Part 24

His friend looked at him a little sternly. “Believe at least what _I_ say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She’ll speak the truth always.”

It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke. But he didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal to say for himself: “There are things it’s better to conceal.”

“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you’re here and I mayn’t see you again for a long time or perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!) I may as well give you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make her seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”

“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.

“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her having told you—how the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can’t for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”

“Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?”

“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” the old woman smiled. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern.’ That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”

“Yes, we’re not anything of that low sort, thank God! _Dio mio, Dio mio!_” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with Christina’s husband the current of conversation made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied for the moment with the minuteness he had been taught that in such a case courtesy demanded; but by the time that at her request they had returned to the gate nearest South Street (she wished him to come no further) he had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way. “And who and what then is this English captain? About him there’s a great deal said.”

“This English captain?”

“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.

They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple of predatory hansoms dashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought that was coming, and at bottom it’s he who has occupied you most!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”

“Why doesn’t he count?”

“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t even think he does.”

“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”

“Perhaps that’s just the reason. When people give her a chance to get tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate you needn’t be any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, a _factotum_, but he works without wages.”

“Isn’t he then in love with her?”

“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”

“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince lugubriously.

“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!”

“Oh the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events he sees her.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t see _him_!” laughed Madame Grandoni as she turned away.

XIX

The pink dressing-gown that Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose Muniment became in Lomax Place a conspicuous object, supplying poor Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She detailed this episode minutely to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected. The grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital as something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons of which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when they’re out of town what can it be when they’re all there together and everything’s out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted herself to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the state of Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she hadn’t been afraid to appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who had visions of a needle that positively flashed in the disinterested service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship got all dragged out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might be in tatters for all they could do to help her, at the top of those dreadful stairs, with that strange sick creature (she was too unnatural) thinking only of her own finery and talking about her complexion. If she wanted pink she should have pink; but to Pinnie there was something almost unholy in it, like decking out a corpse or dressing up the cat. This was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t be other than difficult for her to enter into the importance her ladyship appeared to attach to those pushing people. The girl was unfortunate certainly, stuck up there like a puppy on a shelf, but in her ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more in keeping while they walked about under those tremendous gilded ceilings. Lady Aurora, seeing how she was struck, showed her all over the house, carrying the lamp herself and telling an old woman who was there—a “confidential” housekeeper, a person with ribbons in her cap who would have pushed Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do very well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive stages of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was terribly long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured presence as had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently because it was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was dedicated to her humble friend.

One day when Hyacinth came home Pinnie at once announced to him that her ladyship had been there to look at it—to pass judgement before the last touches were conferred. The dressmaker intimated that in such a case as that her judgement was rather wild and she seemed to have embarrassing ideas about pockets. Whatever could poor Miss Muniment want of pockets and what had she to put in them? But Lady Aurora had evidently found the garment far beyond anything she expected, and she had been more affable than ever and had wanted to know about every one in the “Plice”: not in a meddling, prying way, either, like some of those condescending swells, but quite as if the poor people were the high ones and she was afraid her curiosity might be “presumptious.” It was in the same discreet spirit that she had invited Amanda to relate her whole history and had expressed an interest in the career of her young friend.

“She said you had charming manners,” Miss Pynsent hastened to remark; “but on my life, Hyacinth Robinson, I never mentioned a scrap that it could give you pain that any one should talk about.” There was an heroic explicitness in this, on Pinnie’s part, for she knew in advance just how Hyacinth would look at her—fixedly, silently, hopelessly, as if she were still capable of tattling horribly (with the idea that her revelations would increase her importance) and putting forward this hollow theory of her supreme discretion to cover it up. His eyes seemed to say it all: “How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you’re lying? I’m very helpless, for I can’t prove that without applying to the person to whom your incorrigible folly has probably led you to brag, to throw out mysterious and tantalising hints. You know of course that I’d never condescend to that.” Pinnie suffered acutely from this imputation, yet exposed herself to it often, because she could never deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting Hyacinth know he was appreciated, admired and, for those “charming manners” commended by Lady Aurora, even all but wondered at in so many words; and this kind of interest always appeared to imply a suspicion of his secret—something which, when he expressed to himself the sense of it, he called, resenting it at once and finding a certain softness in it, “a beastly _attendrissement_.” When Pinnie went on to say to him that Lady Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet having come to Belgrave Square for the famous books he reflected that he must really wait upon her without more delay if he wished to keep up his reputation as a man of the world; and meanwhile he considered much the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life which had opened so suddenly from one day to the other: a phase in which his society should have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the obscurity of his condition only an attraction the more. They were taking him up then one after the other and were even taking up poor Pinnie as a means of getting at him; so that he wondered with gaiety and irony if it meant that his destiny was really seeking him out—that the aristocracy, recognising a mysterious affinity (with that fineness of _flair_ for which they were remarkable), were coming to him to save him the trouble of coming to them.

