Mr. Vetch sat forward to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on his knees and looked very hard at his young host, as if to challenge him to dispute a statement so cheering and above all so authoritative. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to produce immediately the idea that the fiddler knew something, though there was no guessing how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even granting them capable of that baseness—all inconceivable in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into his mind an intense determination to dissemble before his visitor to the last: he might imagine what he liked, but he should have no grain of satisfaction—or rather should have only that of being led to believe if possible that his suspicions were “rot.” Hyacinth glanced over the books he had taken down from the shelf and admitted that they were pleasing efforts and that so long as one didn’t become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself our hero took the aggressive and asked him boldly if it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half-a-dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. “My dear old friend, you’ve something on your mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous idée fixe. Why has it taken you to-night in particular? Whatever it is it has brought you here at an unnatural hour under some impulse you don’t or can’t name. I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if it makes you miserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right—if he isn’t uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr. Vetch, don’t, don’t worry; the blanket’s up to my chin and I haven’t tumbled yet.”
He heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another person; the impudence of them in the grim conditions seemed to him somehow so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of a form of action in which impudence evidently must play a considerable part, and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way the old man looked out might have indicated that he too was able to take the measure of his perversity—judged him false to sit there declaring there was nothing the matter while a brand-new revolutionary commission burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr. Vetch said very mildly and as if he had really been reassured: “It’s wonderful how you read my thoughts. I don’t trust you; I think there are beastly possibilities. It’s not true at any rate that I come to look at you every five minutes. You don’t know how often I’ve resisted my fears—how I’ve forced myself to let you alone.”
“You had better let me come and live with you as I proposed after Pinnie’s death. Then you’ll have me always under your eyes,” Hyacinth smiled.
The old man got up eagerly and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid firm hands on his shoulders, holding him close. “Will you now really, my boy? Will you come to-night?”
“To-night, Mr. Vetch?”
“To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I couldn’t keep quiet; I was very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie—she seemed to be in the room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed in ghosts, in signs or messages from the dead, I should believe I had seen her. She wasn’t there for nothing; she was there to add her fears to mine—to talk to me about you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no use—she drove me out of the house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and stick and came down here. You may judge if I thought it important—I took a cab.”
“Ah why do you spend your money so foolishly?” Hyacinth asked in a tone of the most affectionate remonstrance.
“Will you come to-night?” said his companion for rejoinder, holding him still.
“Surely it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly you’re ill and nervous. You can take the bed and I’ll spend the night in the chair.”
The fiddler thought a moment. “No, you’ll hate me if I subject you to such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.”