The Princess Casamassima

BOOK FOURTH.

XLI.

HYACINTH waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the door the splendor of her appearance did much to justify her delay. He heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a creaking of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward into the narrow, dusky passage, where he had been standing for a quarter of an hour. She looked flushed ; she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume; and she instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle, at him, to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large, vulgar hands. Hyacinth opened the door — it was so natural an assumption that they would not be able to talk properly in the passage — and they came out to the low steps, where they stood in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. The winter was not over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds ; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty sun-tints and faint transparencies. There was warmth and there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church-bells were ringing. Miss Henning remarked that it was a “ shime ” she could n’t have a place to ask a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such a grind for your living, and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger than a pill-box ? She could n’t, herself, abide waiting outside; she knew something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose (the time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!), and it always made her feel quite miserable. It was something cruel. If she could have what she liked, she knew what she would have ; and she hinted at a mystic bower, where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the morning paper, or a nice view out of the window, or something like that — so that, in an adjacent apartment, she could dress without getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.

“ I don’t know how I 'ave pitched on my things,” she remarked, presenting her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware that she had put a small, plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being so fine, he had come to propose to her to take a walk with him, in the manner of ancient times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park, and stroll beside the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it, if she liked, and watch the lambkins, or feed the ducks, if she would put a crust in her pocket. The prospect of paddling Miss Henning entirely declined ; she had no idea of wetting her flounces, and she left those rough pleasures, especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young woman. But she did n’t mind if she did go for a turn, though he did n’t deserve any such favor, after the way he had n’t been near her, if she had died in her garret. She was not one that was to be dropped and taken up at any man’s convenience ; she did n’t keep a shop, where you could come in only if you wanted something. Millicent expressed the belief that if the day had not been so lovely she should have sent Hyacinth about his business ; it was lucky for him that she was always forgiving (such was her sensitive, generous nature) when the sun was out. Only there was one thing — she couldn’t abide making no difference for Sunday; it was her personal habit to go to church, and she should have it on her conscience if she gave it up for a lark. Hyacinth had already been impressed, more than once, at the manner in which his blooming friend stickled for the religious observance : of all the queer disparities of her nature, her devotional turn struck him as perhaps the queerest. She held her head erect through the longest and dullest sermon, and came out of the place of worship with her fine face embellished by the publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by the general secularity of Hyacinth’s behavior, especially taken in conjunction with his general straightness, and was only consoled a little by the fact that if he did n’t drink, or fight, or steal, at least he indulged in unlimited wickedness of opinion — theories as bad as anything that people got ten years for. Hyacinth had not yet revealed to her that his theories had somehow lately come to be held with less tension ; an instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a grievance which ministered so much to sociability. He had not reflected that she would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if her condemnation of his godlessness had been deprived of confirmatory evidence.

On the present occasion she let him know that she would go for a walk with him if he would first accompany her to church ; and it was in vain he represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine, and in the interval there would be no time left. She replied, with a toss of her head, that she dined when she liked ; besides, on Sundays, she had cold fare — it was left out for her ; an argument to which Hyacinth had to assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete, thanks to the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and explanation, in which, in spite of great freedom of complaint, perpetual announcements of intended change, impending promotion, and high bids for her services in other quarters, she had always enshrouded her private affairs. Hyacinth walked by her side to the place of worship she preferred — her choice was made apparently from a large experience; and as they went he remarked that it was a good job he was n’t married to her. Lord, how she would bully him, how she would “ squeeze ” him, in such a case! The worst of it would be that — such was his amiable, peace-loving nature — he would obey, like a showman’s poodle. And pray, whom was a man to obey, asked Millicent, if he was not to obey his wife ? She sat up in her pew with a majesty that carried out this idea; she seemed to answer, in her proper person, for the infallibility of the Church of England, and Hyacinth had never felt himself under such distinguished protection. When she was fine there was no one so fine; the Princess Casamassima came back to him, in comparison, as a Bohemian, a spangled adventuress. He had come to see her to-day not for the sake of her austerity (he had had too gloomy a week for that), but for that of her softer side; yet now that she treated him to the severer spectacle it struck him, for the moment, as really grand sport — a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She had her phases and caprices, like the Princess herself; and if they were not the same as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent, they proved, at least, that she was as brave a woman. No one but a capital girl could give herself such airs ; she would have a consciousness of the large reserve of amiability required for making up for them. The Princess wished to destroy society, and Millicent wished to uphold it; and as Hyacinth, by the side of his childhood’s friend, listened to practiced intonings, he was obliged to recognize the liberality of a fate which had sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the best opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the conventional and the beauty of the original.

Fortunately, on this particular Sunday, there was no sermon (fortunately, I mean, from the point of view of Hyacinth’s heretical impatience), so that after the congregation dispersed there was still plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our friends traversed that barely interrupted expanse of irrepressible herbage which stretches from the BirdCage Walk to Hyde Park Corner, and took their way to Kensington Gardens, beside the Serpentine. Once Millicent’s devotions were over for the day (she as rigidly abstained from repeating them in the afternoon as she made a point of the first service), once she had lifted her voice in prayer and praise, she changed her allure ; moving to a different measure, uttering her sentiments in a high, free manner, and not minding that it should be perceived that she had on her very best gown, and was out, if need be, for the day. She was mainly engaged, for some time, in overhauling Hyacinth for his long absence, demanding some account of what he had been “ up to.” He listened to her philosophically, liking and enjoying her chaff, which seemed to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and absolutely declining to satisfy her. He remarked, as he had had occasion to do before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had a right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily; and even the indignation with which she received this plea did not make him feel that an éclaircissement between them could be a serious thing. There was nothing to explain, and nothing to forgive; they were a pair of very fallible individuals, who were united much more by their weaknesses than by any consistency or fidelity that they might pretend to practice toward each other. It was an old acquaintance — the oldest thing, to-day, except Mr. Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and strange as this may appear, it inspired our young man with a kind of indulgent piety. The probability that Millicent “ kept company ” with other men had quite ceased to torment his imagination ; it was no longer necessary to his happiness to be certain about it in order that he might dismiss her from his mind. He could be as happy without it as with it, and he felt a new modesty in regard to prying into her affairs. He was so little in a position to be stern with her that her assumption that he recognized a right on her own part to chide him seemed to him only a part of her perpetual clumsiness — a clumsiness that was not soothing, but was, nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of the things he liked her for.

“ If you have come to see me only to make jokes at my expense, you had better have stayed away altogether,” she said, with dignity, as they came out of the Green Park. “ In the first place it’s rude, in the second place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”

“My dear Millicent, the motions you go through, the resentment you profess, is purely perfunctory,” her companion replied. “ But it does n’t matter; go on — say anything you like. I came to see you for recreation, for a little entertainment without effort of my own. I scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you would make me laugh — I have been so dismal for a long time. In fact, I am dismal still. I wish I had your disposition ! My mirth is feverish.” “ The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect me,” Miss Henning announced. “ You lead a bad life. I know what to think about that,” she continued irrelevantly.

“ And is it out of respect for you that you wish me to lead a better one ? To-day, then, is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us get on the grass,” Hyacinth continued ; “ it is innocent and pastoral to feel it under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you; you understand everything.”

“ I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything you hide,” the young woman returned, as the great central expanse of Hyde Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before them.

“ Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean, from this time forth, to cease to seek safety in concealment. You ‘ll know nothing about me then, for it will be all under your nose.”

“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “ What will you do when you ’re so bad you can’t go to the shop ?” she added, with a sudden transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that, she said she could see he was in a fever ; she had n’t noticed it at first, because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was it something he had caught in some of those back slums, where he went prying about with his wicked ideas ? It served him right, for taking as little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine friends — a precious lot they were, that put it off on him to do all the nasty part! — would they find the doctor, and the port wine, and the money, and all the rest, when he was laid up perhaps for months, through their putting such rubbish into his head, and his putting it into others that could carry it even less ? Millicent stopped on the grass, in the watery sunshine, and bent on her companion an eye in which he perceived, freshly, an awakened curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a pledge of substantial comradeship. Suddenly she exclaimed, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision which she had used a moment before, “You little rascal, you’ve got something on your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack ? ”

“ My poor girl, your talk is a queer mixture,” Hyacinth murmured. “ But it may well be. It is not queerer than my life.”

“ Well, I’m glad you admit that ! ” the young woman cried, walking on with a flutter of her ribbons.

“ Your ideas about my ideas ! ” Hyacinth continued. “ Yes, you should see me in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”

“ You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t believe that half the time you know what you do mean, yourself. I don’t believe you even know, with all your thinking, what you do think. That’s your disease.”

“ It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,” Hyacinth rejoined. “ I mean to think no more — I mean to give it up. Avoid it yourself, my dear Millicent — avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective contemplation — let us live in the present hour.”

