Part 21

Half an hour later Hyacinth found himself in Captain Sholto’s chambers, seated on a big divan covered with Persian rugs and cushions and smoking the most expensive cigar that had ever touched his lips. As they left Audley Court the Captain had taken his arm and they had walked along together in a desultory, colloquial manner, till on Westminster Bridge (they had followed the embankment beneath Saint Thomas’s Hospital) Sholto brought out: “By the way, why shouldn’t you come home with me and see my little place? I’ve a few things that might amuse you—some pictures, some odds and ends I’ve picked up, and a few bindings; you might tell me what you think of them.” Hyacinth assented without demur; he had still in his ear the reverberation of the Captain’s inquiries in Rosy’s room, and he saw no reason why he on his side shouldn’t embrace an occasion of ascertaining how, as his companion would have said, a man of fashion would live now.

This particular specimen lived in a large old-fashioned house in Queen Anne Street, of which he occupied the upper floors, where he had filled the high wainscoted rooms with the spoils of travel and the ingenuities of modern taste. There was not a country in the world he appeared not to have ransacked, and to Hyacinth his trophies represented a wonderfully long purse. The whole establishment, from the low-voiced inexpressive valet who, after he had poured brandy into tall tumblers, solemnised the very popping of soda-water corks, to the quaint little silver receptacle in which he was invited to deposit the ashes of his cigar, was such a revelation for our appreciative youth that he felt himself hushed and depressed, so poignant was the thought that it took thousands of things he then should never possess nor know to make a civilised being. He had often in evening walks wondered what was behind the walls of certain ample bright-windowed houses in the West End, and now he got an idea. The first effect of the idea was to lay him rather flat.

“Well now, tell me what you thought of our friend the Princess,” the Captain said, thrusting out the loose yellow slippers his servant had helped to exchange for his shoes. He spoke as if he had been waiting impatiently for the proper moment to ask that question, so much might depend on the answer.

“She’s beautiful—beautiful,” Hyacinth answered almost dreamily while his eyes wandered all over the room.

“She was so interested in all you said to her; she’d like so much to see you again. She means to write to you—I suppose she can address to the ‘Sun and Moon’?—and I hope you’ll go to her house if she proposes a day.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know. It seems so strange.”

“What seems strange, my dear chap?”

“Everything! My sitting here with you; my introduction to that lady; the idea of her wanting, as you say, to see me again and of her writing to me; and this whole place of yours, with all its dim rich curiosities hanging on the walls and glinting in the light of that rose-coloured lamp. You yourself too—you’re strangest of all.”

The Captain looked at him so silently and so fixedly, through the fumes of their tobacco, after he had made this last charge that Hyacinth thought he was perhaps offended; but this impression was presently dissipated by further signs of sociability and hospitality, and Sholto took occasion later to let him know how important it was, in the days they were living in, not to have too small a measure of the usual, destined as they certainly were—“in the whole matter of the relations of class with class and all that sort of thing, you know”—to witness some very startling developments. The Captain spoke as if, for his part, he were a child of his age (so that he only wanted to see all it could show him) down to the points of his yellow slippers. Hyacinth felt that he himself had not been very satisfactory about the Princess; but as his nerves began to tremble a little more into tune with the situation he repeated to his host what Milly had said about her at the theatre—asked if this young lady had correctly understood him in believing she had been turned out of the house by her husband.

“Yes, he literally pushed her into the street—or into the garden; I believe the scene took place in the country. But perhaps Miss Henning didn’t mention, or perhaps I didn’t, that the Prince would at the present hour give everything he owns in the world to get her back. Fancy such an absurd scene!” said the Captain, laughing in a manner that struck Hyacinth as rather profane.

He stared with dilated eyes at this picture, which seemed to demand a comparison with the only incident of the sort that had come within his experience—the forcible ejection of intoxicated females from public-houses. “That magnificent being—what had she done?”

“Oh, she had made him feel he was an ass!” the Captain answered promptly. He turned the conversation to Miss Henning; said he was so glad Hyacinth gave him an opportunity to speak of her. He got on with her famously; perhaps she had told him. They became immense friends—_en tout bien tout honneur, s’entend_. Now, _there_ was another London type, plebeian but brilliant; and how little justice one usually did it, how magnificent it was! But she of course was a wonderful specimen. “My dear fellow, I’ve seen many women, and the women of many countries,” the Captain went on, “and I’ve seen them as intimately as you like, and I know what I’m talking about; and when I tell you that that one—that one—!” Then he suddenly paused, laughing in his democratic way. “But perhaps I’m going too far: you must always pull me up, you know, when I do. At any rate I congratulate you; I do right heartily. Have another cigar. Now what sort of—a—salary would she receive at her big shop, you know? I know where it is; I mean to go there and buy some pocket-handkerchiefs.”

