh nothing of course but the little I could tell him. He only spoke on general grounds.”

“I like his odd name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he resembles it I think I should like him.”

“You’d like him much better than me.”

“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I’m determined to keep hold of you simply for what you can show me.” She paused a moment with her beautiful deep eyes lighted as by possibilities that half dazzled and half defied him; then again her wondrous words took it up. “On general grounds, bien entendu, your friend was quite right to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I’ve undertaken to make as small as possible. It’s to reduce them to nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I’ve done. What in the world is it I’m trying to do but by every clever trick I can think of fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my position and yours? You know what I make of ‘positions’—I told you in London. For heaven’s sake let me feel that I’ve—a little—succeeded!” He 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 explosion of laughter, replacing her argumentative pressure by one of her singular sallies. “You must absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants. It will be lovely to see you there!”

As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room after she had a trifle abruptly and, as struck him, almost unceremoniously and inconsequently left him, it occurred to him to wonder if 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 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, he reasoned, because a man must be gallant, especially if he be a poor little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would insist at every step on 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 wonder what that mystery might be. All warnings, reflexions, 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 Crook as he had never dreamed of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of romance, of reality, 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 at watch for his footstep. She had donned her dressing-gown, which seemed to give her all respiratory and other ease, but 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’s positive, Mr. Robinson!” she said as she stopped short.

“What’s 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 I shall stay over. I’m very sorry if it distresses you—but che vuole?” he heard himself almost “cheekily” risk.

Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in return; she only looked at him hard a moment and then, shrugging her shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.

XXIV

“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He’s Diedrich Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly the next morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes on Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed he should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him how her venerable friend had, while the day was still very young, pronounced it in the worst possible taste that she shouldn’t let their companion yet depart in peace; to which she had replied that about tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before without any one’s being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about him—of all thankless subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than this of arranging one’s relations with people; and he guessed how thoroughly she meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her side then there was as little possibility as on his that they should ever quarrel: their acquaintance would be a grand friendship or would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this quality, and it may be figured how safe her guest felt by the time he began to tell her that something had happened to him in London three months before, one night, or rather in the small hours of the morning, that had altered his life altogether—had indeed as he might say changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.

The Princess had led to this almost as soon as they left the house; making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying suddenly: “Now tell me what’s going on among your friends. I don’t mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers. Où en êtes-vous at the present time? Is there anything new, is anything going to be done? I’m afraid you’re always simply dawdling and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if of late he had by no means either dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to refute the imputation she broke out with a different effect: “How annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the right to say to yourself, ‘After all what do I know? Mayn’t she be in the pay of the police—?’”

“Oh that doesn’t occur to me,” Hyacinth gallantly protested.

“It might at all events; by which I mean it may at any moment. Indeed I think it ought.”

“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head about me.”

“I should make you think that certainly! That would be my first care. However, if you’ve no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the scenes.

In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he was sure he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wrong side—he didn’t open himself immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted he said: “I pledged myself by everything that’s sacred.”

“To what did you pledge yourself?”

“I took a vow—a tremendous solemn vow—in the presence of four witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.

“And what was it about, your vow?”

“I gave my life away,” he consciously smiled.

She looked at him askance as if to see how he would indeed carry off such a statement as that; but she betrayed no levity of criticism—her face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance in silence, and then she said: “Ah well then I’m all the more glad you stayed!”

“That was one of the reasons.”

“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” it occurred to her, however, to remark.

“Why till after I had been here?”

“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have seen reasons for keeping it.” With which, like Hyacinth, she sacrificed to the brighter bravery. He replied that he had not the least doubt that on the whole her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and he related what had happened at the place known to him in Bloomsbury and during that night of which I have given some account. The Princess listened intently while they strolled under the budding trees with a more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day or naked in some grey November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences since the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy slopes and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things our young man mentioned that he didn’t go to the “Sun and Moon” any more; he now perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this particular temple of their faith, with everything that pretended to get hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff from the first to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of his in whom he had confidence appeared to set him the example; but now it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again by the way) had always thought the men who went there a pack of shufflers and was trying them only to try everything. There was nobody you could begin to call a first-rate man, putting aside another friend of his, a Frenchman named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent but wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth had a standard now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation of a strong plan. You felt him a big chap the very moment you came into his presence.

“Into whose presence, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess demanded.

“I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I’m speaking of the extraordinary man with whom I entered into that engagement.”

“To give away your life?”

“To do something that in a certain contingency he’ll require of me. He’ll require my poor little carcass.”

“Those ‘strong’ plans have a way of failing—unfortunately,” the Princess murmured, adding the last word more quickly.

“Is that a consolation or a regret?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shan’t fail—so far as depends on me. They wanted an obliging young man. Well, the place was vacant and I stepped in.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re right. We must pay for all we do.” She noted this hard law calmly and coldly and then said: “I think I know the person in whose power you’ve placed yourself.”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“You can’t believe I’ve already gone so far? Why not? I’ve given you a certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back.”

