XVIII
The matter touched him but indirectly, yet it may concern the reader more closely to know that before the visit to the Duke took place Madame Grandoni granted to Prince Casamassima the private interview she had promised him on that sad Sunday afternoon. She crept out of South Street after breakfast—a repast which under the Princess’s roof was served in the foreign fashion at twelve o’clock—crossed the sultry solitude into which at such a season that precinct resolves itself, and entered the Park, where the grass was already brown and a warm, smoky haze prevailed, a tepid and tasteless réchauffé, as it struck our old friend, of the typical London fog. The Prince met her by appointment at the gate and they went and sat down together under the trees beside the drive, amid a wilderness of empty chairs and with nothing to distract their attention from an equestrian or two left over from the cavalcades of a fortnight before and whose vain agitation in the saddle the desolate scene threw into high relief. They remained there nearly an hour, though Madame Grandoni, in spite of her leaning to friendly interpretations, couldn’t have told herself what comfort it was to her afflicted companion. She had nothing to say to him that could better his case as he bent his mournful gaze on a prospect not after all perceptibly improved by its not being Sunday, and could only feel that with her he must seem to himself to be nearer his wife—to be touching something she had touched. She wished he would resign himself more, but she was willing to minister to that thin illusion, little as she approved of the manner in which he had conducted himself at the time of the last sharp crisis in the remarkable history of his relations with Christina. He had conducted himself after the fashion of a spoiled child, a child with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been showy. He had not been clever enough or strong enough to make good his valid rights, and had transferred the whole quarrel to ground where his wife was far too accomplished a combatant not to obtain the appearance of victory.
There was another reflexion for Madame Grandoni to make as her interview with her dejected friend prolonged itself. She could make it the more freely as, besides being naturally quick and appreciative, she had always, during her Roman career, in the dear old days (mixed with bitterness as they had been for her) lived with artists, archæologists, ingenious strangers, people who abounded in good talk, threw out ideas and played with them. It came over her that really, even if things had not reached that particular crisis, Christina’s active, various, ironical mind, with all its audacities and impatiences, could not have tolerated long the simple deadly dulness of the Prince’s company. The old lady had begun on meeting him: “Of course what you want to know at once is whether she has sent you a message. No, my poor friend, I must tell you the truth. I asked her for one, but she assures me she has nothing whatever, of any kind, to say to you. She knew I was coming out to see you—I haven’t done so en cachette. She doesn’t like it, but she accepts the necessity for this once, since you’ve made the mistake, as she considers it, of approaching her again. We talked of you last night after your note came to me—for five minutes; that is, I talked in my independent way and Christina was good enough to listen. At the end she spoke briefly, with perfect calmness and the appearance of being the most reasonable woman in the world. She didn’t ask me to repeat it to you, but I do so because it’s the only substitute I can offer you for a message. ‘I try to occupy my life, my mind, to create interests, in the odious position in which I find myself; I endeavour to get out of myself, my small personal disappointments and troubles, by the aid of such poor faculties as I possess. There are things in the world more interesting after all, and I hope to succeed in giving my attention to them. It appears to me not too much to ask that the Prince on his side should make the same conscientious effort—and leave me contentedly alone!’ Those were your wife’s remarkable words; they’re all I have to give you.”
After she had given them Madame Grandoni felt a pang of regret; the Prince turned upon her a face so white, bewildered and wounded. It had seemed to her they might form a wholesome admonition, but she now saw that, as coming from his wife, they were cruel, and she herself felt almost cruel for having repeated them. What they amounted to was an exquisite taunt of his mediocrity—a mediocrity after all neither a crime nor a design nor a preference. How could the Prince occupy himself, what interests could he create and what faculties, gracious heaven, did he possess? He was as ignorant as one of the dingy London sheep browsing before them, and as contracted as his hat-band. His expression became pitiful; it was as if he dimly measured the insult, felt it more than saw it—felt he couldn’t plead incapacity without putting his wife largely in the right. He gazed at Madame Grandoni, his face worked, and for a moment she thought he was going to cry right out. But he said nothing—perhaps because he was afraid of that—so that suffering silence, during which she gently laid her hand on his own, remained his sole answer. He might doubtless do so much he didn’t that when Christina touched on this she was unanswerable. The old lady changed the subject: told him what a curious country England was in so many ways; offered information as to their possible movements during the summer and autumn, which within a day or two had taken more form. But at last, as if he had not heard her, he broke out on the identity of the young man who had come in the day he called, just as he was going.
Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”
“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”
“Prince, how can you dream she’ll ever live with you again?” the old lady asked in reply to this.
“Why then does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his books, his bindings? I shouldn’t say this to her,” he added as if the declaration justified him.
“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” She couldn’t help laughing out as she gave her explanation this turn; but her mirth elicited no echo.
“I’ve thought that over—over and over; but the more I think the less I understand. Would it be your idea that she’s quite crazy? I must tell you I don’t care if she is!”
“We’re all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at present she’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”
“Santo Dio!” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when they see the bookbinder?”
“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”
The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean the young man you saw at the house—I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first time he had been there and that the Princess had only seen him once—if you mean the little bookbinder he isn’t dirty, especially what we should call. The people of that kind here are not like our dear Romans. Every one has a sponge as big as your head; you can see them in the shops.”
“They’re full of gin; their faces are awful, are purple,” said the Prince; after which he immediately asked: “If she had only seen him once how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?”
His friend looked at him a little sternly. “Believe at least what I say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She’ll speak the truth always.”
It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke. But he didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal to say for himself: “There are things it’s better to conceal.”
“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you’re here and I mayn’t see you again for a long time or perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!) I may as well give you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make her seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”
“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.
“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her having told you—how the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can’t for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”
“Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?”
“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” the old woman smiled. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern.’ That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”
“Yes, we’re not anything of that low sort, thank God! Dio mio, Dio mio!” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with Christina’s husband the current of conversation made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied for the moment with the minuteness he had been taught that in such a case courtesy demanded; but by the time that at her request they had returned to the gate nearest South Street (she wished him to come no further) he had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way. “And who and what then is this English captain? About him there’s a great deal said.”
“This English captain?”
“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.
They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple of predatory hansoms dashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought that was coming, and at bottom it’s he who has occupied you most!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”
“Why doesn’t he count?”
“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t even think he does.”
“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”
“Perhaps that’s just the reason. When people give her a chance to get tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate you needn’t be any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, a factotum, but he works without wages.”
“Isn’t he then in love with her?”
“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”
“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince lugubriously.
“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!”
“Oh the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events he sees her.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t see him!” laughed Madame Grandoni as she turned away.