“I should think so!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “If you hadn’t done your job you would have paid for it.”
Schinkel hesitated a moment while he lingered; then, as Hyacinth turned away, putting in his door-key, he replied, “And if you don’t do yours, so will you.”
“Yes, as you say, they go straight! Good-night.” And our young man let himself in.
The passage and staircase were never lighted, and the lodgers either groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice or scraped the wall with a casual match which, in the milder gloom of day, was visible in a hundred rich streaks. Hyacinth’s room was on the second floor, behind, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of which was in this manner vividly illustrated. He stopped and considered this mysterious brightness, and his first impulse was to connect it with the incident just ushered in by Schinkel; for what could anything that touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was natural that some punctual emissary should be awaiting him. Then it occurred to him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora, after tea, he had simply left a tallow candle burning, and that it showed a cynical spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so close-fisted for herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly, it came over him that he had had a visitor, in his absence, and that the visitor had taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking sources of comfort, as was perfectly just. When he opened the door he found that this last prevision was the right one, though his visitor was not one of the figures that had risen before him. Mr Vetch sat there, beside the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing, with his head resting on his hand and his eyes bent on the floor. He looked up when Hyacinth appeared, and said, “Oh, I didn’t hear you; you are very quiet.”
“I come in softly, when I’m late, for the sake of the house—though I am bound to say I am the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides, you have been asleep,” Hyacinth said.
“No, I have not been asleep,” returned the old man. “I don’t sleep much nowadays.”
“Then you have been plunged in meditation.”
“Yes, I have been thinking.” Then Mr Vetch explained that the woman of the house wouldn’t let him come in, at first, till he had given proper assurances that his intentions were pure and that he was moreover the oldest friend Mr Robinson had in the world. He had been there for an hour; he thought he might find him, coming so late.
Hyacinth answered that he was very glad he had waited and that he was delighted to see him, and expressed regret that he hadn’t known in advance of his visit, so that he might have something to offer him. He sat down on his bed, vaguely expectant; he wondered what special purpose had brought the fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. But he only spoke the truth in saying that he was glad to see him. Hyacinth had come upstairs in a tremor of desire to be alone with the revelation that he carried in his pocket, yet the sight of Anastasius Vetch gave him a sudden relief by postponing solitude. The place where he had put his letter seemed to throb against his side, yet he was thankful to his old friend for forcing him still to leave it so. “I have been looking at your books,” the fiddler said; “you have two or three exquisite specimens of your own. Oh yes, I recognise your work when I see it; there are always certain little finer touches. You have a manner, like a master. With such a talent, such a taste, your future leaves nothing to be desired. You will make a fortune and become a great celebrity.”
Mr Vetch sat forward, to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on his knees and looked very hard at his young friend, as if to challenge him to dispute his flattering views. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to give him immediately the idea that the fiddler knew something, though it was impossible to guess how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even granting that they were capable of that baseness; an unwarrantable supposition, in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into Hyacinth’s mind an intense determination to dissemble before his visitor to the last; he might imagine what he liked, but he should not have a grain of satisfaction—or rather he should have that of being led to believe, if possible, that his suspicions were positively vain and idle. Hyacinth rested his eyes on the books that Mr Vetch had taken down from the shelf, and admitted that they were very pretty work and that so long as one didn’t become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself Hyacinth took the aggressive and asked him boldly whether it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half a dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. “My dear old friend, you have something on your mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous idée fixe. Why has it taken you to-night, in particular? Whatever it is, it has brought you here, at an unnatural hour, you don’t know why. I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am, in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it makes you miserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right—if he isn’t uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr Vetch, don’t, don’t worry; the blanket’s up to my chin, and I haven’t tumbled yet.”