“Well, if you know my friend you’ve gone very far indeed.”

The Princess appeared on the point of pronouncing a name; but she checked herself and said instead, suddenly eager: “Don’t they also want by chance an obliging young woman?”

“I happen to know he doesn’t think much of women, my first-rate man. He doesn’t trust them.”

“Is that why you call him first-rate? You’ve very nearly betrayed him to me.”

“Do you imagine there’s only one of that opinion?” Hyacinth returned.

“Only one who, having it, still remains a superior man. That’s a very difficult opinion to reconcile with others it’s important to have.”

“Schopenhauer did so, successfully,” said Hyacinth.

“How delightful you should know old Schopenhauer!” the Princess exclaimed. “The gentleman I have in my eye is also German.” Hyacinth let this pass, not challenging her, because he wished not to be challenged in return, and she went on: “Of course such an engagement as you speak of must make a tremendous difference in everything.”

“It has made this difference, that I’ve now a far other sense from any I had before of the reality, the solidity, of what’s being prepared. I was hanging about outside, on the steps of the temple, among the loafers and the gossips, but now I’ve been in the innermost sanctuary. Yes, I’ve seen the holy of holies.”

“And it’s very dazzling?”

“Ah Princess!” the young man strangely sighed.

“Then it is real, it is solid?” she pursued. “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to make up my mind about so long.”

“It’s beyond anything I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there’s an immense underworld peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it’s organised is what astonished me. I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all society lives. People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil,’ and generations rot away and starve in the midst of it, and day follows day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds. All that’s one half of it; the other half is that everything’s doomed! In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is complete there will be a great rehearsal. That rehearsal is what they want me for. The invisible, impalpable wires are everywhere, passing through everything, attaching themselves to objects in which one would never think of looking for them. What could be more strange and incredible for instance than that they should exist just here?”

“You make me believe it,” said the Princess thoughtfully.

“It matters little whether one believes it or not!”

“You’ve had a vision,” she continued.

“Pardieu, I’ve had a vision! So would you, if you had been there.”

“I wish I had!” she declared in a tone charged with such ambiguous implications that Hyacinth, catching them a moment after she had spoken, rejoined with a quick, incongruous laugh—

“No, you’d have spoiled everything. He made me see, he made me feel, he made me do, everything he wanted.”

“And why should he have wanted you in particular?”

“Simply because I struck him as the right person. That’s his affair: I can’t tell you. When he meets the right person he chalks him. I sat on the bed. There were only two chairs in the dirty little room and by way of curtain his overcoat was hung up before the window. He himself didn’t sit; he leaned against the wall straight in front of me, his hands behind him. He told me certain things and his manner was extraordinarily quiet. So was mine, I think I may say; and indeed it was only poor Poupin who made a row. It was for my sake somehow: he didn’t think we were all conscious enough; he wanted to call attention to my sublimity. There was no sublimity about it—I simply couldn’t help myself. He and the other German had the two chairs and Muniment sat on a queer old, battered, hair-covered trunk, a most foreign-looking article.” Hyacinth had taken no notice of the little ejaculation with which his companion greeted in this last sentence the word “other.”

“And what did Mr. Muniment say?” she presently asked.

“Oh he said it was all right. Of course he thought so from the moment he determined to bring me. He knew what the other fellow was looking for.”

“I see.” Then the Princess added: “We’ve a curious way of being fond of you.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”

“Your friends. Mr. Muniment and I for instance.”

“I like it as well as any other. But you don’t feel alike. I’ve an idea you yourself are sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“That I’ve put my head into a noose.”

“Ah you’re rather snubby—I thought I concealed it so well!” the Princess cried. He recognised that his discrimination had been invidious, as there might have been for an instant a hint of tears in her voice. She looked away from him, and it was after this that, stopping short, she remarked as I have related: “Your man’s Diedrich Hoffendahl.”

Hyacinth took it with a stare and parted lips. “Well, you are in it—more than I supposed!”

“You know he doesn’t trust women,” his companion smiled.

“Why in the world should you have cared for any light I can throw if you’ve ever been in relation with him?”

She hesitated a little. “Oh you’re very different. I like you better,” she added.

“Ah if it’s for that!” murmured Hyacinth.

The Princess coloured as he had seen her colour before, and in this liability on her part there was even after repetition an unexpectedness, something all too touching. “Don’t try to fix my inconsistencies on me,” she said with a humility that matched her blush. “Of course there are plenty of them, but it will always be kinder of you to let them pass. Besides, in this case they’re not so serious as they seem. As a product of the ‘people’ and of that strange fermenting underworld (what you say of it’s so true!) you interest me more and have more to say to me even than Hoffendahl—wonderful creature as he assuredly is.”

“Would you object to telling me how and where you came to know him?” her visitor asked.

