Part 18

Her spirit was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to her, “I’d trust _you_, if you did!” though he felt the next minute that this was even a more familiar speech than if he had expressed a want of confidence.

“It comes then to the same thing,” said the Princess. “She wouldn’t show herself with me in public if I weren’t respectable. If you knew more about me you’d understand what has led me to turn my attention to the great social question. It’s a long story and the details wouldn’t interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more talk, you’ll put yourself a little in my place. I’m very serious, you know; I’m not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I’m convinced that we’re living in a fool’s paradise, that the ground’s heaving under our feet.”

“It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you who are turning somersaults,” Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Ah you, my friend, you’ve the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.”

“She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it,” Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with imperturbable gravity.

“I’m sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young man responded in his glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion set his pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations appearing as yet so vague—her tone, her voice, her wonderful face showed she had a generous soul.

She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a melancholy head-shake. “I’ve no such pretensions and my good old friend’s laughing at me. Of course that’s very easy; for what in fact can be more absurd on the face of it than for a woman with a title, with diamonds, with a carriage, with servants, with a position, as they call it, to sympathise with the upward struggles of those who are below? ‘Give all that up and we’ll believe you,’ you’ve a right to say. I’m ready to give them up the moment it will help the cause; I assure you that’s the least difficulty. I don’t want to teach, I want to learn; and above all I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_. Are we on the eve of great changes or are we not? Is everything that’s gathering force underground, in the dark, in the night, in little hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic ‘statesmen’—heaven save them!—is all this going to burst forth some fine morning and set the world on fire? Or is it to sputter out and spend itself in vain conspiracies, be dissipated in sterile heroisms and abortive isolated movements? I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_,” she repeated, fixing her visitor with more brilliant eyes and almost as if he could tell her on the spot. Then suddenly she added in quite a different tone: “Pardon me, I’ve an idea you know French. Didn’t Captain Sholto tell me so?”

“I’ve some little acquaintance with it,” Hyacinth replied. “I’ve French blood in my veins.”

She considered him as if he had proposed to her some attaching problem. “Yes, I can see you’re not _le premier venu_. Now your friend, of whom you were speaking, is a chemist; and you yourself—what’s your occupation?”

“I’m just a bookbinder.”

“That must be delightful. I wonder if you’d bind me some books.”

“You’d have to bring them to our shop, and I can do there only the work that’s given out to me. I might manage it by myself at home,” Hyacinth freely professed.

“I should like that better. And what do you call home?”

“The place I live in, in the north of London: a little street you certainly never heard of.”

“What is it called?”

“Lomax Place, at your service,” he laughed.

She seemed to reflect his innocent gaiety; she wasn’t a bit afraid to let him see she liked him. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of it. I don’t know London very well; I haven’t lived here long. I’ve spent most of my life abroad. My husband’s a foreigner, a South Italian. We don’t live always together. I haven’t the manners of this country—not of any class, have I, eh? Oh this country—there’s a great deal to be said about it and a great deal to be done, as you of course understand better than any one. But I want to know London; it interests me more than I can say—the huge, swarming, smoky, human city. I mean real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions; not Park Lane and Bond Street. Perhaps you can help me—it would be a great kindness: that’s what I want to know men like you for. You see it isn’t idle, my having given you so much trouble to-night.”

“I shall be very glad to show you all I know. But it isn’t much and above all it isn’t pretty,” said Hyacinth.

“Whom do you live with in Lomax Place?” she asked, a little oddly, by way of allowance for this.

“Captain Sholto’s leaving the young lady—he’s coming back here,” Madame Grandoni announced, inspecting the balcony with her instrument. The orchestra had been for some time playing the overture to the following act.

Hyacinth had just hesitated. “I live with a dressmaker.”

“With a dressmaker? Do you mean—do you mean—?” But the Princess paused.

“Do you mean she’s your wife?” asked Madame Grandoni more bravely.

“Perhaps she gives you rooms,” the Princess suggested.

“How many do you think I have? She gives me everything, or has done so in the past. She brought me up; she’s the best little woman in the world.”

“You had better command a dress of her,” Madame Grandoni threw off.

“And your family, where are they?” the Princess continued.

“I have no family.”

“None at all?”

“None at all. I never had.”

“But the French blood you speak of and which I see perfectly in your face—you haven’t the English expression or want of expression—that must have come to you through some one.”

