Part 23

It was perhaps to contradict this that, after a moment, she began to tell him more about her domestic affairs. He ought to know who she was, unless Captain Sholto had told him; and she mentioned her parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and how she had led from her youngest years a wandering Bohemian life in a thousand different places (always in Europe, she had never been in America and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to cross the Atlantic) and largely at one period in Rome. She had been married by her people, in a mercenary way, for the sake of a fortune and a great name, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy could have wished. Her parents were dead, luckily for them, and she had no one near her of her own except Madame Grandoni, who belonged to her only in the sense that she had known her as a girl; was an association of her—what should she call them?—her uneasy but innocent years. Not that she had ever been very innocent; she had had a horrible education. However, she had known a few good people—people she respected then; but Madame Grandoni was the only one who had stuck to her. She too was liable to leave her any day; the Princess appeared to intimate that her destiny might require her to take some step which would test severely the old woman’s attachment. It would detain her too long to make him understand the stages by which she had arrived at her present state of mind: her disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility of the people who all over Europe had the upper hand. If he could have seen her life, the _milieu_ in which she had for several years been condemned to move, the evolution of her opinions (Hyacinth was delighted to hear her use that term) would strike him as perfectly logical. She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she considered that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put on a tolerable footing only by a revolution. At any rate she had some self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover; the only way to arrive at which was to throw herself into some effort that would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles and efforts of others. Hyacinth listened to her with a wonderment which, as she went on, was transformed into willing submission; she seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By the time he had been with her half an hour she had made the situation itself easy and usual, and a third person who should have joined them at this moment would have noticed nothing to suggest that friendly social intercourse between little bookbinders and Neapolitan princesses was not in London a matter of daily occurrence.

Hyacinth had seen plenty of women who chattered about themselves and their affairs—a vulgar garrulity of confidence was indeed a leading characteristic of the sex as he had hitherto learned to know it—but he was quick to perceive that the great lady who now took the trouble to open herself to him was not of a gossiping habit; that she must be on the contrary, as a general thing, proudly, ironically reserved, even to the point of passing with many people for a model of the unsatisfactory. It was very possible she was capricious; yet the fact that her present sympathies and curiosities might be a caprice wore in her visitor’s eyes no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and interesting whim, and why mightn’t he stand for the hour at any rate in the silvery moonshine it cast on his path? It must be added that he was far from taking in everything she said, some of her allusions and implications being so difficult to seize that they mainly served to reveal to him the limits of his own acquaintance with life. Her words evoked all sorts of shadowy suggestions of things he was condemned not to know, touching him most when he had not the key to them. This was especially the case with her reference to her career in Italy, on her husband’s estates, and her relations with his family, who considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business) after they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it. The position made for her among such people and what she had had to suffer from their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might be remained vague to her listener) had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and heretical _à outrance_—lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the revolutionary spirit. He surely needn’t have been so sensible of the weak spots in his comprehension of the Princess when he could already surmise that personal passion had counted for so much in the formation of her views. This induction, however, which had no harshness, didn’t make her affect him any the less as a creature compounded of the finest elements; brilliant, delicate, complicated, but complicated with something divine.

It was not till after he had left her that he became conscious she had forced him to talk in spite of talking so much herself. He drew a long breath as he reflected that he hadn’t made quite such an ass of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by the thrill of his interest and admiration, which had not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too in his improbable little way was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of anxious, conscious tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity, some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the grimmest subterranean circles. He had said indeed much more than he had warrant for when she questioned him on his “radical” affiliations; he had spoken as if the movement were vast and mature, whereas in fact, so far at least as he was as yet concerned with it and could answer for it from personal knowledge, it was circumscribed by the hideously-papered walls of the little club-room at the “Sun and Moon.” He reproached himself with this laxity, but it had not been engendered by pride. He was only afraid of disappointing his hostess too much, of making her say, “Why in the world then did you come to see me if you’ve nothing more remarkable to put before me?”—a question to which of course he would have had an answer ready but for its being so impossible to say he had never asked to come and that his coming was her own affair. He wanted too much to come a second time to have the courage to make that speech. Nevertheless when she exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, as she always did, from something else they had been talking about, “I wonder if I shall ever see you again!” he replied with perfect sincerity that it was scarce possible for him to believe anything so delightful could be repeated. There were some kinds of happiness that to many people never came at all, and to others could come only once. He added: “It’s very true I had just that feeling after I left you the other night at the theatre. And yet here I am!”

