“Ah my friend, if you should begin to kill every one who has troubled me!” she wonderfully wailed as they went into the room.
XXVII
He knew there was something out of the way as soon as he saw Lady Aurora’s face look forth at him in answer to his tap while she held the door ajar. What was she doing in Pinnie’s bedroom?—a very poor place, into which the dressmaker, with her reverence, would never have admitted a person of that quality unless things had got pretty bad. She was solemn too and without her usual incoherent laugh; she had removed her large hat, with its limp old-fashioned veil, and she raised her finger to her lips. Hyacinth’s first alarm had been immediately after he let himself into the house with his latch-key, as he always did, and found the little room on the right of the passage, in which Pinnie had lived ever since he remembered, fireless and untenanted. As soon as he had paid the cabman who put down his portmanteau for him in the hall—he was not used to paying cabmen and was conscious he gave too much, but was too impatient in his sudden anxiety to care—he had hurried up the vile staircase that seemed viler, even through his preoccupation, than ever, and given the knock, accompanied by a call the least bit tremulous, precipitately answered by Lady Aurora. She had drawn back into the room a moment while he stared in his dismay; then she emerged again, closing the door behind her—all with the air of enjoining him to be terribly quiet. He felt suddenly so sick at the idea of having lingered at Medley while there was distress in the wretched little house to which he owed so much that he scarcely found strength for an articulate question and obeyed mechanically the mute, urgent gesture by which their noble visitor appealed to him to go downstairs with her. It was only when they stood together in the deserted parlour—where he noted as for the first time what an inelegant odour prevailed—that he asked: “Is she dying—is she dead?” That was the least the strained sadness looking out of Lady Aurora’s face appeared to announce.
“Dear Mr. Robinson, I’m so sorry for you. I wanted to write, but I promised her I wouldn’t. She’s very ill, poor dear—we’re very anxious. It began ten days ago and I suppose I must tell you how much she has gone down.” Lady Aurora spoke with more than all her usual embarrassments and precautions—eagerly, yet as if it cost her much pain: pausing a little after everything to see how he would take it, then going on with a small propitiatory rush. He learned presently what was the matter, what doctor she had sent for, and that if he would wait a little before going into the room it would be so much better; the invalid having sunk within half an hour into a doze of a less agitated kind than she had had for some time, from which it would be an immense pity to run the risk of waking her. The doctor gave her the right things, as it seemed to her ladyship, but he admitted that she had very little power of resistance. He was of course not a very large practitioner, Mr. Buffery from round the corner, yet he seemed really clever; and she herself had taken the liberty (as she confessed to this she threw off one of her odd laughs and her colour rose) of sending an elderly, respectable person—a decent nursing body known to many doctors. She was out just then, she had to go once a day for the air—“only when I come of course” Lady Aurora hastened to note. Dear Miss Pynsent had had a cold hanging about her and had not taken care of it. Hyacinth would know how plucky she was about that sort of thing; she took so little interest in herself. “Of course a cold’s a cold, whoever has it; isn’t it?” his friend asked as if superior to the old discrimination against the power of the lowly to do justice to such visitations. Ten days previous she had taken an additional chill through falling asleep in her chair, at night, down there, and letting the fire go out. “It would have been nothing if she had been like you or me, you know,” his benefactress went on; “but as she was then it made the difference. The day was horribly damp—the chill had struck into the lungs and inflammation come on. Mr. Buffery says she was impoverished, you know—so weak and low she had nothing to go on.” The next morning she had bad pains and a good deal of fever, yet had got up. Poor Pinnie’s gracious ministrant didn’t make clear to Hyacinth what time had elapsed before she came to the rescue, nor by what means she had been notified, and he saw that she slurred this over, from the admirable motive of wishing him not to feel that their patient had suffered by his absence or called for him in vain. This indeed appeared not to have been the case if Pinnie had opposed successfully his being written to. “I came in very soon,” Lady Aurora only said—“it was such a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything—if it wasn’t so sad to see a person need so little. She did want you to stay where you were: she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr. Robinson.”
“I don’t know what to say to you—you’re so extraordinarily good, so angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and sickened by a strange, unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—this whole contrast cut him like a knife and made the ugly accident of his absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you when you’re so kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke out.
Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that your visit should not be cut short. When you should come of yourself it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you’ve been, but she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would do you so much good.”
Hyacinth felt his eyes fill with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying! How can she live when she’s like that?”
He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid touch of consolation. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said “we” just before, and he asked her whom she meant.
“Oh Mr. Vetch, don’t you know? I’ve made his charming acquaintance; it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then while for a space Hyacinth was silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden to the fiddler while he was masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora added: “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once at first to bring his violin; she thought it would soothe her.”
“I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble him,” said Hyacinth.