by Henry James
‘He addresses you that way, in plain terms?’
‘I can’t call them very plain, because the letter is written in French, and I naturally have had a certain difficulty in making it out, in spite of my persevering study of the tongue and the fine example set me by poor Robinson. But that appears to be the gist of the matter.’
‘And you can repeat such an insult to me without the smallest apparent discomposure? You’re the most remarkable man!’ the Princess broke out.
‘Why is it an insult? It is the simple truth. I do take your money,’ said Paul Muniment.
‘You take it for a sacred cause; you don’t take it for yourself.’
‘The Prince isn’t obliged to look at that,’ Muniment rejoined, laughing.
His companion was silent for a moment; then, ‘I didn’t know you were on his side,’ she replied, gently.
‘Oh, you know on what side I am!’
‘What does he know? What business has he to address you so?’
‘I suppose he knows from Madame Grandoni. She has told him that I have great influence with you.’
‘She was welcome to tell him that!’ the Princess exclaimed.
‘His reasoning, therefore, has been that when I find you have nothing more to give to the cause I will let you go.’
‘Nothing more? And does he count me, myself, and every pulse of my being, every capacity of my nature, as nothing?’ the Princess cried, with shining eyes.
‘Apparently he thinks that I do.’
‘Oh, as for that, after all, I have known that you care far more for my money than for me. But it has made no difference to me,’ said the Princess.
‘Then you see that by your own calculation the Prince is right.’
‘My dear sir,’ Muniment’s hostess replied, ‘my interest in you never depended on your interest in me. It depended wholly on a sense of your great destinies. I suppose that what you began to tell me is that he stops my allowance.’
‘From the first of next month. He has taken legal advice. It is now clear – so he tells me – that you forfeit your settlements.’
‘Can I not take legal advice, too?’ the Princess asked. ‘Surely I can contest that. I can forfeit my settlements only by an act of my own. The act that led to our separation was his act; he turned me out of his house by physical violence.’
‘Certainly,’ said Muniment, displaying even in this simple discussion his easy aptitude for argument; ‘but since then there have been acts of your own –’ He stopped a moment, smiling; then he went on: ‘Your whole connection with a secret society constitutes an act, and so does your exercise of the pleasure, which you appreciate so highly, of feeding it with money extorted from an old Catholic and princely family. You know how little it is to be desired that these matters should come to light.’
‘Why in the world need they come to light? Allegations in plenty, of course, he would have, but not a particle of proof. Even if Madame Grandoni were to testify against me, which is inconceivable, she would not be able to produce a definite fact.’
‘She would be able to produce the fact that you had a little bookbinder staying for a month in your house.’
‘What has that to do with it?’ the Princess demanded. ‘If you mean that that is a circumstance which would put me in the wrong as against the Prince, is there not, on the other side, this circumstance, that while our young friend was staying with me Madame Grandoni herself, a person of the highest and most conspicuous respectability, never saw fit to withdraw from me her countenance and protection? Besides, why shouldn’t I have my bookbinder, just as I might have (and the Prince should surely appreciate my consideration in not having) my physician and my chaplain?’
‘Am I not your chaplain?’ said Muniment, with a laugh. ‘And does the bookbinder usually dine at the Princess’s table?’
‘Why not, if he’s an artist? In the old times, I know, artists dined with the servants; but not to-day.’
‘That would be for the court to appreciate,’ Muniment remarked. And in a moment he added, ‘Allow me to call your attention to the fact that Madame Grandoni has left you – has withdrawn her countenance and protection.’
‘Ah, but not for Hyacinth!’ the Princess returned, in a tone which would have made the fortune of an actress if an actress could have caught it.
‘For the bookbinder or for the chaplain, it doesn’t matter. But that’s only a detail,’ said Muniment. ‘In any case, I shouldn’t in the least care for your going to law.’
The Princess rested her eyes upon him for a while in silence, and at last she replied, ‘I was speaking just now of your great destinies, but every now and then you do something, you say something, that makes me doubt of them. It’s when you seem afraid. That’s terribly against your being a first-rate man.’
‘Oh, I know you have thought me a coward from the first of your knowing me. But what does it matter? I haven’t the smallest pretension to being a first-rate man.’
‘Oh, you are deep, and you are provoking!’ murmured the Princess, with a sombre eye.
‘Don’t you remember,’ Muniment continued, without heeding this somewhat passionate ejaculation – ‘don’t you remember how, the other day, you accused me of being not only a coward but a traitor; of playing false; of wanting, as you said, to back out?’