“Yes, there you are,” said the Princess thoughtfully—as if this might be a still graver and more embarrassing fact than she had yet supposed it. “I take it there’s nothing essentially inconceivable in my seeing you again; but it may very well be that you’ll never again find it so pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any rate, you know, I’m going away.”

“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town—!” Hyacinth rose to that occasion.

“Do _you_, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess asked.

“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless it’s possible that this year I may get three or four days at the seaside. I should like to take my old lady. I’ve done it before.”

“And except for that shall you be always at work?”

“Yes; but you must understand that I love my work. You must understand that it’s a great blessing for a young fellow like me to have it.”

“And if you didn’t have it what would you do? Should you starve?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should starve,” our friend replied judicially.

She looked a little chagrined, but after a moment pursued: “I wonder whether you’d come to see me in the country somewhere.”

“Oh cracky!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You’re so kind I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t be _banal_, please. That’s what other people are. What’s the use of my looking for something fresh in other walks of life if you’re going to be _banal_ too? I ask if you’d come.”

He couldn’t have said at this moment whether he were plunging or soaring. “Yes, I think I’d come. I don’t know at all how I should do it—there would be several obstacles; but wherever you should call for me I’d come.”

“You mean you can’t leave your work like that? You might lose it if you did, and then be in want of money and much embarrassed?”

“Yes, there would be little difficulties of that kind. You see that immediately, in practice, great obstacles and complications come up when it’s a question of a person like you making friends with a person like me.”

“That’s the way I like you to talk,” said the Princess with a pitying gentleness that struck her visitor as quite sacred. “After all I don’t know where I shall be. I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump. Every one here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there’s no doubt I am! I might be ever so much more so if you’d only help me a little. Why shouldn’t I have my bookbinder after all? In attendance, you know—it would be awfully _chic_. We might have immense fun, don’t you think so? No doubt it will come. At any rate I shall return to London when I’ve got through that _corvée_; I shall be here next year. In the meantime don’t forget me,” she went on as she rose to her feet. “Remember on the contrary that I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad places.” Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted up her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at Hyacinth—who even as he stood up was of slightly smaller stature—with all her strange high radiance. Then in a manner almost equally quaint she added a reference to what she had said a moment before. “I recognise perfectly the obstacles in practice as you call them; but though I’m not by nature persevering, and am really very easily put off, I don’t consider they’ll prove insurmountable. They exist on my side as well, and if you’ll help me to overcome mine I’ll do the same for you with yours.”

These words, repeating themselves again and again in his consciousness, appeared to give him wings, to help him to float and soar as he turned that afternoon out of South Street. He had at home a copy of Tennyson’s poems—a single comprehensive volume, with a double column on the page, in a tolerably neat condition despite much handling. He took it to pieces that same evening, and during the following week, in his hours of leisure, at home in his little room, with the tools he kept there for private use and a morsel of delicate, blue-tinted Russia leather of which he obtained possession at old Crook’s, he devoted himself to the task of binding the book as perfectly as he knew how. He worked with passion, with religion, and produced a masterpiece of firmness and finish, of which his own appreciation was as high as that of M. Poupin when at the end of the week he exhibited to him the fruit of his toil, and much more freely expressed than that of old Crook himself, who grunted approbation but was always too long-headed to create precedents. Hyacinth carried the volume to South Street as an offering to the Princess, hoping she would not yet have left London; in which case he would ask the servant to deliver it to her along with a little note he had sat up all night to compose. But the majestic major-domo in charge of the house, opening the door yet looking down at him as if from a second-story window, took the life out of his vision and erected instead of it, by a touch, a high blank wall. The Princess had been absent for some days; her representative was so good as to inform the young man with the parcel that she was on a visit to a “Juke” in a distant part of the country. He offered, however, to receive and even to forward anything Hyacinth might wish to leave; but our hero felt a sudden indisposition to launch his humble tribute into the vast, the possibly cold unknown of a “jucal” circle. He decided to retain his little package for the present; he would offer it to her when he should see her again, and he retreated without giving it up. Later on it seemed to create a manner of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it had almost come to appear not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness, almost always, with our young man, in retrospect, became rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned to a virtual proof and gage—as if a ghost in vanishing from sight had left a palpable relic.