“Through a couple of friends of mine in Vienna, two of the affiliated, both passionate revolutionists and clever men. They’re Neapolitans, originally poveretti like yourself, who emigrated years ago to seek their fortune. One of them’s a teacher of singing, the wisest, most accomplished person in his line I’ve ever known. The other, if you please, is a confectioner! He makes the most delicious pâtisserie fine. It would take long to tell you how I made their acquaintance and how they put me into relation with the Maestro, as they called him, of whom they spoke with bated breath. It’s not from yesterday—though you don’t seem able to believe it—that I’ve had a care for these interests. I wrote to Hoffendahl and had several letters from him; the singing-master and the pastry-cook went bail for my sincerity. The next year I had an interview with him at Wiesbaden; but I can’t tell you the circumstances of our meeting in that place without implicating another person to whom just now at least I’ve no right to give you a clue. Of course Hoffendahl made an immense impression on me; he struck me as the Master indeed, the very genius of a new social order, and I fully understand the manner in which you were affected by him. When he was in London three months ago I knew it and knew where to write to him. I did so and asked him if he wouldn’t see me somewhere. I said I’d meet him anywhere, in any darkness, if it should have to be, that he might designate. He answered by a charming letter which I’ll show you—it has nothing in the least compromising—but declined my offer, pleading his short stay and a press of engagements. He’ll write to me but won’t trust me. However, he shall some day!”

Hyacinth was thrown quite off his balance by this representation of the ground the Princess had already traversed, and the explanation was still but half restorative when, on his asking her why she hadn’t exhibited her titles before, she replied: “Well, I thought my being quiet was the better way to draw you out.” There was but little difficulty in drawing him out now, and before their walk was over he had told her more definitely what Hoffendahl demanded. This was simply that he should hold himself ready for the next five years to do at a given moment an act which would in all probability cost him his life. The act was as yet indefinite, but one might get an idea of it from the penalty involved, which would certainly be capital. The only thing settled was that it was to be done instantly and absolutely, without a question, a condition or a scruple, in the manner that should be prescribed at the moment from headquarters. Very likely it would be to shoot some one—some blatant humbug in a high place; but whether the individual should deserve it or shouldn’t deserve it was not to be one’s affair. If he recognised generally Hoffendahl’s wisdom—and the other night it had seemed to shine like a great cold, splendid, northern aurora—it was not in order that he might challenge it in the particular case. He had taken a vow of blind obedience, the vow as of the Jesuit fathers to the head of their order. It was because the Jesuits had carried out their vows (having in the first place great administrators) that their organisation had been mighty, and this sort of mightiness was what people who felt as Hyacinth and the Princess felt should go in for. It was not certain sure he should be bagged after his coup any more than it was certain sure he should bring down his man; but it was much to be looked for and was what he counted on and indeed preferred. He should probably take little trouble to save his skin, and he should never enjoy the idea of dodging or hiding or disavowing. If it were a question of really placing his bullet he himself should naturally deserve what would come to him. If one did that sort of thing there was an indelicacy in not being ready to pay for it, and he at least was perfectly willing. He shouldn’t judge, he should simply execute. He didn’t pretend to say what good his little job might do or what portée it might have; he hadn’t the data for appreciating it and simply took upon himself to believe that at headquarters they knew what they were about. The thing was to be part of a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure the scope—something that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen different countries. The impression was to be very much in this immense coincidence. It was to be hoped it wouldn’t be spoiled by any muffing. At all events he wouldn’t hang fire, whatever the other fellows might do. He didn’t say it because Hoffendahl had done him the honour of giving him the business to do, but he believed the Master knew how to pick out his men. To be sure they had known nothing about him in advance; he had only been suggested from one day to the other by those who were always looking out. The fact remained, however, that when Hyacinth stood before him he recognised him as the sort of little chap he had in his eye—one who could pass through a very small opening. Humanity, in his scheme, was classified and subdivided with a truly German thoroughness and altogether of course from the point of view of the revolution—as it might forward or obstruct that cause. Hyacinth’s little job was a very small part of what Hoffendahl had come to England for; he had in his hand innumerable other threads. Hyacinth knew nothing of these and didn’t much want to know, except for the portentous wonder of the way Hoffendahl kept them apart. He had exactly the same mastery of them that a great musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of the piano; he treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so many notes in his great symphonic massacre. The day would come when—far down in the treble—one would feel one’s self touched by the little finger of the composer, would grow generally audible (with a small sharp crack) for a second.

