XXII
Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended with very little effort, as he had scarce closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window made him dress as quickly as a young man might who desired more than ever that his appearance shouldn’t give strange ideas about him: an old garden with parterres in curious figures and little intervals of lawn that seemed to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green. At one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick which looked down on the other side into a canal, a moat, a quaint old pond (he hardly knew what to call it) and from the same standpoint showed a considerable part of the main body of the house—Hyacinth’s room belonging to a wing that commanded the extensive irregular back—which was richly grey wherever clear of the ivy and the other dense creepers, and everywhere infinitely a picture: with a high-piled ancient russet roof broken by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables and windows on different lines, with all manner of antique patches and protrusions and with a particularly fascinating architectural excrescence where a wonderful clock-face was lodged, a clock-face covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years and the weather. He had never in his life been in the country—the real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere ravelled fringe of London—and there entered through his open casement the breath of a world enchantingly new and after his recent feverish hours unspeakably refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that consisted for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were tall quiet trees near by and afar off and everywhere; and the group of objects that greeted his eyes evidently formed only a corner of larger spaces and of a more complicated scene. There was a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting with the dew on it under his windows, and he must go down and take of it such possession as he might.
On his arrival at ten o’clock the night before he had only got the impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate; of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly and of the glow of several windows, suggesting indoor cheer, in a front that lifted a range of vague grand effects into the starlight. It was much of a relief to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration of the lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow: the delay would give him time to recover his balance and look about him. This latter opportunity was offered first as he sat at supper in a vast high hall with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should be treated: too blank for that his conception of the way in which, at a country-house, invidious distinctions might be made and shades of importance marked; but it was plain the best had been ordered for him. He was at all events abundantly content with his reception and more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate—though his other senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he ate, as it were, without eating—and the grave automatic servant filled his glass with a liquor that reminded him of some lines of Keats in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley (he was vague about the seasons of this vocalist) and also if the butler would attempt to talk to him, had ideas about him, knew or suspected who he was and what: which after all there was no reason for his doing save perhaps the aspect of the scant luggage attending the visitor from Lomax Place. Mr. Withers, however (it was this name Hyacinth heard used by the driver of his fly), had given no further symptom of sociability than to ask him at what time he would be called in the morning; to which our young man replied that he preferred not to be called at all—he would get up by himself. The butler rejoined, “Very good, sir,” while Hyacinth thought it probable he puzzled him a good deal and even considered the question of giving him a precautionary glimpse of an identity that might be later on less fortunately betrayed. The object of this diplomacy was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing for the simple reason that before he spoke he found himself liking what he had feared. His impulse to deprecate services departed, he was already aware there were none he should care to miss or was not quite prepared for. He knew he had probably thanked Mr. Withers too much, but he couldn’t help this—it was an irrepressible tendency and an error he should doubtless always commit.
He had lain in a bed constituted in a manner so perfect to ensure rest that it was naturally responsible in some degree for his want of ease, and in a large high room where long dressing-glasses emitted ghostly glances even after the light was extinguished. Suspended on the walls were many prints, mezzotints and old engravings which he supposed, possibly without reason, to be of the finest and rarest. He got up several times in the night, lighted his candle and walked about looking at them. He looked at himself in one of the long glasses, and in a place where everything was on such a scale it seemed to him more than ever that Mademoiselle Vivier’s son, lacking all the social dimensions, was scarce a perceptible person at all. As he came downstairs he encountered housemaids with dusters and brooms, or perceived them through open doors on their knees before fireplaces; and it was his belief that they regarded him more boldly than if he had been a guest of the usual kind. Such a reflexion as that, however, ceased to trouble him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through the park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in narrowing circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled an hour in breathless ecstasy, brushing the dew from the deep fern and bracken and the rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant air and stopping everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of some exquisite impression. His whole walk was peopled with recognitions; he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects, such a morning and such a chance. It was the last of April and everything was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early air, were a blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he revolved repeatedly, catching every aspect and feeling every value, feasting on the whole expression and wondering if the Princess would observe his proceedings from a window and if they would be offensive to her. The house was not hers, but only hired for three months, and it could flatter no princely pride that he should be struck with it. There was something in the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to his eyes; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among whom old age meant for the most part a grudged and degraded survival. In the favoured resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour.
