“That woman in the prison years ago—how old was I?—who was dying and who kissed me so, as I’ve never been kissed, as I never shall be again! Who was she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it had lasted a week; it was to leave her spent and sore for ever after, and before it was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she had retracted the falsehoods with which she had previously tried to put the boy off, and had made at last a confession and a report which he was satisfied to believe as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have told you why the crisis had occurred on such a day, why his question had broken out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly; that the haunting wonder which now, as he looked back, appeared to fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have crept up to the air. It was only of course little by little that he had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness; little by little that he had reconstructed his antecedents, taken the measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the courage to disinter from the Times in the reading-room of the British Museum a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a cause célèbre; his resolution in sitting under that splendid dome and, with his head bent to hide his hot eyes, going through every syllable of the ghastly record, had been an achievement of comparatively recent years. There were certain things Pinnie knew that appalled him; and there were others, as to which he would have given his hand to have some light, that it made his heart ache supremely to find she was honestly ignorant of. He scarce understood what sort of favour Mr. Vetch wished to make with him (as a compensation for the precious part he had played in the business years before) when the fiddler permitted himself to pass judgement on the family of the wretched young nobleman for not having provided in some manner for the infant child of his assassin. Why should they have provided when it was evident they had refused absolutely to recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie had to admit this under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she couldn’t pretend with any show of evidence that Lord Whiteroy and the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them still living) had at the time of the trial given any symptom of believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the established facts (few as they were and poor and hideous) he regarded himself immutably as the son of the recreant and sacrificed Lord Frederick.
He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people—all Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father, his gun in his hand, had fallen in the blood-stained streets of Paris on a barricade; but on the other side it took an English aristocrat to account for him, though a poor specimen apparently had to suffice. This, with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the reflexion that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the reflexion that he was a gentleman. He was conscious he didn’t hate the image of his father as he might have been expected to do; and he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a penalty. It was in the exaction of that penalty that the moral proof for him resided; his mother wouldn’t have armed herself on account of any injury less cruel than the passage of which her miserable baby was the living sign. She had avenged herself because she had been thrown over, and the bitterness of that wrong had been in the fact that he, hopeless brat, lay there in her lap. He was the one properly to have been sacrificed: that remark our young man often made to himself. That his judgement of the whole question was passionate and personal and took little account of any disturbing conflict of evidence is proved by the importance he attached for instance to the name by which his mother had told poor Pinnie (when this excellent creature consented to take him) that she wished him to be called. Hyacinth had been the name of her father, a republican clockmaker, the martyr of his opinions, whose memory she professed to worship; and when Lord Frederick had insinuated himself into her confidence he had had reasons for preferring to be known as plain Mr. Robinson—reasons, however, into which, in spite of the light thrown upon them at the trial, it was difficult after so many years to enter.
Hyacinth had never known of Mr. Vetch’s saying more than once to Pinnie, “If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true why didn’t she make the child bear his real name instead of his false one?”—an inquiry which the dressmaker had answered, with some ingenuity, by remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, as one must suppose her unwilling to publish to every one his connexion with a crime that had been so much talked about. If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion it is needless to say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his judgement was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had been surrounded and of which he had never caught the meaning; they having seemed but a feature of the general fact of the poor woman’s professional life—so much cutting and trimming and shaping and embroidering, so much turning and altering and doing-up. When it came over him that she had for years made a fool of him to himself and to others he could have beaten her for grief and shame; and yet before he administered this rebuke he had to remember that she only chattered (though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter over which he spent nine-tenths of his own time in all gloomily brooding. When she tried to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on the glory of the Purvises and reminding him that he was related through them to half the aristocracy of England he felt her to be turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born. He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and his impracticability on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep dejection of her later years. If he had only let her idealise him a little to himself she would have felt she was making up by so much for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s kin in the newspaper, but he then always cast the sheet away. He had nothing to ask of them and wished to prove to himself that he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat) as completely as they ignored him. A thousand times yes, he was with the people and every possible vengeance of the people as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he was happy to feel he had blood in his veins that would account for the finest sensibilities.
He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand, Millicent Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box or a couple of stalls at ten bob apiece?” he asked of her on a note of that too uniform irony which formed the basis of almost all their talk. She had replied that she would content herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as such a position involved an expenditure still beyond his compass he waited one night on Mr. Vetch, to whom he had already more than once had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His relations with the caustic fiddler were of the oddest and much easier when put to the proof than in theory. Mr. Vetch had let him know—long before this and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost—the part he had played at the crisis of that question of her captive’s being taken to call on Mrs. Bowerbank; and Hyacinth, in the face of this information, had asked with some sublimity what the devil the fiddler had had to do with his private affairs. Their neighbour had replied that it was not as an affair of his but as an affair of Pinnie’s he had considered the matter; and our hero had afterwards let it drop, though he had never been formally reconciled to so officious a critic. Of course his feeling on this head had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr. Vetch had taken to get him a place with old Crook; and at the period of which I write it had long been familiar to him that the author of that benefit didn’t care a straw what he thought of his advice at the dark hour and in fact took a perverse pleasure in “following” the career of a youth put together of such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to be conscious that this projected attention was kindly; and to-day, at any rate, he would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not knowing the truth, horrible as it might be. His miserable mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of motive, and in the conditions that was a support. What he chiefly objected to in Mr. Vetch was the betrayed habit of still regarding him as extremely juvenile; he would have got on much better with a better recognition of his being already a man of the world. The obscure virtuoso knew an immense deal about society and seemed to know the more because he never swaggered—it was only little by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as if his chief boon in life was a private diverting commentary on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he gave considerable evidence of patience with this when he occasionally asked his fellow-resident in Lomax Place to lend him half-a-crown. Somehow circumstances had of old tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little bookbinder it also touched him; he had more than once solved the problem of deciding how to behave (when the fiddler exasperated him) by simply asking of him some substantial service. Mr. Vetch had never once refused. It was satisfactory to Hyacinth to remember as much when knocking at his door late, after allowing him time to come home from the theatre. He knew his habits: he never went straight to bed, but sat by his fire an hour, smoking his pipe, mixing a grog and reading some old book. Hyacinth could tell when to go up by the light in his window, which he could see from a court behind.
“Oh, I know I haven’t been to see you for a long time,” he said in response to the remark with which his neighbour greeted him; “and I may as well tell you immediately what has brought me at present—in addition to the desire to ask after your health. I want to take a young lady to the theatre.”
Mr. Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear he looked to our hero so plucked and blighted as on the spot to settle his claims in the event of a social liquidation; he too was unmistakably a creditor. “I’m afraid you find your young lady rather expensive.”
“I find everything expensive,” said Hyacinth as if to finish that subject.
“Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.”
“What do you mean by that?” the young man asked with a fine stare.
“Why, you told me in the autumn that you were just about to join a few.”