I mention these dim broodings not because they belong in an especial degree to the history of our young man during the winter of the Princess’s residence in Madeira Crescent, but because they were a constant element in his moral life and need to be remembered in any view of him at a given time. There were nights of November and December, as he trod the greasy pavements that lay between Westminster and Paddington, groping his way through the baffled lamplight and tasting the smoke-seasoned fog, when there was more happiness in his heart than he had ever known. The influence of his permeating London had closed over him again; Paris and Milan and Venice had shimmered away into reminiscence and picture; and as the great city which was most his own lay round him under her pall like an immeasurable breathing monster he felt with a vague excitement, as he had felt before, only now with more knowledge, that it was the richest expression of the life of man. His horizon had been immensely widened, but it was filled again by the expanse that sent dim night-gleams and strange, blurred reflexions and emanations into a sky without stars. He suspended, so to say, his small sensibility in the midst of it, to quiver there with joy and hope and ambition as well as with the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations with its mistress were more organised than they had been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity, it was better at least for poor Mr. Robinson. It made her more near and him more free; and if there had been a danger of her nature’s seeming really to take the tone of the vulgar things about her he would only have had to remember her as she was at Medley to restore the perspective. Her beauty always appeared in truth to have the setting that best became it; her fairness made the element in which she lived and, among the meanest accessories, constituted a kind of splendour. Nature had emphasised the difficult, the deterrent, for her establishing properties in common with the horrible populace of London. Hyacinth used to smile at this pretension in his night-walks to Paddington or homeward; the populace of London were scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls in particular were appalling—saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be in the great scheme of things for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference and only shifted the shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect.
It didn’t occur to our young man that the Princess had withdrawn her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still further the condition of the poor, she had placed herself in the hands of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her knowledge and her capacity to answer any question it could come into the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness of his own desultory and superficial view of the great question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve and toward which his steps could direct themselves with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the time in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless didn’t literally characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends whom long pauses, during which they merely looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, couldn’t make uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamplight, interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences that all turned to the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was picnicking, but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat or looked after the fire or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home, never dining out nor going to parties, ignorant of the dissipations of the town. There was something in the isolation of the room when the kettle was on the hob and he had given his wet umbrella to the maid and his friend had made him sit in a certain place near the fire, the better to dry his shoes—there was something that evoked the idea of the vie de province he had read about in French fiction. The French term came to him because it represented more the especial note of the Princess’s company, the cultivation, the facility, of talk. She expressed herself often in the French tongue itself; she could borrow that convenience for certain shades of meaning, though she had told Hyacinth she had her own intenser Latin view of the people to whom it was native. Certainly the strain of her discourse was not provincial; her talk was singularly free and unabashed; there was nothing one mightn’t say to her or that she was not liable to say herself. She had cast off prejudices and gave no heed to conventional danger-posts. Hyacinth admired the movement—his eyes seemed to see it—with which in any direction, intellectually, she could fling open her windows. There was an extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility—in seeing a creature capable socially of immeasurable flights sit dove-like and with folded wings.
The young man met Lady Aurora several times in Madeira Crescent—her days, like his own, were filled with work, so that she came in the evening—and he knew that her friendship with the Princess had arrived at a rich maturity. The two ladies were a source of almost rapturous interest to each other, each rejoicing that the other was not a bit different. The Princess prophesied freely that her visitor would give her up—all nice people did very soon; but to the acuteness of our hero’s observation the end of her ladyship’s almost breathless enthusiasm was not yet in view. She was bewildered but was fascinated; she thought her foreign friend not only the most distinguished, the most startling, the most edifying and the most original person in the world, but the most amusing and the most delightful to have tea with. As for that personage herself her sentiment about Lady Aurora was the same Hyacinth’s had been: she held her a saint, the first she had ever seen, and the purest specimen conceivable; as good in her way as Saint Francis of Assisi, as tender and quaint and transparent, of a spirit of charity as sublime. She felt that when one met a human flower as fresh as that in the dusty ways of the world one should pluck it and wear it; and she was always inhaling Lady Aurora’s fragrance, always kissing her and holding her hand. The spinster was frightened at her generosity, at the way her imagination embroidered; she wanted to convince her—as the Princess did on her own side—that such exaggerations destroyed their unfortunate subject. The Princess delighted in her clothes, in the way she put them on and wore them, in the economies she practised in order to have money for charity and the ingenuity with which these slender resources were made to go far—in the very manner in which she spoke, a kind of startled simplicity. She wished to emulate her in all these particulars; to learn how to economise still more cunningly, to get her bonnets at the same shop, to care as little for the fit of her gloves, to ask in the same tone, “Isn’t it a bore Susan Crotty’s husband has got a ticket-of-leave?” She said Lady Aurora made her feel like a French milliner and that if there was anything in the world she loathed it was a French milliner. Each of these persons was powerfully affected by the other’s idiosyncrasies, and each wanted the other to remain as she was while she herself should be transformed into the image of her friend.
One night, going to Madeira Crescent a little later than usual, Hyacinth met the pilgrim from Belgrave Square just leaving the house. She had a different air from any he had seen in her before; appeared flushed and even a little agitated, as if she had been learning a piece of bad news. She said, “Oh how do you do?” with her customary quick, vague laugh, but she went her way without stopping to talk. Three minutes later he mentioned to the Princess that he had encountered her, and this lady replied: “It’s a pity you didn’t come a little sooner. You’d have assisted at a scene.”
“At a scene?” he repeated, not understanding what violence could have taken place between mutual adorers.
“She made me a scene of tears, of earnest remonstrance—perfectly well meant, I needn’t tell you. She thinks I’m going too far.”
“I imagine you tell her things you don’t tell me,” Hyacinth said.
“Oh you, my dear fellow!” his hostess murmured. She spoke absent-mindedly, as if she were thinking of what had passed with Lady Aurora and as if the futility of telling things to Mr. Robinson had become a commonplace.
There was no annoyance for him in this, his pretension to keep pace with her “views” being quite extinct. The tone they now for the most part took with each other was one of mutual derision, of shrugging commiseration for lunacy on the one hand and pusillanimity on the other. In discussing with her he exaggerated deliberately, went fantastic lengths in the way of reaction, a point where it was their habit and their amusement to hurl all manner of denunciation at each other’s head. They had given up serious discussion altogether and when not engaged in bandying, in the spirit of burlesque, the amenities I have mentioned, talked for a compromise of matters as to which it couldn’t occur to them to differ. There were evenings when she did nothing but relate her life and all she had seen of humanity, from her earliest years, in a variety of countries. If evil appearances seemed mainly to have been presented to her view this didn’t diminish the interest and vividness of her reminiscences, nor her power, the greatest Hyacinth had ever encountered, of light mimetic, dramatic evocation. She was irreverent and invidious, but she made him hang on her lips; and when she regaled him with anecdotes of foreign courts—he delighted to know how monarchs lived and conversed—there was often for hours together nothing to indicate that she would have liked to get into a conspiracy and he would have liked to get out of one. Nevertheless his mind was by no means exempt from wonder as to what she was really doing in such holes and in what queer penalties she might find herself landed. When he questioned her she wished to know by what title, with his sentiments, he pretended to inquire. He did so but little, not being himself altogether convinced of the validity of his warrant; but on an occasion when she had challenged him he replied, smiling and hesitating: “Well, I must say it seems to me that from what I’ve told you it ought to strike you I’ve rather a title.”
“You mean your famous pledge to ‘act’ on demand? Oh that will never come to anything.”