“Yes, through my mother.”

“And she’s dead?”

“Long ago.”

“That’s a great loss, because French mothers are usually so much to their sons.” The Princess looked at her painted fan as she opened and closed it; after which she said: “Well then, you’ll come some day. We’ll arrange it.” Hyacinth felt the answer to this could be only a silent inclination of his utmost stature, and to make it he rose from his chair. As he stood there, conscious he had stayed long enough and yet not knowing exactly how to withdraw, the Princess, with her fan closed, resting upright on her knee, and her hands clasped on the end of it, turned up her strange lovely eyes at him and said: “Do you think anything will occur soon?”

“Will occur—?”

“That there’ll be a crisis—that you’ll make yourselves felt?”

In this beautiful woman’s face there was to his bewildered perception something at once inspiring, tempting and mocking; and the effect of her expression was to make him say rather clumsily, “I’ll try and ascertain—” as if she had asked him whether her carriage were at the door.

“I don’t quite know what you’re talking about; but please don’t have it for another hour or two. I want to see what becomes of the Pearl!” Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Remember what I told you: I’d give up everything—everything!” And the Princess kept looking up at him. Then she held out her hand, and this time he knew sufficiently what he was about to take it.

When he bade good-night to Madame Grandoni the old lady sounded at him with a comical sigh, “Well, she is respectable!” and out in the lobby when he had closed the door of the box behind him he found himself echoing these words and repeating mechanically, “She _is_ respectable!” They were on his lips as he stood suddenly face to face with Captain Sholto, who grasped his shoulder once more and shook him in that free yet insinuating manner for which this officer appeared remarkable.

“My dear fellow, you were born under a lucky star.”

“I never supposed it,” said Hyacinth, changing colour.

“Why what in the world would you have? You’ve the faculty, the precious faculty, of inspiring women with an interest—but an interest!”

“Yes, ask them in the box there! I behaved like an awful muff,” Hyacinth declared, overwhelmed now with a sense of opportunities missed.

“They won’t tell me that. And the lady upstairs?”

“Well,” said Hyacinth gravely, “what about her?”

“She wouldn’t talk to me of anything but you. You may imagine how I liked it!”

“I don’t like it either. But I must go up.”

“Oh yes, she counts the minutes. Such a charming person!” Captain Sholto added with more propriety of tone. As Hyacinth left him he called out: “Don’t be afraid—you’ll go far.”

When the young man took his place in the balcony beside Millicent she gave him no greeting nor asked any question about his adventures in the more privileged part of the house. She only turned her fine complexion upon him for some minutes, and as he himself was not in the mood to begin to chatter the silence continued—continued till after the curtain had risen on the last act of the play. Millicent’s attention was now evidently not at her disposal for the stage, and in the midst of a violent scene which included pistol-shots and shrieks she said at last to her companion: “She’s a tidy lot, your Princess, by what I learn.”

“Pray what do you know about her?”

“I know what that fellow told me.”

“And what may that have been?”

“Well, she’s a bad ’un as ever was. Her own husband has had to turn her out of the house.”

Hyacinth remembered the allusion the lady herself had made to her matrimonial situation; in spite of which he would have liked to be able to reply to Miss Henning that he didn’t believe a word of it. He withheld the doubt and after a moment simply remarked: “Well, I don’t care.”

“You don’t care? Well, I do then!” Millicent cried. And as it was impossible in view of the performance and the jealous attention of their neighbours to continue the conversation at this pitch, she contented herself with ejaculating in a somewhat lower key at the end of five minutes during which she had been watching the stage: “Gracious, what dreadful common stuff!” Hyacinth then wondered if Captain Sholto had given her this formula.

