“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend upon it, there are always good reasons. I should have liked it better if it had been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him—” Schinkel interrupted himself; the remainder of his sentence was lost in a cloud of smoke.
“Well, if they didn’t send to him,”—Hyacinth persisted.
“You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?”
At this Hyacinth looked up at his companion askance, and caught an odd glance, accompanied with a smile, which the mild, circumspect German directed toward him. “If it’s anything against him, my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.”
“Well, it’s a possibility that they are not satisfied.”
“How do you mean it—not satisfied?”
“How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.”
“Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!”
“Ah, my boy, depend upon it, there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and in a moment he added, “They know everything—everything. Oh, they go straight!”
The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence, Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin had said when Schinkel, that evening, first told him what he had come to see him about. “Il vaut du galme—il vaut du galme:” that was the German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them over to himself several times, almost with the same accent. They had a certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was soothing altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face, while Hyacinth waited—waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away, and he watched without irritation the loving manner in which the German shook the ashes out of his big pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail of it that he said, “Also, now for the letter,” and, putting his hand inside of his waistcoat, drew forth the important document. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw a shade of disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face, at this indication that he should have no present knowledge of its contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to say again that it was nothing—that it was only a release. Schinkel had now the good sense, or the good taste, not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed against his heart Hyacinth felt still more distinctly that it was something—that it was a command. What Schinkel did say, in a moment, was: “Now that you have got it, I am very glad. It is more comfortable for me.”