The solution of his difficulty – he flattered himself he had arrived at it – involved a winding-up of his affairs; and though, even if no solution had been required, he would have felt clearly that he had been dropped, yet as even in that case it would have been sweet to him to bid her good-bye, so, at present, the desire for some last vision of her own hurrying fate could still appeal to him. If things had not gone well for him he was still capable of wondering whether they looked better for her. It is a singular fact, that there rose in his mind a sort of incongruous desire to pity her. All these were odd feelings enough, and by the time half an hour had elapsed they had throbbed themselves into weariness and into slumber. While he remembered that he was waiting now in a very different frame from that in which he waited for her in South Street the first time he went to see her, he closed his eyes and lost himself. His unconsciousness lasted, he afterwards perceived, nearly half an hour; it terminated in his becoming aware that the lady of the house was standing before him. Assunta was behind her, and as he opened his eyes she took from her mistress the bonnet and mantle of which the Princess divested herself. ‘It’s charming of you to have waited,’ the latter said, smiling down at him with all her old kindness. ‘You are very tired – don’t get up; that’s the best chair, and you must keep it.’ She made him remain where he was; she placed herself near him on a smaller seat; she declared that she was not tired herself, that she didn’t know what was the matter with her – nothing tired her now; she exclaimed on the time that had elapsed since he had last called, as if she were reminded of it simply by seeing him again; and she insisted that he should have some tea – he looked so much as if he needed it. She considered him with deeper attention, and wished to know what was the matter with him – what he had done to use himself up; adding that she must begin and look after him again, for while she had the care of him that kind of thing didn’t happen. In response to this Hyacinth made a great confession: he admitted that he had stayed away from work and simply amused himself – amused himself by loafing about London all day. This didn’t pay – he was beginning to discover it as he grew older; it was doubtless a sign of increasing years when one began to perceive that wanton pleasures were hollow and that to stick to one’s tools was not only more profitable but more refreshing. However, he did stick to them, as a general thing; that was no doubt partly why, from the absence of the habit of it, a day off turned out to be rather a grind. When Hyacinth had not seen the Princess for some time he always, on meeting her again, had a renewed, tremendous sense of her beauty, and he had it to-night in an extraordinary degree. Splendid as that beauty had ever been, it seemed clothed at present in transcendent glory, and (if that which was already supremely fine could be capable of greater refinement), to have worked itself free of all earthly grossness and been purified and consecrated by her new life. Her gentleness, when she was in the mood for it, was quite divine (it had always the irresistible charm that it was the humility of a high spirit), and on this occasion she gave herself up to it. Whether it was because he had the consciousness of resting his eyes upon her for the last time, or because she wished to be particularly pleasant to him in order to make up for having, amid other preoccupations, rather dropped him of late (it was probable the effect was a product of both causes), at all events the sight of her loveliness seemed none the less a privilege than it had done the night he went into her box, at the play, and her presence lifted the weight from his soul. He suffered himself to be coddled and absently, even if radiantly, smiled at, and his state of mind was such that it could produce no alteration of his pain to see that on the Princess’s part these were inexpensive gifts. She had sent Assunta to bring them tea, and when the tray arrived she gave him cup after cup, with every restorative demonstration; but he had not sat with her a quarter of an hour before he perceived that she scarcely measured a word he said to her or a word that she herself uttered. If she had the best intention of being nice to him, by way of compensation, this compensation was for a wrong that was far from vividly present to her mind. Two points became perfectly clear: one was that she was thinking of something very different from her present, her past, or her future relations with Hyacinth Robinson; the other was that he was superseded indeed. This was so completely the case that it did not even occur to her, it was evident, that the sense of supersession might be cruel to the young man. If she was charming to him it was because she was good-natured and he had been hanging off, and not because she had done him an injury. Perhaps, after all, she hadn’t, for he got the impression that it might be no great loss of comfort not to constitute part of her life to-day. It was manifest from her eye, from her smile, from every movement and tone, and indeed from all the irradiation of her beauty, that that life to-day was tremendously wound up. If he had come to Madeira Crescent because he was curious to see how she was getting on, it was sufficiently intimated to him that she was getting on well; that is that she was living more than ever on high hopes and bold plans and far-reaching combinations. These things, from his own point of view, ministered less to happiness, and to be mixed up with them was perhaps not so much greater a sign that one had not lived for nothing, than the grim arrangement which, in the interest of peace, he had just arrived at with himself. She asked him why he had not been to see her for so long, quite as if this failure were only a vulgar form of social neglect; and she scarcely seemed to notice whether it were a good or a poor excuse when he said he had stayed away because he knew her to be extremely busy. But she did not deny the impeachment; she admitted that she had been busier than ever in her life before. She looked at him as if he would know what that meant, and he remarked that he was very sorry for her.