It was impossible that our young man shouldn’t become aware at the end of ten minutes that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention: she was listening to him as she had never listened before. He enjoyed that high effect on her, and his sense of the tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by his hearing himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present anything in the line of enjoyment, any scrap filched from the feast of life, was so much gained for eager young experience. The reader may judge if he had held his breath and felt his heart-beats after placing himself on his new footing of utility in the world; but that emotion had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture—through an exaltation which alternated with despair and which, equally with the despair, he concealed more successfully than he supposed. He would have detested the idea that his companion might have heard his voice tremble while he told his story; but though to-day he had really grown used to his danger and resigned, as it were, to his consecration, and though it couldn’t fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that, like some famous novel, he was thrilling, he still couldn’t guess how very remarkable, in such a connexion, the Princess thought his composure, his lucidity, his good humour. It is true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it to her self-respect to let it still appear that even such a one as she was prepared for a personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she endeavoured to have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted for himself; nevertheless there was something rather forced in the smile (lovely as it might be) with which she covered him while she said after a little: “It’s very serious—it’s very serious indeed, isn’t it?” He replied that the serious part was to come—there was no particular grimness for him (comparatively) in strolling in that fine park and gossiping with her about the matter; and it occurred to her presently to suggest to him that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign at all, so that he might wait, all the while sur les dents, in a false suspense. He admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that either way he should be sold, though differently; and that at any rate he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last.

“In holiness, you mean—in great recueillement?” the Princess asked.

“Oh dear no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every good minute that’s added.”

“Ah well, there will probably be a great many good minutes,” she returned.

“The more the better—if they’re as good as this one.”

“That won’t be the case with many of them in Lomax Place.”

“I assure you that since that night Lomax Place has improved.” Hyacinth stood there smiling, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back.

The Princess appeared to consider this quaint truth, as well as the charming facts of his appearance and attitude, with an extreme intellectual curiosity. “If after all then you’re not called you’ll have been positively happy.”

“I shall have had some fine moments. Perhaps Hoffendahl’s plot is simply for that: Muniment may have put him up to it!”

“Who knows? However, with me you must go on as if nothing were changed.”

“Changed from what?”

“From the time of our first meeting at the theatre.”

“I’ll go on in any way you like,” said Hyacinth. “Only the real difference will be there, you know.”

“The real difference?”

“That I shall have ceased to care for what you care for.”

“I don’t understand,” she confessed with all the candour of her beauty.

“Isn’t it enough now to give my life to the beastly cause,” the young man broke out, “without giving my sympathy?”

“The beastly cause?” the Princess murmured, opening her deep eyes.

“Of course it’s really just as holy as ever; only the people I find myself pitying now are the rich, the happy.”

“I see. You’re very remarkable. You’re splendid. Perhaps you pity my husband,” she added in a moment.

“Do you call him one of the happy?” Hyacinth inquired as they walked on again.

But she only repeated: “You’re very remarkable. Yes, you’re splendid.”

To which he made answer: “Well, it’s what I want to be!”

I have related the whole of this conversation because it supplies a highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but we may not take time to trace all the stages and reproduce all the passages through which the friendship of the Princess Casamassima with the young man she had constituted her bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the standard of fitness she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties appeared the model of justice and convenience; and during this period, a season of strange revelations for our young man, many other things happened. One of them was that he drove over to Broome with his hostess and called on Lady Marchant and her daughters; an episode that appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee. When they came away he asked her why she hadn’t told the ladies who he was. Otherwise where was the point? And she replied: “Simply because they wouldn’t have believed me. That’s your fault!” This was the same note she had struck when the third day of his stay (the weather had changed for the worse and a rainy afternoon kept them indoors) she remarked to him irrelevantly and abruptly: “It is most extraordinary, your knowing poor dear old ‘Schop’!” He answered that she really seemed quite unable to accustom herself to his little talents; and this led to a long talk, longer than the one I have already narrated, in which he took her still further into his confidence. Never had the pleasure of conversation, the greatest he knew, been so largely opened to him. The Princess admitted frankly that he would to her sense take a great deal of accounting for; she observed that he was, no doubt, pretty well used to himself, but must give stupider persons time. “I’ve watched you constantly since you came—in every detail of your behaviour—and I’m more and more intriguée. You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the poor cramped hole you’ve described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life. You’re much better than if you had! Jugez donc, from the way I talk to you! I’ve to make no allowances—not one little allowance. I’ve seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and ease, but I didn’t know it was ever to be found in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it hadn’t been cultivated at a vast expense; unless perhaps in certain horribly ‘refined’ little American women.”

“Do you mean I’m a gentleman?” asked Hyacinth in a peculiar tone while he looked out into the wet garden.

She faltered and then said: “It’s I who make the mistakes!” Five minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy, putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. “Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you’re constituted, to be conscious of the capacity you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!”

“Every class has its pleasures,” he made answer with perverse sententiousness in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn’t darken their mutual intelligence, which was to expand to still greater wonders, and before they separated that evening he told her the things that had never yet passed his lips—the things to which he had awaked when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the prison. He told her in short what he was.

