“He needn’t be afraid! That will never happen.”
“I don’t know. We can at least try!”
“Try what you like, madam, but, for God’s sake, get the boy out of his mess!”
The Princess had suddenly grown excited, in speaking of the cause she believed in, and she gave, for the moment, no heed to this appeal, which broke from Mr Vetch’s lips with a sudden passion of anxiety. Her beautiful head raised itself higher, and the deep expression that was always in her eyes became an extraordinary radiance. “Do you know what I say to Mr Robinson when he makes such remarks as that to me? I ask him what he means by civilisation. Let civilisation come a little, first, and then we will talk about it. For the present, face to face with those horrors, I scorn it, I deny it!” And the Princess laughed ineffable things, like some splendid syren of the Revolution.
“The world is very sad and very hideous, and I am happy to say that I soon shall have done with it. But before I go I want to save Hyacinth. If he’s a little aristocrat, as you say, there is so much the less fitness in his being ground in your mill. If he doesn’t even believe in what he pretends to do, that’s a pretty situation! What is he in for, madam? What devilish folly has he undertaken?”
“He is a strange mixture of contradictory impulses,” said the Princess, musingly. Then, as if calling herself back to the old man’s question, she continued: “How can I enter into his affairs with you? How can I tell you his secrets? In the first place, I don’t know them, and if I did—fancy me!”
The fiddler gave a long, low sigh, almost a moan, of discouragement and perplexity. He had told the Princess that now he saw her he understood how Hyacinth should have become her slave, but he would not have been able to tell her that he understood her own motives and mysteries, that he embraced the immense anomaly of her behaviour. It came over him that she was incongruous and perverse, a more complicated form of the feminine character than any he had hitherto dealt with, and he felt helpless and baffled, foredoomed to failure. He had come prepared to flatter her without scruple, thinking that would be the clever, the efficacious, method of dealing with her; but he now had a sense that this primitive device had, though it was strange, no application to such a nature, while his embarrassment was increased rather than diminished by the fact that the lady at least made the effort to be accommodating. He had put down his hat on the floor beside him, and his two hands were clasped on the knob of an umbrella which had long since renounced pretensions to compactness; he collapsed a little, and his chin rested on his folded hands. “Why do you take such a line? Why do you believe such things?” he asked; and he was conscious that his tone was weak and his inquiry beside the question.
“My dear sir, how do you know what I believe? However, I have my reasons, which it would take too long to tell you, and which, after all, would not particularly interest you. One must see life as one can; it comes, no doubt, to each of us in different ways. You think me affected, of course, and my behaviour a fearful pose; but I am only trying to be natural. Are you not yourself a little inconsequent?” the Princess went on, with the bright mildness which had the effect of making Mr Vetch feel that he should not extract any pledge of assistance from her. “You don’t want our young friend to pry into the wretchedness of London, because it excites his sense of justice. It is a strange thing to wish, for a person of whom one is fond and whom one esteems, that his sense of justice shall not be excited.”
“I don’t care a fig for his sense of justice—I don’t care a fig for the wretchedness of London; and if I were young, and beautiful, and clever, and brilliant, and of a noble position, like you, I should care still less. In that case I should have very little to say to a poor mechanic—a youngster who earns his living with a glue-pot and scraps of old leather.”
“Don’t misrepresent him; don’t make him out what you know he’s not!” the Princess retorted, with her baffling smile. “You know he’s one of the most civilised people possible.”