XXV
He took several long walks by himself beyond the gates of the park and through the neighbouring country—walks during which, committed as he was to reflexion on the general “rumness” of his destiny, he had still a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields; the hedges thick with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew no names, the picture-making power of thatched cottages, the mystery and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of rural complexions, the quaintness of little girls bobbing curtsies by waysides (a sort of homage he had never prefigured); the soft sense of the turf under feet that had never ached but from paving-stones. One morning as he had his face turned homeward after a long stroll he heard behind him the sound of a horse’s hoofs and, looking back, perceived a gentleman who would presently pass him advancing up the road which led to the lodge-gates of Medley. He went his way and as the horse overtook him noticed that the rider slackened pace. Then he turned again and recognised in this personage his occasional florid friend Captain Sholto. The Captain pulled up alongside of him, saluting him with a smile and a movement of the whip-handle. Hyacinth stared with surprise, not having heard from the Princess that she was expecting him. He gathered, however, in a moment that she was not; and meanwhile he received an impression on Sholto’s part of riding-gear that was “knowing”—of gaiters and spurs and a hunting-crop and a curious waistcoat; perceiving this to be a phase of the Captain’s varied nature that he had not yet had occasion to observe. He struck him as very high in the air, perched on his big lean chestnut, and Hyacinth noticed that if the horse was heated the rider was cool.
“Good-morning, my dear fellow. I thought I should find you here!” the Captain exclaimed. “It’s a good job I’ve met you this way without having to go to the house.”
“Who gave you reason to think I was here?” Hyacinth asked; partly occupied with the appositeness of this inquiry and partly thinking, as his eyes wandered over his handsome friend bestriding so handsome a beast, what a jolly thing it would be to know how to ride. He had already, during the few days he had been at Medley, had time to observe that the knowledge of luxury and the wider range of sensation begot in him a taste for still bolder pleasures.
“Why, I knew the Princess was capable of asking you,” Sholto said; “and I learned at the ‘Sun and Moon’ that you had not been there for a long time. I knew furthermore that as a general thing you go there a good deal, don’t you? So I put this and that together and judged you were out of town.”
This was very clear and straightforward and might have satisfied just exactions save for that irritating reference to the Princess’s being “capable of asking him.” He knew as well as the Captain that it had been tremendously eccentric in her to do so, but somehow a transformation had lately taken place in him which made it unpleasant he should receive that view from another, and particularly from a gentleman of whom at a certain juncture several months before he had had strong grounds for thinking unfavourably. He had not seen Sholto since the evening when a queer combination of circumstances caused him to sit more queerly still and listen to comic songs in the company of Millicent Henning and this admirer. The Captain had not concealed his admiration; Hyacinth had his own ideas about his taking that line in order to look more innocent. When he accompanied Millicent that evening to her lodgings (they parted with Sholto on coming out of the Pavilion) the situation was tense between the young lady and her childhood’s friend. She let him have it, as she said; she gave him a dressing which she evidently intended should be memorable for having suspected her, for having insulted her before one of the military. The tone she took and the magnificent audacity with which she took it reduced him to an odd, gratified helplessness; he watched her at last with something of the excitement with which he would have watched a clever but uncultivated actress while she worked herself into a passion that he believed to be fictitious. He gave more credence to his jealousy and to the whole air of the case than to her loud rebuttals, enlivened though these were by tremendous head-tossings and skirt-shakings. But he felt baffled and outfaced, and had recourse to sarcasms which after all proved no more than her high gibes; seeking a final solution in one of those beastly little French shrugs, as Millicent called them, with which she had already denounced him for interlarding his conversation.