XXV

He took several long walks by himself beyond the gates of the park and through the neighbouring country—walks during which, committed as he was to reflexion on the general “rumness” of his destiny, he had still a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields; the hedges thick with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew no names, the picture-making power of thatched cottages, the mystery and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of rural complexions, the quaintness of little girls bobbing curtsies by waysides (a sort of homage he had never prefigured); the soft sense of the turf under feet that had never ached but from paving-stones. One morning as he had his face turned homeward after a long stroll he heard behind him the sound of a horse’s hoofs and, looking back, perceived a gentleman who would presently pass him advancing up the road which led to the lodge-gates of Medley. He went his way and as the horse overtook him noticed that the rider slackened pace. Then he turned again and recognised in this personage his occasional florid friend Captain Sholto. The Captain pulled up alongside of him, saluting him with a smile and a movement of the whip-handle. Hyacinth stared with surprise, not having heard from the Princess that she was expecting him. He gathered, however, in a moment that she was not; and meanwhile he received an impression on Sholto’s part of riding-gear that was “knowing”—of gaiters and spurs and a hunting-crop and a curious waistcoat; perceiving this to be a phase of the Captain’s varied nature that he had not yet had occasion to observe. He struck him as very high in the air, perched on his big lean chestnut, and Hyacinth noticed that if the horse was heated the rider was cool.

“Good-morning, my dear fellow. I thought I should find you here!” the Captain exclaimed. “It’s a good job I’ve met you this way without having to go to the house.”

“Who gave you reason to think I was here?” Hyacinth asked; partly occupied with the appositeness of this inquiry and partly thinking, as his eyes wandered over his handsome friend bestriding so handsome a beast, what a jolly thing it would be to know how to ride. He had already, during the few days he had been at Medley, had time to observe that the knowledge of luxury and the wider range of sensation begot in him a taste for still bolder pleasures.

“Why, I knew the Princess was capable of asking you,” Sholto said; “and I learned at the ‘Sun and Moon’ that you had not been there for a long time. I knew furthermore that as a general thing you go there a good deal, don’t you? So I put this and that together and judged you were out of town.”

This was very clear and straightforward and might have satisfied just exactions save for that irritating reference to the Princess’s being “capable of asking him.” He knew as well as the Captain that it had been tremendously eccentric in her to do so, but somehow a transformation had lately taken place in him which made it unpleasant he should receive that view from another, and particularly from a gentleman of whom at a certain juncture several months before he had had strong grounds for thinking unfavourably. He had not seen Sholto since the evening when a queer combination of circumstances caused him to sit more queerly still and listen to comic songs in the company of Millicent Henning and this admirer. The Captain had not concealed his admiration; Hyacinth had his own ideas about his taking that line in order to look more innocent. When he accompanied Millicent that evening to her lodgings (they parted with Sholto on coming out of the Pavilion) the situation was tense between the young lady and her childhood’s friend. She let him have it, as she said; she gave him a dressing which she evidently intended should be memorable for having suspected her, for having insulted her before one of the military. The tone she took and the magnificent audacity with which she took it reduced him to an odd, gratified helplessness; he watched her at last with something of the excitement with which he would have watched a clever but uncultivated actress while she worked herself into a passion that he believed to be fictitious. He gave more credence to his jealousy and to the whole air of the case than to her loud rebuttals, enlivened though these were by tremendous head-tossings and skirt-shakings. But he felt baffled and outfaced, and had recourse to sarcasms which after all proved no more than her high gibes; seeking a final solution in one of those beastly little French shrugs, as Millicent called them, with which she had already denounced him for interlarding his conversation.

