Apparently there had been a certain dryness in his tone, which was the cause of her ladyship’s venturing to reply after an hesitation: “Do let him come, Mr. Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder if you know that—that he has a great affection for you.”
“The more fool he; I’ve always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth declared, colouring.
The way Lady Aurora spoke proved to him later that she now definitely did know his secret, or one of those mysteries rather; for at the rate things had been going for the last few months he was making a regular collection. She knew the smaller secret—not of course the greater; she had decidedly been illuminated by Pinnie’s divagations. At the moment he made that reflexion, however, he was almost startled to perceive how completely he had ceased to resent such betrayals and how little it suddenly seemed to signify that the innocent source of them was about to be quenched. The sense of his larger treasure of experience swallowed up that particular anxiety, making him ask himself what it mattered, for the little time now left him, that people should exchange allusions, below their breath, to the hidden mark he now bore. The day came quickly when he believed, and yet didn’t care, that it had been in that manner immensely talked about.
After Lady Aurora left him, promising she would call him the first moment it should seem prudent, he walked up and down the cold, stale parlour sunk in his meditations. The shock of the danger of losing Pinnie had already passed away; he had achieved so much of late in the line of accepting the idea of death that the little dressmaker, in taking her departure, seemed already to benefit by this curious discipline. What was most vivid to him in the deserted field of her unsuccessful industry was the changed vision with which he had come back to objects familiar for twenty years. The picture was the same, and all its horrid elements, wearing a kind of greasy gloss in the impure air of Lomax Place, made, through the mean window-panes, a dismal chiaroscuro—showed, in their polished misery, the friction of his own little life; yet the eyes with which he looked at it had new terms of comparison. He had known the scene for hideous and sordid, but its aspect to-day was pitiful to the verge of the sickening; he couldn’t believe that for years he had accepted and even a little revered it. He was frightened at the sort of service his experience of grandeur had rendered him. It was all very well to have assimilated that element with a rapidity which had surprises even for himself; but with sensibilities now so improved what fresh arrangement could one come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising? Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle and the room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from the muddy street where the shallow defensive areas were a narrow slit. No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, no wonder her small underfed organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a particularly lamentable, conscious squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes that didn’t match, though of an equal antiquity and intimately emulous in the facility with which they dropped off. He had not heard Mr. Vetch’s voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper; but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not to make the door creak, their neighbour came into the parlour. The fiddler said nothing to him at first; they only looked at each other for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he knew the worst about Pinnie: but what was further in his eyes, which had an expression considerably different from any hitherto seen in them, defined itself to our hero only little by little.
“Don’t you think you might have written me a word?” said Hyacinth at last. His anger at having been left in ignorance had quitted him, but he thought the question fair. None the less he expected a sarcastic answer, and was surprised at the mild reasonableness with which Mr. Vetch replied—
“I assure you that no responsibility, in the course of my life, ever did more to distress me. There were obvious reasons for calling you back, and yet I couldn’t help wishing you might finish your visit. I balanced one thing against the other. It was very difficult.”
“I can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest are dying they’re usually sent for.”
The visitor gave a strange argumentative smile. If Lomax Place and Miss Pynsent’s select lodging-house wore a new face of vulgarity to Hyacinth it may be imagined whether the renunciation of the niceties of the toilet, the resigned seediness, which marked Mr. Vetch’s old age was unlikely to lend itself to comparison. The glossy butler at Medley had had a hundred more of the signs of success in life. “My dear boy, this case was exceptional,” the fiddler returned. “Your visit had a character of importance.”
“I don’t know what you know about it. I don’t remember that I told you anything.”
“No certainly, you’ve never told me much. But if, as is probable, you’ve seen that kind lady who’s now upstairs you’ll have learned that Pinnie made a tremendous point of your not being disturbed. She threatened us with her displeasure if we should hurry you back. You know what Pinnie’s displeasure is!” As at this Hyacinth turned away with a gesture of irritation Mr. Vetch went on: “No doubt she’s absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don’t now cast any disrespect on it. I assure you that if she had been here alone, suffering, sinking, without a creature to tend her and nothing before her but to die in a corner like a starved cat, she would still have faced that fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel scenes.”