“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added, “My dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”
“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “I’ll tell her my great relations have adopted me and that I have come back in the character of Lord Robinson.”
“She will need nothing more to die happy,” Mr Vetch observed.
Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition, Mr Vetch explaining that he came over, like that, to see how she was, half a dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended upon the pair, while Hyacinth waited for some sign from Lady Aurora that he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked out of the window, studying intently the physiognomy of Lomax Place; and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with his hands in his pockets. At last Mr Vetch observed, without taking his pipe out of his lips or looking round, “I think you might be a little more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”
Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment, sincerely, what his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of an effort to conceal anything he could possibly tell (there were some things, of course, he couldn’t); on the contrary, his life seemed to him particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious comment. It was at this moment he first observed a certain difference; there was a tone in Mr Vetch’s voice that he had never perceived before—an absence of that note which had made him say, in other days, that the impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It was as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate, in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part, his having grown older, or more important, or even simply more surpassingly curious. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s old neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his being a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr Vetch in a mind familiar now for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience on Hyacinth’s part was speedily corrected by one of the sudden reactions or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim. In the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than it said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had, for years, a small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of it, his visible expression, even, of ultimate parsimony and of having ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more for something else—these things became so many reasons for turning round, going over to him, touching signs of an invincible fidelity, the humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an art after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting with fidgeted from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the same place for three months together.
“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to know what I have been doing in the country? I should have first to know, myself,” Hyacinth said.
“Have you enjoyed it very much?”
“Yes, certainly, very much—not knowing anything about Pinnie. I have been in a beautiful house, with a beautiful woman.”
Mr Vetch had turned round; he looked very impartial, through the smoke of his pipe.
“Is she really a princess?”