“ I don’t care how I live, nor where I live,” said Millicent, “ so long as I can do as I like. It’s them that are over you — it’s them that cut it fine. But you never were really satisfactory to me— not as one friend should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the concrete, and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “ Do you remember that day I came back to Lomax Place, ever so long ago, and called on poor dear Miss Pynsent (she could n’t abide me ; she did n’t like my form), and waited till you came in, and went out for a walk with you, and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you were n’t satisfactory to me then, and that I consider myself remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything, and you never told one nothing at all.”

“ What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth inquired, putting his hand into her arm. “ I ’ll tell you anything you like.”

“ I dare say, you ’ll tell me a lot of trash! Certainly, I tried kindness,” Miss Henning declared.

“ Try it again ; don’t give it up,” said her companion, strolling along with her in close association.

She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “ Well, then, has she — has she chucked you over?”

Hyacinth turned his eyes away ; he looked at the green expanse, faintly misty in the sunshine, dotted with Sundayfied figures which made it seem larger ; at the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of Kensington Gardens ; at a shining reach of the Serpentine on one side, and the far façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege of their view, on the other. “ Well, you know I rather think so,” he replied, in a moment.

“ Ah, the nasty brute ! ” cried Millicent, as they resumed their walk.

Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of Kensington Gardens, those scattered over the slope which rises gently from the side of the water most distant from the old red palace. They had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed there for the convenience of that part of the public for which a penny is not, as the French say, an affair, and Millicent, of whom such speculations were highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the question whether the individual charged with collecting the said penny would omit to come and ask for his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy her pleasures gratis, as well as to see others do so, and even that of sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion as she might feel that nothing would be paid for it. The man came round, however, and after that her pleasure could only take the form of sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This question had been settled, and two or three others, of a much weightier kind, had come up. At the moment we again participate in the conversation of the pair Millicent was leaning forward, earnest and attentive, with her hands clasped in her lap and her multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled forward upon her wrists. Her face, with its parted lips and eyes clouded to gentleness, wore an expression which Hyacinth had never seen there before, and which caused him to say to her, “ After all, dear Milly, you ’re a good old fellow ! ”

“ Why did you never tell me before — years ago ? ” she asked.

“ It’s always soon enough to commit an imbecility ! I don’t know why I tell you to-day, sitting here in a charming place, in balmy air, amid pleasing suggestions, without any reason or practical end. The story is hideous, and I have held my tongue for so long! It would have been an effort, an impossible effort, at any time, to do otherwise. Somehow, to-day it has n’t been an effort ; and indeed I have spoken just because the air is sweet, and the place ornamental, and the day a holiday, and your company exhilarating. These circumstances have had the effect that an object has if you plunge it into a cup of water — the water overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very foul liquid indeed. Excuse the bad odor ! ”

There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she listened to what had gone before; it lingered there, and as a color heightened by emotion is never unbecoming to a handsome woman, it enriched her exceptional expression. “ I would n’t have been so rough with you,” she presently remarked.

“My dear lass, this isn’t rough!” her companion exclaimed.

“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own, as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.

“ Very likely. I ’m a nervous little beast,” said Hyacinth.

“ Any one would be nervous, to think of anything so awful. Aud when it’s yourself! ” And the girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a contingency. “ You require sympathy,” she added, in a tone that made Hyacinth smile ; the words sounded like a medical prescription.

“ A tablespoonful every half hour,” he rejoined, keeping her hand, which she was about to draw away.

“ You would have been nicer, too,” Millicent went on,

“ How do you mean, I would have been nicer ? ”

“ Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away her hand, as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.

“It’s a pity I have always been so terribly under the influence of women,” Hyacinth murmured, folding his arms.

He was surprised at the delicacy with which Millicent replied: “You must remember that they have a great deal to make up to you.”

“ Do you mean for my mother ? Ah, she would have made it up, if they had let her ! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he continued. “ It’s wonderful, the kindness they have shown me, and the amount of pleasure I have derived from their society.”

It would perhaps be inquiring too nicely to consider whether this reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from her own bosom had an irritating effect on Millicent; at all events, after a moment’s silence, she answered it by asking, “ Does she know — your abominable Princess ?”

“ Yes, but she does n’t mind it.”

“ That’s most uncommonly kind of her! ” cried the girl, with a scornful laugh.

“It annoys me very much to hear you apply invidious epithets to her. You know nothing about her.”

“ How do you know what I know, please?” Millicent asked this question with the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she dropped her voice, as if she remembered that she was in the presence of a great misfortune. “ Has n’t she treated you most shamefully, and you such a regular dear ? ”

“ Not in the least. It is I that, as you may say, have rounded on hers. She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as she was. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent, and I have been fickle.”

“ Your interest has declined, in the Princess?” Millicent questioned, following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.

“ Oh, dear, no. I mean only in some views that I used to have.”

“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good job ! ” Miss Henning exclaimed, with an indulgent laugh, as if, after all, Hyacinth’s views and the changes in his views were not what was most important. “And your grand lady still holds for the costermongers ! ”

“ She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery ; she wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to be done, and of the courage and devotion of those that set themselves to do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples I ’m a very poor creature.”

“You are a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusation on yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you have n’t a spirit for yourself, I promise you I’ve got one for you ! If she has n’t chucked you over, why in the name of common sense did you say just now that she has ? And why is your dear old face as white as my stocking ? ”

Hyacinth looked at her awhile without answering, as if he took a placid pleasure in her violence. “ I don’t know—I don’t understand.”

She put out her hand and took possession of his own ; for a minute she held it, as if she wished to check herself, finding some influence in his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the ornamental water and the landscape gardening beyond, which was reflected in it; until Millicent turned her eyes again upon her companion, and remarked, “ Well, that’s the way I’d have served him, too! ”

It took him a moment to perceive that she was alluding to the vengeance wrought upon Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you ’ll never again hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”

“ I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on.

“ A queer variety, cara mia,” her companion rejoined, not very candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this point. “ Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s incurable indiscretions. They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I ‘m breaking up.”

“Oh, it was n’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”

“ Pray, what did I ever say, in those days ? ”

“ It was n’t what you said,” Millicent answered, with refinement. “I guessed the whole business—except, of course, what she got her time for, and you being taken to that death-bed — that day I came back to the Place. Could n’t you see I was turning it over ? And did I ever throw it up at you, whatever high words we might have had ? Therefore what I say now is no more than I thought then ; it only makes you nicer.”

She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of unskillful exaggeration, for he himself honestly could not understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose, as it were, to the surface, it diffused a sense of rest, almost of protection, deepening, at any rate, the luxury of the balmy holiday, the interlude and the grind of the week’s work ; so that, though neither of them had dined, Hyacinth would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something bitter that was happening to him, making it stop awhile or pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of which they themselves were weary ; but they regarded it now with a kind of wounded indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a compensation, but it seemed at least a resource. She too, evidently, was highly content; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She interrogated him about his father’s family, and whether they were going to let him go on like that always, without ever holding out so much as a little finger to him ; and she declared, in a manner that was meant to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of the turn made him smile, that if she were one of them she could n’t “ abear ” the thought of a relation of hers being in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old Crookenden’s, and of the perversity of a young man of his parts contenting himself with a career which was after all a mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books ; but so had any shop boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers ; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practiced ditfered from that of a plumber or glazier. He had not forgotten the shock he once administered to her by letting her know that he wore an apron ; she looked down on such conditions from the summit of her own intellectual profession, for she wore mantles and jackets and shawls and the long trains of robes exhibited in the window on dummies of wire, and taken down to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about them, and showing them off, and persuading people of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as he had answered his own of old, by asking her what those people owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question made her reflect for a moment; after which she returned, with the finest spirit, “ Well, if your position was so miserable, ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift? Oh, it ’s something cruel ! ” she cried ; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. She would n’t have drudged out her life in Soho, if she had had gentlefolks’ blood in her veins ! “ If they

had noticed you, they would have liked you,” she was so good as to remark; but she immediately remembered, also, that in that case he would have been

carried away quite over her head. She was not prepared to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and she emphasized the “ real ” by way of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent — an artifice which was wasted, however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed history of the personage in question. Millicent was tender and tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really made little impression upon her ; she accounted it an accident much less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and moved ; but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful revenge, her long imprisonment, and his childish visit to the jail, with the later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things produced a generous agitation — something the same in kind as the impressions she had occasionally derived from the perusal of the Family Herald. What affected her most, and what she came back to, was the whole element of Lord Frederick and the misery of Hyacinth’s having got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She could n’t get over her friend’s not having done something, though her imagination was still vague as to what he might have done. It was the queerest thing in the world, to Hyacinth, to find her apparently assuming that if he had not been so perverse he might have “ worked ” the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory. She would n’t have been a nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh, the left hand was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, did n’t care for that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience, and there was a strange candor in her wonderment at his not having bragged about his grand relations. They had become vivid and concrete to her now, in comparison with the timid shadows that Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent pumped about in the hushed past of her companion with the oddest mixture of sympathy and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane voices holloaing for echoes.