‘Most distinctly. How can I help its coming over me, at times, that you have incalculable ulterior views and are only using me – only using us all? But I don’t care!’
‘No, no; I’m genuine,’ said Paul Muniment, simply, yet in a tone which might have implied that the discussion was idle. And he immediately went on, with a transition too abrupt for perfect civility: ‘The best reason in the world for your not having a lawsuit with your husband is this: that when you haven’t a penny left you will be obliged to go back and live with him.’
‘How do you mean, when I haven’t a penny left? Haven’t I my own property?’ the Princess demanded.
‘The Prince tells me that you have drawn upon your own property at such a rate that the income to be derived from it amounts, to his positive knowledge, to no more than a thousand francs – forty pounds – a year. Surely, with your habits and tastes, you can’t live on forty pounds. I should add that your husband implies that your property, originally, was but a small affair.’
‘You have the most extraordinary tone,’ observed the Princess, gravely. ‘What you appear to wish to express is simply this: that from the moment I have no more money to give you I am of no more value than the skin of an orange.’
Muniment looked down at his shoe awhile. His companion’s words had brought a flush into his cheek; he appeared to admit to himself and to her that, at the point at which their conversation had arrived, there was a natural difficulty in his delivering himself. But presently he raised his head, showing a face still slightly embarrassed but none the less bright and frank. ‘I have no intention whatever of saying anything harsh or offensive to you, but since you challenge me perhaps it is well that I should let you know that I do consider that in giving your money – or, rather, your husband’s – to our business you gave the most valuable thing you had to contribute.’
‘This is the day of plain truths!’ the Princess exclaimed, with a laugh that was not expressive of pleasure. ‘You don’t count then any devotion, any intelligence, that I may have placed at your service, even rating my faculties modestly?’
‘I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one is nothing without the other. You are not trusted at headquarters.’
‘Not trusted!’ the Princess repeated, with her splendid stare. ‘Why, I thought I could be hanged to-morrow!’
‘They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You are liable to be weary of us,’ Paul Muniment went on; ‘and, indeed, I think you are weary of us already.’
‘Ah, you must be a first-rate man – you are such a brute!’ replied the Princess, who noticed, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced ‘weary’ we
ery.
‘I didn’t say you were weary of me,’ said Muniment, blushing again. ‘You can never live poor – you don’t begin to know the meaning of it.’
‘Oh, no, I am not tired of you,’ the Princess returned, in a strange tone. ‘In a moment you will make me cry with passion, and no man has done that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,’ she added, in a different manner. ‘You yourself recognised it just now, in speaking of the insignificant character of my fortune.’
‘It had to be a fortune, to be insignificant,’ said Muniment, smiling. ‘You will go back to your husband!’
To this declaration she made no answer whatever; she only sat looking at him in a sort of desperate calmness. ‘I don’t see, after all, why they trust you more than they trust me,’ she remarked.
‘I am not sure that they do,’ said Muniment. ‘I have heard something this evening which suggests that.’
‘And may one know what it is?’
‘A communication which I should have expected to be made through me has been made through another person.’
‘A communication?’
‘To Hyacinth Robinson.’
‘To Hyacinth –’ The Princess sprang up; she had turned pale in a moment.
‘He has got his ticket; but they didn’t send it through me.’
‘Do you mean his orders? He was here last night,’ the Princess said.
‘A fellow named Schinkel, a German – whom you don’t know, I think, but who was a sort of witness, with me and another, of his undertaking – came to see me this evening. It was through him the summons came, and he put Hyacinth up to it on Sunday night.’
‘On Sunday night?’ The Princess stared. ‘Why, he was here yesterday, and he talked of it, and he told me nothing.’
‘That was quite right of him, bless him!’ Muniment exclaimed.
The Princess closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again Muniment had risen and was standing before her. ‘What do they want him to do?’ she asked.
‘I am like Hyacinth; I think I had better not tell you – at least till it’s over.’
‘And when will it be over?’
‘They give him several days and, I believe, minute instructions,’ said Muniment; ‘with, however, considerable discretion in respect to seizing his chance. The thing is made remarkably easy for him. All this I know from Schinkel, who himself knew nothing on Sunday, being a mere medium of transmission, but who saw Hyacinth yesterday morning.’
‘Schinkel trusts you, then?’ the Princess remarked.
