Part 3

“My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see you again for the present, as, to take your early train, you’ll have left the house before I put on my wig—and I never show myself to gentlemen without it. I’ve looked after the Princess pretty well, all day, to keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you for a little. Take the same care, I earnestly beg you. I must put myself into my dressing-gown; at my age, at this hour, it’s the only thing. What will you have? I hate to be tight,” pursued Madame Grandoni, who appeared even in her ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort successfully enough. “Don’t sit up late,” she added, “and don’t keep him, Christina. Remember that for an active young man like Mr. Robinson, going every day to his work, there’s nothing more exhausting than such an unoccupied life as ours. For what do we do after all? His eyes are very heavy. _Basta!_”

During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned shield and rested her eyes a while on Hyacinth. At last she said: “Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something to you that I can’t shout across the room.” He immediately got up, but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other, they met half-way and before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood opening and closing her fan, then she began: “You must be surprised at my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.”

“No indeed: I’m not now surprised at anything.”

“When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all, become friends,” said the Princess.

“I hoped we were already. Certainly after the kindness you’ve shown me there’s no service of friendship you might ask of me——!”

“That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you’re going to say, and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do me if all the while you think of me as a hollow-headed, hollow-hearted trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and oppressing you with clumsy attentions? Perhaps you believe me a bad, bold, ravening flirt.”

“Capable of wanting to flirt with _me_?” Hyacinth demurred. “I should be very conceited.”

“Surely you’ve the right to be as conceited as you please after the advances I’ve made you! Pray who has a better one? But you persist in remaining humble, and that’s very provoking.”

“It’s not I who am provoking; it’s life and society and all the difficulties that surround us.”

“I’m precisely of that opinion—that they’re exasperating; that when I appeal to you frankly, candidly, disinterestedly—simply because I like you, for no other reason in the world—to help me to disregard and surmount these conventions and absurdities, to treat them with the contempt they deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little and make yourself small and try to edge out of the situation by pleading general devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease to be insignificant from the moment I’ve anything to do with you. My dear fellow,” the Princess went on in her free, audacious, fraternising way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, “there are people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of obscurity.”

“What do you wish me then to do?” Hyacinth asked as quietly as he could.

If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his lips and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment, he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant: “I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends in general—all I ever asked of the best I’ve ever had. But none of them ever did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has just left us. She understood me long ago.”

“That’s all I on my side ask of you,” said Hyacinth with a smile, as to attest presence of mind, that might have come from some flushed young captive under cross-examination for his life. “Give _me_ time, give _me_ time,” he murmured, looking up at her splendour.

“Dear Mr. Hyacinth, I’ve given you months!—months since our first meeting. And at present haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans—I know what I’m saying. Don’t try to look stupid; with your beautiful intelligent face you’ll never succeed. I wished to leave you free to amuse yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve amused myself,” said Hyacinth.

“You’d have been very fastidious if you hadn’t. However, that’s precisely in the first place what I wished you to come here for. To observe the impression made by such a house as this on such a nature as yours introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure you, quite worth my while. I’ve already given you a hint of how extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having seen—what shall I call them?—beautiful, delightful old things. I’ve been watching you; I’m frank enough to tell you that. I want you to see more—more—more!” the Princess exclaimed with a sudden emphasis that, had he heard her use it to another, he would have taken for a passion of tenderness. “And I want to talk with you about this matter as well as others. That will be for to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?”

“I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you’re going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little imagination!”

He shook his head with a pale grin and had an idea his mind was made up. “I can’t stay.”

She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching—it was so sad, yet as a rebuke so gentle—in the tone in which she replied: “You oughtn’t make me too abject. It isn’t nice.”

He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed to fall from under him and crumble. He remained a moment looking on the ground. “Princess,” he then said, “you’ve no idea—how should you have?—into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust yourself. I’ve no money—I’ve no clothes.”

“What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.”

“Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages. I live on my wages from day to day.”

“Let me then give you wages. You’ll work for me.”

“What do you mean—work for you?”

“You’ll bind all my books. I’ve ever so many foreign ones in paper.”

“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”

“No, I don’t imagine that. I’ll give you the wages now, and you can do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then if you want anything you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very good shops; I’ve used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things at this juncture; she had that quickening effect on him. Among others he thought of these two: first that it was indelicate (though such an opinion was not very strongly held either in Pentonville or in Soho) to accept money from a woman; and second that it was still more indelicate to make such a woman as that go down on her knees to him. But it took more than a minute for one of these convictions to prevail over the other, and before that he had heard his friend continue in the tone of mild, disinterested argument: “If we believe in the coming democracy, if it seems to us right and just and we hold that in sweeping over the world the great wave will wash away a myriad iniquities and cruelties, why not make some attempt with our own poor means—for one must begin somewhere—to carry out the spirit of it in our lives and our manners? I want to do that. I try to do it—in my relations with you for instance. But you hang ridiculously back. You’re really not a bit democratic!”

