After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale parlour, immersed in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much, of late, in the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker, in taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious discipline. What was most vivid to him, in the deserted scene of Pinnie’s unsuccessful industry, was the changed vision with which he had come back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the same, and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in the impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a dismal chiaroscuro—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of his own little life; but the eyes with which he looked at it had new terms of comparison. He had known the place was hideous and sordid, but its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he couldn’t believe that for years together he had accepted and even, a little, revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service that his experience of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have assimilated that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for himself; but with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement could one come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising? Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle, and the room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from the muddy street, where the areas were a narrow slit. No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, and her small under-fed organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient, humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes that didn’t match, though they were of an equal antiquity and resembled each other in the facility with which they dropped off. Hyacinth had not heard Mr Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper; but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not to make the door creak, he came into the parlour. The fiddler said nothing to him at first; the two men only looked at each other for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he knew the worst about Pinnie; but what was further in his eyes (they had an expression considerably different from any he had hitherto seen in them) defined itself to our hero only little by little.
“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth, at last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but he thought the question fair. None the less, he expected a sarcastic answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr Vetch replied—
“I assure you, no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever did more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you back, and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I balanced one thing against the other; it was very difficult.”
“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest are dying, they are usually sent for.”
The fiddler gave a strange, argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to Hyacinth, it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr Vetch’s old age was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy, this case was exceptional,” said the old man. “Your visit had a character of importance.”
“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you anything.”
“No, certainly, you have never told me much. But if, as is probable, you have seen that kind lady who is now upstairs, you will have learned that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed. She threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back. You know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As, at this, Hyacinth turned away with a gesture of irritation, Mr Vetch went on, “No doubt she is absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t, now, cast any disrespect upon it. I assure you, if she had been here alone, suffering, sinking, without a creature to tend her, and nothing before her but to die in a corner, like a starved cat, she would still have faced that fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel scenes.”
Hyacinth was silent for a moment. “Of course I know what you mean. But she spun her delusion—she always did, all of them—out of nothing. I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of scenes. I told her, when I went out of town, very little more than I told you.”
“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been, at any rate, enough. She has made up her mind that you have formed a connection by means of which you will come, somehow or other, into your own. She has done nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the aristocracy, and nothing is simpler than that the person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you have been to stay should undertake your business with her friends.”
“Oh, well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of that entertainment.”