Muniment looked at her steadily a moment. ‘Yes, but he won’t trust you. Hyacinth is to receive a card of invitation to a certain big house,’ he went on, ‘a card with the name left in blank, so that he may fill it out himself. It is to be good for each of two grand parties which are to be given at a few days’ interval. That’s why they give him the job – because at a grand party he’ll look in his place.’
‘He will like that,’ said the Princess, musingly – ‘repaying hospitality with a pistol-shot.’
‘If he doesn’t like it he needn’t do it.’
The Princess made no rejoinder to this, but in a moment she said, ‘I can easily find out the place you mean – the big house where two parties are to be given at a few days’ interval and where the master is worth your powder.’
‘Easily, no doubt. And do you want to warn him?’
‘No, I want to do the business first, so that it won’t be left for another. If Hyacinth will look in his place at a grand party, should not I look still more in mine? And as I know the individual I should be able to approach him without exciting the smallest suspicion.’
Muniment appeared to consider her suggestion a moment, as if it were practical and interesting; but presently he answered, placidly, ‘To fall by your hand would be too good for him.’
‘However he falls, will it be useful, valuable?’ the Princess asked.
‘It’s worth trying. He’s a very bad institution.’
‘And don’t you mean to go near Hyacinth?’
‘No, I wish to leave him free,’ Muniment answered.
‘Ah, Paul Muniment,’ murmured the Princess, ‘you are a first-rate man!’ She sank down upon the sofa and sat looking up at him. ‘In God’s name, why have you told me this?’ she broke out.
‘So that you should not be able to throw it up at me, later, that I had not.’
She threw herself over, burying her face in the cushions, and remained so for some minutes, in silence. Muniment watched her awhile, without speaking; but at last he remarked, ‘I don’t want to aggravate you, but you will go back!’ The words failed to cause her even to raise her head, and after a moment he quietly went out.
47
That the Princess had done with him, done with him for ever, remained the most vivid impression that Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira Crescent the night before. He went home, and he flung himself on his narrow bed, where the consolation of sleep again descended upon him. But he woke up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day was a quick revival of pain. He was overpast, he had become vague, he was extinct. The things that Sholto had said to him came back to him, and the compassion of foreknowledge that Madame Grandoni had shown him from the first. Of Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder whether he knew. An insurmountable desire to do justice to him, for the very reason that there might be a temptation to oblique thoughts, forbade him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely wondered whether he would ever be superseded; but this possibility faded away in a stronger light – a kind of dazzling vision of some great tribuneship, which swept before him now and again and in which the figure of the Princess herself seemed merged and extinguished. When full morning came at last, and he got up, it brought with it, in the restlessness which made it impossible to him to remain in his room, a return of that beginning of an answerless question, ‘After all – after all –?’ which the Princess had planted there the night before when she spoke so bravely in the name of the Revolution. ‘After all – after all, since nothing else was tried, or would, apparently, ever be tried –’ He had a sense of his mind, which had been made up, falling to pieces again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was already familiar – the horror of the public reappearance, on his part, of the imbrued hands of his mother. This loathing of the idea of a repetition had not been sharp, strangely enough, till his summons came; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance to act for the ‘party of action’ had not been the fear of a personal stain, but the simple extension of his observation. Yet now the idea of the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to make service impossible. It rose before him like a kind of backward accusation of his mother; to suffer it to start out in the life of her son was in a manner to place her own forgotten, redeemed pollution again in the eye of the world. The thought that was most of all with him was that he had time – he had time; he was grateful for that, and saw a kind of delicacy in their having given him a margin – not condemned him to be pressed by the hours. He had another day, he had two days, he might take three, he might take several. He knew he should be terribly weary of them before they were over; but for that matter they would be over whenever he liked. Anyhow, he went forth again into the streets, into the squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to steep himself yet once again in the great indifferent city which he knew and loved and which had had so many of his smiles and tears and confidences. The day was gray and damp, though no rain fell, and London had never appeared to him to wear more proudly and publicly the stamp of her imperial history. He passed slowly to and fro over Westminster bridge and watched the black barges drift on the great brown river, and looked up at the huge fretted palace288 that rose there as a fortress of the social order which he, like the young David,289 had been commissioned to attack with a sling and pebble. At last he made his way to St James’s Park, and he strolled about a long time. He revolved around it, and he went