“Me only — me and her? Certainly, I ought to be obliged, even though it is late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh ? She ’d have worse to tell you, I ’m sure, if she was equally frank. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in the chemical line ? ”

“ No, we have never talked about it.”

“ Men are rare creatures ! ” Millicent cried. “ You never so much as mentioned it ? ”

“ It was n’t necessary. He knew it otherwise — he knew it through his sister.”

“ How do you know that, if he never spoke ? ”

“Oh, because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.

“ Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And how did his sister know it?”

“Oh, I don’t know; she guessed it.”

Millicent stared. “ It was none of her business.” Then she added, “ He was jolly good to you ? Ain’t he good to you now ? ” She asked this question in her loud, free voice, which rang through the bright stillness of the place.

Hyacinth delayed for a minute to answer her, and when at last he did so it was without looking at her: “I don’t know ; I can’t make it out.”

“ Well, I can, then ! ” And Millicent jerked him round toward her, and inspected him with her big bright eyes. “ You silly baby, has he been serving you ” — She pressed her question upon him; she asked if that was what disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently, after an instant, she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to her ladyship — is that his game ? ” she broke out. “ Do you mean to say she’d look at the likes of him?”

“ The likes of him ? He ’s as fine a man as stands ! ” said Hyacinth. “ They have the same view’s, they are doing the same work.”

“ Oh, he has n’t changed his opinions, then — not like you ? ”

“ No, he knows what he wants ; he knows what he thinks.”

“ Very much the same w’ork, I ’ll be bound ! ” cried Millicent, in large derision. “ He knows what he wants, and I dare say he ’ll get it.”

Hyacinth got up, turning away from her ; but she also rose, and passed her hand into his arm. “ It’s their own business ; they can do as they please.”

“ Oh, don’t try to be a saint; you put me out of patience! ” the girl responded, with characteristic energy. “ They ’re a precious pair, and it would do me good to hear you say so.”

“ A man should n’t turn against his friends,” Hyacinth went on, with desperate sententiousness.

“ That’s for them to remember ; there’s no danger of your forgetting it.” They had begun to walk, but she stopped him ; she was suddenly smiling at him, and her face was radiant. She went on, with caressing inconsequence: “All that you have told me — it has made you nicer.”

“ I don’t see that, but it has certainly made you so. My dear girl, you ’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added, as they strolled on again.

XLII.

Hyacinth had no intention of going in the evening to Madeira Crescent, and that is why he asked his companion, before they separated, if he might not see her again, after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now, and he feared them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element ; it had visions for him, that passed even before his closed eyes — sharp doubts and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of suffering. He wanted company, to light up his gloom, and this had driven him back to Millicent, in a manner not altogether consistent with the respect which it was still his theory that he owed to his nobler part. He felt no longer free to drop in at the Crescent, and tried to persuade himself, in case his mistrust should be overdone, that his reasons were reasons of magnanimity. If Paul Muniment were seriously occupied with the Princess, if they had work in hand for which their most earnest attention was required (and Sunday was very likely to be the day they would take ; they had spent so much of the previous Sunday together), it would be delicate on his part to stay away, to leave his friend a clear field. There was something inexpressibly representative to him in the way that friend had abruptly decided to reënter the house, after pausing outside with its mistress, at the moment he himself stood peering through the fog with the Prince. The movement repeated itself, innumerable times, to his mental vision, suggesting to him things that he could n’t bear to learn. Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous, even after he had become so, and to prove to himself that he was not he had gone to see the Princess one evening in the middle of the week. Had n’t he wanted Paul to know her. months and months before, and now was he to entertain a vile feeling at the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested, in each party to it, upon aspirations that he respected ? The Princess had not been at home, and he had turned away from the door without asking for Madame Grandoni ; he had not forgotten that on the occasion of his previous visit she had excused herself from remaining in the drawing-room. After the little maid in the Crescent had told him the Princess was out, he walked away with a quick curiosity — a curiosity which, if he had listened to it, would have led him to mount upon the first omnibus that traveled in the direction of South Lambeth. Was Paul Muniment, who was such a rare one, in general, for stopping at home of an evening—was he also out, and would Rosy, in this case, be in the humor to mention (for of course she would know) where he had gone ? Hyacinth let the omnibus pass, for he suddenly became aware, with a throb of horror, that he was in danger of playing the spy. He had not been near Muniment since, on purpose to leave his curiosity unsatisfied. He allowed himself, however, to notice that the Princess had now not written him a word of consolation, as she had been so kind as to do once or twice before, when he had knocked at her door without finding her. At present he had missed her twice in succession, and yet she had given no sign of regret — regret even for him. This determined him to stay away awhile longer ; it was such a proof that she was absorbingly occupied. Hyacinth’s glimpse of the Princess in earnest conversation with Muniment as they returned from the excursion described by the Prince, his memory of Paul’s relenting figure crossing the threshold once more, could leave him no doubt as to the degree of that absorption.

Millicent hesitated when Hyacinth proposed to her that they should finish the day together. She smiled, and her handsome eyes rested on his with an air of indulgent interrogation ; they seemed to ask whether it were worth her while, in face of his probable incredulity, to mention the real reason why she could not have the pleasure of acceding to his delightful suggestion. Since he would be sure to deride her explanation, would not some trumped-up excuse do as well, since he could knock that about without hurting her ? I know not exactly in what sense Miss Henning decided ; but she confessed at last that there was an odious obstacle to their meeting again later — a promise she had made to go and see a young lady, the forewoman of her department, who was kept in-doors with a bad face, and nothing in life to help her pass the time. She was under a pledge to spend the evening with her, and it was not her way to disappoint an expectation. Hyacinth made no comment on this speech; he received it in silence, looking at the girl gloomily.

“ I know what’s passing in your mind!” Millicent suddenly broke out. “ Why don’t you say it at once, and give me a chance to contradict it ? I ought n’t to care, but I do care ! ”

“Stop, stop—don’t let us fight!” Hyacinth spoke in a tone of pleading weariness; she had never heard just that accent before.

Millicent considered a moment. “ I’ve a mind to play her false. She is a real lady, highly connected, and the best friend I have — I don’t count men,” the girl interpolated, smiling — “and there is n’t one in the world I’d do such a thing for but you.”

“ No, keep your promise; don’t play any one false,” said Hyacinth.

“ Well, you are a gentleman!” Miss Henning murmured, with a sweetness that her voice occasionally took.

“ Especially ” — Hyacinth began; but he suddenly stopped.

“ Especially what ? Something impudent, I ’ll engage ! Especially as you don’t believe me? ”

“ Oh, no! Don’t let’s fight ! ” he repeated.

“Fight, my darling? I’d fight for you ! ” Miss Henning declared.

Hyacinth offered himself, after tea, the choice between a visit to Lady Aurora and a pilgrimage to Lisson Grove. He was in a little doubt about the former alternative, having an idea that her ladyship’s family might have returned to Belgrave Square. He reflected, however, that he could not recognize that as a reason for not going to see her; his relations with her were not clandestine, and she had given him the kindest general invitation. If her unjust relations were at home, she was probably at dinner with them ; he would take that risk. He had taken it before, without disastrous results. He was determined not to spend the evening alone, and he would keep the Poupius as a more substantial alternative, in case her ladyship should not be able to receive him.

