“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 suivante 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 – capisce —” 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!” she added, with a sigh.
“I should have liked to see her again – I should have liked to bid her 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,” 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.
The solution of his difficulty – he flattered himself he had arrived at it – involved a winding-up of his affairs; and though, even if no solution had been required, he would have felt clearly that he had been dropped, yet as even in that case it would have been sweet to him to bid her good-bye, so, at present, the desire for some last vision of her own hurrying fate could still appeal to him. If things had not gone well for him he was still capable of wondering whether they looked better for her. It is a singular fact, but there rose in his mind a sort of incongruous desire to pity her. All these were odd feelings enough, and by the time half an hour had elapsed they had throbbed themselves into weariness and into slumber. While he remembered that he was waiting now in a very different frame from that in which he waited for her in South Street the first time he went to see her, he closed his eyes and lost himself. His unconsciousness lasted, he afterwards perceived, nearly half an hour; it terminated in his becoming aware that the lady of the house was standing before him. Assunta was behind her, and as he opened his eyes she took from her mistress the bonnet and mantle of which the Princess divested herself. “It’s charming of you to have waited,” the latter said, smiling down at him with all her old kindness. “You are very tired – don’t get up; that’s the best chair, and you must keep it.” She made him remain where he was; she placed herself near him on a smaller seat; she declared that she was not tired herself, that she didn’t know what was the matter with her – nothing tired her now; she exclaimed on the time that had elapsed since he had last called, as if she were reminded of it simply by seeing him again; and she insisted that he should have some tea – he looked so much as if he needed it. She considered him with deeper attention, and wished to know what was the matter with him – what he had done to use himself up; adding that she must begin and look after him again, for while she had the care of him that kind of thing didn’t happen. In response to this Hyacinth made a great confession: he admitted that he had stayed away from work and simply amused himself – amused himself by loafing about London all day. This didn’t pay – he was beginning to discover it as he grew older; it was doubtless a sign of increasing years when one began to perceive that wanton pleasures were hollow and that to stick to one’s tools was not only more profitable but more refreshing. However, he did stick to them, as a general thing; that was no doubt partly why, from the absence of the habit of it, a day off turned out to be rather a grind. When Hyacinth had not seen the Princess for some time he always, on meeting her again, had a renewed, tremendous sense of her beauty, and he had it to-night in an extraordinary degree. Splendid as that beauty had ever been, it seemed clothed at present in transcendent glory, and (if that which was already supremely fine could be capable of greater refinement) to have worked itself free of all earthly grossness and been purified and consecrated by her new life. Her gentleness, when she was in the mood for it, was quite divine (it had always the irresistible charm that it was the humility of a high spirit), and on this occasion she gave herself up to it. Whether it was because he had the consciousness of resting his eyes upon her for the last time, or because she wished to be particularly pleasant to him in order to make up for having, amid other preoccupations, rather dropped him of late (it was probable the effect was a product of both causes), at all events the sight of her loveliness seemed none the less a privilege than it had done the night he went into her box, at the play, and her presence lifted the weight from his soul. He suffered himself to be coddled and absently, even if radiantly, smiled at, and his state of mind was such that it could produce no alteration of his pain to see that on the Princess’s part these were inexpensive gifts. She had sent Assunta to bring them tea, and when the tray arrived she gave him cup after cup, with every restorative demonstration; but he had not sat with her a quarter of an hour before he perceived that she scarcely measured a word he said to her or a word that she herself uttered. If she had the best intention of being nice to him, by way of compensation, this compensation was for a wrong that was far from vividly present to her mind. Two points became perfectly clear: one was that she was thinking of something very different from her present, her past, or her future relations with Hyacinth Robinson; the other was that he was superseded indeed. This was so completely the case that it did not even occur to her, it was evident, that the sense of supersession might be cruel to the young man. If she was charming to him it was because she was good-natured and he had been hanging off, and not because she had done him an injury. Perhaps, after all, she hadn’t, for he got the impression that it might be no great loss of comfort not to const............