“Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from Camberwell, Mr. Monument (what do you call him?), fills your head with ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there doesn’t look as if he’d be on your side.”
Hyacinth had indulged in this reflexion himself; but the only answer he made to Millicent was: “Well then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!”
“Laws, I hope she ain’t one of the aristocracy!” Millicent exclaimed with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible—not the one who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an ancient personage muffled in a voluminous and crumpled white shawl—a stout, odd, foreign-looking woman with a fair, nodding, wiggy head. She had a placid, patient air and a round wrinkled face in which, however, a pair of small bright eyes moved quickly enough. Her rather soiled white gloves were too large for her, and round her head, horizontally arranged as if to keep her wig in its place, she wore a narrow band of tinsel decorated in the middle of the forehead by a jewel which the rest of her appearance would lead the spectator to suppose false. “Is the old woman his mother? Where did she dig up her clothes? They look as if she had hired them for the evening. Does she come to your wonderful club too? I daresay she cuts it fine, don’t she?” Millicent went on; and when Hyacinth suggested sportively that the old lady might be not the gentleman’s mother but his wife or his fancy of the moment she declared that in that case, were he to come to see them, she shouldn’t fear for herself. No wonder he wanted to get out of that box! The party in the wig—and what a wig!—was sitting there on purpose to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly honoured by the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended he quite liked her appearance and admired in her a charm of her own; he offered to bet another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To this Millicent replied with an air of experience that she had never thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion could see she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his strange clubmate and that she would be disappointed if he didn’t come. This idea didn’t make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was occupied with another side of the business; and if he offered sportive suggestions it was because he was really excited, was dazzled, by an incident of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the larger relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being patronised by a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new experience—a sensation for which he was always ready to exchange any present boon; and he was convinced that if the gentleman with whom he had conversed in a small occult back room in Bloomsbury as Captain Godfrey Sholto—the Captain had given him his card—had in more positive fashion than by Millicent’s supposing it come out of the stage-box to see him, he would bring with him rare influences. His view of this possibility made suspense akin to preparation; therefore when at the end of a few minutes he became aware that his young woman, with her head turned, was taking the measure of some one who had come in behind them, he felt fate to be doing for him by way of a change as much as could be expected. He got up in his place, but not too soon to see that Captain Sholto had been standing there a moment in contemplation of Millicent and that she on her side had performed with deliberation the ceremony of appraising him. The Captain had his hands in his pockets and wore his crush-hat pushed a good deal back. He laughed to the young couple in the balcony in the friendliest way, as if he had known them both for years, and Millicent could see on a nearer view that he was a fine distinguished easy genial gentleman, at least six feet high in spite of a habit or an affectation of carrying himself in a casual relaxed familiar manner. Hyacinth felt a little, after the first, as if he were treating them rather too much as a pair of children on whom he had stolen to startle them; but this impression was speedily removed by the air with which he said, laying his hand on our hero’s shoulder as he stood in the little passage at the end of the bench where the holders of Mr. Vetch’s order occupied the first seats: “My dear fellow, I really thought I must come round and speak to you. My spirits are all gone with this brute of a play. And those boxes are fearfully stuffy, you know,” he added—quite as if Hyacinth had had at least an equal experience of that part of the theatre.
“It’s hot enough here too,” Millicent’s companion returned. He had suddenly become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his proximity to the fierce chandelier, and he mentioned that the plot of the play certainly was unnatural, though he thought the piece rather well acted.
“Oh, it’s the good old stodgy British tradition. This is the only place where you find it still, and even here it can’t last much longer; it can’t survive old Baskerville and Mrs. Ruffler. ’Gad, how old they are! I remember her, long past her prime, when I used to be taken to the play, as a boy, in the Christmas holidays. Between them they must be something like a hundred and eighty, eh? I believe one’s supposed to cry a good deal about the middle,” Captain Sholto continued in the same friendly familiar encouraging way, addressing himself to Millicent, upon whom indeed his eyes had rested almost uninterruptedly from the start. She sustained his glance with composure, but with just enough of emphasised reserve to intimate (what was perfectly true) that she was not in the habit of conversing with gentlemen with whom she was unacquainted. She turned away her face at this (she had already given the visitor the benefit of a good deal of it) and left him, as in the little passage he leaned against the parapet of the balcony with his back to the stage, facing toward Hyacinth, who was now wondering, with rather more vivid a sense of the relations of things, what he had come for. He wanted to do him honour in return for his civility, but didn’t know what one could talk of at such short notice to a person whom he immediately perceived to be, and the more finely that it was all unaggressively, a man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto didn’t take the play seriously, so that he felt himself warned off that topic, on which otherwise he might have had much to say. On the other hand he couldn’t in the presence of a third person allude to the matters they had discussed at the “Sun and Moon”; nor might he suppose his visitor would expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a man of humours and whims, disposed to amuse himself with everything, including esoteric socialism and a little bookbinder who had so much more of the gentleman about him than one would expect. Captain Sholto may have been slightly embarrassed, now that he was completely launched in his attempt at fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit a smile from Millicent’s rare respectability; but he left to Hyacinth the burden of no initiative and went on to say that it was just this prospect of the dying-out of the old British tradition that had brought him to-night. He was with a friend, a lady who had lived much abroad, who had never seen anything of the kind and who liked everything that was characteristic. “You know the foreign school of acting’s a very different affair,” he said again to Millicent, who this time replied “Oh yes, of course,” and, considering afresh the old woman in the box, reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that she at least hadn’t seen.
“We’ve never been abroad,” Hyacinth candidly said while he looked into his friend’s curious light-coloured eyes, the palest in tint he had ever encountered.
“Oh well, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about that!” Captain Sholto replied; on which Hyacinth remained uncertain of his reference and Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.
“They’re making a tremendous row on the stage. I should think it would be very bad in those boxes.” There was a banging and thumping behind the curtain, the sound of heavy scenery pushed about.
“Oh yes, it’s much better here every way. I think you’ve the best seats in the house,” said their visitor. “I should like very much to finish my evening beside you. The trouble is I’ve ladies—a pair of them,” he pursued as if he were seriously considering this possibility. Then laying his hand again on Hyacinth’s shoulder he smiled at him a moment and indulged in a still greater burst of frankness. “My dear fellow, that’s just what, as a partial reason, has brought me up here to see you. One of my ladies has a great desire to make your acquaintance!”
“To make my acquaintance?” Hyacinth felt himself turn pale; the first impulse he could have in connexion with such an announcement as that—and it lay far down in the depths of the unspeakable—was a conjecture that it had something to do with his parentage on his father’s side. Captain Sholto’s smooth bright face, irradiating such unexpected advances, seemed for an instant to swim before him. The Captain went on to say that he had told the lady of the talks they had had, that she was immensely interested in such matters—“You know what I mean, she really is”—and that as a consequence of what he had said she had begged him to come and ask—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to look in at her if he didn’t mind.