The air was never cleared, though the subject of their dispute was afterwards dropped, Hyacinth promising himself to watch his playmate as he had never done before. She let him know, as may well be supposed, that she had her eye on him, and it must be confessed that as regards the exercise of a right of supervision he had felt himself at a disadvantage ever since the night at the theatre. It scantly mattered that she had pushed him into the Princess’s box (for she herself had not been jealous beforehand; she had wanted too much to know what such a person could be “up to,” desiring perhaps to borrow a hint) and it signified as little also that his relations with the great lady were all for the sake of suffering humanity. The atmosphere, however these things might be, was full of thunder for many weeks, and of what importance was the quarter from which the flash and the explosion should proceed? Hyacinth was a good deal surprised to find he could care whether Millicent deceived him or not, and even tried to persuade himself that he didn’t; but it was as if he yet felt between them a personal affinity deeper than any difference, so that it would torment him more never to see her at all than to see her go into tantrums in order to cover her tracks. An inner sense told him that her mingled beauty and grossness, her vulgar vitality, the spirit of contradiction yet at the same time of attachment that was in her, had ended by making her indispensable to him. She bored as much as she irritated; but if she was full of excruciating taste she was also full of life, and her rustlings and chatterings, her wonderful stories, her bad grammar and good health, her insatiable thirst, her shrewd perceptions and grotesque opinions, her blunders and her felicities, were now all part of the familiar human sound of his little world. He could say to himself that she made up to him far more than he to her, and it helped him a little to believe, though the logic was but lame, that she was not “larking” at his expense. If she were really in with a swell he didn’t see why she wished to retain a bookbinder. Of late, it must be added, he had ceased to devote much consideration to Millicent’s ambiguities; for although he was lingering on at Medley for the sake of suffering humanity he was quite aware that to say so (should she ask him for a reason) would have almost as low a value as some of the girl’s own speeches. As regards Sholto he was in the awkward position of having let him off, as it were, by accepting his hospitality, his bounty; thus he couldn’t quarrel with him save on a fresh pretext. This pretext the Captain had apparently been careful not to give, and Millicent had told him after the triple encounter in the street that he had driven him out of England, the poor gentleman he insulted by his vulgar insinuations even more (why ‘even more’ Hyacinth hardly could think) than he outraged herself. When he asked her what she knew about the Captain’s movements she made no scruple to announce to him that the latter had come to her great shop to make a little purchase (it was a pair of silk braces, if she remembered rightly, and she acknowledged unreservedly the thinness of the pretext) and had asked her with much concern whether his gifted young friend (that’s what he called him—Hyacinth could see he meant well) was still in a huff. Millicent had replied that she was afraid he was—the more shame to him; and then the Captain had declared it didn’t matter, as he himself was on the point of leaving England for several weeks (Hyacinth—he called him Hyacinth this time—couldn’t have ideas about a man in a foreign country, could he?) and hoped that by the time he returned the little cloud would have blown over. Sholto had added that she had better tell him frankly—recommending her at the same time to be gentle with their morbid friend—about his visit to the shop. Their candour, their humane precautions, were all very well; but after this, two or three evenings, Hyacinth passed and repassed the Captain’s chambers in Queen Anne Street to see if there were signs at the window of his being in London. Darkness in fact prevailed and he was forced to comfort himself a little when, at last making up his mind to ring at the door and inquire, as a test, for the occupant, he was informed by the superior valet whose acquaintance he had already made and whose air of wearing a jacket left behind by his master confirmed the statement, that the gentleman in question was at Monte Carlo.

“Have you still got your back up a little?” the Captain now demanded without rancour; and in a moment he had swung a long leg over the saddle and dismounted, walking beside his young friend and leading his horse by the bridle. Hyacinth pretended not to know what he meant, for it came over him that after all, even if he had not condoned at the time the Captain’s suspected treachery, he was in no position, sitting at the feet of the Princess, to sound the note of jealousy in relation to another woman. He reflected that the Princess had originally been in a manner Sholto’s property, and if he did en fin de compte wish to quarrel with him about Millicent he would have to cease to appear to poach on the Captain’s preserves. It now occurred to him for the first time that the latter might have intended a practical exchange; though it must be added that the Princess, who on a couple of occasions had alluded slightingly to her military friend, had given him no sign of recognising this gentleman’s claim. Sholto let him know at present that he was staying at Bonchester, seven miles off; he had come down from London and put up at the inn. That morning he had ridden over on a hired horse (Hyacinth had supposed this steed to be a very fine animal, but Sholto spoke of it as an infernal screw); he had felt a sudden prompting to see how his young friend was coming on.

“I’m coming on very well, thank you,” said Hyacinth with some shortness, not knowing exactly what business it was of the Captain’s.

“Of course you understand my interest in you, don’t you? I’m responsible for you—I put you forward.”

“There are a great many things in the world I don’t understand, but I think the thing I understand least is your interest in me. Why the devil——?” And Hyacinth paused, breathless with the force of his inquiry. Then he went on: “If I were you I shouldn’t care tuppence for the sort of person I happen to be.”

“That proves how different my nature is from yours! But I don’t believe it, my dear boy; you’re too generous for that.” Sholto’s imperturbability always appeared to grow with the irritation it produced, and it was proof even against the just resentment excited by his deficiency of tact. That deficiency was marked when he went on to say: “I wanted to see you here with my own eyes. I wanted to see how it looked, your domesticated state—and it is a rum sight! Of course you know what I mean, though you’re always trying to make a fellow explain. I don’t explain well in any sense, and that’s why I go in only for clever people who can do without it. It’s very grand, her having brought you down.”

“Grand, no doubt, but hardly surprising, considering that, as you say, I was put forward by you.”

“Oh that’s a great thing for me, but it doesn’t make any difference to her!” Sholto returned. “She may care for certain things for themselves, but it will never signify a jot to her what I may have thought about them. One good turn deserves another. I wish you’d put me forward!”

“I don’t understand you and I don’t think I want to,” said Hyacinth as his companion strolled beside him.

The latter put a hand on his arm, stopping him, and they stood face to face a moment. “I say, my dear Robinson, you’re not spoiled already, at the end of a week—how long is it? It isn’t possible you’re jealous!”

“Jealous of whom?” asked Hyacinth, whose measure of the allusion was, amid the strangeness of everything, imperfect.

