‘Yes, perhaps he won’t,’ said the Princess, thoughtfully.
39
On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at four o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his visit to Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy’s room at about five, carefully dressed and brushed, and ruddy with the freshness of an abundant washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa, with a conscious smile, knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after a moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him, ‘My dear Mr Muniment, you are going to see the Princess.’
‘Well, have you anything to say against it?’ Mr Muniment asked.
‘Not a word; you know I like princesses. But you have.’
‘Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,’ the young man rejoined. ‘There’s something to be said against everything, if you’ll give yourself trouble enough.’
‘I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against you.’
‘The man’s a sneak who is only and always praised,’ Muniment remarked. ‘If you didn’t hope to be finely abused, where would be the encouragement?’
‘Ay, but not with reason,’ said Rosy, who always brightened to an argument.
‘The better the reason, the greater the incentive to expose one’s self. However, you won’t hear it, if people do heave bricks at me.’
‘I won’t hear it? Pray, don’t I hear everything? I should like any one to keep anything from me!’ And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her recumbent head.
‘There’s a good deal I keep from you, my dear,’ said Paul, rather dryly.
‘You mean there are things I don’t want, I don’t take any trouble, to know. Indeed and indeed there are: things that I wouldn’t know for the world – that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you was to go down on your knees. But if I did – if I did, I promise you that just as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are others,’ the young woman went on – ‘there are others that you will just be so good as to tell me. When the Princess asked you to come and see her you refused, and you wanted to know what good it would do. I hoped you would go, then; I should have liked you to go, because I wanted to know how she lived, and whether she had things handsome, or only in the poor way she said. But I didn’t push you, because I couldn’t have told you what good it would do you: that was only the good it would have done me. At present I have heard everything from Lady Aurora, and I know that it’s all quite decent and tidy (though not really like a princess a bit), and that she knows how to turn everything about and put it best end foremost, just as I do, like, though I oughtn’t to say it, no doubt. Well, you have been, and more than once, and I have had nothing to do with it; of which I am very glad now, for reasons that you perfectly know – you’re too honest a man to pretend you don’t. Therefore, when I see you going again, I just inquire of you, as you inquired of her, what good does it do you?’
‘I like it – I like it, my dear,’ said Paul, with his fresh, unembarrassed smile.
‘I dare say you do. So should I, in your place. But it’s the first time I have heard you express the idea that we ought to do everything we like.’
‘Why not, when it doesn’t hurt any one else?’
‘Oh, Mr Muniment, Mr Muniment!’ Rosy exclaimed, with exaggerated solemnity, holding up a straight, attenuated forefinger at him. Then she added, ‘No, she doesn’t do you good, that beautiful, brilliant woman.’
‘Give her time, my dear – give her time,’ said Paul, looking at his watch.
‘Of course you are impatient, but you must hear me. I have no doubt she’ll wait for you; you won’t lose your turn. Please, what would you do if any one was to break down altogether?’
‘My bonny lassie,’ the young man rejoined, ‘if you only keep going, I don’t care who fails.’
‘Oh, I shall keep going, if it’s only to look after my friends and get justice for them,’ said Miss Muniment – ‘the delicate, sensitive creatures who require support and protection. Have you really forgotten that we have such a one as that?’
The young man walked to the window, with his hands in his pockets, and looked out at the fading light. ‘Why does she go herself, then, if she doesn’t like her?’
Rose Muniment hesitated a moment. ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not a man!’ she broke out. ‘I think a woman on her back is cleverer than a man on his two legs. And you such a wonderful one, too!’
‘You are all too clever for me, my dear. If she goes – and twenty times a week, too – why shouldn’t I go, once in ever so long? Especially as I like her, and Lady Aurora doesn’t.’
‘Lady Aurora doesn’t? Do you think she’d be guilty of hypocrisy? Lady Aurora delights in her; she won’t let me say that she herself is fit to dust the Princess’s shoes. I needn’t tell you how she goes down before them she likes. And I don’t believe you care a button; you have got something in your head, some wicked game or other, that you think she can hatch for you.’
At this Paul Muniment turned round and looked at his sister a moment, smiling still and whistling just audibly. ‘Why shouldn’t I care? Ain’t I soft, ain’t I susceptible?’
‘I never thought I should hear you ask that, after what I have seen these four years. For four years she has come, and it’s all for you, as well it might be, and you never showing any more sense of what she’d be willing to do for you than if you had been that woollen cat on the hearthrug!’
‘What would you like me to do? Would you like me to hang round her neck and hold her hand, the same as you do?’ Muniment asked.
‘Yes, it would do me good, I can tell you. It’s better than what I see – the poor lady getting spotted and dim, like a mirror that wants rubbing.’
‘You know a good deal, Rosy, but you don’t know everything,’ Muniment remarked in a moment, with a face that gave no sign of seeing a reason in what she said. ‘Your mind is too poetical. There’s nothing that I should care for that her ladyship would be willing to do for me.’