A footman sought him out in the garden to tell him breakfast was served. He had never thought of breakfast, and as he walked back to the house attended by the inscrutable flunkey this offer appeared a free extravagant gift, unexpected and romantic. He found he was to breakfast alone and asked no questions, but when he had finished the butler came in to say that the Princess would see him after luncheon but that in the meanwhile she wished him to understand the library to be all at his service. “After luncheon”—that threw the hour he had come for very far into the future, and it caused him some bewilderment that she should think it worth while to invite him to stay with her from Saturday evening to Monday morning only to let so much of his visit elapse without their meeting. But he felt neither slighted nor impatient; the impressions already crowding on him were in themselves a sufficient reward, and what could one do better precisely in such a house as that than wait for a wonderful lady? Mr. Withers conducted him to the library and left him planted in the middle of it and staring at the treasures he quickly and widely took in. It was an old brown room of great extent—even the ceiling was brown, though there were figures in it dimly gilt—where row upon row of finely-lettered backs consciously appealed for recognition. A fire of logs crackled in a great chimney, and there were alcoves with deep window-seats, and arm-chairs such as he had never seen, luxurious, leather-covered, with an adjustment for holding one’s volume; and a vast writing-table before one of the windows, furnished with a perfect magazine of paper and pens, inkstands and blotters, seals, stamps, candlesticks, reels of twine, paper-weights, book-knives. He had never imagined so many aids to correspondence and before he turned away had written a note to Millicent in a hand even nobler than usual—his penmanship was very minute, but at the same time wonderfully free and fair—largely for the pleasure of seeing “Medley Hall” stamped in heraldic-looking red characters at the top of his paper. In the course of an hour he had ravaged the collection, taken down almost every book, wishing he could keep it a week, and then put it back as quickly as his eye caught the next, which glowed with a sharper challenge. He came upon rare bindings and extracted precious hints—hints by which he felt himself perfectly capable of profiting. Altogether his vision of true happiness at this moment was that for a month or two he should be locked into the treasure-house of Medley. He forgot the outer world and the morning waned—the beautiful vernal Sunday—while he lingered there.
He was on the top of a ladder when he heard a voice remark, “I’m afraid they’re very dusty; in this house, you know, it’s the dust of centuries,” and, looking down, saw Madame Grandoni posted in the middle of the room. He instantly prepared to descend and greet her, but she exclaimed: “Stay, stay, if you’re not giddy; we can talk from here! I only came in to show you we are in the house and to tell you to keep up your patience. The Princess will probably see you in a few hours.”
“I really hope so,” he returned from his perch, rather dismayed at the “probably.”
“Natürlich,” said the old lady; “but people have come sometimes and gone away without seeing her. It all depends on her mood.”
“Do you mean even when she has sent for them?”
“Oh, who can tell whether she has sent for them or not?”
“But she sent for me, you know,” Hyacinth declared, staring down and struck with the odd effect of Madame Grandoni’s wig in that bird’s-eye view.
“Oh yes, she sent for you, poor young man!” The old lady looked up at him with a smile and they communicated a little in silence. Then she added: “Captain Sholto has come like that more than once and has gone away no better off.”
“Captain Sholto?” Hyacinth repeated.
“Very true, if we talk at this distance I must shut the door.” She retraced her course while he watched her, and pushed it to, then advanced into the room again with her superannuated, shuffling step, walking as if her shoes were too big for her. Hyacinth, moreover, descended the ladder. “There it is. She’s a capricciosa.”
“I don’t understand how you speak of her,” Hyacinth remarked gravely. “You seem her friend, yet you say things not favourable to her.”
