“You are a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself I promise I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t kicked you out why in the name of common sense did you say just now she has? And why is your dear old face as white as my stocking?”
Hyacinth looked at her a while without answering and as if he took a placid pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”
She put out her own hand now and took possession of his; for a minute she held it as wishing to check herself, as finding some influence in his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the ornamental water and the landscape-gardening reflected in it, till Milly turned her eyes again and brought out: “Well, that’s the way I’d have served him too!”
It took him a moment to perceive she was alluding to the vengeance wrought on Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”
“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on with assurance.
“A queer variety, cara mia,” her companion rejoined—not very candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s wild maunderings. They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking up.”
“Oh it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”
“Pray what did I ever say—in those days?”
“It wasn’t what you said,” she answered with refinement. “I guessed the whole business—except of course what she got her time for and you being taken to that death-bed—the very day I came back to the Plice. Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is no more than I thought then. It only makes you nicer.”
She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of pointless exaggeration, for he himself honestly couldn’t understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose to the surface it diffused a glow of rest, almost of protection, deepening at any rate the luxury of their small cheap pastoral, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so that though neither of them had dined he would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something harsh that was happening to him, making it all easier, pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of which they themselves wearied, but they hung there now with an ache of indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a compensation, yet he felt it at least a resource. For her too, evidently, the time had a taste; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She questioned him about his father’s family and as to their letting him go on like that without ever holding out so much as a little finger; and she declared in a manner that was meant to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of the turn made him smile, that if she had been one of such a bloated crew she should never have been able to “abear” the thought of a relation in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old Crook’s and of the feeble show of a young man of his parts contented with a career that was after all a mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books, but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practised differed from that of a plumber or a saddler. He had not forgotten the shock once administered to her by his letting her know he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from her own so much higher range, since she wore mantles and jackets and shawls and the long trains of robes exhibited behind plate glass on dummies of wire and drawn forth to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had moreover never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about them and showing them off and persuading people—people too quite gaping with the impression—of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what “his family” owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question pulled her up a moment; after which she returned with the finest spirit: “Well, if your position was so low ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift? Oh it’s something cruel!” she cried; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. She wouldn’t have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had the blood of half the Peerage in her veins! “If they had noticed you they’d have liked you,” she was so good as to observe; but she immediately remembered also that in that case he would have been carried away quite over her head. She wasn’t prepared to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the “real” by way of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice wasted, however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed history of the Princess. Millicent was tender and tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really made little impression on her: she accounted it an accident much less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and moved, but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail, with his later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things produced in her a generous agitation—something the same in kind as the emotion she had occasionally owed to the perusal of the Family Herald. What affected her most and what she came back to was the whole element of Lord Frederick and the mystery of Hyacinth’s having got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn’t get over his friends’ not having done something, though her imagination was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest thing in the world to find her apparently assuming that if he hadn’t been so inefficient he might have “worked” the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory, of profit. She wouldn’t have been a nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh the left hand was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, made nothing of that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience, and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having bragged about his ancestry. The generations representing it were vivid and concrete to her now in comparison with the timid shadows Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in his hushed past with the oddest mixture of enthusiasm and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane voices bawling for sacred echoes.