“It won’t be a bit different in your room. There as here I shall have to sleep in a chair.”
“I’ll get another room. We shall be close together,” the fiddler went on.
“Do you mean you’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with your little house stuffed full and your people all in bed? My poor Anastasius, you’re very bad; your reason totters on its throne,” said Hyacinth with excellent gaiety.
“Very good, we’ll get a room to-morrow. I’ll move into another house where there are two side by side.” His “boy’s” tone was evidently soothing to him.
“Comme vous y allez!” the young man continued. “Excuse me if I remind you that in case of my leaving this place I’ve to give a fortnight’s notice.”
“Ah you’re backing out!” Mr. Vetch lamented, dropping his hands.
“Pinnie wouldn’t have said that,” Hyacinth returned. “If you’re acting, if you’re speaking, at the behest of her pure spirit, you had better act and speak exactly as she’d have done. She’d have believed me.”
“Believed you? Believed what? What’s there to believe? If you’ll make me a promise I’ll believe that.”
“I’ll make you any promise you like,” said Hyacinth.
“Oh any promise I like—that isn’t what I want! I want just one very particular little proof—and that’s really what I came here for to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass all this time never to have got it out of you before. Give it to me now and I’ll go home quietly and leave you in peace.” Hyacinth, assenting in advance, requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then Mr. Vetch said: “Well, make me a promise—on your honour and as from the man you are, God help you, to the man I am—that you’ll never, under any circumstances whatever, ‘do’ anything.”