IX
“She lives in Belgrave Square; she has ever so many brothers and sisters; one of her sisters is married to Lord Warmington,” Rose Muniment instantly began, not apparently in the least discomposed at being left alone with a strange young man in a room which was now half dark again, thanks to her brother’s having carried off the second and more brilliant candle. She was so interested for the time in telling Hyacinth the history of Lady Aurora that she appeared not to remember how little she knew about himself. Her ladyship had dedicated her life and her pocket-money to the poor and sick; she cared nothing for parties and races and dances and picnics and cards and life in great houses, the usual amusements of the aristocracy: she was like one of the saints of old come to life again out of a legend. She had made their acquaintance, Paul’s and hers, about a year before, through a friend of theirs, such a fine brave young woman, who was in Saint Thomas’s Hospital for a surgical operation. She had been laid up there for weeks during which Lady Aurora, always looking out for those who couldn’t help themselves, used to come and talk to her and read to her, till the end of her time in the ward, when the poor girl, parting with her kind friend, told her how she knew of another unfortunate creature (for whom there was no place there, because she was incurable) who would be mighty thankful for any little attention of that sort. She had given Lady Aurora the address in Audley Court and the very next day her ladyship had knocked at their door. It wasn’t because she was poor—though in all conscience they were pinched enough—but because she had so little satisfaction in her limbs. Lady Aurora came very often, for several months, without meeting Paul, because he was always at his work; but one day he came home early on purpose to find her, to thank her for her goodness, and also to see (Miss Muniment rather shyly intimated) if she were really so good as his extravagant little sister made her out. Rosy had a triumph after that: Paul had to admit that her ladyship was beyond anything that any one in his waking senses would believe. She seemed to want to give up everything to those who were below her and never to expect any thanks at all. And she wasn’t always preaching and showing you your duty; she wanted to talk to you sociable-like, as if you were just her own sister. And her own sisters were the highest in the land, and you might see her name in the newspapers the day they were presented to the Queen. Lady Aurora had been presented too, with feathers in her head and a long tail to her gown; but she had turned her back on it all with a kind of terror—a sort of shivering sinking state which she had often described to Miss Muniment. The day she had first seen Paul was the day they became so intimate, the three of them together—if she might apply such a word as that to such a peculiar connexion. The little woman, the little girl, as she lay there (Hyacinth scarce knew how to characterise her) told our young man a very great secret, in which he found himself too much interested to think of criticising so precipitate a confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had ever seen in the world, her ladyship thought Rosy’s Paul the very cleverest. And she had seen the greatest, the most famous, the brightest of every kind, for they all came to stay at Inglefield, thirty and forty of them at once. She had talked with them all and heard them say their best (and you could fancy how they would try to give it out at such a place as that, where there was nearly a mile of conservatories and a hundred wax candles were lighted at a time) and at the end of it all she had made the remark to herself—and she had made it to Rosy too—that there was none of them had such a head on his shoulders as the young man in Audley Court. Rosy wouldn’t spread such a rumour as that in the court itself, but she wanted every friend of her brother’s (and she could see Hyacinth was a real one by the way he listened) to know what was thought of him by them that had an experience of intellect. She didn’t wish to give it out that her ladyship had lowered herself in any manner to a person that earned his bread in a dirty shop (clever as he might be), but it was easy to see she minded what he said as if he had been a bishop—or more indeed, for she didn’t think much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his work before she had gone, and to-night Hyacinth could see for himself how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling, high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished, of a poor north-country home, bedecked with penny ornaments and related in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed estates. He spent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd, sharp, crippled, chattering sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far better than Pinnie or than Milly Henning) and who startled, puzzled and at the same time rather distressed him by the manner in which she referred herself to the most abject class—the class that prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter, in the presence of its betters. That was Pinnie’s attitude of course, but Hyacinth had long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian patience in her blood, and that though she had a tender soul she had not a truly high spirit. He was more entertained than afflicted, however, by Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered about; this was the first time he had heard it described with that degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually, almost morbidly conscious that the circle in which he lived was an infinitesimally small shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London, and his imagination plunged again and again into the flood that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter, happier vision—the vision of societies where, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked of art, literature and history. When Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject of Lady Aurora she became more quiet, asking as yet, however, no straight questions of her guest, whom she seemed to take very much for granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon again, and he added, to explain this wish: “You know you seem to me very curious people.”
Miss Muniment didn’t in the least repudiate the imputation. “Oh yes, I daresay we seem very curious. I think we’re generally thought so; especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.” And she laughed till her bed creaked again.
“Perhaps it’s lucky you’re ill; perhaps if you had your health you’d be all over the place,” Hyacinth suggested. And he went on candidly: “I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.”