a considerable distance up the thoroughfare that communicates with Pimlico. He stopped at a certain point and came back again, and then he retraced his steps in the former direction. He looked in the windows of shops, and he looked in particular into the long, glazed expanse of that establishment in which, at that hour of the day, Millicent Henning discharged superior functions. Millicent’s image had descended upon him after he came out, and now it moved before him as he went, it clung to him, it refused to quit him. He made, in truth, no effort to drive it away; he held fast to it in return, and it murmured strange things in his ear. She had been so jolly to him on Sunday; she was such a strong, obvious, simple nature, with such a generous breast and such a freedom from the sophistries of civilisation. All that he had ever liked in her came back to him now with a finer air, and there was a moment, during which he hung over the rail of the bridge that spans the lake in St James’s Park and mechanically followed the movement of the swans, when he asked himself whether, at bottom, he hadn’t liked her better, almost, than any one. He tried to think he had, he wanted to think he had, and he seemed to see the look her eyes would have if he should tell her that he had. Something of that sort had really passed between them on Sunday; only the business that had come up since had superseded it. Now the taste of the vague, primitive comfort that his Sunday had given him came back to him, and he asked himself whether he mightn’t know it a second time. After he had thought he couldn’t again wish for anything, he found himself wishing that he might believe there was something Millicent could do for him. Mightn’t she help him – mightn’t she even extricate him? He was looking into a window – not that of her own shop – when a vision rose before him of a quick flight with her, for an undefined purpose, to an undefined spot; and he was glad, at that moment, to have his back turned to the people in the street, because his face suddenly grew red to the tips of his ears. Again and again, all the same, he indulged in the reflection that spontaneous, uncultivated minds often have inventions, inspirations. Moreover, whether Millicent should have any or not, he might at least feel her arms around him. He didn’t exactly know what good it would do him or what door it would open; but he should like it. The sensation was not one he could afford to defer, but the nearest moment at which he should be able to enjoy it would be that evening. He had thrown over everything, but she would be busy all day; nevertheless, it would be a gain, it would be a kind of foretaste, to see her earlier, to have three words with her. He wrestled with the temptation to go into her haberdasher’s, because he knew she didn’t like it (he had tried it once, of old); as the visits of gentlemen, even when ostensible purchasers (there were people watching about who could tell who was who), compromised her in the eyes of her employers. This was not an ordinary case, however; and though he hovered about the place a long time, undecided, embarrassed, half ashamed, at last he went in, as by an irresistible necessity. He would just make an appointment with her, and a glance of the eye and a single word would suffice. He remembered his way through the labyrinth of the shop; he knew that her department was on the second floor. He walked through the place, which was crowded, as if he had as good a right as any one else; and as he had entertained himself, on rising, with putting on his holiday garments, in which he made such a distinguished little figure, he was not suspected of any purpose more nefarious than that of looking for some nice thing to give a lady. He ascended the stairs, and found himself in a large room where made-up articles were exhibited and where, though there were twenty people in it, a glance told him he shouldn’t find Millicent. She was perhaps in the next one, into which he passed by a wide opening. Here also were numerous purchasers, most of them ladies; the men were but three or four, and the disposal of the wares was in the hands of neat young women attired in black dresses with long trains. At first it appeared to Hyacinth that the young woman he sought was even here not within sight, and he was turning away, to look elsewhere, when suddenly he perceived that a tall gentleman, standing in the middle of the room, was none other than Captain Sholto. It next became plain to him that the person standing upright before the Captain, as still as a lay-figure and with her back turned to Hyacinth, was the object of his own quest. In spite of her averted face he instantly recognised Millicent; he knew her shop-attitude, the dressing of her hair behind, and the long, grand lines of her figure, draped in the last new thing. She was exhibiting this article to the Captain, and he was lost in contemplation. He had been beforehand with Hyacinth as a false purchaser, but he imitated a real one better than our young man, as, with his eyes travelling up and down the front of Millicent’s person, he frowned, consideringly, and rubbed his lower lip slowly with his walking-stick. Millicent stood admirably still, and the back-view of the garment she displayed was magnificent. Hyacinth, for a minute, stood as still as she. At the end of that minute he perceived that Sholto saw him, and for an instant he thought he was going to direct Millicent’s attention to him. But Sholto only looked at him very hard, for a few seconds, without telling her he was there; to enjoy that satisfaction he would wait till the interloper was gone. Hyacinth gazed back at him for the same length of time – what these two pairs of eyes said to each other requires perhaps no definite mention – and then turned away.