Sholto looked at him a moment; then with a laugh: “I don’t mean Miss Henning.” Hyacinth turned away and the Captain resumed his walk, now taking the young man’s arm and passing his own through the bridle of the horse. “The courage of it, the insolence, the crânerie! There isn’t another woman in Europe who could carry it off.”

Hyacinth was silent a little; after which he remarked: “This is nothing, here. You should have seen me the other day over at Broome, at Lady Marchant’s.”

“Gad, did she take you there? I’d have given ten pounds to see it. There’s no one like her!” cried the Captain gaily, enthusiastically.

“There’s no one like me, I think—for going.”

“Why, didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Too much—too much. Such excesses are dangerous.”

“Oh. I’ll back you,” said the Captain; then checking their pace, “Is there any chance of our meeting her?” he asked. “I won’t go into the park.”

“You won’t go to the house?” Hyacinth demanded in wonder.

“Oh dear no, not while you’re there.”

“Well, I shall ask the Princess about you, and so have done with it once for all.”

“Lucky little beggar, with your fireside talks!” the Captain lamented. “Where does she sit now in the evening? She won’t tell you anything except that I’m a beastly nuisance; but even if she were willing to take the trouble to throw some light on me it wouldn’t be of much use, because she doesn’t understand me herself.”

“You’re the only thing in the world then of which that can be said,” Hyacinth returned.

“I daresay I am, and I’m rather proud of it. So far as the head’s concerned the Princess is all there. I told you when I presented you that she was the cleverest woman in Europe, and that’s still my opinion. But there are some mysteries you can’t see into unless you happen to have a little decent human feeling, what’s commonly called a bit of heart. The Princess isn’t troubled with that sort of thing, though doubtless just now you may think it her strong point. One of these days you’ll see. I don’t care a rap myself about her quantity of heart. She has hurt me already so much that she can’t hurt me any more, and my interest in her is quite independent of it. To watch her, to adore her, to see her lead her life and act out her extraordinary nature, all the while she pays me no more attention than if I were the postman’s knock several doors on, that’s absolutely the only thing that appeals to me. It doesn’t do me a scrap of good, but all the same it’s my principal occupation. You may believe me or not—it doesn’t in the least matter; but I’m the most disinterested human being alive. She’ll tell you one’s the biggest kind of donkey, and so of course one is. But that isn’t all.”

It was Hyacinth who stopped this time, arrested by something new and natural in the tone of his companion, a simplicity of emotion he had not hitherto associated with him. He stood there a moment looking up at him and thinking again what improbable confidences it decidedly appeared to be his lot to receive from gentlefolk. To what quality in himself were they a tribute? The honour was one he could easily dispense with; though as he scrutinised Sholto he found something in his odd light eyes—a sort of wasted flatness of fidelity—which made of an accepted relation with him a less fantastic adventure. “Please go on,” he said in a moment.

“Well, what I mentioned just now is my real and only motive in anything. The rest’s the mere gabble of the juggler to cover up his trick and help himself do it.”

“What do you mean by the rest?” asked Hyacinth, thinking of Millicent Henning.

“Oh all the straw one chews to cheat one’s appetite; all the rot one dabbles in because it may lead to something which it never does lead to; all the beastly buncombe (you know) that you and I have heard together in Bloomsbury and that I myself have poured out, damme, with an assurance worthy of a better cause. Don’t you remember what I’ve said to you—all as my own opinion—about the impending change of the relations of class with class? Impending collapse of the crust of the earth! I believe those on top of the heap are better than those under it, that they mean to stay there, and that if they’re not a pack of poltroons they will.”

“You don’t care for the social question then?” Hyacinth inquired with an aspect of the blankness of which he was conscious.

“I only took it up because she did. It hasn’t helped me,” Sholto smiled. “My dear Robinson,” he went on, “there’s only one thing I care for in life: to have a look at that woman when I can—and when I can’t to approach her in the sort of way I’m doing now.”

“It’s a very funny sort of way.”

“Indeed it is; but if it’s good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you. What I want you to do is this—to induce her to ask me over to dine.”

“To induce her——?” Hyacinth echoed.

“Tell her I’m staying at Bonchester and it would be an act of common humanity.”

They proceeded till they reached the gates and in a moment Hyacinth said: “You took up the social question then because she did. But do you happen to know why she took it up?”

“Ah my dear fellow, you must worry that out for yourself. I found you the place, but I can’t do your work for you!”

“I see—I see. But perhaps you’ll tell me this: if you had free access to her a year ago, taking her to the theatre and that sort of thing, why shouldn’t you have it now?”

This time Sholto’s yellow eyes were strange again. “You have it now, my dear chap, but I’m afraid it doesn’t follow that you’ll have it a year hence. She was tired of me then, and of course she’s still more tired of me now, for the simple reason that I’m more tiresome. She has sent me to Coventry and I want to come out for a few hours. See how awfully decent I am—I won’t pass the gates.”

