Hyacinth listened to this recital with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment sounded the word ‘intellect’ made him feel this; she pronounced it as if she were distributing prizes for a high degree of it. No doubt the tipsy inventor and the regal laundress had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence upon her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb – the chord of melancholy, bitter, aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made in his spirit if there had been some pure, honourable figure like that to shed her influence over it.
‘Are you very fond of your brother?’ he inquired, after a little.
The eyes of his hostess glittered at him for a moment. ‘If you ever quarrel with him, you’ll see whose side I’ll take.’
‘Ah, before that I shall make you like me.’
‘That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I’ll fling you over!’
‘Why, then, do you object so to his views – his ideas about the way the people will come up?’
‘Because I think he’ll get over them.’
‘Never – never!’ cried Hyacinth. ‘I have only known him an hour or two, but I deny that, with all my strength.’
‘Is that the way you are going to make me like you – contradicting me so?’ Miss Muniment inquired, with familiar archness.
‘What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.’94
‘I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you are not, if you want all the great people pulled down, and the most dreadful scenes enacted.’
‘Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for the groaning, toiling millions – those who have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time?’
Hyacinth asked this question with considerable heat, but the effect of it was to send his companion off into a new fit of laughter. ‘You say that just like a man that my brother described to me three days ago; a little man at some club, whose hair stood up – Paul imitated the way he glowered and screamed. I don’t mean that you scream, you know; but you use almost the same words that he did.’ Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of this allusion, or of the picture offered to him of Paul Muniment casting ridicule upon those who spoke in the name of the down-trodden. But Rosy went on, before he had time to do more than reflect that there would evidently be a great deal more to learn about her brother: ‘I haven’t the least objection to seeing the people improved, but I don’t want to see the aristocracy lowered an inch. I like so much to look at it up there.’
‘You ought to know my aunt Pinnie – she’s just such another benighted idolater!’ Hyacinth exclaimed.
‘Oh, you are making me like you very fast! And pray, who is your aunt Pinnie?’
‘She’s a dressmaker, and a charming little woman. I should like her to come and see you.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not in her line – I never had on a dress in my life. But, as a charming woman, I should be delighted to see her.’
‘I will bring her some day,’ said Hyacinth. And then he added, rather incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it a shame that her sharpness should be enlisted on the wrong side, ‘Don’t you want, for yourself, a better place to live in?’
She jerked herself up, and for a moment he thought she would jump out of her bed at him. ‘A better place than this? Pray, how could there be a better place? Every one thinks it’s lovely; you should see our view by daylight – you should see everything I’ve got. Perhaps you are used to something very fine, but Lady Aurora says that in all Belgrave Square there isn’t such a cosy little room. If you think I’m not perfectly content, you are very much mistaken!’
Such a sentiment as that could only exasperate Hyacinth, and his exasperation made him indifferent to the fact that he had appeared to cast discredit on Miss Muniment’s apartment. Pinnie herself, submissive as she was, had spared him that sort of displeasure; she groaned over the dinginess of Lomax Place sufficiently to remind him that she had not been absolutely stultified by misery. ‘Don’t you sometimes make your brother very angry?’ he asked, smiling, of Rose Muniment.
‘Angry? I don’t know what you take us for! I never saw him lose his temper in his life.’
‘He must be a rum customer! Doesn’t he really care for – for what we were talking about?’
For a moment Rosy was silent; then she replied, ‘What my brother really cares for – well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me.’
Hyacinth stared. ‘But isn’t he tremendously deep in –’ He hesitated.
‘Deep in what?’
‘Well, in what’s going on, beneath the surface. Doesn’t he belong to things?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to – you may ask him!’ cried Rosy, laughing gaily again, as the opening door readmitted the subject of their conversation. ‘You must have crossed the water with her ladyship,’ she went on. ‘I wonder who enjoyed their walk most.’
‘She’s a handy old girl, and she has a goodish stride,’ said the young man.
‘I think she’s in love with you, simply, Mr Muniment.’
‘Really, my dear, for an admirer of the aristocracy you allow yourself a license,’ Paul murmured, smiling at Hyacinth.
Hyacinth got up, feeling that really he had paid a long visit; his curiosity was far from satisfied, but there was a limit to the time one should spend in a young lady’s sleeping apartment. ‘Perhaps she is; why not?’ he remarked.
‘Perhaps she is, then; she’s daft enough for anything.’
‘There have been fine folks before who have patted the people on the back and pretended to enter into their life,’ Hyacinth said. ‘Is she only playing with that idea, or is she in earnest?’
‘In earnest – in terrible earnest, my dear fellow. I think she must be rather crowded out at home.’
‘Crowded out of Inglefield? Why, there’s room for three hundred!’ Rosy broke in.
‘Well, if that’s the kind of mob that’s in possession, no wonder she prefers Camberwell. We must be kind to the poor lady,’ Paul added, in a tone which Hyacinth noticed. He attributed a remarkable meaning to it; it seemed to say that people such as he were now so sure of their game that they could afford to be magnanimous; or else it expressed a prevision of the doom which hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had made friends, and the girl replied that Mr Robinson had made himself very agreeable. ‘Then you must tell me all about him after he goes, for you know I don’t know him much myself,’ said her brother.
‘Oh yes, I’ll tell you everything; you know how I like describing.’
Hyacinth was laughing to himself at the young lady’s account of his efforts to please her, the fact being that he had only listened to her own eager discourse, without opening his mouth; but Paul, whether or no he guessed the truth, said to him very pertinently, ‘It’s very wonderful: she can describe things she has never seen. And they are just like the reality.’