“Dear young man, I say much worse to her about herself than I should ever say to you. I’m rude, oh yes—even to you, to whom, no doubt, I ought to be particularly kind. But I’m not false. That’s not our German nature. You’ll hear me some day. I am the friend of the Princess; it would be well enough if she never had a worse one! But I should like to be yours too—what will you have? Perhaps it’s of no use. At any rate here you are.”
“Yes, here I am decidedly!” Hyacinth uneasily laughed.
“And how long shall you stay? Pardon me if I ask that; it’s part of my rudeness.”
“I shall stay till to-morrow morning. I must be at my work by noon.”
“That will do very well. Don’t you remember, the other time, how I told you to remain faithful?”
“That was very good advice. But I think you exaggerate my danger.”
“So much the better,” said Madame Grandoni; “though now that I look at you well I doubt it a little. I see you’re one of those types that ladies like. I can be sure of that—I like you myself. At my age—a hundred and twenty—can’t I say that? If the Princess were to do so it would be different; remember that—that any flattery she may ever offer you will be on her lips much less discreet. But perhaps she will never have the chance; you may never come again. There are people who have come only once. Vedremo bene. I must tell you that I’m not in the least against a young man’s taking a holiday, a little quiet recreation, once in a while,” Madame Grandoni continued in her disconnected, discursive, confidential way. “In Rome they take one every five days; that’s no doubt too often. In Germany less often. In this country I can’t understand if it’s an increase of effort: the English Sunday’s so difficult! This one will in any case have been beautiful for you. Be happy, make yourself comfortable; but go home to-morrow!” And with this injunction Madame Grandoni took her way again to the door while he went to open it for her. “I can say that because it’s not my house. I’m only here like you. And sometimes I think I also shall go to-morrow!”
“I imagine you’ve not, like me, your living to get every day. That’s reason enough for me,” said Hyacinth.
She paused in the doorway with her expressive, ugly, kindly little eyes on his face. “I believe I’m nearly as poor as you. And I’ve not, like you, the appearance of nobility. Yet I’m noble,” said the old lady, shaking her wig.
“And I’m not!” Hyacinth deeply smiled.
“It’s better not to be lifted up high like our friend. It doesn’t give happiness.”
“Not to one’s self possibly; but to others!” From where they stood he looked out into the great panelled and decorated hall, lighted from above and roofed with a far-away dim fresco, and the reflexion of this grandeur came into his appreciative eyes.
“Do you admire everything here very much—do you receive great pleasure?” asked Madame Grandoni.
“Oh, so much—so much!”
She considered him a moment longer. “Poverino!” she murmured as she turned away.
A couple of hours later the Princess sent for him and he was conducted upstairs, through corridors carpeted with crimson and hung with pictures, and ushered into a large bright saloon which he afterwards learned that his hostess used as a boudoir. The sound of music had come to him outside the door, so that he was prepared to find her seated at the piano, if not to see her continue to play after he appeared. Her face was turned in the direction from which he entered, and she smiled at him without lifting her hands from the keys while the servant, as if he had just arrived, formally pronounced his name. The room, placed in an angle of the house and lighted from two sides, was large and sunny, upholstered in fresh gay chintz, furnished with all sorts of sofas and low familiar seats and convenient little tables, most of these holding great bowls of early flowers; littered over with books, newspapers, magazines, photographs of celebrities slashed across by signatures, and full of the marks of luxurious and rather indolent habitation. Hyacinth stood there, not advancing very far, and the Princess, still playing and smiling, nodded toward a seat near the piano. “Put yourself there and listen to me.” He did so and she played a long time without glancing at him. This left him the more free to rest his eyes on her own face and person while she looked about the room, vaguely, absently, but with an expression of quiet happiness, as if lost in her music, soothed and pacified by it. A window near her was half-open and the soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused themselves and made the place cheerful and pure. The Princess struck him as extraordinarily young and fair, and she seemed so slim and simple, and so friendly too, in spite of having neither abandoned her occupation nor offered him her hand, that he at last sank back in his seat with the sense that all his uneasiness, his nervous tension, was leaving him, and that he was safe in her kindness, in the free original way with which she evidently would always treat him. This peculiar manner, half consideration, half fellowship, seemed to him to have already so mild and wise an intention. She played ever so movingly, with different pieces succeeding each other; he had never listened to music nor to a talent of that order. Two or three times she turned her eyes on him, and then they shone with the wonderful expression which was the essence of her beauty; that profuse mingled light which seemed to belong to some everlasting summer and yet to suggest seasons that were past and gone, some experience that was only an exquisite memory. She asked him if he cared for music and then added, laughing, that she ought to have made sure of this before; while he answered—he had already told her so in South Street, but she appeared to have forgotten—that he was awfully fond of it.
