“Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked what had become of Mr. Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was your mamma, he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss Pynsent’s young man.”
“He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth said. “He’s our best friend — or supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle, as he used to do.”
Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she remarked, “I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.”
“At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t -play any instrument.”
“I don’t mean in the orchestra, you guby! You would look very nice in a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table, and her shoulders lifted in an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go through life in his own character; but he checked himself, with the reflection that this was exactly what, apparently, he was destined not to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle; he was to be, every day and every hour, an actor. Suddenly, with the utmost irrelevance, Miss Henning inquired, “Is Miss Pynsent some relation? What gave her any right over you?”
Hyacinth had an answer ready for this question; he had determined to say, as he had several times said before, “Miss Pynsent is an old friend of my family. My mother was very fond of her, and she was very fond of my mother.” He repeated the formula now, looking at Millicent with the same inscrutable calmness (as he fancied), though what he would have liked to say to her would have been that his mother was none of her business. But she was too handsome to talk that way to, and she presented her large fair face to him, across the table, with an air of solicitation to be cosy and comfortable. There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would be the cure, ultimately; that in return for something he might drop, syllable by syllable, into a listening feminine ear, certain other words would be spoken to him which would make his pain forever less sharp. But what woman could he trust, what ear would be safe? The answer was not in this loud, fresh, laughing creature, whose sympathy couldn’t have the fineness he was looking for, since her curiosity was vulgar. Hyacinth objected to the vulgar as much as Miss Pynsent herself; in this respect she had long since discovered that he was after her own heart. He had not taken up the subject of Mrs. Henning’s death; he felt himself incapable of inquiring about that lady, and had no desire for knowledge of Millicent’s relationships. Moreover, he always suffered, to sickness, when people began to hover about the question of his origin, the reasons why Pinnie had had the care of him from a baby. Mrs. Henning had been untidy, but at least her daughter could speak of her. “Mr. Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved out of No. 17, three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t stand the other people in the house; there was a man that played the accordion.”
Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote, and she wanted to know why people should like Mr. Vetch’s fiddle any better. Then she added, “And I think that, while he was about it, he might have put you into something better than a bookbinder’s.”
“He wasn’t obliged to put me into anything. It’s a very good place.”
“All the same, it isn’t where I should have looked to find you,” Millicent declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to pay him a compliment as of resentment at having miscalculated.
“Where should you have looked to find me? In the House of Commons? It’s a pity you couldn’t have told me, in advance, what you would have liked me to be.”
She looked at him, over her cup, while she drank, in several sips. “Do you know what they used to say in the Place? That your father was a lord.”
“Very likely. That’s the kind of rot they talk in that precious hole,” the young man said, without blenching.
“Well, perhaps he was,” Millicent ventured.
“He may have been a prince, for all the good it has done me.”
“Fancy your talking as if you didn’t know!” said Millicent.
“Finish your tea — don’t mind how I talk.”
“ Well, you ‘ave got a temper!” the girl exclaimed, archly. “1 should have thought you ‘d be a clerk at a banker’s.”
“Do they select them for their tempers?”
“You know what I mean. You used to be too clever to follow a trade.”
“Well, I’m not clever enough to live on air.”
“You might be, really, for all the tea you drink! Why didn’t you go in for some high profession?”
“How was I to go in? Who the devil was to help me?” Hyacinth inquired, with a certain vibration.
“Haven’t you got any relations?” said Millicent, after a moment.
“What are you doing? Are you trying to make me brag?”
When he spoke sharply she only laughed, not in the least ruffled, and by the way she looked at him seemed to like it. “Well, I’m sorry you ‘re only a journeyman,” she went on, pushing away her cup.
“So am I,” Hyacinth rejoined; but he called for the bill as if he had been an employer of labor. Then, while it was being brought, he remarked to his companion that he didn’t believe she had an idea of what his work was and how charming it could be. “Yes, I get up books for the shops,” he said, when she had retorted that she perfectly understood. “But the art of the binder is an exquisite art.”
“So Miss Pynsent told me. She said you had some samples at home. I should like to see them.”
“You wouldn’t know how good they are,” said Hyacinth, smiling.
He expected that she would exclaim, in answer, that he was an impudent wretch, and for a moment she seemed to be on the point of doing so. But the words changed, on her lips, and she replied, almost tenderly, “That’s just the way you used to speak to me, years ago, in the Place.”
“I don’t care about that. I hate all that time.”
“Oh, so do I, if you come to that,” said Millicent, as if she could rise to any breadth of view. And then she returned to her idea that he had not done himself justice. “You used always to be reading: I never thought you would work with your ‘ands.”
This seemed to irritate him, and, having paid the bill and given threepence, ostentatiously, to the young woman with a languid manner and hair of an unnatural yellow, who had waited on them, he said, “You may depend upon it, I sha’n’t do it an hour longer than I can help.”
“What will you do then?”
“Oh, you’ll see, some day.” In the street, after they had begun to walk again, he went on: “You speak as if I could have my pick. What was an obscure little beggar to do, buried in a squalid corner of London, under a million of idiots? I had no help, no influence, no acquaintance of any kind with professional people, and no means of getting at them. I had to do something; I couldn’t go on living on Pinnie. Thank God, I help her now, a little. I took what I could get.” He spoke as if he had been touched by the imputation of having derogated.
Millicent seemed to imply that he defended himself successfully when she said, “You express yourself like a gentleman” — a speech to which he made no response. But he began to talk again afterwards, and, the evening having definitely set in, his companion took his arm for the rest of the way home. By the time he reached her door he had confided to her that, in secret, he wrote: he had a dream of literary distinction. This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with an irrelevance that characterized