Hyacinth knew neither how far Captain Sholto had been going, nor exactly on what he congratulated him; and he pretended at least an equal ignorance on the subject of Millicent’s pecuniary gains. He didn’t want to talk about her, moreover, nor about his own life; he wanted to talk about the Captain’s and to elicit information that would be in harmony with his romantic chambers, which reminded one somehow of certain of Bulwer’s novels. His host gratified this pretension most liberally and told him twenty stories of things of interest, often of amazement, that had happened to him in Albania, in Madagascar and even in Paris. Hyacinth induced him easily to talk about Paris (from a different point of view from M. Poupin’s) and sat there drinking in enchantments. The only thing that fell below the high level of his entertainment was the bindings of his friend’s books, which he told him frankly, with the conscience of an artist, were not up to the mark. After he left Queen Anne Street he was quite too excited to go straight home; he walked about with his mind full of images and strange speculations till the grey London streets began to clear with the summer dawn.
XVI
The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August, is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-pitched light itself, which seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British Sabbath. Our personage, however, had a talent for that kind of attitude: it was one of the things by which he had exasperated his wife; he could remain motionless, with the aid of some casual support for his high, lean person, considering serenely and inexpressively any object that might lie before him and presenting his aristocratic head at a favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length. On first coming into the room he had given some attention to its furniture and decorations, perceiving at a glance that they were rich and varied; some of the things he recognised as old friends, odds and ends the Princess was fond of, which had accompanied her in her remarkable wanderings, while others were unfamiliar and suggested vividly that she had not ceased to “collect.” He made two reflexions: one was that she was living as expensively as ever; the other that, however this might be, no one had such a feeling as she for the mise-en-scène of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had always, wherever she was, the most charming room in Europe.
It was his impression that she had taken the house in South Street but for three months; yet, gracious heaven, what had she not put into it? The Prince asked himself this question without violence, for that was not to be his line to-day. He could be angry to a point at which he himself was often frightened, but he honestly believed this to be only when he had been baited past endurance, so that as a usual thing he was really as mild and accommodating as the extreme urbanity of his manner appeared to announce. There was indeed nothing to suggest to the world in general that he was an impracticable or vindictive nobleman: his features were not regular and his complexion had a bilious tone; but his dark brown eye, which was at once salient and dull, expressed benevolence and melancholy; his head drooped from his long neck in a considerate, attentive style; and his close-cropped black hair, combined with a short, fine, pointed beard, completed his resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples. To-day at any rate he had come in conciliation, almost in humility, and that is why he didn’t permit himself even to murmur at the long delay he had to accept. He knew very well that if his wife should consent to take him back it would be only after a probation to which this little wait in her drawing-room was a trifle. It was a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and even then it was not the Princess who appeared, but only Madame Grandoni.
Their greeting was at first all a renouncement of words. She came to him with both hands outstretched, and took his own and held them a while, looking up at him with full benignity. She had elongated her florid, humorous face to a degree that was almost comical, and the pair might have passed, in their silent solemnity, for acquaintances meeting in a house in which last obsequies were about to take place. It was indeed a house on which death had descended, as he very soon learned from Madame Grandoni’s expression; something had perished there for ever and he might proceed to bury it as soon as he liked. His wife’s ancient German friend, however, was not a person to sustain that note very long, and when, after she had made him sit down on the sofa beside her, she shook her head slowly and definitely several times, it was with a brow on which a more genial appreciation of the facts had already begun to appear.
“Never—never—never?” said the Prince in a deep hoarse voice, a voice at variance with his attenuated capacity. He had much of the complexion which in late-coming members of long-descended races we qualify to-day as effete; but his tone might have served for the battle-cry of some deep-chested fighting ancestor.
“Surely you know your wife as well as I,” she replied in Italian, which she evidently spoke with facility, though with a strong guttural accent. “I’ve been talking with her: that’s what has made me keep you. I’ve urged her to see you. I’ve told her that this could do no harm and would pledge her to nothing. But you know your wife,” Madame Grandoni repeated with an intensity now much relaxed.
Prince Casamassima looked down at his boots. “How can one ever know a person like that? I hoped she’d see me five little minutes.”
“For what purpose? Have you anything to propose?”
“For what purpose? To rest my eyes on her beautiful face.”