Hyacinth knew neither how far Captain Sholto had been going, nor exactly on what he congratulated him; and he pretended at least an equal ignorance on the subject of Millicent’s pecuniary gains. He didn’t want to talk about her, moreover, nor about his own life; he wanted to talk about the Captain’s and to elicit information that would be in harmony with his romantic chambers, which reminded one somehow of certain of Bulwer’s novels. His host gratified this pretension most liberally and told him twenty stories of things of interest, often of amazement, that had happened to him in Albania, in Madagascar and even in Paris. Hyacinth induced him easily to talk about Paris (from a different point of view from M. Poupin’s) and sat there drinking in enchantments. The only thing that fell below the high level of his entertainment was the bindings of his friend’s books, which he told him frankly, with the conscience of an artist, were not up to the mark. After he left Queen Anne Street he was quite too excited to go straight home; he walked about with his mind full of images and strange speculations till the grey London streets began to clear with the summer dawn.

XVI

The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August, is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-pitched light itself, which seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British Sabbath. Our personage, however, had a talent for that kind of attitude: it was one of the things by which he had exasperated his wife; he could remain motionless, with the aid of some casual support for his high, lean person, considering serenely and inexpressively any object that might lie before him and presenting his aristocratic head at a favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length. On first coming into the room he had given some attention to its furniture and decorations, perceiving at a glance that they were rich and varied; some of the things he recognised as old friends, odds and ends the Princess was fond of, which had accompanied her in her remarkable wanderings, while others were unfamiliar and suggested vividly that she had not ceased to “collect.” He made two reflexions: one was that she was living as expensively as ever; the other that, however this might be, no one had such a feeling as she for the _mise-en-scène_ of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had always, wherever she was, the most charming room in Europe.

It was his impression that she had taken the house in South Street but for three months; yet, gracious heaven, what had she not put into it? The Prince asked himself this question without violence, for that was not to be his line to-day. He could be angry to a point at which he himself was often frightened, but he honestly believed this to be only when he had been baited past endurance, so that as a usual thing he was really as mild and accommodating as the extreme urbanity of his manner appeared to announce. There was indeed nothing to suggest to the world in general that he was an impracticable or vindictive nobleman: his features were not regular and his complexion had a bilious tone; but his dark brown eye, which was at once salient and dull, expressed benevolence and melancholy; his head drooped from his long neck in a considerate, attentive style; and his close-cropped black hair, combined with a short, fine, pointed beard, completed his resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples. To-day at any rate he had come in conciliation, almost in humility, and that is why he didn’t permit himself even to murmur at the long delay he had to accept. He knew very well that if his wife should consent to take him back it would be only after a probation to which this little wait in her drawing-room was a trifle. It was a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and even then it was not the Princess who appeared, but only Madame Grandoni.

Their greeting was at first all a renouncement of words. She came to him with both hands outstretched, and took his own and held them a while, looking up at him with full benignity. She had elongated her florid, humorous face to a degree that was almost comical, and the pair might have passed, in their silent solemnity, for acquaintances meeting in a house in which last obsequies were about to take place. It was indeed a house on which death had descended, as he very soon learned from Madame Grandoni’s expression; something had perished there for ever and he might proceed to bury it as soon as he liked. His wife’s ancient German friend, however, was not a person to sustain that note very long, and when, after she had made him sit down on the sofa beside her, she shook her head slowly and definitely several times, it was with a brow on which a more genial appreciation of the facts had already begun to appear.

“Never—never—never?” said the Prince in a deep hoarse voice, a voice at variance with his attenuated capacity. He had much of the complexion which in late-coming members of long-descended races we qualify to-day as effete; but his tone might have served for the battle-cry of some deep-chested fighting ancestor.

“Surely you know your wife as well as I,” she replied in Italian, which she evidently spoke with facility, though with a strong guttural accent. “I’ve been talking with her: that’s what has made me keep you. I’ve urged her to see you. I’ve told her that this could do no harm and would pledge her to nothing. But you know your wife,” Madame Grandoni repeated with an intensity now much relaxed.