As soon as the great portal in Belgrave Square was drawn open before him, he perceived that the house was occupied and animated — if the latter term might properly be applied to so severe and stately an establishment. The place was pervaded by subdued light and tall domestics. Hyacinth found himself looking down a kind of colonnade of colossal footmen, an array more imposing even than the retinue of the Princess at Medley. His inquiry died away on his lips, and he stood there struggling with dumbness. It was manifest to him that some high festival was taking place, at which his presence could only be deeply irrelevant; and when a large official, out of livery, bending over him for a voice that faltered, suggested, not unenconragingly, that it might be Lady Aurora he wished to see, he replied in a low, melancholy accent, “ Yes, yes, but it can’t be possible! ” The butler took no pains to controvert this proposition verbally ; he merely turned round, with a majestic air of leading the way, and as at the same moment two of the footmen closed the wings of the door behind the visitor Hyacinth judged that it was his cue to follow him. In this manner, after traversing a passage where, in the perfect silence of the servants, he heard the shorter click of his plebeian shoes upon a marble floor, he found himself ushered into a small apartment, lighted by a veiled lamp, which, when he had been left there alone, without further remark on the part of his conductor, he recognized as the scene—only now more amply decorated — of one of his former interviews. Lady Aurora kept him waiting a few moments, and then fluttered in with an anxious, incoherent apology. The same transformation had taken place in her own appearance as in the aspect of her parental halls: she had on a light-colored, crumpled-looking, faintly-rustling dress ; her head was adorned with a kind of languid plume, terminating in little pink tips; and in her hand she carried a pair of white gloves. All her repressed eagerness was in her lace, and she smiled, as if she wished to anticipate any scruples or embarrassments on the part of her visitor ; frankly recognizing the brilliancy of her attire and the startling implications it might convey. Hyacinth said to her that, no doubt, on perceiving her family had returned to town, he ought to have backed out; he knew that must make a difference in her life. But he had been marched in, in spite of himself, and now it was clear that he had interrupted her at dinner. She answered that no one who asked for her at any hour was ever turned away ; she had managed to arrange that, and she was very happy in her success. She did n’t usually dine — there were so many of them, and it took so long. Most of her friends could n’t come at visiting-hours, and it would n’t be right that she should n’t ever receive them. On that occasion she had been dining, but it was all over ; she was only sitting there because she was going to a party. Her parents were dining out, and she was just in the drawing-room with some of her sisters. When they were alone it was n’t so long, though it was rather long afterwards, in the dressing-room. It was n’t time yet ; the carriage would n’t come for nearly half an hour. She had n’t been to an evening thing for months and months, but — did n’t he

know? — one sometimes had to do it. Lady Aurora expressed the idea that one ought to be fair all round, and that one’s duties were not all of the same kind; some of them would come up, from time to time, that were quite different from the others. Of course it was n’t just, unless one did all, and that was why she was going to a thing this evening. It was something very small — a sort of family thing, at some of their relations’. Since they had given her that room, for any hour she wanted (it was really tremendously convenient), she had determined to do a party now and then, like a respectable young woman, because it pleased them — though why it should, to see her at a place, was more than she could imagine. She supposed it was because it would perhaps keep some people, a little, from thinking she was mad, and not safe to be at large — which was of course a sort of thing that people did n’t like to have thought of their belongings. Lady Aurora explained and expatiated with a kind of nervous superabundance ; she talked more continuously than Hyacinth had ever heard her do before, and the young man saw that she was not in her natural equilibrium. He thought it scarcely probable that she was excited by the simple prospect of again dipping into the great world she had forsworn, and he presently perceived that he himself had an agitating effect upon her. His senses were fine enough to make him feel that he revived certain associations and quickened certain wounds. She suddenly stopped talking, and the two sat there looking at each other, in a kind of occult community of suffering. Hyacinth made several mechanical remarks, explaining, insufficiently, why he had come, and in the course of a very few moments, quite independently of these observations, it seemed to him that there was a deeper, a measurelessly deep, confidence between them. A tacit confession passed and repassed, and each understood the situation of the other. They would n’t speak of it — it was very definite that they would never do that; for there was something in their common consciousness that was inconsistent with the grossness of accusation. Besides, the grievance of each was an apprehension, an instinct of the soul — not a sharp, definite wrong, supported by proof. It was in the air and in their restless pulses, and not in anything that they could exhibit or complain of. Strange enough it seemed to Hyacinth that the history of each should be the counterpart of that of the other. What had each done but lose that which he or she had never had ? Things had gone ill with them; but even if they had gone well, if the Princess had not combined with his friend in that manner which made his heart sink, and produced an effect exactly corresponding upon that of Lady Aurora — even in this case, what would prosperity, what would success, have amounted to ? They would have been very barren. He was sure the singular creature before him would never have had a chance to take the unprecedented social step for the sake of which she was ready to go forth from Belgrave Square forever; Hyacinth had judged the smallness of Paul Muniment’s appetite for that complication sufficiently to have begun really to pity her ladyship long ago. And now, even when he most felt the sweetness of her sympathy, he might wonder what she could have imagined for him in the event of his not having been supplanted — what security, what completer promotion, what honorable, satisfying sequel. They were unhappy because they were unhappy, and they were right not to rail about that.

“ Oh, I like to see you — I like to talk with you,” said Lady Aurora, simply. They talked for a quarter of an hour, and he made her such a visit as any gentleman might have made to any lady. They exchanged remarks about the lateness of the spring, about the loan exhibition at Burlington House — which Hyacinth had paid his shilling to see — about the question of opening the museums on Sundays, about the danger of too much coddling legislation on behalf of the working-classes. He declared that it. gave him great pleasure to see any sign of her amusing herself; it was unnatural never to do that, and he hoped that now she had taken a turn she would keep it up. At this she looked down, smiling, at her frugal finery, and then she replied, “ I dare say I shall begin to go to balls —who knows?”

“ That’s what our friends in Audley Court think, you know — that it’s the worst mistake you can make, not to drink deep of the cup while you have it.”

“ Oh, I ’ll do it, then — I ‘ll do it for them ! ” Lady Aurora exclaimed. “ I dare say that, as regards all that, I have n’t listened to them enough.” This was the only allusion that passed on the subject of the Muniments.

Hyacinth got up — he had stayed long enough, as she was going out; and as he held out his hand to her she seemed to him a heroine. She would try to cultivate the pleasures of her class if they thought it right — try even to be a woman of fashion, in order to console herself. Paul Muniment didn’t care for her, but she was capable of considering that it might be her duty to regulate her life by the very advice that made an abyss between them. Hyacinth did n’t believe in the success of this attempt; there passed before his imagination a picture of the poor lady coming home and pulling off her feathers forever, after an evening spent in watching the agitation of a ball-room, from the outer edge of the circle, with a white, elongated face. “ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” he said, laughing.

“Oh, I don’t mind dying.”

“ I think I do,” Hyacinth declared, as he turned away. There had been no mention whatever of the Princess.

It was early enough in the evening for him to risk a visit to Lisson Grove; he calculated that the Poupins would still be sitting up. When he reached their house he found this calculation justified ; the brilliancy of the light in the window appeared to announce that Madame was holding a salon. He ascended to this apartment without delay (it was free to a visitor to open the housedoor himself), and, having knocked, obeyed the hostess’s invitation to come in. Poupin and his wife were seated, with a third person, at a table in the middle of the room, round a staring kerosene lamp, adorned with a globe of clear glass, of which the transparency was mitigated only by a circular pattern of bunches of grapes. The third person was his friend Schinkel, who had been a member of the little party that waited upon Hoffendahl. No one said anything as Hyacinth came in; but, in their silence, the three others got up, looking at him, as he thought, rather strangely.

BOOK FIFTH.

XLIII.

“ My child, you are always welcome,” said Eustache Poupin, taking Hyacinth’s hand in both his own and holding it for some moments. An impression had come to our young man, immediately, that they were talking about him before he came in, and that they would rather have been left to talk at their ease. He even thought he saw in Poupin’s face the kind of consciousness that comes from detection, or at least interruption, in a nefarious act. With Poupin, however, it was difficult to tell; he always looked so heated and exalted, so like a conspirator defying the approach of justice. Hyacinth’s eyes turned to the others: they were standing as if they had shuffled something on the table out of sight, as if they had been engaged in the manufacture of counterfeit coin. Poupin kept hold of his hand; the Frenchman’s ardent eyes, fixed, unwinking, always expressive of the greatness of the occasion, whatever the occasion was, had never seemed to him to protrude so far from his head. “ Ah, my dear friend, nous causions justement de vous,” Eustache remarked, as if this were a very extraordinary fact.

“ Oh, nous causions — nous causions ! ” his wife exclaimed, as if to deprecate an indiscreet exaggeration “ One may mention a friend, I suppose, in the way of conversation, without taking such a liberty.”

“ A cat may look at a king, as your English proverb says,” added Schinkel, jocosely. He smiled so hard at his own pleasantry that his eyes closed up and vanished — an effect which Hyacinth, who had observed it before, thought particularly unbecoming to him, appearing as it did to administer the last perfection to his ugliness. He would have consulted his interests by always looking grave.

“ Oh, a king, a king! ” murmured Poupin, shaking his head up and down. “That’s what it’s not good to be, au point où nous en sommes.”

“ I just came in to wish you goodnight,” said Hyacinth. “I’m afraid it’s rather late for a call, though Schinkel is here.”

“ It’s always too late, my very dear, when you come,” the Frenchman rejoined. “ You know if you have a place at our fireside.”

“ I esteem it too much to disturb it,” said Hyacinth, smiling, and looking round at the three.

“ We can easily sit down again ; we are a comfortable party. Put yourself beside me.” And the Frenchman drew a chair close to the one, at the table, that he had just quitted.

“ He has had a long walk, he is tired — he will certainly accept a little glass,” Madame Poupin announced with decision, moving toward the tray containing the small gilded liqueur service.