XIV

He didn’t mention to Pinnie or Mr. Vetch that he had been taken up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he now confided a great many things. He had at first been in considerable fear of his straight loud north-country friend, who showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism in a degree that was hostile to fine loose talk; but he discovered in him later a man to whom one could say anything in the world if one didn’t think it of more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a revolutionist he was strangely unexasperated, was indulgent even to contempt. The sight of all the things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his humour had no ferocity—the fault Hyacinth sometimes found with it rather was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who of a Sunday morning has put on a clean shirt and, not having taken the gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest and Gravesend. He never dragged in with the least snarl his personal lot and his daily life; it had not seemed to occur to him for instance that “society” was really responsible for the condition of his sister’s spinal column, though Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient as he) did everything they could to make him say so, believing evidently that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for women, talked of them rarely and always decently, and had never a sign of a sweetheart save in so far as Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear tone, a fresh cheek and a merely, an imperturbably intelligent eye, and once excited on Hyacinth’s part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny gallery, at Astley’s, at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the tawdry spectacle. He once pronounced the young bookbinder a suggestive little beggar, and Hyacinth’s opinion of him was by this time so exalted that the remark had almost the value of a patent of nobility. Our hero treated himself to a high unlimited faith in him; he had always dreamed of some grand friendship and this was the best opening he had yet encountered. No one could entertain a sentiment of that sort more nobly, more ingeniously than Hyacinth, or cultivate with more art the intimate personal relation. It disappointed him sometimes that his confidence was not more unreservedly repaid; that on certain important points of the socialistic programme Muniment would never commit himself and had not yet shown the _fond du sac_, as Eustache Poupin called it, to so ardent an admirer. He answered particular appeals freely enough, and answered them occasionally in a manner that made Hyacinth jump, as when in reply to a question about his attitude on capital punishment he said that so far from wishing it abolished he should go in for extending it much further—he should impose it on those who habitually lied or got drunk; but his friend had always a feeling that he kept back his best card and that even in the listening circle in Bloomsbury, when only the right men were present, there were unspoken conclusions in his mind which he didn’t as yet think any one good enough to be favoured with. So far therefore from suspecting him of any real poverty of programme Hyacinth was sure he had extraordinary things in his head; that he was thinking them out to the logical end, wherever it might land him; and that the night he should produce them with the door of the club-room guarded and the company bound by a tremendous oath the others would look at each other, gasp and turn pale.

“She wants to see you; she asked me to bring you; she was very serious,” our young man meanwhile said, reporting his interview with the ladies in the box at the play; which, however, now that he looked back upon it, seemed as queer as a dream and not much more likely than that sort of experience to have a continuation in one’s waking hours.

“To bring me—to bring me where?” asked Muniment. “You talk as if I were a sample out of your shop or a little dog you had for sale. Has she ever seen me? Does she think I’m smaller than you? What does she know about me?”

“Well, principally that you’re a friend of mine—that’s enough for her.”

“Do you mean it ought to be enough for me that she’s a friend of yours? I’ve a notion you’ll have some queer ones before you’ve done; a good many more than I have time to talk to. And how can I go to see a delicate female with those paws?” Muniment said as he exhibited ten work-stained fingers.

“Buy a pair of gloves—” Hyacinth recognised the serious character of this obstacle. But after a moment he added: “No, you oughtn’t to do that. She wants to see dirty hands.”

“That’s easy enough, good Lord! She needn’t send for me for the purpose. But isn’t she making game of you?”

“It’s very possible, but I don’t see what good it can do her.”

“You’re not obliged to find excuses for the pampered classes. Their bloated luxury begets evil, impudent desires; they’re capable of doing harm for the sake of harm. Besides, is she genuine?”

“If she isn’t, what becomes of your explanation?” Hyacinth asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter; at night all cats are grey. Whatever she is, she’s an idle, bedizened trifler; perhaps even a real profligate female.”

“If you had seen her you wouldn’t talk of her that way.”

“God forbid I should see her then, if she’s going to corrupt me!”

“Do you suppose she’ll corrupt _me_?” Hyacinth demanded with an expression of face and a tone of voice which produced on his friend’s part an explosion of mirth.

“How can she, after all, when you’re already such a little mass of corruption?”

“You don’t think that—?” and Hyacinth looked very grave.

“Do you mean that if I did I wouldn’t say it? Haven’t you noticed that I say what I think?”

“No, you don’t, not half of it: you’re as dark as a fish.”

Paul Muniment glanced at his friend as if rather struck with the penetration of that remark; then he said: “Well then, if I should give you the other half of my opinion of you do you think you’d fancy it?”

“I’ll save you the trouble. I’m a very clever, conscientious, promising young chap, and any one would be proud to claim me as a friend.”

“Is that what your Princess told you? She must be a precious piece of goods!” Paul exclaimed. “Did she pick your pocket meanwhile?”

“Oh yes; a few minutes later I missed a silver cigar-case engraved with the arms of the Robinsons. Seriously,” Hyacinth continued, “don’t you consider it possible that a woman of that class should want to know what’s going on among the like of us?”