“I’ll tell her I met you,” said Hyacinth. Then, irrelevantly, he added: “Is that what you mean by her having no heart?”

“Her treating me as she treats me? Oh dear no. Her treating you!”

This had a portentous sound, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from turning round with his visitor—for it was the greatest part of the oddity of the present meeting that the hope of a little conversation with him, if accident were favourable, had been the motive not only of Sholto’s riding over to Medley but of his coming down to stay, in the neighbourhood, at a musty inn in a dull market-town—it didn’t prevent him, I say, from bearing the Captain company for a mile on his backward way. Our young man pursued this particular topic little further, but he discovered still another reason or two for admiring the light, free action with which his companion had unmasked himself, as well as the nature of his interest in the revolutionary idea, after he had asked him abruptly what he had had in his head when he travelled over that evening, the summer before—and he didn’t appear to have come back as often as he promised—to Paul Muniment’s place in Camberwell. What was he looking for, whom was he looking for there?

“I was looking for anything that would turn up, that might take her fancy. Don’t you understand that I’m always looking? There was a time when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts) all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I collected you.”

“Muniment made you out exactly then. And what did you find to your purpose in Audley Court?”

“Well, I think the little woman with the popping eyes—she reminded me of a bedridden grasshopper—will do. And I made a note of the other one, the old virgin with the high nose, the aristocratic sister of mercy. I’m keeping them in reserve for my next propitiatory offering.”

Hyacinth had a pause. “And Muniment himself—can’t you do anything with him?”

“Oh my dear fellow, after you he’s poor!”

“That’s the first stupid thing you’ve said. But it doesn’t matter, for he dislikes the Princess—what he knows of her—too much ever to consent to see her.”

“That’s his line, is it? Then he’ll do!” Sholto cried.

XXVI

“Of course he may come, and may stay as long as he likes!” the Princess exclaimed when Hyacinth, that afternoon, told her of his encounter: she spoke with the sweet, bright surprise her face always wore when people went through the form (supererogatory she apparently meant to declare it) of asking her leave. From the manner in which she granted Sholto’s petition—with a facility that made light of it, as if the question were not worth talking of one way or the other—the account he had given Hyacinth of their relations might have passed for an elaborate but none the less foolish hoax. She sent a messenger with a note over to Bonchester, and the Captain arrived just in time to dress for dinner. The Princess was always late, and Hyacinth’s toilet on these occasions occupied him considerably (he was acutely conscious of its deficiencies, and yet tried to persuade himself that they were positively honourable and that the only garb of dignity for him was the costume, as it were, of his profession); therefore when the fourth member of the little party descended to the drawing-room Madame Grandoni was the only person he found there.

“Santissima Vergine! I’m glad to see you! What good wind has sent you?” she exclaimed as soon as Sholto came into the room.

“Didn’t you know I was coming?” he asked. “Has the idea of my arrival produced so little agitation?”

“I know nothing of the affairs of this house. I’ve given them up at last, and it was time. I remain in my room.” There was nothing at present in the old lady’s countenance of her usual spirit of cheer; it expressed anxiety and even a certain sternness, and the excellent woman had perhaps at this moment more than she had ever had in her life of the air of a duenna who took her duties seriously. She looked almost august. “From the moment you come it’s a little better. But it’s very bad.”

“Very bad, dear madam?”

“Perhaps you’ll be able to tell me where Christina veut en venir. I’ve always been faithful to her—I’ve always been loyal. But to-day I’ve lost patience. It has no sense.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Sholto said; “but if I understand you I must tell you I think it all magnificent.”

“Yes, I know your tone; you’re worse than she, because you’re cynical. It passes all bounds. It’s very serious. I’ve been thinking what I should do.”

“Precisely. I know what you’ll probably do.”

“Oh this time I shouldn’t come back!” the old lady declared. “The scandal’s too great. It’s intolerable. But my danger’s of making it worse.”

“Dear Madame Grandoni, you can’t make it worse and you can’t make it better,” Sholto returned as he seated himself on the sofa beside her. “In point of fact no idea of scandal can possibly attach itself to our friend. She’s above and outside all such considerations, such dangers. She carries everything off; she heeds so little, she cares so little. Besides, she has one great strength—she does no wrong.”

“Pray what do you call it when a lady sends for a bookbinder to come and live with her?”

“Why not for a bookbinder as well as for a bishop? It all depends upon who the lady is and what she is.”

“She had better take care of one thing first,” cried Madame Grandoni—“that she shall not have been separated, with a hundred stories, from her husband!”

“The Princess can carry off even that. It’s unusual, it’s eccentric, it’s fantastic if you will, but it isn’t necessarily wicked. From her own point of view our friend goes straight. Besides, she has her opinions.”

“Her opinions are perversity itself.”

“What does it matter,” asked Sholto, “if they keep her quiet?”

“Quiet! Do you call this quiet?”