Prince Casamassima looked down at his boots. “How can one ever know a person like that? I hoped she’d see me five little minutes.”

“For what purpose? Have you anything to propose?”

“For what purpose? To rest my eyes on her beautiful face.”

“Did you come to England for that?”

“For what else should I have come?” the Prince asked as he turned his blighted gaze to the opposite side of South Street.

“In London, such a day as this, _già_,” said the old lady sympathetically. “I’m very sorry for you; but if I had known you were coming I’d have written to you that you might spare yourself the pain.”

He gave a deep interminable sigh. “You ask me what I wish to propose. What I wish to propose is that my wife shouldn’t kill me inch by inch.”

“She’d be much more likely to do that if you lived with her!” Madame Grandoni cried.

“_Cara amica_, she doesn’t appear to have killed you,” the melancholy nobleman returned.

“Oh, me? I’m past killing. I’m as hard as a stone. I went through my miseries long ago; I suffered what you’ve not had to suffer; I wished for death many times and I survived it all. Our troubles don’t kill us, _Principe mio_; it’s we who must try to kill them. I’ve buried not a few. Besides, Christina’s fond of me, the devil knows why!” Madame Grandoni added.

“And you’re so good to her,” said the Prince, who laid his hand on her fat wrinkled fist.

“_Che vuole?_ I’ve known her so long. And she has some such great qualities.”

“Ah, to whom do you say it?” And he gazed at his boots again, for some moments, in silence. Suddenly he resumed: “How does she look to-day?”

“She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth!”

The Prince was evidently a man of a simple nature, and Madame Grandoni’s rather violent metaphor took his fancy. His face lighted up a little and he replied with eagerness: “Ah, she’s the only woman I’ve ever seen whose beauty never for a moment falls below itself. She has no bad days. She’s so handsome when she’s angry!”

“She’s very handsome to-day, but she’s not angry,” said the old lady.

“Not when my name was announced?”

“I was not with her then; but when she sent for me and asked me to see you it was quite without passion. And even when I argued with her and tried to persuade her (and she doesn’t like that, you know) she was still perfectly quiet.”

“She hates me, she despises me too much, eh?”

“How can I tell, dear Prince, when she never mentions you?”

“Never, never?”

“That’s much better than if she railed at you and abused you.”

“You mean it should give me more hope for the future?” the young man asked quickly.

His old friend had a pause. “I mean it’s better for _me_,” she answered with a laugh of which the friendly ring covered as much as possible her equivocation.

“Ah, you like me enough to care,” he murmured as he turned on her his sad grateful eyes.

“I’m very sorry for you. _Ma che vuole?_”

The Prince had apparently nothing to suggest and only exhaled in reply another gloomy groan. Then he inquired if his wife pleased herself in that country and if she intended to pass the summer in London. Would she remain long in England and—might he take the liberty to ask?—what were her plans? Madame Grandoni explained that the Princess had found the English capital much more to her taste than one might have expected, and that as for plans she had as many or as few as she had always had. Had he ever known her to carry out any arrangement or to do anything of any kind she had prepared or promised? She always at the last moment did the other thing, the one that had been out of the question; and it was for this Madame Grandoni herself privately made her preparations. Christina, now that everything was over, would leave London from one day to the other; but they shouldn’t know where they were going till they arrived. The old lady concluded by asking if the Prince himself liked England. He thrust forward his full lips. “How can I like anything? Besides, I’ve been here before; I’ve many friends.”

His companion saw he had more to say to her, to extract from her, but that he was hesitating nervously because he feared to incur some warning, some rebuff with which his dignity—in spite of his position of discomfiture, really very great—might find it difficult to square itself. He looked vaguely round the room and presently remarked: “I wanted to see for myself how she’s living.”

“Yes, that’s very natural.”

“I’ve heard—I’ve heard—” And Prince Casamassima stopped.

“You’ve heard great rubbish, I’ve no doubt.” Madame Grandoni watched him as if she foresaw what was coming.

“She spends a terrible deal of money,” said the young man.

