“Eh, and the worst is she’ll probably never come back. She didn’t move, as she kept threatening, for a long time; but when at last she decided——!” And Assunta’s flattened hand, sweeping the air sidewise, figured the straightness of the old lady’s course. “Peccato!” she ended with a sigh.
“I should have liked to see her again—I should have liked to bid her good-bye.” He lingered, suddenly helpless, though, informed of the Princess’s own more temporary absence, he had no reason for remaining save the possibility she might reappear before he turned away. This possibility, however, was small, since it was only nine o’clock, the middle of the evening—too early an hour for her return if, as Assunta said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up and down the Crescent, gently swinging his stick, and became aware in a moment of some tender interest on the part of his humbler friend.
“You should have come back sooner; then perhaps Madama wouldn’t have gone, povera vecchia,” she rejoined in a moment. “It’s too many days since you’ve been here. She liked you—I know that.”
“She liked me, but she didn’t like me to come,” said Hyacinth. “Wasn’t that why she went—because we keep coming?”
“Ah that other one—with the long legs—yes. But you’re better.”
“The Princess doesn’t think so, and she’s the right judge,” Hyacinth smiled.
“Eh, who knows what she thinks? It’s not for me to say. But you had better come in and wait. I daresay she won’t be long, and she’ll be content to find you.”
Hyacinth wondered. “I’m not sure of that.” Then he asked: “Did she go out alone?”
“Sola, sola. Oh don’t be afraid; you were the first!” And Assunta, delightfully, frankly insidious, flung open the door of the little drawing-room.
He sat there nearly an hour, in the chair the Princess habitually used, under her shaded lamp, with a dozen objects round him which seemed as much a part of herself as if they had been folds of her dress or even tones of her voice. His thoughts rattled like the broken ice of a drink he had once wistfully seen mixed at an “American Bar,” but he was too tired for unrest; he had not been to work and had walked about all day to fill the time; so that he simply lay back there with his head on one of the Princess’s cushions, his feet on one of her little stools—one of the ugly ones that belonged to the house—and his respiration coming as quick as that of a man in sharp suspense. He was agitated beneath his fatigue, yet not because he was waiting for the Princess; a deeper source of emotion had been opened to him and he had not on the present occasion more mere “nervous” intensity than he had known at other moments of the past twenty hours. He had not closed his eyes the night before, and the day had not made up for that torment. A fever of reflexion had descended on him and the range of his imagination been wide. It whirled him through circles of immeasurable compass; and this is the reason for which, thinking of many things while he sat in the Princess’s place, he wondered why, after all, he had come to Madeira Crescent and what interest he could have in seeing the lady of the house. Wasn’t everything over between them and the link snapped which had for its brief hour bound them so closely together? And this not simply because for a long time now he had received no sign nor communication from her, no invitation to come back, no inquiry as to why his visits had stopped; not even because he had seen her go in and out with Paul Muniment and it had suited Prince Casamassima to point to him the moral of her doing so; nor still because, quite independently of the Prince, he believed her to be more deeply absorbed in her acquaintance with that superior young man than she had ever been in her relations with himself. The ground of his approach, so far as he became conscious of it in his fitful meditations, could only be a strange, detached curiosity—strange and detached because everything else of his past had been engulfed in the abyss that opened before him when, after his separation from Mr. Vetch, he stood under the lamp in the paltry Westminster street. That had swallowed up all familiar feelings, and yet out of the ruin had sprung the impulse of which this vigil was the result.