‘She would marry you at a day’s notice – she’d do that.’
‘I shouldn’t care for that. Besides, if I was to ask her she would never come into the place again. And I shouldn’t care for that, for you.’
‘Never mind me; I’ll take the risk!’ cried Rosy, gaily.
‘But what’s to be gained, if I can have her, for you, without any risk?’
‘You won’t have her for me, or for any one, when she’s dead of a broken heart.’
‘Dead of a broken tea-cup!’ said the young man. ‘And, pray, what should we live on, when you had got us set up? – the three of us, without counting the kids.’
He evidently was arguing from pure good-nature, and not in the least from curiosity; but his sister replied as eagerly as if he would be floored by her answer: ‘Hasn’t she got two hundred a year of her own? Don’t I know every penny of her affairs?’
Paul Muniment gave no sign of any mental criticism he may have made on Rosy’s conception of the delicate course, or of a superior policy; perhaps, indeed, for it is perfectly possible, her inquiry did not strike him as having a mixture of motives. He only rejoined, with a little pleasant, patient sigh, ‘I don’t want the dear old girl’s money.’
His sister, in spite of her eagerness, waited twenty seconds; then she flashed at him, ‘Pray, do you like the Princess’s better?’
‘If I did, there would be more of it,’ he answered, quietly.
‘How can she marry you? Hasn’t she got a husband?’ Rosy cried.
‘Lord, how you give me away!’ laughed her brother. ‘Daughters of earls, wives of princes – I have only to pick.’
‘I don’t speak of the Princess, so long as there’s a prince. But if you haven’t seen that Lady Aurora is a beautiful, wonderful exception, and quite unlike any one else in all the wide world – well, all I can say
is that I have.’
‘I thought it was your opinion,’ Paul objected, ‘that the swells should remain swells, and the high ones keep their place.’
‘And, pray, would she lose hers if she were to marry you?’
‘Her place at Inglefield, certainly,’ said Paul, as patiently as if his sister could never tire him with any insistence or any minuteness.
‘Hasn’t she lost that already? Does she ever go there?’
‘Surely you appear to think so, from the way you always question her about it,’ replied Paul.
‘Well, they think her so mad already that they can’t think her any madder,’ his sister continued. ‘They have given her up, and if she were to marry you –’
‘If she were to marry me, they wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,’ Paul broke in.
Rosy flinched a moment; then she said, serenely, ‘Oh, I don’t care for that!’
‘You ought to, to be consistent, though, possibly, she shouldn’t, admitting that she wouldn’t. You have more imagination than logic – which of course, for a woman, is quite right. That’s what makes you say that her ladyship is in affliction because I go to a place that she herself goes to without the least compulsion.’
‘She goes to keep you off,’ said Rosy, with decision.
‘To keep me off?’
‘To interpose, with the Princess; to be nice to her and conciliate her, so that she may not take you.’
‘Did she tell you any such rigmarole as that?’ Paul inquired, this time staring a little.
‘Do I need to be told things, to know them? I am not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,’ answered Rosy, with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear that she was capable of wizardry.
‘You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,’ the young man rejoined. ‘She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world – to make the poor a little less poor.’
‘Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.’
‘She knows I am not helpless so long as you are about the place, and that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.’
‘She wants to assist me to assist you, then!’ the girl exclaimed, with the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused; it was a spirit that seemed, at moments, in argument, to mock at her own contention. ‘Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring about?’ she went on. ‘Isn’t that what you are plotting and working and waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it – to work with you.’
‘My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She couldn’t if she would.’
‘And no more do I, I suppose you mean.’
‘No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would, you could. However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for there’s mighty little of it. I’m not doing much, you know.’
Rosy lay there looking up at him. ‘It must be pretty thick, when you talk that way. However, I don’t care what happens, for I know I shall be looked after.’
‘Nothing will happen – nothing will happen,’ Paul remarked, simply.
The girl’s rejoinder to this was to say in a moment, ‘You have a different tone since you have taken up the Princess.’
She spoke with a certain severity, but he broke out, as if he had not heard her, ‘I like your idea of the female aristocracy quarrelling over a dirty brute like me.’
‘I don’t know how dirty you are, but I know you smell of soap,’ said Rosy, with serenity. ‘They won’t quarrel; that’s not the way they do it. Yes, you are taking a different tone, for some purpose that I can’t discover just yet.’
‘What do you mean by that? When did I ever take a tone?’ her brother asked.
‘Why then do you speak as if you were not remarkable, immensely remarkable – more remarkable than anything any one, male or female, good or bad, of the aristocracy or of the vulgar sort, can ever do for you?’
‘What on earth have I ever done to show it?’ Paul demanded.
