“I know what you are going to say!” the Princess broke in. “You are going to say that it will help them to do what you do—to do their work and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what do you propose for the thousands and thousands for whom no work—on the overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be found? There is less and less work in the world, and there are more and more people to do the little that there is. The old ferocious selfishnesses must come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must be smashed!”
The tone in which the Princess uttered these words made Hyacinth’s heart beat fast, and there was something so inspiring in her devoted fairness that the vision of a great heroism flashed up again before him, in all the splendour it had lost—the idea of a tremendous risk and an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at such a moment, made every scruple seem a prudence and every compunction a cowardice. “I wish to God I could see it as you see it!” he exclaimed, after he had looked at her a minute in silent admiration.
“I see simply this: that what we are doing is at least worth trying, and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means, will try anything else, on their head be the responsibility, on their head be the blood!”
“Princess,” said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he trembled, “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to you—” and his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings; they seemed to him worse than anything he had imagined for himself.
She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. “To me! And pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?”
“Simply because there is no one in the world, and there has never been any one in the world, like you.”
“Oh, thank you!” said the Princess, with a kind of dry impatience, turning away.
The manner in which she spoke put an end to their conversation. It expressed an indifference to what it might interest him to think about her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to his eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent his head over her hand, which he had taken to kiss; after which he left the room without looking at her.
XLVI
“I have received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to the Princess, the next evening, as soon as he came into the room. He announced this fact with a kind of bald promptitude and with a familiarity of manner which showed that his visit was one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised by it, and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn’t it have been by your old lady?” Muniment inquired. “He must have met her in Paris. It is from Paris that he writes.”