by Henry James
‘Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Muniment. Why was the letter not sent to me through him?’
‘My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend upon it, there are always good reasons. I should have liked it better if it had been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him’ – Schinkel interrupted himself; the remainder of his sentence was lost in a cloud of smoke.
‘Well, if they didn’t send to him – ’ Hyacinth persisted.
‘You’re a great friend of his – how can I tell you?’
At this Hyacinth looked up at his companion askance, and caught an odd glance, accompanied with a smile, which the mild, circumspect German directed toward him. ‘If it’s anything against him, my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.’
‘Well, it’s a possibility that they are not satisfied.’
‘How do you mean it – not satisfied?’
‘How shall I say it? – that they don’t trust him.’
‘Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!’
‘Ah, my boy, depend upon it, there are reasons,’ Schinkel replied; and in a moment he added, ‘They know everything – everything. Oh, they go straight!’
The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence, Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin had said when Schinkel, that evening, first told him what he had come to see him about. ‘Il vaut du galme281 – il vaut du galme:’ that was the German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them over to himself several times, almost with the same accent. They had a certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was soothing altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face, while Hyacinth waited – waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away, and he watched without irritation the loving manner in which the German shook the ashes out of his big pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin.282 It was only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail of it that he said, ‘Also, now for the letter,’ and, putting his hand inside of his waistcoat, drew forth the important document. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw a shade of disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face, at this indication that he should have no present knowledge of its contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to say again that it was nothing – that it was only a release. Schinkel had now the good sense, or the good taste, not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed against his heart Hyacinth felt still more distinctly that it was something – that it was a command. What Schinkel did say, in a moment, was ‘Now that you have got it, I am very glad. It is more comfortable for me.’
‘I should think so!’ Hyacinth exclaimed. ‘If you hadn’t done your job you would have paid for it.’
Schinkel hesitated a moment while he lingered; then, as Hyacinth turned away, putting in his door-key, he replied, ‘And if you don’t do yours, so will you.’
‘Yes, as you say, they go straight! Good-night.’ And our young man let himself in.
The passage and staircase were never lighted, and the lodgers either groped their way bedward with the infallibility of practice or scraped the wall with a casual match which, in the milder gloom of day, was visible in a hundred rich streaks. Hyacinth’s room was on the second floor, behind, and as he approached it he was startled by seeing a light proceed from the crevice under the door, the imperfect fitting of which was in this manner vividly illustrated. He stopped and considered this mysterious brightness, and his first impulse was to connect it with the incident just ushered in by Schinkel; for what could anything that touched him now be but a part of the same business? It was natural that some punctual emissary should be awaiting him. Then it occurred to him that when he went out to call on Lady Aurora, after tea, he had simply left a tallow candle burning, and that it showed a cynical spirit on the part of his landlady, who could be so close-fisted for herself, not to have gone in and put it out. Lastly, it came over him that he had had a visitor, in his absence, and that the visitor had taken possession of his apartment till his return, seeking sources of comfort, as was perfectly just. When he opened the door he found that this last prevision was the right one, though his visitor was not one of the figures that had risen before him. Mr Vetch sat there, beside the little table at which Hyacinth did his writing, with his head resting on his hand and his eyes bent on the floor. He looked up when Hyacinth appeared, and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t hear you; you are very quiet.’
‘I come in softly, when I’m late, for the sake of the house – though I am bound to say I am the only lodger who has that refinement. Besides, you have been asleep,’ Hyacinth said.
‘No, I have not been asleep,’ returned the old man. ‘I don’t sleep much nowadays.’
‘Then you have been plunged in meditation.’
‘Yes, I have been thinking.’ Then Mr Vetch explained that the woman of the house wouldn’t let him come in, at first, till he had given proper assurances that his intentions were pure and that he was moreover the oldest friend Mr Robinson had in the world. He had been there for an hour; he thought he might find him, coming so late.