‘Because you think it’s all a mistake? Yes, I know that. Perhaps it is; but if it is, it’s a magnificent one. If you were scared about me three or four months ago, I don’t know what you would think to-day – if you knew! I have risked everything.’
‘Fortunately I don’t know,’ said Hyacinth.
‘No, indeed, how should you?’
‘And to tell the truth,’ he went on, ‘that is really the reason I haven’t been back here till to-night. I haven’t wanted to know – I have feared and hated to know.’
‘Then why did you come at last?’
Hyacinth hesitated a moment. ‘Out of a kind of inconsistent curiosity.’
‘I suppose then you would like me to tell you where I have been to-night, eh?’
‘No, my curiosity is satisfied. I have learned something – what I mainly wanted to know – without you telling me.’
She stared an instant. ‘Ah, you mean whether Madame Grandoni was gone? I suppose Assunta told you.’
‘Yes, Assunta told me, and I was sorry to hear it.’
The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been indeed a very serious incident. ‘You may imagine how I feel it! It leaves me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an immense difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes of the world. At any rate, she couldn’t put up with me any more – it appears that I am more and more shocking; and it was written!’ On Hyacinth’s asking what the old lady would do, she replied, ‘I suppose she will go and live with my husband.’ Five minutes later she inquired of him whether the same reason that he had mentioned just before was the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr Muniment had told her that he had not been near him and his sister for more than a month.
‘No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy; because, somehow, in the first place it isn’t natural to feel uneasy about Paul, and in the second, if it were, he never lets one see anything. It is simply the general sense of real divergence of view. When that divergence becomes sharp, it is better not to pester each other.’
‘I see what you mean. But you might go and see his sister.’
‘I don’t like her,’ said Hyacinth, simply.
‘Ah, neither do I!’ the Princess exclaimed; while her visitor remained conscious of
the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with which she had referred to their common friend. But she was silent after this, and he judged that he had stayed long enough and sufficiently taxed a preoccupied attention. He got up, and was bidding her good-night, when she checked him by saying, suddenly, ‘By the way, your not going to see so good a friend as Mr Muniment, because you disapprove to-day of his work, suggests to me that you will be in an awkward fix, with your disapprovals, the day you are called upon to serve the cause according to your vow.’
‘Oh, of course I have thought of that,’ said Hyacinth, smiling.
‘And would it be indiscreet to ask what you have thought?’
‘Ah, so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.’
‘I have never talked to you about this, because it seemed to me indelicate, and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast for even so intimate a friend as I have been to have a right to meddle with it. But I have wondered much – seeing that you cared less and less for the people – how you would reconcile your change of heart with the performance of your engagement. I pity you, my poor friend,’ the Princess went on, with a heavenly sweetness, ‘for I can imagine nothing more terrible than to find yourself face to face with such an engagement, and to feel at the same time that the spirit which prompted it is dead within you.’
‘Terrible, terrible, most terrible,’ said Hyacinth, gravely, looking at her.
‘But I pray God it may never be your fate!’ The Princess hesitated a moment; then she added, ‘I see you feel it. Heaven help us all!’ She paused, then went on: ‘Why shouldn’t I tell you, after all? A short time ago I had a visit from Mr Vetch.’
‘It was kind of you to see him,’ said Hyacinth.
‘He was delightful, I assure you. But do you know what he came for? To beg me, on his knees, to snatch you away.’
‘To snatch me away?’
‘From the danger that hangs over you. Poor man, he was very pathetic.’
‘Oh yes, he has talked to me about it,’ Hyacinth said. ‘He has picked up the idea, but he knows nothing whatever about it. And how did he expect that you would be able to snatch me?’