It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening) and Lady Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of “rising from dinner” having always been, in his imagination, for some reason or other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He was ignorant of the fact that Lady Aurora’s principal meal consisted of a scrap of fish and a cup of tea served on a little stand in the dismantled breakfast-parlour. The door was opened for Hyacinth by the invidious old lady whom Pinnie had described and who listened to his appeal, conducted him through the house and ushered him into her ladyship’s presence without the smallest relaxation of a pair of tightly-closed lips. His good hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour by the light of a couple of candles and apparently immersed in a collection of crumpled papers and account-books. She was ciphering, consulting memoranda, taking notes; she had had her head in her hands and the silky entanglement of her hair resisted the rapid effort she made to smooth herself down as she saw the little bookbinder come in. The impression of her fingers remained in little rosy streaks on her pink skin. She exclaimed instantly, “Oh, you’ve come about the books—it’s so very kind of you”; and she hurried him off to another room, to which, as she explained, she had had them brought down for him to choose from. The effect of this precipitation was to make him suppose at first that she might wish him to execute his errand as quickly as possible and take himself off; but he presently noted that her nervousness and her shyness were of an order that would always give false ideas. She wanted him to stay, she wanted to talk with him and she had rushed with him at the books in order to gain time and composure for exercising some subtler art. Hyacinth, staying half an hour, became more and more convinced that her ladyship was, as he had ventured to pronounce her on the occasion of their last meeting, a regular saint. He was privately a little disappointed in the books, though he selected three or four, as many as he could carry, and promised to come back for others: they denoted on Lady Aurora’s part a limited acquaintance with French literature and even a certain puerility of taste. There were several volumes of Lamartine and a set of the spurious memoirs of the Marquise de Créqui; but for the rest the little library consisted mainly of Marmontel and Madame de Genlis, _Le Récit d’une Sœur_ and the tales of M. J. T. de Saint-Germain. There were certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and consistent realists of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but evidently none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple of Balzac’s novels, which by ill luck happened to be just those our young man had read more than once.

There was nevertheless something very agreeable to him in the moments he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals, monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he had seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and Lady Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a sense of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of prohibitory presences. She spoke again of the poor people in the south of London and of the Muniments in particular; evidently the only fault she had to find with these latter was that they were not poor enough—not sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which she could step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished she would talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was that, like Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He didn’t mind, with the poor, going into questions of their state—it even gave him at times a strange savage satisfaction; but he saw that in discussing them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less: the rich couldn’t consider poverty in the light of experience. Their mistakes and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of want and dirt when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this deficient perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness it would be a queer enough business when he should come to pretending to hold the candlestick for the Princess Casamassima.

His present hostess said no word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed she must have wished to place him on the footing on which people don’t express approbation or surprise at the decency or good-breeding of each other’s relatives. He saw how she would always treat him as a gentleman and that even if he should be basely ungrateful she would never call his attention to the fact that she had done so. He shouldn’t have occasion to say to her, as he had said to the Princess, that she regarded him as a curious animal; and it gave him at once the sense of learning more about life, a sense always delightful to him, to perceive there were such different ways (which implied still a good many more) of being a lady of rank. The manner in which Lady Aurora appeared to wish to confer with him on the great problems of pauperism and reform might have implied he was a benevolent nobleman (of the type of Lord Shaftesbury) who had endowed many charities and was noted, in philanthropic schemes, for the breadth of his views. It was not less present to him that Pinnie might have tattled, put forward his claims to high consanguinity, than it had been when the dressmaker herself descanted on her ladyship’s condescensions; but he remembered now that he too had only just escaped being asinine when, the other day, he flashed out an allusion to his accursed origin. At all events he was much touched by the delicacy with which the earl’s daughter comported herself, simply assuming that he was “one of themselves”; and he reflected that if she did know his history (he was sure he might pass twenty years in her society without discovering if she did) this shade of courtesy, this natural tact, coexisting even with extreme awkwardness, illustrated that “best breeding” which he had seen alluded to in novels portraying the aristocracy. The only remark on Lady Aurora’s part that savoured in the least of looking down at him from a height was when she said cheerfully and encouragingly: “I suppose one of these days you’ll be setting up in business for yourself.” This was not so cruelly patronising that he couldn’t reply with a smile equally free from any sort of impertinence: “Oh dear, no, I shall never do that. I should make a great mess of any attempt to carry on a business. I’ve no turn at all for that sort of thing.”