The air was never cleared, though the subject of their dispute was afterwards dropped, Hyacinth promising himself to watch his playmate as he had never done before. She let him know, as may well be supposed, that she had her eye on him, and it must be confessed that as regards the exercise of a right of supervision he had felt himself at a disadvantage ever since the night at the theatre. It scantly mattered that she had pushed him into the Princess’s box (for she herself had not been jealous beforehand; she had wanted too much to know what such a person could be “up to,” desiring perhaps to borrow a hint) and it signified as little also that his relations with the great lady were all for the sake of suffering humanity. The atmosphere, however these things might be, was full of thunder for many weeks, and of what importance was the quarter from which the flash and the explosion should proceed? Hyacinth was a good deal surprised to find he could care whether Millicent deceived him or not, and even tried to persuade himself that he didn’t; but it was as if he yet felt between them a personal affinity deeper than any difference, so that it would torment him more never to see her at all than to see her go into tantrums in order to cover her tracks. An inner sense told him that her mingled beauty and grossness, her vulgar vitality, the spirit of contradiction yet at the same time of attachment that was in her, had ended by making her indispensable to him. She bored as much as she irritated; but if she was full of excruciating taste she was also full of life, and her rustlings and chatterings, her wonderful stories, her bad grammar and good health, her insatiable thirst, her shrewd perceptions and grotesque opinions, her blunders and her felicities, were now all part of the familiar human sound of his little world. He could say to himself that she made up to him far more than he to her, and it helped him a little to believe, though the logic was but lame, that she was not “larking” at his expense. If she were really in with a swell he didn’t see why she wished to retain a bookbinder. Of late, it must be added, he had ceased to devote much consideration to Millicent’s ambiguities; for although he was lingering on at Medley for the sake of suffering humanity he was quite aware that to say so (should she ask him for a reason) would have almost as low a value as some of the girl’s own speeches. As regards Sholto he was in the awkward position of having let him off, as it were, by accepting his hospitality, his bounty; thus he couldn’t quarrel with him save on a fresh pretext. This pretext the Captain had apparently been careful not to give, and Millicent had told him after the triple encounter in the street that he had driven him out of England, the poor gentleman he insulted by his vulgar insinuations even more (why ‘even more’ Hyacinth hardly could think) than he outraged herself. When he asked her what she knew about the Captain’s movements she made no scruple to announce to him that the latter had come to her great shop to make a little purchase (it was a pair of silk braces, if she remembered rightly, and she acknowledged unreservedly the thinness of the pretext) and had asked her with much concern whether his gifted young friend (that’s what he called him—Hyacinth could see he meant well) was still in a huff. Millicent had replied that she was afraid he was—the more shame to him; and then the Captain had declared it didn’t matter, as he himself was on the point of leaving England for several weeks (Hyacinth—he called him Hyacinth this time—couldn’t have ideas about a man in a foreign country, could he?) and hoped that by the time he returned the little cloud would have blown over. Sholto had added that she had better tell him frankly—recommending her at the same time to be gentle with their morbid friend—about his visit to the shop. Their candour, their humane precautions, were all very well; but after this, two or three evenings, Hyacinth passed and repassed the Captain’s chambers in Queen Anne Street to see if there were signs at the window of his being in London. Darkness in fact prevailed and he was forced to comfort himself a little when, at last making up his mind to ring at the door and inquire, as a test, for the occupant, he was informed by the superior valet whose acquaintance he had already made and whose air of wearing a jacket left behind by his master confirmed the statement, that the gentleman in question was at Monte Carlo.
“Have you still got your back up a little?” the Captain now demanded without rancour; and in a moment he had swung a long leg over the saddle and dismounted, walking beside his young friend and leading his horse by the bridle. Hyacinth pretended not to know what he meant, for it came over him that after all, even if he had not condoned at the time the Captain’s suspected treachery, he was in no position, sitting at the feet of the Princess, to sound the note of jealousy in relation to another woman. He reflected that the Princess had originally been in a manner Sholto’s property, and if he did en fin de compte wish to quarrel with him about Millicent he would have to cease to appear to poach on the Captain’s preserves. It now occurred to him for the first time that the latter might have intended a practical exchange; though it must be added that the Princess, who on a couple of occasions had alluded slightingly to her military friend, had given him no sign of recognising this gentleman’s claim. Sholto let him know at present that he was staying at Bonchester, seven miles off; he had come down from London and put up at the inn. That morning he had ridden over on a hired horse (Hyacinth had supposed this steed to be a very fine animal, but Sholto spoke of it as an infernal screw); he had felt a sudden prompting to see how his young friend was coming on.
“I’m coming on very well, thank you,” said Hyacinth with some shortness, not knowing exactly what business it was of the Captain’s.
