“Yes, yes, it’s a kind of passion!” her ladyship repeated eagerly, all thankful for the word. “I don’t know if it’s charity—I don’t mean that. But whatever it is it’s a passion—it’s my life—it’s all I care for.” She faltered as if there might be something indecent in the confession or uncertain in the recipient; and then evidently was mastered by the comfort of being able to justify herself for an eccentricity that had excited notice, as well as by the luxury of discharging her soul of a long accumulation of intense things. “Already when I was fifteen years old I wanted to sell all I had and give to the poor. And ever since I’ve wanted to do something: it has seemed as if my heart would break if I shouldn’t be able!”
Hyacinth was struck with a great respect, which however didn’t prevent his presently saying, though in words that sounded patronising even to himself: “I suppose you’re very religious.”
She looked away into the thickening dusk, at the smutty housetops, the blurred emanation of lamp-light above the streets. “I don’t know. One has one’s ideas. Some of them may be strange. I think a great many clergymen do good, but there are others I don’t like at all. I daresay we had too many always at home; my father likes them so particularly. I think I’ve known too many bishops, I’ve had the church too much on my back. I daresay they wouldn’t think at home, you know, that one was quite what one ought to be; but of course they consider me very odd in every way, as there’s no doubt I am. I should tell you that I don’t tell them everything; for what’s the use when people don’t understand? We’re twelve at home and eight of us girls; and if you think it’s so very splendid, and she thinks so, I should like you both to try it for a little! My father isn’t rich and there’s only one of us, Eva, married, and we’re not at all handsome, and—oh there are all kinds of things,” the young woman went on, looking round at him an instant through her sense of being launched. “I don’t like society, and neither would you if you were to see the kind there is in London—at least in some parts,” Lady Aurora added considerately. “I daresay you wouldn’t believe all the humbuggery and the tiresomeness that one has to go through. But I’ve got out of it; I do as I like, though it has been rather a struggle. I have my liberty, and that’s the greatest blessing in life except the reputation of being queer, and even a little mad, which is a greater advantage still. I’m a little mad, you know; you needn’t be surprised if you hear it. That’s because I stop in town when they go into the country; all the autumn, all the winter, when there’s no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people live. I daresay I oughtn’t to say such things to you, but, as I tell you, I’m quite a proper lunatic and I might as well keep up the character. When one’s one of eight daughters and there’s very little money (for any of us at least) and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in mackintoshes, one can easily go off one’s head. Of course there’s the village, and it’s not at all a nice one, and there are the people to look after, and goodness knows they’re in want of it; but one must work with the vicarage, and at the vicarage are four more daughters, all old maids, and it’s dreary and dreadful and one has too much of it, for they don’t understand what one thinks or feels or a single word one says to them. Besides, they are stupid, I admit, the country poor; they’re very very dense. I like Camberwell better,” said Lady Aurora, smiling and taking breath at the end of her nervous, hurried, almost incoherent speech, of which she had delivered herself pantingly, with strange intonations and contortions, as if afraid that from one moment to the other she would repent, not of her confidence but of her egotism.
It placed her for Hyacinth in an unexpected light, making him feel that her awkward aristocratic spinsterhood was the cover of tumultuous passions. No one could have less the appearance of being animated by a vengeful irony; but he saw this timorous, scrupulous, though clearly all generous, creature to be evidently most a person not to spare, wherever she could prick them, the institutions among which she had been brought up and against which she had violently reacted. He had always supposed a reactionary to mean a backslider from the liberal faith, but Rosy’s devotee gave a new value to the term; she appeared to have been driven to her present excesses by the squire and the parson and the conservative influences of that upper-class British home which our young man had always held the highest fruit of civilisation. It was clear that her ladyship was an original, and an original with force; but it gave Hyacinth a real pang to hear her make light of Inglefield (especially the park) and of the opportunities that must have abounded in Belgrave Square. It had been his belief that in a world of suffering and injustice these things were if not the most righteous at least the most fascinating. If they didn’t give one the finest sensations where were such sensations to be had? He looked at Lady Aurora with a face that was a tribute to her sudden vividness while he said: “I can easily understand your wanting to do some good in the world, because you’re a kind of saint.”
“A very curious kind!” laughed her ladyship.
“But I don’t understand your not liking what your position gives you.”
“I don’t know anything about my position. I want to live!”
“And do you call this life?”
“I’ll tell you what my position is if you want to know: it’s the deadness of the grave!”
Hyacinth was startled by her tone, but he nevertheless laughed back at her: “Ah, as I say, you’re a regular saint!” She made no reply, for at that moment the door opened and Paul Muniment’s tall figure emerged from the blackness of the staircase into the twilight, now very faint, of the room. Lady Aurora’s eyes as they rested on him seemed to declare that such a vision as that at least was life. Another person as tall as himself appeared behind him, and Hyacinth recognised with astonishment their insinuating friend Captain Sholto. Paul had brought him up for Rosy’s entertainment, being ready, and more than ready, always to introduce any one in the world, from the prime minister to the common hangman, who might give that young lady a sensation. They must have met at the “Sun and Moon,” and if the Captain, some accident smoothing the way, had made him half as many advances as he had made some other people, Hyacinth could see that it wouldn’t take long for Paul to lay him under contribution. But what the mischief was the Captain up to? It can’t be said that our young man arrived this evening at an answer to that question. The occasion proved highly festal and the hostess rose to it without lifting her head from the pillow. Her brother introduced Captain Sholto as a gentleman who had a great desire to know extraordinary people, and she made him take possession of the chair at her bedside, out of which Miss Pynsent quickly edged herself, and asked him who he was and where he came from and how Paul had made his acquaintance and whether he had many friends in Camberwell. Sholto had not the same grand air that hovered about him at the theatre; he was dressed with ingenious cheapness, to an effect coinciding, however different the cause, with poor Hyacinth’s own; but his disguise prompted our young man to wonder what made him so unmistakably a gentleman in spite of it—in spite too of his rather overdoing the manner of being appreciative even to rapture and thinking everything and every one most charming and curious. He stood out, in poor Rosy’s tawdry little room, among her hideous attempts at decoration, and looked to Hyacinth a being from another sphere, playing over the place and company a smile (one couldn’t call it false or unpleasant, yet it was distinctly not natural) of which he had got the habit in camps and courts. It became intense when it rested on our hero, whom he greeted as he might have done a dear young friend from whom he had been long and painfully separated. He was easy, he was familiar, he was exquisitely benevolent and bland—he was altogether a problem.