‘Oh, I don’t know your secrets, and that’s one of them. But we’re out of the common beyond any one, you and I, and, between ourselves, with the door fastened, we might as well admit it.’
‘I admit it for you, with all my heart,’ said the young man, laughing.
‘Well, then, if I admit it for you, that’s all that’s required.’
The brother and sister considered each other a while in silence, as if each were tasting, agreeably, the distinction the other conferred; then Muniment said, ‘If I’m such an awfully superior chap, why shouldn’t I behave in keeping?’
‘Oh, you do, you do!’
‘All the same, you don’t like it.’
‘It isn’t so much what you do; it’s what she does.’
‘How do you mean, what she does?’
‘She makes Lady Aurora suffer.’
‘Oh, I can’t go into that,’ said Paul. ‘A man feels like a muff, talking about the women that “suffer” for him.’
‘Well, if they do it, I think you might bear it!’ Rosy exclaimed. ‘That’s what a man is. When it comes to being sorry, oh, that’s too ridiculous!’
‘There are plenty of things in the world I’m sorry for,’ Paul rejoined, smiling. ‘One of them is that you should keep me gossiping here when I want to go out.’
‘Oh, I don’t care if I worry her a little. Does she do it on purpose?’ Rosy continued.
‘You ladies must settle all that together,’ Muniment answered, rubbing his hat with the cuff of his coat. It was a new one, the bravest he had ever possessed, and in a moment he put it on his head, as if to reinforce his reminder to his sister that it was time she should release him.
‘Well, you do look genteel,’ she remarked, complacently, gazing up at him. ‘No wonder she has lost her head! I mean the Princess,’ she explained. ‘You never went to any such expense for her ladyship.’
‘My dear, the Princess is worth it – she’s worth it,’ said the young man, speaking seriously now, and reflectively.
‘Will she help you very much?’ Rosy demanded, with a strange, sudden transition to eagerness.
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘that’s rather what I look for.’
She threw herself forward on her sofa, with a movement that was rare with her, and shaking her clasped hands she exclaimed, ‘Then go off, go off quickly!’
He came round and kissed her, as if he were not more struck than usual with her freakish inconsistency. ‘It’s not bad to have a little person at home who wants a fellow to succeed.’
‘Oh, I know they will look after me,’ she said, sinking back upon her pillow with an air of agreeable security.
He was aware that whenever she said ‘they’, without further elucidation, she meant the populace surging up in his rear, and he rejoined, always hilarious, ‘I don’t think we’ll leave it much to “them”.’
‘No, it’s not much you’ll leave to them, I’ll be bound.’
He gave a louder laugh at this, and said, ‘You’re the deepest of the lot, Miss Muniment.’
Her eyes kindled at his praise, and as she rested them on her brother’s she murmured, ‘Well, I pity the poor Princess, too, you know.’
‘Well, now, I’m not conceited, but I don’t,’ Paul returned, passing in front of the little mirror on the mantelshelf.
‘Yes, you’ll succeed, and so shall I – but she won’t,’ Rosy went on.
Muniment stopped a moment, with his hand on the latch of the door, and said, gravely, almost sententiously, ‘She is not only beautiful, as beautiful as a picture, but she is uncommon sharp, and she has taking ways, beyond anything that ever was known.’
‘I know her ways,’ his sister replied. Then, as he left the room, she called after him, ‘But I don’t care for anything, so long as you become prime minister of England!’
T
hree quarters of an hour after this Muniment knocked at the door in Madeira Crescent, and was immediately ushered into the parlour, where the Princess, in her bonnet and mantle, sat alone. She made no movement as he came in; she only looked up at him with a smile.
‘You are braver than I gave you credit for,’ she said, in her rich voice.
‘I shall learn to be brave, if I associate a while longer with you. But I shall never cease to be shy,’ Muniment added, standing there and looking tall in the middle of the small room. He cast his eyes about him for a place to sit down, but the Princess gave him no help to choose; she only watched him, in silence, from her own place, with her hands quietly folded in her lap. At last, when, without remonstrance from her, he had selected the most uncomfortable chair in the room, she replied –
‘That’s only another name for desperate courage. I put on my bonnet, on the chance, but I didn’t expect you.’
‘Well, here I am – that’s the great thing,’ Muniment said, good-humouredly.
‘Yes, no doubt it’s a very great thing. But it will be a still greater thing when you are there.’
‘I am afraid you hope too much,’ the young man observed. ‘Where is it? I don’t think you told me.’
The Princess drew a small folded letter from her pocket, and, without saying anything, held it out to him. He got up to take it from her, opened it, and, as he read it, remained standing in front of her. Then he went straight to the fire and thrust the paper into it. At this movement she rose quickly, as if to save the document, but the expression of his face, as he turned round to her, made her stop. The smile that came into her own was a little forced. ‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked. ‘I take it the house is known. If we go, I suppose we may admit that we go.’