“Of course you understand my interest in you, don’t you? I’m responsible for you—I put you forward.”
“There are a great many things in the world I don’t understand, but I think the thing I understand least is your interest in me. Why the devil——?” And Hyacinth paused, breathless with the force of his inquiry. Then he went on: “If I were you I shouldn’t care tuppence for the sort of person I happen to be.”
“That proves how different my nature is from yours! But I don’t believe it, my dear boy; you’re too generous for that.” Sholto’s imperturbability always appeared to grow with the irritation it produced, and it was proof even against the just resentment excited by his deficiency of tact. That deficiency was marked when he went on to say: “I wanted to see you here with my own eyes. I wanted to see how it looked, your domesticated state—and it is a rum sight! Of course you know what I mean, though you’re always trying to make a fellow explain. I don’t explain well in any sense, and that’s why I go in only for clever people who can do without it. It’s very grand, her having brought you down.”
“Grand, no doubt, but hardly surprising, considering that, as you say, I was put forward by you.”
“Oh that’s a great thing for me, but it doesn’t make any difference to her!” Sholto returned. “She may care for certain things for themselves, but it will never signify a jot to her what I may have thought about them. One good turn deserves another. I wish you’d put me forward!”
“I don’t understand you and I don’t think I want to,” said Hyacinth as his companion strolled beside him.
The latter put a hand on his arm, stopping him, and they stood face to face a moment. “I say, my dear Robinson, you’re not spoiled already, at the end of a week—how long is it? It isn’t possible you’re jealous!”
“Jealous of whom?” asked Hyacinth, whose measure of the allusion was, amid the strangeness of everything, imperfect.
Sholto looked at him a moment; then with a laugh: “I don’t mean Miss Henning.” Hyacinth turned away and the Captain resumed his walk, now taking the young man’s arm and passing his own through the bridle of the horse. “The courage of it, the insolence, the crânerie! There isn’t another woman in Europe who could carry it off.”
Hyacinth was silent a little; after which he remarked: “This is nothing, here. You should have seen me the other day over at Broome, at Lady Marchant’s.”
“Gad, did she take you there? I’d have given ten pounds to see it. There’s no one like her!” cried the Captain gaily, enthusiastically.
“There’s no one like me, I think—for going.”
“Why, didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Too much—too much. Such excesses are dangerous.”
“Oh. I’ll back you,” said the Captain; then checking their pace, “Is there any chance of our meeting her?” he asked. “I won’t go into the park.”
“You won’t go to the house?” Hyacinth demanded in wonder.
“Oh dear no, not while you’re there.”
“Well, I shall ask the Princess about you, and so have done with it once for all.”
“Lucky little beggar, with your fireside talks!” the Captain lamented. “Where does she sit now in the evening? She won’t tell you anything except that I’m a beastly nuisance; but even if she were willing to take the trouble to throw some light on me it wouldn’t be of much use, because she doesn’t understand me herself.”
“You’re the only thing in the world then of which that can be said,” Hyacinth returned.
“I daresay I am, and I’m rather proud of it. So far as the head’s concerned the Princess is all there. I told you when I presented you that she was the cleverest woman in Europe, and that’s still my opinion. But there are some mysteries you can’t see into unless you happen to have a little decent human feeling, what’s commonly called a bit of heart. The Princess isn’t troubled with that sort of thing, though doubtless just now you may think it her strong point. One of these days you’ll see. I don’t care a rap myself about her quantity of heart. She has hurt me already so much that she can’t hurt me any more, and my interest in her is quite independent of it. To watch her, to adore her, to see her lead her life and act out her extraordinary nature, all the while she pays me no more attention than if I were the postman’s knock several doors on, that’s absolutely the only thing that appeals to me. It doesn’t do me a scrap of good, but all the same it’s my principal occupation. You may believe me or not—it doesn’t in the least matter; but I’m the most disinterested human being alive. She’ll tell you one’s the biggest kind of donkey, and so of course one is. But that isn’t all.”