Her accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity (though he still hesitated an instant, wondering if the words wouldn’t offend her) to say straightforwardly enough: “I’ve been strongly warned against you.”

The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that. Of course my proceedings—though after all I’ve done little enough as yet—must appear most unnatural. _Che vuole?_ as Madame Grandoni says.”

A certain knot of light blue ribbon which formed part of the trimming of her dress hung down at her side in the folds of it. On these glossy loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and he now took up one of them and carried it to his lips. “I’ll do all the work for you that you’ll give me. If you give it on purpose and by way of munificence that’s your own affair. I myself will estimate the price. What decides me is that I shall do the job so well; certainly it shall be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will have been at least that reason. I’ve brought you a book—so you can see. I did it for you last year and went to South Street to give it to you, but you had already gone.”

“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so exclusively the calmness of relief at finding he could be reasonable, as well as a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he was surprised when in the next breath she said irrelevantly: “Who was it warned you against me?”

He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady and reflecting how, as the likelihood was small that his friend in Camberwell would ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her plan of going there) no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in London—Paul Muniment.”

“Paul Muniment?”

“I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.”

“The person who said something good? I forget what it was.”

“It was sure to be something good if he said it. He’s awfully wise.”

“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about me?”

“Oh nothing of course but the little I could tell him. He only spoke on general grounds.”

“I like his odd name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he resembles it I think I should like him.”

“You’d like him much better than me.”

“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I’m determined to keep hold of you simply for what you can show me.” She paused a moment with her beautiful deep eyes lighted as by possibilities that half dazzled and half defied him; then again her wondrous words took it up. “On general grounds, _bien entendu_, your friend was quite right to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I’ve undertaken to make as small as possible. It’s to reduce them to nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I’ve done. What in the world is it I’m trying to do but by every clever trick I can think of fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my position and yours? You know what I make of ‘positions’—I told you in London. For heaven’s sake let me feel that I’ve—a little—succeeded!” He satisfied her sufficiently to enable her five minutes later apparently to entertain no further doubt on the question of his staying over. On the contrary she burst into a sudden explosion of laughter, replacing her argumentative pressure by one of her singular sallies. “You must absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants. It will be lovely to see you there!”

As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room after she had a trifle abruptly and, as struck him, almost unceremoniously and inconsequently left him, it occurred to him to wonder if that was mainly what she was keeping him for—so that he might help her to play one of her tricks on the good people at Broome. He paced there in the still candlelight for a longer time than he measured; until the butler came and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently and fixedly as to let him know that he interfered with the custom of the house. He had told the Princess that what determined him was the thought of the manner in which he might exercise his craft in her service; but this was only half the influence that pressed him into forgetfulness of what he had most said to himself when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of unprecedented introspection, he wrote the letter by which he accepted the invitation to Medley. He would go there, he reasoned, because a man must be gallant, especially if he be a poor little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would insist at every step on knowing what he was in for. The change that had taken place in him now, from one moment to another, was that he had simply ceased to wonder what that mystery might be. All warnings, reflexions, considerations of verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the possible, of the value of his independence, had become as nothing to him. The cup of an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted palace, a week of such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crook as he had never dreamed of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of romance, of reality, of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without drinking. He might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in his mouth the taste of nectar. He went upstairs under the eye of the butler and on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found himself face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just issued from her own apartment, the door of which stood open near her; she might have been hovering there at watch for his footstep. She had donned her dressing-gown, which seemed to give her all respiratory and other ease, but had not yet parted with her wig. She still had her pink French book under her arm, and her fat little hands, tightly locked together in front of her, formed the clasp of her generous girdle.

“Do tell me it’s positive, Mr. Robinson!” she said as she stopped short.

“What’s positive, Madame Grandoni?”

“That you take the train in the morning.”

“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary it has been settled I shall stay over. I’m very sorry if it distresses you—but _che vuole_?” he heard himself almost “cheekily” risk.

Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in return; she only looked at him hard a moment and then, shrugging her shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.