“ We will each accept one, ma bonne ; it is a very good occasion for a drop of fine,” her husband interposed, while Hyacinth seated himself in the chair his host had designated. Schinkel resumed his place, which was opposite ; he looked across at Hyacinth, without speaking, but his long face continued to flatten itself into a representation of mirth. He had on a green coat, which Hyacinth had seen before; it was a garment of ceremony, and such as our young man judged it would have been impossible to procure in London or in any modern time. It was eminently German and of high antiquity, and had a tall, stiff, clumsy collar, which came up to the wearer’s ears and almost concealed his perpetual bandage. When Hyacinth had sat down, Eustache Poupin did not take possession of his own chair, but stood beside him, resting his hand on his head. At that touch something came over Hyacinth, and his heart sprang into his throat. The idea that occurred to him, conveyed in Poupin’s whole manner, as well as in the reassuring intention of that caress and in his wife’s uneasy, instant offer of refreshment, explained the embarrassment of the circle, and reminded our young man of the engagement he had taken with himself to exhibit an extraordinary quietness when a certain crisis in his life should have arrived. It seemed to him that this crisis was in the air, very near — that he should touch it if he made another movement; the pressure of the Frenchman’s hand, which was meant as a solvent, only operated as a warning, As he looked across at Schinkel he felt dizzy and a little sick ; for a moment, to his senses, the room whirled round. His resolution to be quiet appeared only too easy to keep ; he could n’t break it even

to the extent of speaking. He knew that his voice would tremble, and that is why he made no answer to Schinkel’s rather honeyed words, uttered after an hesitation : “ Also, my dear Robinson, have you passed your Sunday well — have you had an ’appy day ? ” Why was every one so endearing ? His eyes questioned the table, but encountered nothing but its well-wiped surface, polished for so many years by the gustatory elbows of the Frenchman and his wife, and the lady’s dirty pack of cards for “ patience ” (she had apparently been engaged in this exercise when Schinkel came in), which indeed gave a little the impression of gamblers surprised, who might have shuffled away the stakes. Madame Poupin, who had dived into a cupboard, came back with a bottle of green chartreuse, an apparition which led the German to exclaim, “ Lieber Gott, you Vrench, you Vrench, how well you manage ! What would you have more ? ” The hostess distributed the liquor, but Hyacinth was scarcely able to swallow it, though it was highly appreciated by his companions. His indifference to this luxury excited much discussion and conjecture, the others bandying theories and contradictions, and even ineffectual jokes, about him. over his head, with a volubility which seemed to him unnatural. Poupin and Schinkel professed the belief that there must be something very curious the matter with a man who could n’t smack his lips over a drop of that tap; he must either be in love, or have some still more insidious complaint. It was true that Hyacinth was always in love — that was no secret to his friends — and it had never been observed to stop his thirst. The Frenchwoman poured scorn on this view of the case, declaring that the effect of the tender passion was to make one enjoy one’s victual (when everything went straight, bien entendu ; and how could an ear be deaf to the whisperings of such a dear little bonhomme as Hyacinth?) ; in proof of which she deposed that she had never eaten and drunk with such relish as at the time — oh, it was far away now — when she had a soft spot in her heart for her rascal of a husband. For Madame Poupin to allude to her husband as a rascal indicated a high degree of conviviality. Hyacinth sat staring at the empty table, with the feeling that he was, somehow, a detached, irresponsible witness of the evolution of his fate. Finally he looked up, and said to his friends, collectively, “ What on earth’s the matter with you all ? ” And he followed this inquiry by an invitation that they should tell him what it was they had been saying about him, since they admitted that he had been the subject of their conversation. Madame Poupin answered for them, that they had simply been saying how much they loved him, but that they would n’t love him any more if he became suspioious and grincheux. She had been telling Mr. Schinkel’s fortune on the cards, and she would tell Hyacinth’s if he liked. There was nothing much for Mr. Schinkel, only that he would find something, some day, that he had lost, but would probably lose it again, and serve him right if he did! He objected that he had never had anything to lose, and never expected to have; but that was a vain remark, inasmuch as the time was fast coming when every one would have something — though indeed it was to be hoped that he would keep it when he had got it. Eustache rebuked his wife for her levity, reminded her that their young friend cared nothing for old women’s tricks, and said he was sure Hyacinth had come to talk over a very different matter — the question (he was so good as to take an interest in it, as he had done in everything that related to them) of the terms which M. Poupin might owe it to himself, to his dignity, to a just though not exaggerated sentiment of his value, to make in accepting Mr. Crookenden’s offer of the foremanship of the establishment in Soho; an offer not yet formally enunciated, but visibly in the air, and destined — it would seem, at least— to arrive within a day or two. The old foreman was going to set up for himself. The Frenchman intimated that before accepting any such proposal he must have the most substantial guarantees. “ Il me faudrait des conditions très-particulières.” It was singular to Hyacinth to hear M. Poupin talk so comfortably about these high contingencies, the chasm by which he himself was divided from the future having suddenly doubled its width. His host and hostess sat down on either side of him, and Poupin gave a sketch, in somewhat sombre tints, of the situation in Soho, enumerating certain elements of decomposition which he perceived to be at work there, and which he would not undertake to deal with unless he should be given a completely free hand. Did Schinkel understand, and was that what Schinkel was grinning at ? Did Schinkel understand that poor Eustache was the victim of an absurd hallucination, and that there was not the smallest chance of his being invited to assume a lieutenancy ? He had less capacity for tackling the British workman to-day than when he began to rub shoulders with him, and Mr. Crookenden had never in his life made a mistake, at least in the use of his tools. Hyacinth’s responses were few and mechanical, and he presently ceased to try to look as if he were entering into the Frenchman’s ideas.

“ You have some news — you have some news about me,” he remarked, abruptly, to Schinkel. " You don’t like it, you don’t like to have to give it to me, and you came to ask our friends here whether they would n’t help you out with it. But I don’t think they will assist you particularly, poor dears ! Why do you mind ? You ought n’t to mind more than I do. That is n’t the way.”

“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit—qu’est-ce qu’il dit, le pauvre chéri ? ” Madame Poupin demanded, eagerly; while Schinkel looked very hard at her husband, as if to ask for direction.

“ My dear child, vous vous faites des idées ! ” the latter exclaimed, laying his hand on him remonstrantly.

But Hyacinth pushed away his chair and got up. “ If you have anything to tell me, it is cruel of you to let me see it, as you have done, and yet not to satisfy me.”

“ Why should I have anything to tell you ? ” Schinkel asked.

“ I don’t know that, but I believe you have. I perceive things, I guess things, quickly. That’s my nature at all times, and I do it much more now.”

“ You do it indeed ; it is very wonderful,” said Schinkel.

“ Mr. Schinkel, will you do me the pleasure to go away — I don’t care where—out of this house?” Madame Poupin broke out in French.

“ Yes, that will be the best thing, and I will go with you,” said Hyacinth.

“ If you would retire, my child, I think it would be a service that you would render us,” Poupin returned, appealing to his young friend. “Won’t you do us the justice to believe that you may leave your interests in our hands? ”

Hyacinth hesitated a moment; it was now perfectly clear to him that Schinkel had some sort of message for him, and his curiosity as to what it might be had become nearly intolerable. “ I am surprised at your weakness,” he observed, as sternly as he could manage it, to Poupin.

The Frenchman stared at him an instant, and then fell on his neck. “ You are sublime, my young friend — you are sublime ! ”

“ Will you be so good as to tell me what you are going to do with that young man ? ” demanded Madame Poupin, glaring at Schinkel.

“It’s none of your business, my poor lady,” Hyacinth replied, disengaging himself from her husband. “ Schinkel, I wish you would walk away with me.”

“ Calmons-nous, entendons-nous, expliquous-nous! The situation is very simple,” Poupin went on.

“ I will go with you, if it will give you pleasure,” said Schinkel, very obligingly, to Hyacinth.

“ Then you will give me that letter first!” Madame Poupin, erecting herself, declared to the German.

“ My wife, you are an imbecile ! ” Poupin groaned, lifting his hands and shoulders and turning away.

“ I may be an imbecile, but I won’t be a party — no, God help me, not to that! ” protested the Frenchwoman, planted before Schinkel as if to prevent his moving.

“ If you have a letter for me, you ought to give it to me,” said Hyacinth to Schinkel. “ You have no right to give it to any one else.”

“ I will bring it to you in your house, my good friend,” Schinkel replied, with a little wink that seemed to say that Madame Poupin would have to be considered.