The sense of the beauty of women had been given to our young man in a high degree; it was a faculty that made him conscious to adoration of all the forces of that power and depths of that mystery; of every element of loveliness, every delicacy of feature, every shade and tone that contributed to charm. Therefore even if he had appreciated less the strange harmonies the Princess drew from her instrument and her genius there would have been no lack of interest in his situation, in such an opportunity to watch her admirable outline and movement, the noble form of her head and face, the gathered-up glories of her hair, the living flower-like freshness which had no need to turn from the light. She was dressed in fair colours and as simply as a young girl. Before she ceased playing she asked him what he would like to do in the afternoon: would he have any objection to taking a drive with her? It was very possible he might enjoy the country. She seemed not to attend to his answer, which was covered by the sound of the piano; but if she had done so it would have left her very little doubt as to the reality of his inclination. She remained gazing at the cornice of the room while her hands wandered to and fro; then suddenly she stopped, got up and came toward him. “It’s probable that’s the most I shall ever bore you. You know the worst. Would you very kindly close the piano?” He complied with her request and she went to another part of the room and sank into an arm-chair. When he approached her again she said: “Is it really true that you’ve never seen a park nor a garden nor any of the beauties of nature and that sort of thing?” The allusion was to something gravely stated in his letter when he answered the note by which she proposed to him to run down to Medley, and after he had assured her it was perfectly true she exclaimed: “I’m so glad—I’m so glad! I’ve never been able to show any one anything new and have always felt I should like it—especially with a fine sensitive mind. Then you will come and drive with me?” She spoke as if this would be a great favour.
That was the beginning of the communion—so strange considering their respective positions—which he had come to Medley to enjoy, and it passed into some singular phases. The Princess had an extraordinary way of taking things for granted, of ignoring difficulties, of assuming that her preferences might be translated into fact. After her guest had remained with her ten minutes longer—a period mainly occupied with her exclamations of delight at his having seen so little of the sort of thing of which Medley consisted (Where should he have seen it, gracious heaven? he asked himself); after she had rested thus briefly from her exertions at the piano she proposed that they should go out-of-doors together. She was an immense walker—she wanted her regular walk. She left him for a short time, giving him the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes to entertain himself withal and calling his attention in particular to a story by M. Octave Feuillet (she should be so curious to know what he thought of it); to reappear later with dark hat and clear parasol, drawing on fresh loose gloves and offering herself to our young man at that moment as a sudden incarnation of the heroine of M. Feuillet’s novel, in which he had instantly become immersed. On their way downstairs it occurred to her that he had not yet seen the house and that it would be amusing for her to show it him; so she turned aside and took him through it, up and down and everywhere, even into the vast old-fashioned kitchen where they found a small red-faced man in a white jacket and apron and a white cap (he removed the latter ornament to salute the little bookbinder) with whom his companion spoke Italian, which Hyacinth understood sufficiently to perceive that she addressed her cook in the second person singular, as if he had been a feudal retainer. He remembered how it was in the same way the three Musketeers spoke to their lackeys. The Princess explained that the gentleman in the white cap was a delightful creature (she couldn’t endure English servants, though she was obliged to have two or three) who would make her plenty of risottos and polentas—she had quite the palate of a contadina. She showed Hyacinth everything: the queer transmogrified corner that had once been a chapel; the secret stairway which had served in the persecutions of the Catholics (the owners of Medley were, like the Princess herself, of the old persuasion); the musicians’ gallery over the hall; the tapestried room which people came from a distance to see; and the haunted chamber (the two, sometimes confounded, were quite distinct) where a horrible figure at certain times made its appearance—a dwarfish ghost with an enormous head, a dispossessed eldest brother of long ago who had passed for an idiot, which he wasn’t, and had somehow been made away with. The Princess offered her visitor the privilege of sleeping in this apartment, declaring however that nothing would induce her even to enter it alone, she being a benighted creature, consumed with abject superstitions. “I don’t know if I’m religious or whether if I were my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m faithful to.” She made her young friend pass through the drawing-room very cursorily, remarking that they should see it again: it was rather stupid—drawing-rooms in English country-houses were always stupid; indeed if it would amuse him they would sit there after dinner. Madame Grandoni and she usually sat upstairs, but they would do anything he should find more comfortable.