‘He left that to me; he had only a general conviction of my influence with you.’
‘And he thought you would exercise it to make me back out? He does you injustice; you wouldn’t!’ Hyacinth exclaimed, with a laugh. ‘In that case, taking one false position with another, yours would be no better than mine.’
‘Oh, speaking seriously, I am perfectly quiet about you and about myself. I know you won’t be called,’ the Princess returned.
‘May I inquire how you know it?’
After a slight hesitation she replied, ‘Mr Muniment tells me so.’
‘And how does he know it?’
‘We have information. My dear fellow,’ the Princess went on, ‘you are so much out of it now that if I were to tell you, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Yes, no doubt I am out of it; but I still have a right to say, all the same, in contradiction to your imputation of a moment ago, that I care for the people exactly as much as I ever did.’
‘My poor Hyacinth, my dear infatuated little aristocrat, was that ever very much?’ the Princess asked.
‘It was enough, and it is still enough, to make me willing to lay down my life for anything that will really help them.’
‘Yes, and of course you must decide for yourself what that is; or, rather, what it’s not.’
‘I didn’t decide when I gave my promise. I agreed to take the decision of others,’ Hyacinth said.
‘Well, you said just now that in relation to this business of yours you had thought of many things,’ the Princess rejoined. ‘Have you ever, by chance, thought of anything that will help the people?’
‘You call me fantastic names, but I’m one of them myself.’
‘I know what you are going to say!’ the Princess broke in. ‘You are going to say that it will help them to do what you do – to do their work and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what do you propose for the thousands and thousands for whom no work – on the overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven – is to be found? There is less and less work in the world, and there are more and more people to do the little that there is. The old ferocious selfishnesses must come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must be smashed!’
The tone in which the Princess uttered these words made Hyacinth’s heart beat fast, and there was something so inspiring in her devoted fairness that the vision of a great heroism flashed up again before him, in all the splendour it had lost – the idea of a tremendous risk and an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at such a moment, made every scruple seem a prudence and every compunction a cowardice. ‘I wish to God I could see it as you see it!’ he exclaimed, after he had looked at her a minute in silent admiration.
‘I see simply this: that what we are doing is at least worth trying, and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means, will try anything else, on their head be the responsibility, on their head be the blood!’
‘Princess,’ said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he trembled, ‘dearest Princess, if anything should happen to you’ – and his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings; they seemed to him worse than anything he had imagined for himself.
She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. ‘To me! And pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?’
‘Simply because there is no one in the world, and there has never been any one in the world, like you.’
‘Oh, thank you!’ said the Princess, with a kind of dry impatience, turning away.
The manner in which she spoke put an end to their conversation. It expressed an indifference to what it might interest him to think about her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to his eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent his head over her hand, which he had taken to kiss; after which he left the room without looking at her.
46
‘I have received a letter from your husband,’ Paul Muniment said to the Princess, the next evening, as soon as he came into the room. He announced this fact with a kind of bald promptitude and with a familiarity of manner which showed that his visit was one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised by it, and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. ‘Couldn’t it have been by your old lady?’ Muniment inquired. ‘He must have met her in Paris. It is from Paris that he writes.’
‘What an incorrigible cad!’ the Princess exclaimed.
‘I don’t see that – for writing to me. I have his letter in my pocket, and I will show it to you if you like.’
‘Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched,’ the Princess replied.
‘You touch his money, my dear lady,’ Muniment remarked, with the quiet smile of a man who sees things as they are.
The Princess hesitated a little. ‘Yes, I make an exception for that, because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.’
‘I should think, on the contrary, it would gratify him by showing you in a condition of weakness and dependence.’
‘Not when he knows I don’t use it for myself. What exasperates him is that it is devoted to ends which he hates almost as much as he hates me and yet which he can’t call selfish.’
‘He doesn’t hate you,’ said Muniment, with the tone of pleasant reasonableness that he used when he was most imperturbable. ‘His letter satisfies me of that.’ The Princess stared, at this, and asked him what he was coming to – whether he were leading up to advising her to go back and live with her husband. ‘I don’t know that I would go so far as to advise,’ he replied; ‘when I have so much
benefit from seeing you here, on your present footing, that wouldn’t sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy that you will go before very long.’
‘And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?’