‘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 is nothing essentially impossible in my seeing you again; but it may very well be that you will never again find it so pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any rate, you know, I am going away.’
‘Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town,’ Hyacinth commented, sagaciously.
‘Do you, Mr Robinson?’ asked the Princess.
‘Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless, it is possible that, this year, I may get two or three days at the seaside.139 I should like to take my old lady. I have done it before.’
‘And except for that you shall be always at work?’
‘Yes; but you must understand that I like 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,’ the young man replied, judicially.
The Princess looked a little chagrined, but after a moment she remarked, ‘I wonder whether you would come to see me, in the country, somewhere.’
‘Oh, dear!’ Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. ‘You are 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 are going to be banal too? I ask you, would you come?’
Hyacinth hesitated a moment. ‘Yes, I think I would 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 would come.’
‘You mean you can’t leave your work, like that; you might lose it, if you did, and 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 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 seemed to her visitor quite sacred. ‘After all, I don’t know where I shall be. I have got to pay stupid visits, myself, where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump. Every one here thinks me exceedingly odd – as there is no doubt I am! I might be ever so much more so if you would 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 have got through that corvée;140 I shall be here next year. In the meantime, don’t forget me,’ she went on, rising 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, radiant sweetness. Then, in a manner almost equally incongruous, 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 am not, by nature, persevering, and am really very easily put off, I don’t consider that they will prove insurmountable. They exist on my side as well, and if you will help me to overcome mine I will do the same for you, with yours.’
These words, repeating themselves again and again in Hyacinth’s 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, though he had handled it much. 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 the place in Soho, 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 the fruit of his toil, and much more freely expressed than that of old Crookenden, who grunted approbation, but was always too longheaded 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 butler, in charge of the house, opening the door yet looking down at him as if from a second-storey window, took the life out of his vision and erected himself as an impenetrable medium. The Princess had been absent for some days; the butler 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 ducal circle. He decided to retain his little package for the present; he would give it to her when he should see her again, and he turned away without parting with it. Later, it seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, 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 Hyacinth, 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 into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic.
18
The matter concerned him only indirectly, but 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 at twelve o’clock, in the foreign fashion – 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 sort of summer edition of what was most characteristic in the London air. The Prince met her, by appointment, at the gate, and they went and sat down together under the crees 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 seemed to throw into high relief. They remained there for nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning to friendly interpretations, could not have told herself what comfort it was to the depressed, embarrassed young man at her side. She had nothing to say to him which could better his case, as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect which was 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. The old lady 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 behaved like a spoiled 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 judgment, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles! though one of them was a powerful prelate), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions – occasions on which such ideas were a gratuitous injury. He had not been
clever enough or strong enough to make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to a ground where his wife was far too accomplished a woman not to obtain the appearance of victory.
There was another reflection that Madame Grandoni made, 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 (mingled with bitterness as they had been for her), lived with artists, archaeologists, 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 come to that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have tolerated for long the simple dulness of the Prince’s company. The old lady had said to him, on meeting him, ‘Of course, what you want to know immediately 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 told me that she had 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.141 She doesn’t like it, but she accepts the necessity for this once, since you have made the mistake, as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked about you, last night, after your note came to me – for five minutes; that is, I talked, and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end she said this (what I shall tell you), 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 is 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 alone!” Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they are 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 that they might form a wholesome admonition, but it was now impressed upon her 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 which was, after all, not a crime. How could the Prince occupy himself, what interests could he create, and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as a fish, and as narrow as his hat-band. His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult, felt it more than saw it – felt that he could not plead incapacity without putting the Princess largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to burst into tears. But he said nothing – perhaps because he was afraid of that – so that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand upon his own, remained his only answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t, that when Christina touched upon 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 become slightly clearer. But at last, abruptly, as if he had not heard her, he inquired, appealingly, who the young man was who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.
Madame Grandoni hesitated a moment. ‘He was the Princess’s bookbinder.’
‘Her bookbinder? Do you mean her lover?’
‘Prince, how can you dream she will 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,’ the Prince added, as if the declaration justified him.
‘I told you the other day that she is making studies of the people – the lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.’ Madame Grandoni could not help laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth elicited no echo from her interlocutor.
‘I have thought that over – over and over; but the more I think the less I understand. Would it be your idea that she is quite crazy? I must tell you I don’t care if she is!’
‘We are 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 is trying democracy and socialism.’
‘Santo Dio!’142 murmured the young man. ‘And what do they say here when they see her bookbinder?’
‘They haven’t seen him, and perhaps they won’t. But if they do, it won’t matter, because here everything is forgiven. That a person should be singular is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.’
The Prince mused a while, and then he said, ‘How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?’
‘I don’t know what you are 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 are full of gin; their faces 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?’
The old lady looked at him with a certain severity. ‘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 will 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 did not admit his error, and she doubted whether he even perceived 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 is better to conceal.’