“It depends on what class you mean.”

“Well, a woman with a lot of wonderful jewels and wonderful scents and the manners of an angel. I wonder if even the young ladies in the perfumery shops have such manners—they can’t have such pearls. It’s queer of course, that sort of interest, but it’s conceivable; why not? There may be unselfish natures; there may be disinterested feelings.”

“And there may be fine ladies in an awful funk about their jewels and even about their manners. Seriously, as you say, it’s perfectly conceivable. I’m not in the least surprised at the aristocracy being curious to know what we’re up to and wanting very much to look into it. In their place I should be very uneasy, and if I were a woman with angelic manners very likely I too should be glad to get hold of a soft susceptible little bookbinder and pump him dry, bless his tender heart!”

“Are you afraid I’ll tell her secrets?” cried Hyacinth, flushing with virtuous indignation.

“Secrets? What secrets could you tell her, my pretty lad?”

Hyacinth turned away. “You don’t trust me—you never have.”

“We will, some day—don’t be afraid,” said Muniment, who evidently had no intention of harshness, at least in respect to Hyacinth, a thing that appeared impossible to him. “And when we do you’ll cry with disappointment.”

“Well, _you_ won’t,” Hyacinth returned. And then he asked if his friend thought the Princess Casamassima a spy of spies—the devil she’d have to be!—and why, if she were in that line, Sholto was not, since it must be supposed he was not when they had seen fit to let him walk in and out, at any rate, at the place in Bloomsbury. Muniment didn’t even know whom he meant, not having had any relations with the gentleman; but he summoned a sufficient image after his companion had described the Captain’s appearance. He then remarked with his usual geniality that he didn’t take him for anything worse than a jackass; but even if he had edged himself into the place with every intention to betray them what handle could he possibly get—what use against them could he make of anything he had seen or heard? If he had a fancy to dip into workingmen’s clubs (Paul remembered now the first night he came; he had been brought by that German cabinet-maker who always had a bandaged neck and smoked a pipe with a bowl as big as a stove); if it amused him to put on a bad hat and inhale foul tobacco and call his “inferiors” “my dear fellow”; if he thought that in doing so he was getting an insight into the people and going halfway to meet them and preparing for what was coming—all this was his own affair and he was very welcome, though a man must be a flat who would spend his evening in a hole like that when he might enjoy his comfort in one of those flaming big shops, full of armchairs and flunkies, in Pall Mall. And what did he see after all in Bloomsbury? Nothing but a remarkably stupid “social gathering” where there were clay pipes and a sanded floor and not half enough gas and the principal papers; and where the men, as any one would know, were advanced radicals and mostly advanced idiots. He could pat as many of them on the back as he liked and say the House of Lords wouldn’t last till midsummer; but what discoveries would he make? He was simply on the same lay as Hyacinth’s Princess; he was nervous and scared and thought he would see for himself.

“Oh, he isn’t the same sort as the Princess. I’m sure he’s in a very different line!” Hyacinth objected.

“Different of course; she’s a handsome woman, I suppose, and he’s an ugly man; but I don’t think that either of them will save us or spoil us. Their curiosity’s natural, but I’ve other things to do than to show them over: therefore you can tell her Serene Highness that I’m much obliged.”

Hyacinth reflected a moment and then said: “You show Lady Aurora over; you seem to wish to give her the information she desires; therefore what’s the difference? If it’s right for her to take an interest why isn’t it right for my Princess?”

“If she’s already yours what more can she want?” Muniment asked. “All I know of Lady Aurora and all I look at is that she comes and sits with Rosy and brings her tea and waits on her. If the Princess will do as much I’ll see what _I_ can do; but apart from that I shall never take a grain of interest in her interest in the masses—or in this

## particular mass!” And Paul, with his discoloured thumb, designated

his own substantial person. His tone was disappointing to Hyacinth, who was surprised at his not appearing to think the incident at the theatre more remarkable and romantic. He seemed to regard his mate’s explanation of the passage as all-sufficient; but when a moment later he made use, in referring to the mysterious lady, of the expression that she was “quaking” that critic broke out: “Never in the world; she’s not afraid of anything!”

“Ah, my lad, not afraid of you, evidently!” Hyacinth paid no attention to this coarse sally, but resumed with a candour that was proof against further ridicule: “Do you think she can do me a hurt of any kind if we follow up our acquaintance?”