‘There’s nothing I’ve never seen,’ Rosy rejoined. ‘That’s the advantage of my lying here in such a manner. I see everything in the world.’
‘You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings – his secret societies and clubs. You put that aside when I asked you.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t ask her that sort of thing,’ said Paul, lowering at Hyacinth with a fierce frown – an expression which he perceived in a moment to be humorously assumed.
‘What am I to do, then, since you won’t tell me anything definite yourself?’
‘It will be definite enough when you get hanged for it!’ Rosy ex
claimed, mockingly.
‘Why do you want to poke your head into black holes?’ Muniment asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder, and shaking it gently.
‘Don’t you belong to the party of action?’ said Hyacinth, solemnly.
‘Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!’ Paul cried, laughing, to his sister. ‘You must have got that precious phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that the party you want to belong to?’ he went on, with his clear eyes ranging over his diminutive friend.
‘If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,’ Hyacinth pleaded. It was his view of himself, and it was not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never beg for a favour; but now he felt that in any relation he might have with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This man he could entreat, pray to, go on his knees to, without a sense of humiliation.
‘What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth??’ Paul went on, refusing to be serious.
‘Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure they are coming in to make a search for your papers,’ Miss Muniment lucidly interposed.
‘The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up and dance.’
‘What did you ask me to come home with you for?’ Hyacinth demanded, twirling his hat. It was an effort for him, for a moment, to keep the tears out of his eyes; he found himself forced to put such a different construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy impression that Muniment perceived in him a possible associate, of a high type, in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of things, and now it came over him that the real use he had been put to was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service, every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man, at the present juncture, justified the high estimate that Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question would have been, he invented, at the moment, a better one, and said, at random, smiling, and not knowing exactly what his visitor had meant,
‘What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you would be afraid.’
What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally vague; but he rejoined, quickly enough, ‘I think you have only to try me to see.’
‘I’m sure if you introduce him to some of your low, wicked friends, he’ll be quite satisfied after he has looked round a bit,’ Miss Muniment remarked, irrepressibly.
‘Those are just the kind of people I want to know,’ said Hyacinth, ingenuously.
His ingenuousness appeared to touch Paul Muniment. ‘Well, I see you’re a good ’un. Just meet me some night.’
‘Where, where?’ asked Hyacinth, eagerly.
‘Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away from her,’ said his friend, laughing, but leading him out of the room again.
10
Several months after Hyacinth had made the acquaintance of Paul Muniment, Millicent Henning remarked to him that it was high time he should take her to some place of amusement. He proposed the Canterbury Music Hall;95 whereupon she tossed her head and affirmed that when a young lady had done for a young man what she had done for him, the least he could do was to take her to some theatre in the Strand. Hyacinth would have been a good deal at a loss to say exactly what she had done for him, but it was familiar to him by this time that she regarded him as under great obligations. From the day she came to look him up in Lomax Place she had taken a position, largely, in his life, and he had seen poor Pinnie’s wan countenance grow several degrees more blank. Amanda Pynsent’s forebodings had been answered to the letter; that bold-faced apparition had become a permanent influence. She never spoke to him about Millicent but once, several weeks after her interview with the girl; and this was not in a tone of rebuke, for she had divested herself for ever of any maternal prerogative. Tearful, tremulous, deferen tial inquiry was now her only weapon, and nothing could be more humble and circumspect than the manner in which she made use of it. He was never at home of an evening, at present, and he had mysterious ways of spending his Sundays, with which churchgoing had nothing to do. The time had been when, often, after tea, he sat near the lamp with the dressmaker, and, while her fingers flew, read out to her the works of Dickens and of Scott; happy hours when he appeared to have forgotten the wrong she had done him and she almost forgot it herself. But now he gulped down his tea so fast that he hardly took off his hat while he sat there, and Pinnie, with her quick eye for all matters of costume, noticed that he wore it still more gracefully askew than usual, with a little victorious, exalted air. He hummed to himself; he fingered his moustache; he looked out of the window when there was nothing to look at; he seemed pre-occupied, absorbed in intellectual excursions, half anxious and half delighted. During the whole winter Miss Pynsent explained everything by three words murmured beneath her breath: ‘That forward jade!’ On the single occasion, however, on which she sought relief from her agitation in an appeal to Hyacinth, she did not trust herself to designate the girl by any epithet or title.
‘There is only one thing I want to know,’ she said to him, in a manner which might have seemed casual if in her silence, knowing her as well as he did, he had not already perceived the implication of her thought. ‘Does she expect you to marry her, dearest?’
‘Does who expect me? I should like to see the woman who does!’
‘Of course you know who I mean. The one that came after you – and picked you right up – from the other end of London.’ And at the remembrance of that insufferable scene poor Pinnie flamed up for a moment. ‘Isn’t there plenty of young fellows down in that low part where she lives, without her ravaging over here? Why can’t she stick to her own beat, I should like to know?’ Hyacinth had flushed at this inquiry, and she saw something in his face which made her change her tone. ‘Just promise me this, my precious child: that if you get into any sort of mess with that piece you’ll immediately confide it to your poor old Pinnie.’
‘My poor old Pinnie sometimes makes me quite sick,’ Hyacinth remarked, for answer. ‘What sort of a mess do you suppose I’ll get into?’
‘Well, suppose she does come it over you that you promised to marry her?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. She doesn’t want to marry any one to-day.’
‘Then what does she want to do?’
‘Do you imagine I would tell a lady’s secrets?’ the young man inquired.
‘Dear me, if she was a lady, I shouldn’t be afraid!’ said Pinnie.
‘Every woman’s a lady when she has placed herself under one’s protection,’ Hyacinth rejoined, with his little manner of a man of the world.