XVIII

The matter touched him but indirectly, yet it may concern the reader more closely to know that before the visit to the Duke took place Madame Grandoni granted to Prince Casamassima the private interview she had promised him on that sad Sunday afternoon. She crept out of South Street after breakfast—a repast which under the Princess’s roof was served in the foreign fashion at twelve o’clock—crossed the sultry solitude into which at such a season that precinct resolves itself, and entered the Park, where the grass was already brown and a warm, smoky haze prevailed, a tepid and tasteless _réchauffé_, as it struck our old friend, of the typical London fog. The Prince met her by appointment at the gate and they went and sat down together under the trees beside the drive, amid a wilderness of empty chairs and with nothing to distract their attention from an equestrian or two left over from the cavalcades of a fortnight before and whose vain agitation in the saddle the desolate scene threw into high relief. They remained there nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning to friendly interpretations, couldn’t have told herself what comfort it was to her afflicted companion. She had nothing to say to him that could better his case as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect not after all perceptibly improved by its not being Sunday, and could only feel that with her he must seem to himself to be nearer his wife—to be touching something she had touched. She wished he would resign himself more, but she was willing to minister to that thin illusion, little as she approved of the manner in which he had conducted himself at the time of the last sharp crisis in the remarkable history of his relations with Christina. He had conducted himself after the fashion of a spoiled child, a child with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been showy. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to ground where his wife was far too accomplished a combatant not to obtain the appearance of victory.

There was another reflexion for Madame Grandoni to make as her interview with her dejected friend prolonged itself. She could make it the more freely as, besides being naturally quick and appreciative, she had always, during her Roman career, in the dear old days (mixed with bitterness as they had been for her) lived with artists, archæologists, ingenious strangers, people who abounded in good talk, threw out ideas and played with them. It came over her that really, even if things had not reached that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have tolerated long the simple deadly dulness of the Prince’s company. The old lady had begun on meeting him: “Of course what you want to know at once is whether she has sent you a message. No, my poor friend, I must tell you the truth. I asked her for one, but she assures me she has nothing whatever, of any kind, to say to you. She knew I was coming out to see you—I haven’t done so _en cachette_. She doesn’t like it, but she accepts the necessity for this once, since you’ve made the mistake, as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked of you last night after your note came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked in my independent way and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end she spoke briefly, with perfect calmness and the appearance of being the most reasonable woman in the world. She didn’t ask me to repeat it to you, but I do so because it’s the only substitute I can offer you for a message. ‘I try to occupy my life, my mind, to create interests, in the odious position in which I find myself; I endeavour to get out of myself, my small personal disappointments and troubles, by the aid of such poor faculties as I possess. There are things in the world more interesting after all, and I hope to succeed in giving my attention to them. It appears to me not too much to ask that the Prince on his side should make the same conscientious effort—and leave me contentedly alone!’ Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they’re all I have to give you.”

After she had given them Madame Grandoni felt a pang of regret; the Prince turned upon her a face so white, bewildered and wounded. It had seemed to her they might form a wholesome admonition, but she now saw that, as coming from his wife, they were cruel, and she herself felt almost cruel for having repeated them. What they amounted to was an exquisite taunt of his mediocrity—a mediocrity after all neither a crime nor a design nor a preference. How could the Prince occupy himself, what interests could he create and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as one of the dingy London sheep browsing before them, and as contracted as his hat-band. His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult, felt it more than saw it—felt he couldn’t plead incapacity without putting his wife largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry right out. But he said nothing—perhaps because he was afraid of that—so that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand on his own, remained his sole answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t that when Christina touched on this she was unanswerable. The old lady changed the subject: told him what a curious country England was in so many ways; offered information as to their possible movements during the summer and autumn, which within a day or two had taken more form. But at last, as if he had not heard her, he broke out on the identity of the young man who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.

Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”

“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”

“Prince, how can you dream she’ll ever live with you again?” the old lady asked in reply to this.

“Why then does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his books, his bindings? I shouldn’t say this to _her_,” he added as if the declaration justified him.

“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” She couldn’t help laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth elicited no echo.

“I’ve thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less I understand. Would it be your idea that she’s quite crazy? I must tell you I don’t care if she is!”

“We’re all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at present she’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”

“_Santo Dio!_” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when they see the bookbinder?”

“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”

The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean the young man you saw at the house—I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first time he had been there and that the Princess had only seen him once—if you mean the little bookbinder he isn’t dirty, especially what _we_ should call. The people of that kind here are not like our dear Romans. Every one has a sponge as big as your head; you can see them in the shops.”

“They’re full of gin; their faces are awful, are purple,” said the Prince; after which he immediately asked: “If she had only seen him once how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?”