Lady Aurora looked a little surprised. “Oh, I see; you don’t like—you don’t like—!” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say he didn’t like the idea of going in to that extent for a trade; but he stopped her in time from imputing to him a sentiment so foolish and declared what he meant to be simply that his one faculty was the faculty of doing his little piece of work, whatever it was, of liking to do it skilfully and prettily, and of liking still better to get his money for it when done. His conception of “business” or of rising in the world didn’t go beyond that. “Oh yes, I can fancy!” her ladyship exclaimed; but she looked at him a moment with eyes which showed that he puzzled her, that she didn’t quite understand his tone. Before he left her she asked him abruptly (nothing had led up to it) what he thought of Captain Sholto, whom she had seen that other evening in Audley Court. Didn’t he think him a very odd sort of person? Hyacinth confessed to this impression; whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider him decidedly vulgar?”

“How can I know?”

“You can know perfectly—as well as any one!” Then she added: “I think it’s a pity they should form relations with any one of that kind.”

“They” of course meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person who may be vulgar?”—Hyacinth regarded this solicitude as exquisite. “But think of the people they know—think of those they’re surrounded with—think of all Audley Court!”

“The poor, the unhappy, the labouring classes? Oh, I don’t call _them_ vulgar!” cried her ladyship with radiant eyes. The young man, lying awake a good deal that night, laughed to himself, on his pillow, not unkindly, at her fear that he and his friends would be contaminated by the familiar of a princess. He even wondered if she wouldn’t find the Princess herself a bit vulgar.

XX

It must not be supposed that his relations with Millicent had remained unaffected by the remarkable incident that had brushed her with its wing at the theatre. The whole occurrence had made a great impression on the young lady from Pimlico; he never saw her, for weeks afterwards, that she had not an immense deal to say about it; and though it suited her to cultivate the shocked state at the crudity of such proceedings and to denounce the Princess for a bold-faced foreigner, of a kind to which any one who knew anything of what could go on in London would give a wide berth, it was easy to see she enjoyed having rubbed shoulders across the house with a person so splendid and having found her own critical estimate of her friend confirmed in such high quarters. She professed to draw her warrant for her low opinion of the lady in the box from information given her by Captain Sholto as he sat beside her—information of which at different moments she gave a different version; her notes of it having nothing in common save that they were alike unflattering to the Princess. Hyacinth had many doubts of the Captain’s having talked indiscreetly; it would be in such a case such a very unnatural thing for him to do. He _was_ unnatural—that was true—and he might have told Millicent, who was capable of having plied him with questions, that his distinguished friend was separated from her husband; but, for the rest, it was more probable that the girl had given the rein to a fine faculty of free invention of which he had had frequent glimpses, under pressure of her primitive half-childish, half-plebeian impulse of destruction, the instinct of pulling down what was above her, the reckless energy that would, precisely, make her so effective in revolutionary scenes. Hyacinth (it has been mentioned) didn’t consider that Millicent was false, and it struck him as a proof of positive candour that she should make up absurd, abusive stories about a person as to whom she only knew that she disliked her and could hope for no esteem, and indeed for no recognition of any kind, in return. When people were fully false you didn’t know where you stood with them, and on such a point as this Miss Henning could never be accused of leaving you in obscurity. She said little else about the Captain and didn’t pretend to repeat the remainder of his conversation, taking on her air of grand indifference when Hyacinth amused himself with repaying her criticism of his new acquaintance by drawing a sufficiently derisive portrait of hers.