“Do you call him one of the happy?” Hyacinth inquired as they walked on again.
But she only repeated: “You’re very remarkable. Yes, you’re splendid.”
To which he made answer: “Well, it’s what I want to be!”
I have related the whole of this conversation because it supplies a highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but we may not take time to trace all the stages and reproduce all the passages through which the friendship of the Princess Casamassima with the young man she had constituted her bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the standard of fitness she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties appeared the model of justice and convenience; and during this period, a season of strange revelations for our young man, many other things happened. One of them was that he drove over to Broome with his hostess and called on Lady Marchant and her daughters; an episode that appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee. When they came away he asked her why she hadn’t told the ladies who he was. Otherwise where was the point? And she replied: “Simply because they wouldn’t have believed me. That’s your fault!” This was the same note she had struck when the third day of his stay (the weather had changed for the worse and a rainy afternoon kept them indoors) she remarked to him irrelevantly and abruptly: “It is most extraordinary, your knowing poor dear old ‘Schop’!” He answered that she really seemed quite unable to accustom herself to his little talents; and this led to a long talk, longer than the one I have already narrated, in which he took her still further into his confidence. Never had the pleasure of conversation, the greatest he knew, been so largely opened to him. The Princess admitted frankly that he would to her sense take a great deal of accounting for; she observed that he was, no doubt, pretty well used to himself, but must give stupider persons time. “I’ve watched you constantly since you came—in every detail of your behaviour—and I’m more and more intriguée. You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the poor cramped hole you’ve described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life. You’re much better than if you had! Jugez donc, from the way I talk to you! I’ve to make no allowances—not one little allowance. I’ve seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and ease, but I didn’t know it was ever to be found in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it hadn’t been cultivated at a vast expense; unless perhaps in certain horribly ‘refined’ little American women.”
“Do you mean I’m a gentleman?” asked Hyacinth in a peculiar tone while he looked out into the wet garden.
She faltered and then said: “It’s I who make the mistakes!” Five minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy, putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. “Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you’re constituted, to be conscious of the capacity you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!”
“Every class has its pleasures,” he made answer with perverse sententiousness in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn’t darken their mutual intelligence, which was to expand to still greater wonders, and before they separated that evening he told her the things that had never yet passed his lips—the things to which he had awaked when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the prison. He told her in short what he was.
XXV
He took several long walks by himself beyond the gates of the park and through the neighbouring country—walks during which, committed as he was to reflexion on the general “rumness” of his destiny, he had still a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields; the hedges thick with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew no names, the picture-making power of thatched cottages, the mystery and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of rural complexions, the quaintness of little girls bobbing curtsies by waysides (a sort of homage he had never prefigured); the soft sense of the turf under feet that had never ached but from paving-stones. One morning as he had his face turned homeward after a long stroll he heard behind him the sound of a horse’s hoofs and, looking back, perceived a gentleman who would presently pass him advancing up the road which led to the lodge-gates of Medley. He went his way and as the horse overtook him noticed that the rider slackened pace. Then he turned again and recognised in this personage his occasional florid friend Captain Sholto. The Captain pulled up alongside of him, saluting him with a smile and a movement of the whip-handle. Hyacinth stared with surprise, not having heard from the Princess that she was expecting him. He gathered, however, in a moment that she was not; and meanwhile he received an impression on Sholto’s part of riding-gear that was “knowing”—of gaiters and spurs and a hunting-crop and a curious waistcoat; perceiving this to be a phase of the Captain’s varied nature that he had not yet had occasion to observe. He struck him as very high in the air, perched on his big lean chestnut, and Hyacinth noticed that if the horse was heated the rider was cool.
“Good-morning, my dear fellow. I thought I should find you here!” the Captain exclaimed. “It’s a good job I’ve met you this way without having to go to the house.”