“Oh I mean more about the lower classes!” she returned; and oddly enough there was a sense in which he was unable to deny the claim made for her ladyship. He presently came back to something said by his hostess a moment before, declaring that it had not been the way with Madame Grandoni and him to take to their heels, and to this she replied: “Oh you’ll run away yet! Don’t be afraid.”
“I think that if I had been capable of quitting you I should have done it by this time: I’ve neglected such opportunities,” the old woman sighed. Hyacinth now made out that her eye had quite lost or intermitted its fine old pleasantry: she was troubled about many things.
“It’s true that if you didn’t leave me when I was rich it wouldn’t look well for you to leave me at present,” the Princess suggested; and before Madame Grandoni could meet this speech she said to Hyacinth: “I liked that odd man, your friend Muniment, so much for saying he wouldn’t come to see me. ‘What good would it do him,’ poor fellow? What good would it do him indeed? You were not so difficult: you held off a little and pleaded obstacles, but one easily saw you’d come down,” she continued while she covered her guest with her mystifying smile. “Besides I was smarter then, more splendid; I had on gewgaws and suggested worldly lures. I must have been more attractive. But I liked him for refusing,” she repeated; and of the many words she uttered that evening it was these that made most impression on our hero. He remained an hour after tea, for on rising from the table she had gone to the piano—not depriving herself of this resource she had a humble instrument of the so-called “cottage” kind—and begun to play in a manner that reminded him of her commemorative outburst, as he might have fancied it, the day of his arrival at Medley. The night had grown close and as the piano was in the front room he opened at her request the window that looked into Madeira Crescent. Beneath it assembled the youth of both sexes, the dingy loiterers, who had clustered an hour before round the hurdy-gurdy. But on this occasion they didn’t caper about; they leaned in silence against the area-rails and listened to the wondrous music. When Hyacinth told the player of the spell she had thrown on them she declared that it made her singularly happy; she added that she was really glad, almost proud, of her day; she felt as if she had begun to do something for the people. Just before he took leave she encountered some occasion for saying that she was certain the odd man in Audley Court wouldn’t come; and he forbore to contradict her because he believed in fact he wouldn’t.
XXXIV
How right had been her prevision that Lady Aurora would be fascinated at first was proved as soon as Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square—a visit he was promptly led to pay by a deep sense of the obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie’s death. The conditions in which he found her were quite the same as those of his visit the year before; she was spending the unfashionable season in her father’s empty house and amid a desert of brown holland and the dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen so much of her during Pinnie’s illness that he felt—or had felt then—that he knew her almost intimately, that they had become real friends, almost comrades, and might meet henceforth without reserves or ceremonies. She was in spite of this as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the other occasion: not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and apparently unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer. Hyacinth, however, always liked extremely to be with her, for she was the person in the world who quietly, delicately and as a matter of course treated him most as a gentleman and appeared most naturally to take him for one. She had never addressed him the handsome flattering freedoms that had fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained at all her view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptive manner, which took all sorts of equalities and communities for granted, was a homage to the idea of his fine essence. It was in this manner that she now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he found himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian theories of Venice in Belgravia after the fashion of the cosmopolites bred by those wastes. It took him none the less but a few minutes to be sure Lady Aurora’s heart was not in these considerations; the deferential smile she bent upon him while she sat with her head thrust forward and her long hands clasped in her lap was slightly mechanical, her attitude all perfunctory. When he gave her his views of some of the arrière-pensées of M. Gambetta—for he had views not altogether, as he thought, deficient in originality—she didn’t interrupt, for she never interrupted; but she took advantage of his first pause to say quickly and irrelevantly: “Will the Princess Casamassima come again to Audley Court?”
“I’ve no doubt she’d come again if they’d particularly like her to.”
“I do hope she will. She’s very wonderful,” Lady Aurora richly breathed.
“Oh yes, she’s very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure.”
“Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to have such an experience again. Don’t you think her quite different from anybody one has ever seen?” But her ladyship added before waiting for an answer to this: “I liked her quite extraordinarily.”
“She liked you just as much. I know it would give her great pleasure if you could go to see her,” Hyacinth said.