“ Oh, in his house — I ’ll go to his house ! ” cried the lady. “ I regard you, I have always regarded you, as my child,” she declared to Hyacinth, “ and if this is n’t an occasion for a mother ! ”

“ It’s you that are making it an occasion. I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Hyacinth. He had been questioning Schinkel’s eye, and he thought he saw there a little twinkle of assurance that he might really depend upon him. “ I have disturbed you, and I think I had better go away.”

Poupin had turned round again; he seized the young man’s arm eagerly, as if to prevent his retiring before he had given a certain satisfaction. “ How can you care, when you know everything is changed ?”

“ What do you mean — everything is changed ? ”

“ Your opinions, your sympathies, your whole attitude. I don’t approve of it — je le constate. You have withdrawn your confidence from the people ; you have said things in this spot, where you stand now, that have given pain to my wife and me.”

“ If we did n’t love you, we should say that you had betrayed us ! ” cried Madame Poupin, quickly, taking her husband’s idea.

“ Oh, I shall never betray you,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

“ You will never betray us — of course you think so. But you have no right to act for the people when you have ceased to believe in the people. Il faut être conséquent, now de Dieu,” Poupin went on.

“ You will give up all thoughts of acting for me — je ne permets pas ça ! ” exclaimed his wife.

“It is probably not of importance — only a little fraternal greeting,” Schinkel suggested, soothingly.

“ We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you ! ” shouted Poupin, more and more excited.

“ My poor friends, it is you who have broken down, not I,” said Hyacinth. “ I am much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the inconsequence is yours. At all events, good-night.”

He turned away from them, and was leaving the room, when Madame Poupin threw herself upon him, as her husband had done a moment before, but in silence, and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being stout and powerful, she quickly got the better of him, and pressed him to her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.

“ I don’t know what you want me to do,” said Hyacinth, as soon as he could speak. “ It’s for me to judge of my convictions.”

“ We want you to do nothing, because we know you have changed,” Poupin replied. “ Does n’t it stick out of you, in every glance of your eye and every breath of your life? It’s only for that, because that alters everything.”

“ Does it alter my engagement ? There are some things in which one can’t change. I did n’t promise to believe ; I promised to obey.”

“ We want you to be sincere — that is the great thing,” said Poupin edifyingly. “ I will go to see them — I will make them understand.”

“Ah, you should have done that before ! ” Madame Poupin groaned.

“ I don’t know whom you are talking about, but I will allow no one to meddle in my affairs.” Hyacinth spoke with sudden vehemence ; the scene was cruel to his nerves, which were not in a condition to bear it.

“ When it is Hoffendahl, it is no good to meddle,” Schinkel remarked, smiling.

“ And pray, who is Hoffendahl, and what authority has he got?” demanded Madame Poupin, who had caught his meaning. “ Who has put him over us all, and is there nothing to do but to lie down in the dust before him ? Let him attend to his little affairs himself, and not put them off on innocent children, no matter whether they are with us or against us.”

This protest went so far that, evidently, Poupin felt a little ashamed of his wife. “ he has no authority but what we give him ; but you know that we respect him, that he is one of the pure, ma bonne. Hyacinth can do exactly as he likes ; he knows that as well as we do. He knows there is not a feather’s weight of compulsion ; he knows that, for my part, I long since ceased to expect anything from him.”

“ Certainly, there is no compulsion,” said Schinkel. “ It’s to take or to leave. Only they keep the books.”

Hyacinth stood there before the three, with his eyes on the floor. “ Of course I can do as I like, and what I like is what I shall do. Besides, what are we talking about, with such sudden passion ? ” he asked, looking up. “ I have no summons, I have no sign. When the call reaches me, it will be time to discuss it. Let it come, or not come : it’s not my affair.”

“ Certainly, it is not your affair,” said Schinkel.

“ I can’t think why M. Paul has never done anything, all this time, knowing that everything is different now ! ” Madame Poupin exclaimed.

“Yes, my dear boy, I don’t understand our friend,” her husband remarked, watching Hyacinth with suspicious, contentious eyes.

“ It ’s none of his business, any more than ours ; it s none of any one’s business ! ” Schinkel declared.

“ Muniment walks straight; the best thing you can do is to imitate him,” said Hyacinth, trying to pass Poupin, who had placed himself before the door.

“ Promise me only this — not to do anything till I have seen you first,” the Frenchman begged, almost piteously.

“ My poor old friend, you are very weak.” And Hyacinth opened the door, in spite of him, and passed out.

“ Ah, well, if you are with us, that’s all I want to know! ” the young man heard him say, behind him, at the top of the stairs, in a different voice, a tone of sudden, exaggerated fortitude.

XLIV.

Hyacinth hurried down and got out of the house, but he had not the least intention of losing sight of Schinkel. The odd behavior of the Poupins was a surprise and annoyance, and he had wished to shake himself free from it. He was candidly astonished at the alarm they were so good as to feel for him, for he had never perceived that they had gone round to the hope that the note he had signed (as it were) for Hoffendahl would not be presented. What had he said, what had he done, after all, to give them the right to fasten on him the charge of apostasy ? He had always been a free critic of everything, and it was natural that, on certain occasions, in the little parlor in Lisson Grove, he should have spoken in accordance with that freedom ; but it was only with the Princess that he had permitted himself really to rail at the democracy, and given the full measure of his skepticism. He would have thought it indelicate to express contempt for the opinions of his old foreign friends, to whom associations that made them memorable were attached ; and, moreover, for Hyacinth, a change of heart was, in the nature of things, much more an occasion for a hush of publicity and a kind of retrospective reserve ; it could n’t prompt one to aggression or jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what could be said on the opposite side one did n’t want to boast of one’s sharpness — not even when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked like the ghosts of the old.

Hyacinth lingered in the street, a certain distance from the house, watching for Schickel’s exit, and prepared to remain there, if necessary, till the dawn of another day. He had said to his friends, just before, that the manner in which the communication they looked so askance at should reach him was none of his business — it might reach him as it could. This was true enough in theory, but in fact his desire was overwhelming to know what Madame Poupin had meant by her allusion to a letter, destined for him, in Schickel’s possession — an allusion confirmed by Schinkel’s own virtual acknowledgment. It was indeed this eagerness that had driven him out of the house, for he had reason to believe that the German would not fail him, and it galled his suspense to see the foolish Poupins try to interpose, to divert the mission from its course. He waited and waited, in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow, categorical Teutonic way, and only objurgated the cabinetmaker for having in the first place dallied with his sacred trust. Why had n’t he come straight to him — whatever the mysterious document was — instead of talking it over with the inconsequents ? Passers were rare, at this hour, in Lisson Grove, and lights were mainly extinguished ; there was nothing to look at but the vista of the low black houses, the dim, interspaced street-lamps, the prowling cats who darted occasionally across the road, and the terrible, mysterious, far-off stars, which appeared to him more than ever to see everything and to tell nothing. A policeman creaked along on the opposite side of the way, looking across at him as he passed, and stood for some minutes on the corner, as if to keep an eye on him. Hyacinth had leisure to reflect that the day was perhaps not far off when a policeman might have his eye on him for a very good reason — might walk up and down, pass and repass, as he mounted guard over him.

It seemed horribly long before Schinkel came out of the house, but it was probably only half an hour. In the stillness of the street he heard Poupin let his visitor out, and at the sound he stepped back into the recess of a doorway on the same side, so that, in looking out, the Frenchman should not see him waiting. There was another delay, for the two stood talking together interminably and in a low tone on the doorstep. At last, however, Poupin went in again, and then Schinkel came down the street towards Hyacinth, who had calculated that he would proceed in that direction, it being, as Hyacinth happened to know, that of his own lodging. After he had heard Ponpin go in, he stopped, and looked up and down ; it was evidently his idea that Hyacinth would be waiting for him. Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in which he had been flattening himself, and came straight to him, and the two men stood there face to face, in the dusky, empty, sordid street.

“ You did n’t let them have the letter ? ”

“ Oh no, I retained it,” said Schinkel, with his eyes more than ever like invisible points.

“ Then had n’t you better give it to me ? ”

“ We will talk of that — we will talk.” Schinkel made no motion to satisfy his friend ; he had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his appearance was characterized by an exasperating assumption that they had the whole night before them. He was intolerably deliberate.

“ Why should we talk ? Have n’t you talked enough with those people, all the evening? What have they to say about it? What right have you to detain a letter that belongs to me ? ”

“ Erlauben Sie: I will light my pipe,” the German remarked. And he proceeded to this business, methodically, while Hyacinth’s pale, excited face showed in the glow of the match that he ignited on the rusty railing beside them. “ It is not yours unless I have given it to you,” Schinkel went on, as they walked along. “ Be patient, and I will tell you,” he added, passing his hand into his companion’s arm. “ Your way, not so ? We will go down toward the Park.” Hyacinth tried to be patient, and he listened with interest when Schinkel said, “ She tried to take it; she attacked me with her hands. But that was not what I went for, to give it up.”