At last they came out of the house together and while they went she explained, to justify herself against the imputation of extravagance, that, though the place doubtless struck him as absurdly large for a couple of quiet women and the whole thing was not in the least what she would have preferred, yet it was all far cheaper than he probably imagined; she would never have looked at it if it hadn’t been cheap. It must appear to him so preposterous for a woman to associate herself with the great uprising of the poor and yet live in palatial halls—a place with forty or fifty rooms. This was one of her only two allusions as yet to her infatuation with the “cause”; but it fell very happily, for Hyacinth had not been unconscious of the anomaly she mentioned. It had been present to him all day; it added much to the way life practised on his sense of the tragi-comical to think of the Princess’s having retired to a private paradise to think out the problem of the slums. He listened therefore with great attention while she made all conscientiously the point that she had taken the house only for three months in any case, because she wanted to rest after a winter of visiting and living in public (as the English spent their lives, with all their celebrated worship of the “home”) and yet didn’t wish too soon to return to town; though she was obliged to confess that she had still the place in South Street on her hands, thanks to her deciding unexpectedly to go on with it rather than move out her things. One had to keep one’s things somewhere, and why wasn’t that as good a dépôt as another? Medley was not what she would have chosen if she had been left to herself; but she had not been left to herself—she never was; she had been bullied into taking it by the owners, whom she had met somewhere and who had made up to her immensely, persuading her that she might really have it for nothing, for no more than she would give for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old parsonage embowered in clematis, which were really what she had been looking for. Besides, it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so far from town, which it was always difficult to let or to get a price for; and then it was a wretched house for any convenience. Hyacinth, for whom his three hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not been struck with its geographic remoteness, and he asked the Princess what she meant in such a connexion by her use of the word “wretched.” To this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, impossible in every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. “That’s the only reason I come to have it. I don’t want you to think me so sunk in luxury or that I throw away money. Never, never!” Hyacinth had no standard by which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for her, and he saw that though she judged him as a creature still open to every initiation, whose naïveté would entertain her, it was also her fancy to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she might have had the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay before him but the reason she might have for playing it.
One of the gardens at Medley took the young man’s heart beyond the others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a great training of apricots and plums; it had straight walks bordered with old-fashioned homely flowers and enclosing immense squares where other fruit-trees stood upright and mint and lavender floated in the air. In the southern quarter it overhung a small disused canal, and here a high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad and covered with fine turf; so that the top of it, looking down at the canal, made a magnificent grassy terrace, than which on a summer’s day there could be no more delightful place for strolling up and down with a companion—all the more that at either end was a curious pavilion, in the manner of a tea-house, which crowned the scene in an old-world sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or shower. One of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and superfluous flower-pots; the other was covered inside with a queer Chinese paper representing ever so many times over a group of people with faces like blind kittens, groups who drank tea while they sat on the floor. It also contained a straddling inlaid cabinet in which cups and saucers showed valuably through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved cocoanut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf over a sofa which was not very comfortable, though it had cushions of faded tapestry that resembled samplers, stood a row of novels out of date and out of print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves mixed with some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness.