Hyacinth answered that he was very glad he had waited and that he was delighted to see him, and expressed regret that he hadn’t known in advance of his visit, so that he might have something to offer him. He sat down on his bed, vaguely expectant; he wondered what special purpose had brought the fiddler so far at that unnatural hour. But he only spoke the truth in saying that he was glad to see him. Hyacinth had come up-stairs in a tremor of desire to be alone with the revelation that he carried in his pocket, yet the sight of Anastasius Vetch gave him a sudden relief by postponing solitude. The place where he had put his letter seemed to throb against his side, yet he was thankful to his old friend for forcing him still to leave it so. ‘I have been looking at your books,’ the fiddler said; ‘you have two or three exquisite specimens of your own. Oh yes, I recognise your work when I see it; there are always certain little finer touches. You have a manner, like a master. With such a talent, such a taste, your future leaves nothing to be desired. You will make a fortune and become a great celebrity.’
Mr Vetch sat forward, to sketch this vision; he rested his hands on his knees and looked very hard at his young friend, as if to challenge him to dispute his flattering views. The effect of what Hyacinth saw in his face was to give him immediately the idea that the fiddler knew something, though it was impossible to guess how he could know it. The Poupins, for instance, had had no time to communicate with him, even granting that they were capable of that baseness; an unwarrantable supposition, in spite of Hyacinth’s having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into Hyacinth’s mind an intense determination to dissemble before his visitor to the last: he might imagine what he liked, but he should not have a grain of satisfaction – or rather he should have that of being led to believe, if possible, that his suspicions were positively vain and idle. Hyacinth rested his eyes on the books that Mr Vetch had taken down from the shelf, and admitted that they were very pretty work and that so long as one didn’t become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man’s curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself Hyacinth took the aggressive and asked him boldly whether it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half a dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. ‘My dear old friend, you have something on your mind – some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous idée
fixe. Why has it taken you to-night, in particular? Whatever it is, it has brought you here, at an unnatural hour, you don’t know why. I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am, in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can’t like it if makes you miserable. You’re like a nervous mother whose baby’s in bed upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he’s all right – if he isn’t uncovered or hasn’t tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr Vetch, don’t, don’t worry; the blanket’s up to my chin, and I haven’t tumbled yet.’
Hyacinth heard himself say these things as if he were listening to another person; the impudence of them, under the circumstances, seemed to him, somehow, so rare. But he believed himself to be on the edge of an episode in which impudence, evidently, must play a considerable part, and he might as well try his hand at it without delay. The way the old man gazed at him might have indicated that he too was able to take the measure of his perversity – that he knew he was false as he sat there declaring that there was nothing the matter, while a brand-new revolutionary commission burned in his pocket. But in a moment Mr Vetch said, very mildly, as if he had really been reassured, ‘It’s wonderful how you read my thoughts. I don’t trust you; I think there are beastly possibilities. It’s not true, at any rate, that I come to look at you every five minutes. You don’t know how often I have resisted my fears – how I have forced myself to let you alone.’
‘You had better let me come and live with you, as I proposed after Pinnie’s death. Then you will have me always under your eyes,’ said Hyacinth, smiling.
The old man got up eagerly, and, as Hyacinth did the same, laid his hands upon his shoulders, holding him close. ‘Will you now, really, my boy? Will you come to-night?’
‘To-night, Mr Vetch?’
‘To-night has worried me more than any other, I don’t know why. After my tea I had my pipe and a glass, but I couldn’t keep quiet; I was very, very bad. I got to thinking of Pinnie – she seemed to be in the room. I felt as if I could put out my hand and touch her. If I believed in ghosts I should believe I had seen her. She wasn’t there for nothing; she was there to add her fears to mine – to talk to me about you. I tried to hush her up, but it was no use – she drove me out of the house. About ten o’clock I took my hat and stick and came down here. You may judge whether I thought it important, as I took a cab.’
‘Ah, why do you spend your money so foolishly?’ asked Hyacinth, in a tone of the most affectionate remonstrance.
‘Will you come to-night?’ said the old man, for all rejoinder, holding him still.