“ Is she mad ? I don’t recognize them,” Hyacinth murmured.

“ No, but they lofe you.”

“Why, then, do they try to disgrace me ?”

“ They think it is no disgrace, if you have changed.”

“ That’s very well for her ; but it’s pitiful for him, and I declare it surprises me.”

“ Oh, he came round, and he helped me to resist. He pulled his wife off. It was the first shock,” said Schinkel.

“ You ought n’t to have shocked them, my dear fellow,” Hyacinth replied.

“ I was shocked myself — I could n’t help it.”

“ Lord, how shaky you all are !”

“ You take it well. I am very sorry. But it is a fine chance,” Schinkel went on, smoking away. His pipe, for the moment, seemed to absorb him, so that after a silence Hyacinth resumed —

“ Be so good as to reflect that all this while I don’t in the least understand what you are talking about.”

“Well, it was this morning, early,” said the German. “ You know in my country we don’t lie in bed late, and what they do in my country I try to do everywhere. I think it is good enough. In winter I get up, of course, long before the sun, and in summer I get up almost at the same time. I should see the fine spectacle of the sunrise, if in London you could see. The first thing I do of a Sunday is to smoke a pipe at my window, which is at the front, you remember, and looks into a little dirty street. At that hour there is nothing to see there — you English are so slow to leave the bed. Not much, however, at any time; it is not important, my little street. But my first pipe is the one I enjoy most. I want nothing else when I have that pleasure. I look out at the new, fresh light — though in London it is not very fresh — and I think it is the beginning of another day. I wonder what such a day will bring ; whether it will bring anything good to us poor devils. But I have seen a great many pass, and nothing has come. This morning, however, brought something — something, at least, to you. On the other side of the way I saw a young man, who stood just opposite to my house, looking up at my window. He looked at me straight, without any ceremony, and I

smoked my pipe and looked at him. I wondered what he wanted, but he made no sign and spoke no word. He was a very nice young man ; he had an umbrella, and he wore spectacles. We remained that way, face to face, perhaps for a quarter of an hour, and at last he took out his watch — he had a watch, too — and held it in his hand, just glancing at it every few minutes, as if to let me know that he would rather not give me the whole day. Then it came over me that he wanted to speak to me ! You would have guessed that before, but we good Germans are slow. When we understand, however, we act; so I nodded to him, to let him know I would come down. I put on my coat and my shoes, for I was only in my shirt and stockings (though of course I had on my trousers), and I went down into the street. When he saw me come he walked slowly away, but at the end of a little distance he waited for me. When I came near him I saw that he was a very nice young man indeed — very young, with a very pleasant, friendly face. He was also very neat, and he had gloves, and his umbrella was of silk. I liked him very much. He said I should come round the corner, so we went round the corner together. I thought there would be some one there waiting for us ; but there was nothing — only the closed shops and the early light, and a little spring mist, which told that the day would be fine. I did n’t know what he wanted ; perhaps it was some of our business — that’s what I first thought — and perhaps it was only a little game. So I was very careful; I did n’t ask him to come into the house. Yet I told him that he must excuse me for not understanding more quickly that he wished to speak with me ; and when I said that, he said it was not of consequence — he would have waited there, for the chance to see me, all day. I told him I was glad I had spared him that, at least, and we had some very polite conversation. He was a very nice young man. But what he wanted was simply to put a letter in my hand; as he said himself, he was only a kind of private postman. He gave me the letter — it was not addressed ; and when I had taken it I asked him how he knew, and if he would n’t be sorry if it should turn out that I was not the man for whom the letter was meant. But I did n’t give him a start; he told me he knew all it was necessary for him to know — he knew exactly what to do and how to do it. I think he is a valuable member. I asked him if the letter required an answer, and he told me he had nothing to do with that; he was only to put it in my hand. He recommended me to wait till I had gone into the house again to read it. We had a little more talk — always very polite ; and he mentioned that he had come so early because he thought I might go out, if he delayed, and because, also, he had a great deal to do, and had to take his time when he could. It is true that he looked as if he had plenty to do — as if he was in some very good occupation. I should tell you that he spoke to me always in English, but he is not English ; he sounded his words like some kind of foreigner. I suppose he is not German, or he would have spoken to me in German. But there are so many, of all countries. I said if he had so much to do I would n’t keep him; I would go to my room and open my letter. He said it was n’t important; and then I asked him if he would n’t come into my room, also, and rest. I told him it was n’t very handsome, my room — because he looked like a young man who would have, for himself, a very nice lodging. Then I found he meant it was n’t important that we should talk any more, and he went away without even offering to shake hands, I don’t know if he had other letters to give, but he went away, as I have said, like a postman on his rounds, without giving me any more information.”

It took Schinkel a long time to unfold this history ; he proceeded with a goodhumored deliberation which took no account of any painful acuteness of curiosity that Hyacinth might feel. He went from step to step, and treated his different points with friendly explicitness, as if each would have exactly the same interest for his companion. The latter made no attempt to hurry him, and indeed he listened, now, with a kind of intense patience ; for he was interested, and, moreover, it was clear to him that he was safe with Schinkel ; the German would satisfy him in time — would n’t worry him with attaching conditions to their transaction, in spite of the mistake he had made in going for guidance to Lisson Grove. Hyacinth learned in due course that on returning to his apartment and opening the little packet of which he had been put into possession, Mr. Schinkel had found himself confronted with two separate articles : one a sealed letter superscribed with our young man’s name, the other a sheet of paper containing in three lines a request that within two days of receiving it he would hand the letter to the “ young Robinson.” The three lines in question were signed D. H., and the letter was addressed in the same hand. Schinkel professed that he already knew the hand — it was that of Diedrich Hoffendahl. “ Good, good,” he said, pressing his hand, soothingly, upon Hyacinth’s arm. “ I will walk with you to your door, and I will give it to you there ; unless you like better that I should keep it till to-morrow morning, so that you may have a quiet sleep — I mean in case it might contain anything that will be disagreeable to you. But it is probably nothing; it is probably only a word to say that you need think no more about your ‘ engagement.’ ”

“ Why should it be that?” Hyacinth asked.

“ Probably he has heard that you repent.”

“ That I repent? ” Hyacinth stopped him short; they had just reached the top of Park Lane. “ To whom have I given a right to say that ? ”

“All well, if you have n’t, so much the better. It may be, then, for some other reason.”

“ Don’t be an idiot, Schinkel,” Hyacinth returned, as they walked along. And in a moment he went on, “ What the devil did you go and blab to the Poupins for ? ”

“ Because I thought they would like to know. Besides, I felt my responsibility ; I thought I should carry it better if they knew it. And then, I’m like them — I lofe you.”

Hyacinth made no answer to this profession ; he asked the next instant,

“ Why did n’t your young man bring the letter directly to me ? ”

“ Ah, I did n’t ask him that! The reason was probably not complicated, but simple — that those who wrote it knew my address, and did n’t know yours. And was n’t I one of your guarantors ? ”

“ Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Muniment. Why was the letter not sent to me through him ? ”

“ My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend upon it, there are always good reasons. I should have liked it better if it had been Muniment. But if they did n’t send to him ” — Schinkel interrupted himself ; the remainder of his sentence was lost in a cloud of smoke.

“ Well, if they did n’t send to him ” — Hyacinth persisted.

“ You ’re a great friend of his — how can I tell you ? ”

At this Hyacinth looked up at his companion askance, and caught an odd glance, accompanied with a smile, which the mild, circumspect German directed toward him. “If it’s anything against him, my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.”

“ Well, it’s a possibility that they are not satisfied.”

“ How do you mean it — not satisfied ? ”

“ How shall I say it ? — that they don’t trust him.”

“ Don’t trust him ? And yet they trust me ! ”

“ Ah, my boy, depend upon it, there are reasons,” Schinkel replied ; and in a moment he added, “ They know everything — everything. Oil, they go straight! ”

The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence, Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin had said when Schinkel, that evening, first told him what he had come to see him about. “ Il vaut du galme — il vaut du galme : ” that was the German’s version of the Frenchman’s words ; and Hyacinth repeated them over to himself several times, almost with the same accent. They had a certain soothing effect. In fact, the good Schinkel was soothing altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of his lodging in Westminster, and stood there face to face, while Hyacinth waited — waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away, and he watched without irritation the loving manner in which the German shook the ashes out of his big pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail of it that he said, “ Also, now for the letter,” and, putting his hand inside of his waistcoat, drew forth the important document. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw a shade of disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face, at this indication that he should have no present knowledge of its contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to say again that it was nothing — that it was only a release. Schinkel had now the good sense, or the good taste, not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed against his heart Hyacinth felt still more distinctly that it was something — that it was a command. What Schinkel did say, in a moment, was,

“ Now that you’ve got it, I am very glad. It is more comfortable for me.”