“I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you had known my father and mother.”
“Were they such a rare lot?”
“I think you’d say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the mines, where the filthy coal’s dug out. That’s where my father came from—he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He never had a day’s schooling in his life, but he climbed up out of his black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of the pits and the awfulness too. My father had no great figure, but she was magnificent—the finest woman in the country and the bravest and the best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was as black as the coal he worked in: I know I’m just his pattern, barring that he did have his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. Yet between him and my mother, for grand high intelligence, there wasn’t much to choose. But what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father had even less of that than I, for with me it’s only the body that can’t stand up, and with him it was the very nature. He invented, for use in machine-shops, a mechanical improvement—a new kind of beam-fixing, whatever that is—and he sold it at Bradford for fifteen pounds: I mean the whole right and profit of it and every hope and comfort of his family. He was always straying and my mother was always bringing him back. She had plenty to do, with me a puny ailing brat from the moment I opened my eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came home, or only came a loose bloody bundle of clothes. He had fallen into a gravel-pit, he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my brother won’t ever touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and that I’ve only a drop once a week or so in the way of a strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more. If she could but have come to us before my mother went—that would have been a saving! I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept us decent—if such a useless little mess as me can be said to be decent. At any rate she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She went to the wash-tub, and she might have been a queen as she stood there with her bare arms in the foul linen and her long hair braided on her head. She was terrible handsome, but he’d have been a bold man that had taken on himself to tell her so. And it was from her we got our education—she was determined we should rise above the common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go into such things, but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book. She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t, and her idea for us was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You can see for yourself that that’s what has come of it. How he got it’s more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s head wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t had a head himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow poster on a wall or a time-table at a railway station than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad—picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing—only that I’d have made a poor feast—and just lay that really grand character on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rose Muniment in conclusion; “but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had jolly good brains at least to give us.”
Hyacinth listened to this eloquence—the clearest statement of anything he had ever heard made by a woman—with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment talked of brains made him feel this; she pronounced the word as if she were distributing prizes for intellectual eminence from off a platform. No doubt the weak inventor and the strong worker had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence on her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the chord of melancholy aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made for his life to have had some rich warm presence like that in it.
“Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired after a little.
The eyes of his hostess glittered at him. “If you ever quarrel with him you’ll see whose side I shall take.”
“Ah, before that I shall make you like me.”
“That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I shall fling you over!”
“Why then do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the people are to come up?”
“Because I think he’ll get over them.”
“Never—never!” cried Hyacinth. “I’ve only known him an hour or two, but I deny that with all my strength.”
“Is that the way you’re going to make me like you—contradicting me so?” Miss Muniment asked with familiar archness.
“What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.”
“I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you’re not if you want all the great people pulled down and the most dreadful scenes enacted.”
“Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for the groaning, toiling millions—those who have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time?”
Hyacinth asked this question with considerable heat, but the effect of it was to send his companion off into a new ring of laughter. “You say that just like a man my brother described to me three days ago, a little man at some club whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way he raved and stamped. I don’t mean that you do either, but you use almost the same words as him.” Hyacinth scarce knew what to make of this allusion or of the picture offered him of Paul Muniment casting ridicule on those who spoke in the name of the down-trodden. But Rosy went on before he had time to do more than reflect that there would evidently be great things to learn about her brother: “I haven’t the least objection to seeing the people improved, but I don’t want to see the aristocracy lowered an inch. I like so much to look at it up there.”
“You ought to know my Aunt Pinnie—she’s just such another benighted idolater!” Hyacinth returned.
“Oh, you’re making me like you very fast! And pray who’s your Aunt Pinnie?”
“She’s a dressmaker and a charming little woman. I should like her to come and see you.”
“I’m afraid I’m not in her line—I never had on a dress in my life. But, as a charming woman, I should be delighted to see her,” Miss Muniment hastened to add.
“I’ll bring her some day,” he said; and then he went on rather incongruously, for he was irritated by the girl’s optimism, thinking it a shame her sharpness should be enlisted on the wrong side. “Don’t you want, for yourself, a better place to live in?”
She jerked herself up and for a moment he thought she would jump out of her bed at him. “A better place than this? Pray how could there be a better place? Every one thinks it’s lovely; you should see our view by daylight—you should see everything I’ve got. Perhaps you’re used to something very fine, but Lady Aurora says that in all Belgrave Square there isn’t such a cosy little room. If you think I’m not perfectly content you’re very much mistaken!”
Such an attitude could only exasperate him, and his exasperation made him indifferent to the mistake of his having appeared to sniff at Miss Muniment’s quarters. Pinnie herself, submissive as she was, had spared him that sort of displeasure; she groaned over the dinginess of Lomax Place sufficiently to remind him that she had not been absolutely stultified by misery. “Don’t you sometimes make your brother very cross?” he asked, smiling, of his present entertainer.