‘Surely, it would be simpler for you to stay here. I see perfectly that you are ill and nervous. You can take the bed, and I’ll spend the night in the chair.’
The fiddler thought a moment. ‘No, you’ll hate me if I subject you to such discomfort as that; and that’s just what I don’t want.’
‘It won’t be a bit different in your room; there, as here, I shall have to sleep in a chair.’
‘I’ll get another room; we shall be close together,’ the fiddler went on.
‘Do you mean you’ll get another room at this hour of the night, with your little house stuffed full and your people all in bed? My poor Anastasius, you are very bad; your reason totters on its throne,’ said Hyacinth, humorously and indulgently.
‘Very good, we’ll get a room to-morrow. I’ll move into another house, where there are two, side by side.’ Hyacinth’s tone was evidently soothing to him.
‘Comme vous y allez!’283 the young man continued. ‘Excuse me if I remind you that in case of my leaving this place I have to give a fortnight’s notice.’
‘Ah, you’re backing out!’ the old man exclaimed, dropping his hands.
‘Pinnie wouldn’t have said that,’ Hyacinth returned. ‘If you are acting, if you are speaking, at the prompting of her pure spirit, you had better act and speak exactly as she would have done. She would have believed me.’
‘Believed you? Believed what? What is there to believe? If you’ll make me a promise, I will believe that.’
‘I’ll make you any promise you like,’ said Hyacinth.
‘Oh, any promise I like – that isn’t what I want! I want just one very particular little pledge; and that is really what I came here for to-night. It came over me that I’ve been an ass, all this time, never to have demanded it of you before. Give it to me now, and I will go home quietly and leave you in peace.’ Hyacinth, assenting in advance, requested again that he would formulate his demand, and then the old man said, ‘Well, promise me that you will never, under any circumstances whatever, do anything.’
‘Do anything?’
‘Anything that those people expect of you.’
‘Those people?’ Hyacinth repeated.
‘Ah, don’t torment me with pretending not to understand!’ the old man begged. ‘You know the people I mean. I can’t call them by their names, because I don’t know them. But you do, and they know you.’
Hyacinth had no desire to torment Mr Vetch, but he was capable of reflecting that to enter into his thought too easily would be tantamount to betraying himself. ‘I suppose I know the people you have in mind,’ he said, in a moment; ‘but I’m afraid I don’t grasp the idea of the promise.’
‘Don’t they want to make use of you?’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Hyacinth. ‘You think they want me to touch off some train for them. Well, if that’s what troubles you, you may sleep sound. I shall never do any of their work.’
A radiant light came into the fiddler’s face, and he stared, as if this assurance were too fair for nature. ‘Do you take your oath to that? Never anything, anything, anything?’
‘Never anything at all.’
‘Will you swear it to me by the memory of that good woman of whom we have been speaking and whom we both loved?’
‘My dear old Pinnie’s memory? Willingly.’
The old man sank down in his chair and buried his face in his hands; the next moment his companion heard him sobbing. Ten minutes later he was content to take his departure, and Hyacinth went out with him to look for another cab. They found an ancient four-wheeler stationed languidly at a crossing of the ways, and before Mr Vetch got into it he asked his young friend to kiss him. That young friend watched the vehicle get itself into motion and rattle away; he saw it turn a neighbouring corner. Then he approached the nearest gas-lamp and drew from his breast-pocket the letter that Schinkel had given him.
45
‘And Madame Grandoni, then?’ asked Hyacinth, reluctant to turn away. He felt pretty sure that he should never knock at that door again, and the desire was strong in him to see once more, for the last time, the ancient, troubled suivante284 of the Princess, whom he had always liked. She had seemed to him ever to be in the slightly ridiculous position of a confidant of tragedy in whom the heroine should have ceased to confide.
‘E andata via, caro signorino,’ said Assunta, smiling at him as she stood there holding the door open.
‘She has gone away? Bless me, when did she go?’
‘It is now five days, dear young sir. She has returned to our country.’