“ I should think so ! ” Hyacinth exclaimed. “ If you had n’t done your job you would have paid for it.”

Schinkel hesitated a moment while he lingered; then, as Hyacinth turned away, putting in his door key, he replied, “ And if you don’t do yours, so will you.”

“ Yes, as you say, they go straight! Good-night.” And our young man let himself in.

The passage and staircase were never lighted, and the lodgers either groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice, or scraped the wall with a casual match, which, in the milder gloom of day, was visible in a hundred bold streaks. Hyacinth’s room was on the second floor, behind, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of which was in this manner vividly illustrated. He stopped and considered this mysterious brightness, and his first impulse was to connect it with the incident just ushered in by Schinkel ; for what could anything that touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was natural that some punctual emissary should be awaiting him. Then it occurred to him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora, after tea, he had simply left a tallow candle burning, and that it showed a cynical spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so close-fisted for herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly, it came over him that he had had a visitor, in his absence, and that the visitor had taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking sources of comfort, as was perfectly just. When he opened the door he found that this last prevision was the right one, though his visitor was not one of the figures that had risen before him. Mr. Vetch sat there, beside the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing, with his head resting on his hand and his eyes bent on the floor. He looked up when Hyacinth appeared, and said, “ Oh, I did n’t hear you ; you are very quiet.”

“ I come in softly, when I’m late, for the sake of the house — though I am bound to say I am the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides, you have been asleep,” Hyacinth said.

“ No, I have not been asleep,” returned the old man. “ I don’t sleep much nowadays.”

“Then you have been plunged in meditation.”

“ Yes, I have been thinking.” Then Mr. Vetch explained that the woman of the house would n’t let him come in at first, till he had given proper assurances that his intentions were pure, and that he was, moreover, the oldest friend Mr. Robinson had in the world. He had been there for an hour ; he thought he might find him, coming so late.

Hyacinth answered that he was very glad he had waited, and that he was delighted to see him, and expressed regret that he had n’t known in advance of his visit, so that he might have something to offer him. He sat down on his bed, vaguely expectant; he wondered what special purpose had brought the fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. But he only spoke the truth in saying that he was glad to see him. Hyacinth had come up-stairs in a tremor of desire to be alone with the revelation that he carried in his pocket; yet the sight of Theophilus Vetch gave him a sudden relief by postponing solitude. The place where he had put his letter seemed to throb against his side, yet he was thankful to his old friend for forcing him still to leave it there. “ I have been looking at your books,” the fiddler said; “ you have two or three exquisite specimens of your otvn. Oh yes, I recognize your work when I see it ; there are always certain little extra touches. You have a manner, like a master. With such a talent, such a taste, your future leaves nothing to be desired. You will make a fortune and become a great celebrity.”

Mr. Vetch sat forward, to sketch this vision ; he rested his hands on his knees and looked very hard at his young friend, as if to challenge him to dispute his high inductions. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to give him immediately the idea that the fiddler knew something, though it was impossible to guess how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even granting that they were capable of that baseness ; an unwarrantable supposition, in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into Hyacinth’s mind an intense determination to dissemble, before his visitor, to the last; he might imagine what he liked, but he should not have a grain of satisfaction — or rather he should have that of being led to believe, if possible, that his suspicions were positively vain and idle. Hyacinth rested his eyes on the books that Mr. Vetch had taken down from the shelf, and admitted that they were very pretty work, and that so long as one did n’t become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then, suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times, and completely changed their character, became so intolerable that to defend himself Hyacinth took the aggressive, and asked him, boldly, whether it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half a dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. “ My dear old friend, you have something on your mind — some fantastic fear, some extremely perverse idée fixe. Why has it taken you to-night, in particular ? Whatever it is, it has brought you here, at an unnatural hour, you don’t know why. I ought, of course, to be thankful to anything that brings you here ; and so I am, in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it makes you miserable. You ’re like a nervous mother, whose baby’s in bed up-stairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right — if he is n’t uncovered or has n’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr. Vetch, don’t, don’t worry ; the blanket’s up to my chin, and I have n’t tumbled yet.”

Hyacinth heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another person ; the impudence of them, under the circumstances, seemed to him, somehow, so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of an episode in which impudence, evidently, must play a considerable part, and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way the old man gazed at him might have indicated that he too was able to take the measure of his perversity — that he knew he was false, as he sat there declaring that there was nothing the matter, while a brand-new revolutionary commission burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr. Vetch said, very mildly, as if he had really been reassured, “It’s wonderful how you read my thoughts. I don’t trust you ; I think there are beastly possibilities. It’s not true, at any rate, that I come to look at you every five minutes. You don’t know how often I have resisted my fears — how I have forced myself to let you alone.”

“ You had better let me come and live with you, as I proposed after Pinnie’s death. Then you will have me always under your eyes,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

The old man got up eagerly, and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid his hands upon his shoulders, holding him close.

“ Will you now, really, my boy ? Will you come to-night ? ”

“ To-night, Mr. Vetch?”

“ To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I could n’t keep quiet; I was very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie — she seemed to be in the room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed in ghosts, I should believe I had seen her. She was n’t there for nothing ; she was there to add her fears to mine—to talk to me about you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no use, and she drove me out of the house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and stick and came down here. You may judge whether I thought it important, as I took a cab.”

“ Ah, why do you spend your money so foolishly ? ” asked Hyacinth, in a tone of the most affectionate remonstrance.

“ Will you come to-night?” said the old man, for all rejoinder, holding him still.

“ Surely, it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly that you are ill and nervous. You can take the bed, and I ’ll spend the night in the chair.”

The fiddler thought a moment. “ No, you ’ll hate me if I subject you to such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.”

“ It won’t be a bit different in your room ; there, as here, I shall have to sleep in a chair.”

“ I ’ll get another room ; we shall be close together,” the fiddler went on.

“ Do you mean you ’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with your little house stuffed full and your people all in bed? My poor Theophilus, you are very bad; your reason totters on its throne,” said Hyacinth humorously and indulgently.

“ Very good, we ‘ll get a room tomorrow. I ’ll move into another house, where there are two, side by side.” Hyacinth’s tone was evidently soothing to him.

“ Comme vous y allez! ” the young man continued. “ Excuse me if I remind you that in case of my leaving this place I have to give a fortnight’s notice.”

“ Ah, you ’re backing out ! ” the old man exclaimed, dropping his hands.

“ Pinnie would n’t have said that,” Hyacinth rejoined. “ If you are acting, if you are speaking, at the prompting of her pure spirit, you had better act and speak exactly as she would have done. She would have believed me.”

“ Believed you ? Believed what ? What is there to believe? If you’ll make me a promise, I will believe that.”

“ I ’ll make you any promise you like,” said Hyacinth.

“ Oh, any promise I like — that is n’t what I want! I want just one very particular little pledge; and that is really what I came here for to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass, all this time, never to have demanded if of you before. Give it to me now, and I will go home quietly and leave you in peace.” Hyacinth, assenting in advance, requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then the old man said, “Well, promise me that you will never, under any circumstances whatever, do anything.”

“ Do anything? ”

“ Anything that those people expect of you.”

“ Those people ? ” Hyacinth repeated.

“Ah, don’t torment me with pretending not to understand ! ” the old man begged. “ You know the people I mean. I can’t call them by their names, because I don’t know them. But you do, and they know you.”

Hyacinth had no desire to torment Mr. Vetch, but he was capable of reflecting that to enter into his thought too easily would be tantamount to betraying himself. “ I suppose I know the people you have in mind,” he said, in a moment ; “ but I’m afraid I don’t grasp the idea of the promise.”

“ Don’t they want to make use of you ? ”

“ I see what you mean,” said Hyacinth. " You think they want me to touch off some train for them. Well, if that s what troubles you, you may sleep sound. I shall never do any of their work.”

A radiant light came into the fiddler’s face, and he stared, as if this assurance were too fair for nature. “ Do you take your oath on that ? Never anything, anything, anything ? ”

“ Never anything at all.”

“ Will you swear it to me by the memory of that good woman of whom we have been speaking, and whom we both loved ? ”

“ My dear old Pinnie’s memory ? Willingly.”

The old man sank down in his chair and buried his face in his hands ; the next moment his companion heard him sobbing. Ten minutes later he was content to take his departure, and Hyacinth went out with him to look for another cab. They found an ancient four-wheeler stationed, languidly, at a crossing of the ways, and before Mr. Vetch got into it he asked his young friend to kiss him. That young friend watched the vehicle get itself into motion and rattle away ; he saw it turn a neighboring corner. Then he approached the nearest gas lamp, and drew from his breast pocket the letter that Schinkel had given him.

Henry James.