Hyacinth turned it miserably over. “Of course I know what you mean. But she spun her delusion—she always did all of them—out of nothing. I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of scenes. I told her when I went out of town very little more than I told you.”
“What she guessed, what she gathered, has been at any rate enough. She has made up her mind that you’ve formed a connexion by means of which you’ll come somehow or other into your own. She has done nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the aristocracy; and nothing’s simpler than that the person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you’ve been to stay should undertake your business with her friends.”
“Oh well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of that entertainment.”
“I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added: “My dear fellow, please leave her the idea.”
“Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth returned. “I’ll tell her my great relations have adopted me and that I’ve come back in the character of Lord Robinson.”
“She’ll need nothing more to die happy,” said Mr. Vetch.
Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition, this worthy explaining that he came over like that to see how she was half-a-dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended upon the pair while our youth awaited some sign from Lady Aurora that he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked out of the window as if the view were a chart of all the grey past; and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with his hands in his pockets. At last Mr. Vetch observed without taking his pipe out of his lips or looking round: “I think you might be a little more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”
Hyacinth stopped in his walk, wondering for a moment all sincerely what his companion meant, for he had no consciousness at present of an effort to conceal anything he could possibly tell—there were some things of course he couldn’t: on the contrary his life seemed to him particularly open to the public view and exposed to invidious comment. It was at this moment he first noticed a certain difference; there was a tone in Mr. Vetch’s voice he seemed never to have felt before—an absence of that note which had made him say in other days that the impenetrable old man was diverting himself at his expense. It was as if his attitude had changed, become more explicitly considerate, in consequence of some alteration or promotion on Hyacinth’s part, his having grown older or more important, or even grown simply more surpassingly odd. If the first impression made upon him by Pinnie’s old neighbour, as to whose place in the list of the sacrificial (his being a gentleman or one of the sovereign people) he formerly was so perplexed; if the sentiment excited by Mr. Vetch in a mind familiar now for nearly a month with forms of indubitable gentility was not favourable to the idea of fraternisation, this secret impatience in Hyacinth’s breast was soon corrected by one of the sudden reactions or quick conversions of which the young man was so often the victim. In the light of the fiddler’s appeal, which evidently meant more than it said, his musty antiquity, his typical look of having had for years a small, definite use and taken all the creases and contractions of it, even his visible expression of ultimate parsimony and of having ceased to care for the shape of his trousers because he cared more for something else—these things became so many reasons for turning round, going over to him, touching marks of an invincible fidelity, the humble, continuous, single-minded practice of daily duties and an art after all very charming; pursued, moreover, while persons of the species our restored prodigal had lately been consorting with fidgeted from one selfish sensation to another and couldn’t even live in the same place for three months together.
“What should you like me to do, to say, to tell you? Do you want to know what I’ve been doing in the country? I should have first to know myself,” Hyacinth decently pleaded.
“Have you enjoyed it very much?”