It was Hyacinth who stopped this time, arrested by something new and natural in the tone of his companion, a simplicity of emotion he had not hitherto associated with him. He stood there a moment looking up at him and thinking again what improbable confidences it decidedly appeared to be his lot to receive from gentlefolk. To what quality in himself were they a tribute? The honour was one he could easily dispense with; though as he scrutinised Sholto he found something in his odd light eyes—a sort of wasted flatness of fidelity—which made of an accepted relation with him a less fantastic adventure. “Please go on,” he said in a moment.
“Well, what I mentioned just now is my real and only motive in anything. The rest’s the mere gabble of the juggler to cover up his trick and help himself do it.”
“What do you mean by the rest?” asked Hyacinth, thinking of Millicent Henning.
“Oh all the straw one chews to cheat one’s appetite; all the rot one dabbles in because it may lead to something which it never does lead to; all the beastly buncombe (you know) that you and I have heard together in Bloomsbury and that I myself have poured out, damme, with an assurance worthy of a better cause. Don’t you remember what I’ve said to you—all as my own opinion—about the impending change of the relations of class with class? Impending collapse of the crust of the earth! I believe those on top of the heap are better than those under it, that they mean to stay there, and that if they’re not a pack of poltroons they will.”
“You don’t care for the social question then?” Hyacinth inquired with an aspect of the blankness of which he was conscious.
“I only took it up because she did. It hasn’t helped me,” Sholto smiled. “My dear Robinson,” he went on, “there’s only one thing I care for in life: to have a look at that woman when I can—and when I can’t to approach her in the sort of way I’m doing now.”
“It’s a very funny sort of way.”
“Indeed it is; but if it’s good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you. What I want you to do is this—to induce her to ask me over to dine.”
“To induce her——?” Hyacinth echoed.
“Tell her I’m staying at Bonchester and it would be an act of common humanity.”
They proceeded till they reached the gates and in a moment Hyacinth said: “You took up the social question then because she did. But do you happen to know why she took it up?”
“Ah my dear fellow, you must worry that out for yourself. I found you the place, but I can’t do your work for you!”
“I see—I see. But perhaps you’ll tell me this: if you had free access to her a year ago, taking her to the theatre and that sort of thing, why shouldn’t you have it now?”
This time Sholto’s yellow eyes were strange again. “You have it now, my dear chap, but I’m afraid it doesn’t follow that you’ll have it a year hence. She was tired of me then, and of course she’s still more tired of me now, for the simple reason that I’m more tiresome. She has sent me to Coventry and I want to come out for a few hours. See how awfully decent I am—I won’t pass the gates.”
“I’ll tell her I met you,” said Hyacinth. Then, irrelevantly, he added: “Is that what you mean by her having no heart?”
“Her treating me as she treats me? Oh dear no. Her treating you!”
This had a portentous sound, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from turning round with his visitor—for it was the greatest part of the oddity of the present meeting that the hope of a little conversation with him, if accident were favourable, had been the motive not only of Sholto’s riding over to Medley but of his coming down to stay, in the neighbourhood, at a musty inn in a dull market-town—it didn’t prevent him, I say, from bearing the Captain company for a mile on his backward way. Our young man pursued this particular topic little further, but he discovered still another reason or two for admiring the light, free action with which his companion had unmasked himself, as well as the nature of his interest in the revolutionary idea, after he had asked him abruptly what he had had in his head when he travelled over that evening, the summer before—and he didn’t appear to have come back as often as he promised—to Paul Muniment’s place in Camberwell. What was he looking for, whom was he looking for there?
“I was looking for anything that would turn up, that might take her fancy. Don’t you understand that I’m always looking? There was a time when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts) all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I collected you.”
“Muniment made you out exactly then. And what did you find to your purpose in Audley Court?”
“Well, I think the little woman with the popping eyes—she reminded me of a bedridden grasshopper—will do. And I made a note of the other one, the old virgin with the high nose, the aristocratic sister of mercy. I’m keeping them in reserve for my next propitiatory offering.”
Hyacinth had a pause. “And Muniment himself—can’t you do anything with him?”
“Oh my dear fellow, after you he’s poor!”
“That’s the first stupid thing you’ve said. But it doesn’t matter, for he dislikes the Princess—what he knows of her—too much ever to consent to see her.”