“I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary, it has been settled that I shall stay over. I am very sorry if it distresses you—but che vuole?” Hyacinth added, smiling.
Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in return; she only looked at him a moment, and then, shrugging her shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.
XXIV
“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He is Diedrich Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly, the next morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes upon Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon, with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed that he should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him that her venerable friend had let her know, while the day was still very young, that she thought it in the worst possible taste of the Princess not to have allowed Mr Robinson to depart; to which Christina had replied that concerning tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before without any one being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about him—of all thankless subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than that of arranging one’s relations with people; and Hyacinth guessed that she meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her side, then, there was as little possibility as on his that they should ever quarrel; their acquaintance would be a solid friendship or it would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this quality, and it may be imagined how safe Hyacinth felt by the time he began to tell her that something had happened to him, in London, three months before, one night (or rather in the small hours of the morning), that had altered his life altogether—had, indeed, as he might say, changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.
The Princess had led to this, almost as soon as they left the house; making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying, suddenly, “Now tell me what is going on among your friends. I don’t mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers. Où en êtes-vous, at the present time? Is there anything new, is anything going to be done; I am afraid you are always simply dawdling and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if, of late, he had by no means either dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to refute the imputation the Princess exclaimed, in another tone, “How annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the right to say to yourself, ‘After all, what do I know? May she not be in the pay of the police?’”
“Oh, that doesn’t occur to me,” said Hyacinth, with a smile.
“It might, at all events; by which I mean it may, at any moment. Indeed, I think it ought.”
“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head about me.”
“I should make you think that, certainly! That would be my first care. However, if you have no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the scenes.
In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he felt that he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wrong side—he did not open himself immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted, he said, “I pledged myself, by everything that is sacred.”