“Indeed she does.” The old lady knew that, careful as he was of his very considerable property, which at one time had required much nursing, his wife’s prodigality was not what lay heaviest on his mind. She also knew that expensive and luxurious as Christina might be she had never yet exceeded the income settled upon her by the Prince at the time of their separation—an income determined wholly by himself and his estimate of what was required to maintain the social consequence of his name, for which he had a boundless reverence. “She thinks she’s a model of thrift—that she counts every shilling,” Madame Grandoni continued. “If there’s a virtue she prides herself upon it’s her economy. Indeed it’s the only thing for which she takes any credit.”

“I wonder if she knows that I”—he just hesitated, then went on—“spend almost nothing at all. But I’d rather live on dry bread than that in a country like this, in this great English society, she shouldn’t make a proper appearance.”

“Her appearance is all you could wish. How can it help being proper with me to set her off?”

“You’re the best thing she has, dear friend. So long as you’re with her I feel a certain degree of security; and one of the things I came for was to extract from you a promise that you won’t leave her.”

“Ah, let us not tangle ourselves up with promises!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed. “You know the value of any engagement one may take with regard to the Princess; it’s like promising you I’ll stay in the bath when the hot water’s on. When I begin to be scalded I’ve to jump out—naked as I may naturally be. I’ll stay while I can, but I shouldn’t stay if she were to do certain things.” Madame Grandoni uttered these last words with a clear emphasis, and for a minute she and her companion looked deep into each other’s eyes.

“What things do you mean?”

“I can’t say what things. It’s utterly impossible to predict on any occasion what Christina will do. She’s capable of giving us great surprises. The things I mean are things I should recognise as soon as I saw them, and they would make me leave the house on the spot.”

“So that if you’ve not left it yet—?” he asked with extreme eagerness.

“It’s because I’ve thought I may do some good by staying.”

He seemed but half content with this answer; nevertheless he said in a moment: “To me it makes all the difference. And if anything of the kind you speak of should happen, that would be only the greater reason for your staying.—You might interpose, you might arrest—” He stopped short before her large Germanic grimace.

“You must have been in Rome more than once when the Tiber had overflowed, _è vero_? What would you have thought then if you had heard people telling the poor wretches in the Ghetto, on the Ripetta, up to their knees in liquid mud, that they ought to interpose, to arrest?”

“_Capisco bene_,” said the Prince, dropping his eyes. He appeared to have closed them, for some moments, as if under a slow spasm of pain. “I can’t tell you what torments me most,” he presently went on—“the thought that sometimes makes my heart rise into my mouth. It’s a haunting fear.” And his pale face and disturbed respiration might indeed have been those of a man before whom some horrible spectre had risen.

“You needn’t tell me. I know what you mean, my poor friend.”

“Do you think then there _is_ a danger—that she’ll drag my name, do what no one has ever dared to do? That I’d never forgive,” he declared almost under his breath; and the hoarseness of his whisper lent it a great effect.

Madame Grandoni hastily wondered if she had not better tell him (as it would prepare him for the worst) that his wife cared about as much for his name as for any old label on her luggage; but after an instant’s reflexion she reserved this information for another hour. Besides, as she said to herself, the Prince ought already to know perfectly to what extent Christina attached the idea of an obligation or an interdict to her ill-starred connexion with an ignorant and superstitious Italian race whom she despised for their provinciality, their parsimony and their futility (she thought their talk the climax of childishness) and whose fatuous conception of their importance in the great modern world she had on various public occasions sufficiently riddled with her derision. She finally contented herself with remarking: “Dear Prince, your wife’s a very proud woman.”

“Ah, how could my wife be anything else? But her pride’s not my pride. And she has such ideas; such opinions! Some of them are monstrous.”

Madame Grandoni smiled. “She doesn’t think it so necessary to have them when you’re not there.”

“Why then do you say that you enter into my fears—that you recognise the stories I’ve heard?”

I know not whether the good lady lost patience with his pressure; at all events she broke out with a certain sharpness. “Understand this, understand this: Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn’t consider herself much more!”

The Prince appeared to study for a moment this somewhat ambiguous yet portentous phrase; then he slowly got up with his hat in his hand and walked about the room softly, solemnly, as if suffering from his long thin feet. He stopped before one of the windows and took another survey of South Street; then turning he suddenly asked in a voice into which he had evidently endeavoured to infuse a colder curiosity: “Is she admired in this place? Does she see many people?”

“She’s thought very strange of course. But she sees whom she likes. And they mostly bore her to death!” Madame Grandoni conscientiously added.

“Why then do you tell me this country pleases her?”