‘Is it possible?’ exclaimed Hyacinth, disappointedly.
‘E possibilissimo!’ said Assunta. Then she added, ‘There were many times when she almost went; but this time – capisce285 –’ And without finishing her sentence the Princess’s Roman tirewoman indulged in a subtle, suggestive, indefinable play of expression, to which her hands and shoulders contributed, as well as her lips and eyebrows.
Hyacinth looked at her long, enough to catch any meaning that she might have wished to convey, but gave no sign of apprehending it. He only remarked, gravely, ‘In short she is here no more.’
‘And the worst is that she will probably never come back. She didn’t go for a long time, but when she decided herself it was finished,’ Assunta declared. ‘Peccato!’286 she added, with a sigh.
‘I should have liked to see her again – I should have liked to bid h
er good-bye.’ Hyacinth lingered there in strange, melancholy vagueness; since he had been told the Princess was not at home he had no reason for remaining, save the possibility that she might return before he turned away. This possibility, however, was small, for it was only nine o’clock, the middle of the evening – too early an hour for her to reappear, if, as Assunta said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up and down the Crescent, gently swinging his stick, and became conscious in a moment that Assunta was regarding him with tender interest.
‘You should have come back sooner; then perhaps she wouldn’t have gone, povera vecchia,’287 she rejoined in a moment. ‘It is too many days since you have been here. She liked you – I know that.’
‘She liked me, but she didn’t like me to come,’ said Hyacinth. ‘Wasn’t that why she went, because we came?’
‘Ah, that other one – with the long legs – yes. But you are better.’
‘The Princess doesn’t think so, and she is the right judge,’ Hyacinth replied, smiling.
‘Eh, who knows what she thinks? It is not for me to say. But you had better come in and wait. I dare say she won’t be long, and it would gratify her to find you.’
Hyacinth hesitated. ‘I am not sure of that.’ Then he asked, ‘Did she go out alone?’
‘Sola, sola,’ said Assunta, smiling. ‘Oh, don’t be afraid; you were the first!’ And she flung open the door of the little drawing-room, with an air of irresistible solicitation and sympathy.
He sat there nearly an hour, in the chair the Princess habitually used, under her shaded lamp, with a dozen objects around him which seemed as much a part of herself as if they had been folds of her dress or even tones of her voice. His thoughts were tremendously active, but his body was too tired for restlessness; he had not been at work, and had been walking about all day, to fill the time; so that he simply reclined there, with his head on one of the Princess’s cushions, his feet on one of her little stools – one of the ugly ones, that belonged to the house – and his respiration coming quickly, like that of a man in a state of acute agitation. Hyacinth was agitated now, but it was not because he was waiting for the Princess; a deeper source of emotion had been opened to him, and he had not on the present occasion more sharpness of impatience than had already visited him at certain moments of the past twenty hours. He had not closed his eyes the night before, and the day had not made up for that torment. A fever of reflection had descended upon him, and the range of his imagination had been wide. It whirled him through circles of immeasurable compass; and this is the reason that, thinking of many things while he sat in the Princess’s chair, he wondered why, after all, he had come to Madeira Crescent, and what interest he could have in seeing the lady of the house. He had a very complete sense that everything was over between them; that the link had snapped which bound them so closely together for a while. And this was not simply because for a long time now he had received no sign nor communication from her, no invitation to come back, no inquiry as to why his visits had stopped. It was not because he had seen her go in and out with Paul Muniment, nor because it had suited Prince Casamassima to point the moral of her doing so, nor even because, quite independently of the Prince, he believed her to be more deeply absorbed in her acquaintance with that superior young man than she had ever been in her relations with himself. The reason, so far as he became conscious of it in his fitful meditations, could only be a strange, detached curiosity – strange and detached because everything else of his past had been engulfed in the abyss that opened before him as, after Mr Vetch had left him, he stood under the lamp in a paltry Westminster street. That had swallowed up all familiar feelings, and yet out of the ruin had sprung the impulse which brought him to where he sat.