“Cross? I don’t know what you take us for! I never saw him lose his temper in his life.”
“He must be a rum customer! Doesn’t he really care for—for what we were talking about?”
For a space Rosy was silent; then she replied: “What my brother really cares for—well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me.”
Hyacinth stared. “But isn’t he tremendously deep in—” What should he call the mystery?
“Deep in what?”
“Well, in what’s going on beneath the surface. Doesn’t he belong to important things?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what he belongs to—you may ask him!” cried Rosy, who laughed gaily again as the opening door re-admitted the subject of their conversation. “You must have crossed the water with her ladyship,” she pursued. “I wonder who enjoyed their walk most.”
“She’s a handy old girl and she has a goodish stride,” said the young man.
“I think she’s in love with you simply, Mr. Muniment.”
“Really, my dear, for an admirer of the aristocracy you allow yourself a licence,” Paul scoffed, smiling at Hyacinth.
Hyacinth got up, feeling that really he had paid a long visit; his curiosity was far from satisfied, but there was a limit to the time one should spend in a young lady’s sleeping apartment. “Perhaps she is; why not?” he struck out.
“Perhaps she is then; she’s daft enough for anything.”
“There have been fine folks before who have patted the people on the back and pretended to enter into their life,” Hyacinth said. “Is she only playing with that idea or is she in earnest?”
“In earnest—in terrible deadly earnest, my dear fellow! I think she must be rather crowded out at home.”
“Crowded out of Inglefield? Why, there’s room for three hundred!” Rosy broke in.
“Well, if that’s the kind of mob that’s in possession, no wonder she prefers Camberwell. We must be kind to the poor lady,” Paul added in a tone that Hyacinth noticed. He attributed a remarkable meaning to it; it seemed to say that people such as he were now so sure of their game that they could afford to be magnanimous; or else it expressed a prevision of the doom that hung over her ladyship’s head. Muniment asked if Hyacinth and Rosy had got on together, and the girl replied that Mr. Robinson had made himself most agreeable. “Then you must tell me all about him after he goes, for you know I don’t know him much myself,” said her brother.
“Oh yes, I’ll tell you everything—you know how I like describing.”
Hyacinth found himself amused at the young lady’s account of his efforts to please her, the fact being that he had only listened to her own eager discourse without opening his mouth; but Paul, whether or no guessing the truth, said to him all pertinently: “It’s very wonderful—she can describe things she has never seen. And they’re just like the reality.”
“There’s nothing I’ve never seen,” Rosy declared. “That’s the advantage of my lying here in such a manner. I see everything in the world.”
“You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings—his secret societies and his revolutionary clubs. You put that aside when I asked you.”
“Oh, you mustn’t ask her that sort of thing,” said Paul, lowering at Hyacinth with a fierce frown—an expression he perceived in a moment to be facetiously assumed.
“What am I to do then, since you won’t tell me anything definite yourself?”
“It will be definite enough when you get hanged for it!” Rosy exclaimed mockingly.
“Why do you want to poke your head into ugly black holes?” Muniment asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder and shaking it gently.
“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” our young man gravely demanded.
“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!” Paul cried in not unkindly derision to his sister. “You must have got that precious phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that the party you want to belong to?” he went on with his clear eyes ranging over his diminutive friend.
“If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,” Hyacinth candidly pleaded, rejoicing all the while to feel himself in such a relation. It was his view of himself, and not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never sue for a favour; but now he felt that in any connexion with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This rare man he could go on his knees to without a sense of humiliation.
“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul pursued, refusing to be serious.
“Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure they are coming in to make a search for your papers,” Miss Muniment lucidly interposed.
“The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up and dance.”
“What did you ask me to come home with you for?” Hyacinth demanded as he twirled his hat. It was an effort for a moment to keep the tears from his eyes; he saw himself forced to put such a different construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy impression that Muniment had divined in him a possible associate of a high type in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of things, whereas it now came over him that the real use he had been put to was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service, every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man justified at the present juncture the high estimate Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question would have been he invented straight off a better one and said at random, smiling and not knowing exactly what his visitor had meant:
“What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you’d be afraid.”
What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally vague; but he answered quickly enough: “I think you’ve only to try me to see.”
“I’m sure that if you introduce him to some of your low wicked friends he’ll be quite satisfied after he has looked round a bit,” Miss Muniment remarked irrepressibly.
“Those are just the kind of people I want to know,” Hyacinth rang out.
His sincerity appeared to touch his friend. “Well, I see you’re a good ’un. Just meet me some night.”
“Where, where?” asked Hyacinth eagerly.
“Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away from her.” And Muniment led him good-humouredly out.