On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess till she all ruefully remembered he had not had his luncheon. He protested that this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared she hadn’t dragged him down to Medley to starve him and that he must go back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way, through the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk. She explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock, in the foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was so foreign he might like that better, and in this case on the morrow they would breakfast together. He could have coffee and anything else he wanted brought to his room at his waking. When he had sufficiently composed himself in the presence of this latter image—he thought he saw a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside—he mentioned that really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in London. There was a train at nine o’clock—he hoped she didn’t mind his taking it. She looked at him gravely and kindly, as if considering an abstract idea, and then said: “Oh yes, I mind it very much. Not to-morrow—some other day.” He made no rejoinder and the Princess spoke of something else; that is, his rejoinder was private and consisted of the reflexion that he would leave Medley in the morning, whatever she might say. He simply couldn’t afford to stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And then Madame Grandoni thought it so important; for though the old lady was obscure she was decidedly impressive. The Princess’s protest, however, was to be reckoned with; he felt it might take a form less cursory than the words she had just uttered, a form that would make it embarrassing. She was less solemn, less explicit, than Madame Grandoni had been, but there was something in her light fine pressure and the particular tone of her mentioned preference that seemed to tell him his liberty was going—the liberty he had managed to keep (till the other day when he gave Hoffendahl a mortgage on it) and the possession of which had in some degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This made him uneasy; what would become of him if he should add another servitude to the one he had undertaken at the end of that long, anxious cab-drive through the rain, in the back bedroom of a house as to whose whereabouts he was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel, all visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel—how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them at the present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter at least, if they could have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!
As to this Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and conclusions she had gathered since their former meeting. It was to such matters as these she directed the conversation; she seemed to wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted as before that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed he was edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he didn’t know what she was talking about. He at all events, if he had been with the dukes—she didn’t call her associates dukes, but he was sure they were of that order—would have got more satisfaction from them. She appeared on the whole to judge the English world severely; to think poorly of its wit and even worse of its morals. “You know people oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dreary,” she said; and Hyacinth turned this over, feeling he certainly had not yet caught the point of view of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of bores. He had sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing it dubbed grossly profligate, but he was rather disappointed in the bad account the Princess gave of it. She dropped the remark that she herself had no sort of conventional morality—she ought to have mentioned that before—yet had never been accused of being stupid. Perhaps he wouldn’t discover it, but most of the people she had had to do with thought her only too acute. The second allusion she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and hers) was when she said: “I determined to see it”—she was speaking still of English society—“to learn for myself what it really is before we blow it up. I’ve been here now a year and a half and, as I tell you, I feel I’ve seen. It’s the old régime again, the rottenness and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are the barbarians, you know.” The Princess was pretty vague after all in her animadversions and regaled him with no anecdotes—which indeed he rather missed—that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed. She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador. By way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t be true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she had let him know she liked him to speak in the manner of the people) inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them—a noble lady—who was one of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she asked: “Whom do you mean—a noble lady?”
“I suppose there’s no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.”
“I don’t know her. Is she nice?”
“Is she pretty, clever?”
“She isn’t pretty, but she’s very uncommon,” said Hyacinth.
“How did you make her acquaintance?” As he hesitated she went on: “Did you bind some books for her?”
“No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.”
“Where’s that?”
“In Camberwell.”
“And who lives there?”
“A young woman I was calling on, who’s bedridden.”
“And the lady you speak of—what do you call her, Lady Lydia Languish?—goes to see her?”
“Yes, very often.”
The Princess, with her eyes on him, had a pause. “Will you take me there?”
“With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the man—the one who works for a big firm of wholesale chemists—that you’ll perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.”
“Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I’m sorry, you know,” the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth asked what she might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, only soon saying: “Perhaps she goes to see him.”
“Goes to see whom?”
“The young chemist—the brother.” She said this very seriously.
“Perhaps she does,” Hyacinth returned, laughing. “But she’s a fine sort of woman.”
The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again wanted to know for what—for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied: “No; I mean for my not being the first—what is it you call them?—noble lady you’ve encountered.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you don’t make an impression on me.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking you might be less fresh than I first thought.”
“Of course I don’t know what you first thought,” Hyacinth smiled.