XXIV

“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He’s Diedrich Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly the next morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes on Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed he should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him how her venerable friend had, while the day was still very young, pronounced it in the worst possible taste that she shouldn’t let their companion yet depart in peace; to which she had replied that about tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before without any one’s being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about _him_—of all thankless subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than this of arranging one’s relations with people; and he guessed how thoroughly she meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her side then there was as little possibility as on his that they should ever quarrel: their acquaintance would be a grand friendship or would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this quality, and it may be figured how safe her guest felt by the time he began to tell her that something had happened to him in London three months before, one night, or rather in the small hours of the morning, that had altered his life altogether—had indeed as he might say changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.

The Princess had led to this almost as soon as they left the house; making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying suddenly: “Now tell me what’s going on among your friends. I don’t mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers. _Où en êtes-vous_ at the present time? Is there anything new, is anything going to be done? I’m afraid you’re always simply dawdling and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if of late he had by no means either dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to refute the imputation she broke out with a different effect: “How annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the right to say to yourself, ‘After all what do I know? Mayn’t she be in the pay of the police—?’”

“Oh that doesn’t occur to me,” Hyacinth gallantly protested.

“It might at all events; by which I mean it may at any moment. Indeed I think it ought.”

“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head about me.”

“I should make you think that certainly! That would be my first care. However, if you’ve no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the scenes.

In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he was sure he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wrong side—he didn’t open himself immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted he said: “I pledged myself by everything that’s sacred.”

“To what did you pledge yourself?”

“I took a vow—a tremendous solemn vow—in the presence of four witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.

“And what was it about, your vow?”

“I gave my life away,” he consciously smiled.

She looked at him askance as if to see how he would indeed carry off such a statement as that; but she betrayed no levity of criticism—her face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance in silence, and then she said: “Ah well then I’m all the more glad you stayed!”

“That was one of the reasons.”

“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” it occurred to her, however, to remark.

“Why till after I had been here?”

“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have seen reasons for keeping it.” With which, like Hyacinth, she sacrificed to the brighter bravery. He replied that he had not the least doubt that on the whole her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and he related what had happened at the place known to him in Bloomsbury and during that night of which I have given some account. The Princess listened intently while they strolled under the budding trees with a more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day or naked in some grey November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences since the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy slopes and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things our young man mentioned that he didn’t go to the “Sun and Moon” any more; he now perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this particular temple of their faith, with everything that pretended to get hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff from the first to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of his in whom he had confidence appeared to set him the example; but now it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again by the way) had always thought the men who went there a pack of shufflers and was trying them only to try everything. There was nobody you could begin to call a first-rate man, putting aside another friend of his, a Frenchman named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent but wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth had a standard now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation of a strong plan. You felt _him_ a big chap the very moment you came into his presence.

“Into whose presence, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess demanded.

“I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I’m speaking of the extraordinary man with whom I entered into that engagement.”

“To give away your life?”

“To do something that in a certain contingency he’ll require of me. He’ll require my poor little carcass.”

“Those ‘strong’ plans have a way of failing—unfortunately,” the Princess murmured, adding the last word more quickly.

“Is that a consolation or a regret?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shan’t fail—so far as depends on me. They wanted an obliging young man. Well, the place was vacant and I stepped in.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re right. We must pay for all we do.” She noted this hard law calmly and coldly and then said: “I think I know the person in whose power you’ve placed yourself.”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“You can’t believe I’ve already gone so far? Why not? I’ve given you a certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back.”

“Well, if you know my friend you’ve gone very far indeed.”

The Princess appeared on the point of pronouncing a name; but she checked herself and said instead, suddenly eager: “Don’t they also want by chance an obliging young woman?”

“I happen to know he doesn’t think much of women, my first-rate man. He doesn’t trust them.”

“Is that why you call him first-rate? You’ve very nearly betrayed him to me.”

“Do you imagine there’s only one of that opinion?” Hyacinth returned.

“Only one who, having it, still remains a superior man. That’s a very difficult opinion to reconcile with others it’s important to have.”

“Schopenhauer did so, successfully,” said Hyacinth.

“How delightful you should know old Schopenhauer!” the Princess exclaimed. “The gentleman I have in my eye is also German.” Hyacinth let this pass, not challenging her, because he wished not to be challenged in return, and she went on: “Of course such an engagement as you speak of must make a tremendous difference in everything.”

“It has made this difference, that I’ve now a far other sense from any I had before of the reality, the solidity, of what’s being prepared. I was hanging about outside, on the steps of the temple, among the loafers and the gossips, but now I’ve been in the innermost sanctuary. Yes, I’ve seen the holy of holies.”

“And it’s very dazzling?”

“Ah Princess!” the young man strangely sighed.

“Then it _is_ real, it _is_ solid?” she pursued. “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to make up my mind about so long.”