Hyacinth never knew that Mr. Vetch had said more than once to Pinnie, “If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true, why didn’t she make the child bear his real name, instead of his false one?” — an inquiry which the dressmaker answered with some ingenuity, by remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, and that she supposed the unhappy girl didn’t wish to publish to every one the boy’s connection with a crime that had been so much talked about. If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion, it is needless to say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his judgment was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had been surrounded, and of which he had never caught the meaning; they having seemed but part and parcel of the habitual and promiscuous divagations of his too constructive companion. When it came over him that, for years, she had made a fool of him, to himself and to others, he could have beaten her, for grief and shame; and yet, before he administered this rebuke, he had to remember that she only chattered (though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter which he spent nine tenths of his time in brooding over. When she tried to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on the glory of the Purvises, and reminding him that he was related, through them, to half the aristocracy of England, he felt that she was turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born. He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and his stoicism on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep dejection of her later years. If he had only let her brag to him a little about himself, she would have felt that she was making up, by so much, for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s relations in the newspaper, but he always turned away his eyes from it. He had nothing to ask of them, and he wished to prove to himself that he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat) as completely as they ignored him. Decidedly, he cried to himself at times, he was with the people, and every possible vengeance of the people, as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he was happy to feel that he had blood in his veins that would account for the finest sensibilities.
He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand; Millicent Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box, or a couple of stalls at ten shillings apiece?” he asked of her, with a frankness of irony which, with this young lady, fortunately, it was perfectly possible to practice. She had answered that she would content herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as such a position involved an expenditure which he was still unable to meet, he waited one night upon Mr. Vetch, to whom he had already, more than once, had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His relations with the caustic fiddler were peculiar; they were much better in fact than they were in theory. Mr. Vetch had let him know — long before this, and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost — the part he had played when the question of the child’s being taken to Milbank was so distressingly presented; and Hyacinth, in the face of this information, had inquired, with some sublimity, what the devil the fiddler had to do with his private affairs. Theophilus Vetch had replied that it was not as an affair of his, but as an affair of Pinnie’s, that he had considered the matter; and Hyacinth afterwards had let the question drop, though he had never been formally reconciled to his officious neighbor. Of course his feeling about him had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr. Vetch had taken to get him a place with old Crookenden; and at the period of which I write it had long been familiar to him that the fiddler didn’t care a straw what he thought of his advice at the famous crisis, and entertained himself with watching the career of so curiously concocted a youth. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to perceive that the old man’s interest was kindly, and to-day, at any rate, our hero would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not knowing the truth, horrible as the truth might be. His miserable mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of motive, and, under the circumstances, that was a benefit. What he chiefly objected to in Theophilus Vetch was a certain air of still regarding him as extremely juvenile; he would have got on with him much better if the fiddler had consented to recognize the degree in which he was already a man of the world. Vetch knew an immense deal about society, and he seemed to know the more because he never swaggered — it was only little by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as if his chief entertainment resided in a private, humorous commentary on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he himself gave considerable evidence of liking his fellow-resident in Lomax Place when he asked him to lend him half a crown. Somehow, circumstances, of old, had tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little bookbinder, it also touched him; he had more than once solved the problem of deciding how to behave when the fiddler exasperated him by simply asking him some service. The old man had never refused. It was satisfactory to Hyacinth to remember this, as he knocked at his door, very late, after he had allowed him time to come home from the theatre. He knew his habits: Mr. Vetch never went straight to bed, but sat by his fire an hour, smoking his pipe, mixing a grog, and reading some old book. Hyacinth knew when to go up by the light in his window.
“Oh, I know I haven’t been to see you for a long time,” he said, in response to the remark with which the fiddler greeted him; “and I may as well tell you immediately what has brought me at present — in addition to the desire to ask after your health. I want to take a young lady to the theatre.”
Mr. Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear, he looked to our hero so bald, so shabby, so flaccid and forlorn, that on the spot Hyacinth ceased to hesitate as to his claims in the event of a social liquidation; he, too, was unmistakably a creditor. “I’m afraid you find your young lady rather expensive.”
“I find everything expensive,” said Hyacinth, as if to finish that subject.
“Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.”
“What do you mean by that?” the young man asked, staring.
“Why, you told me, in the autumn, that you were just about to join a few.” “A few? How many do you suppose?” And Hyacinth checked himself. “Do you suppose if I had been serious I would tell?”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr. Vetch murmured, with a sigh. Then he went on: “You want to take her to my shop, eh?”
“I’m sorry to say she won’t go there. She wants something in the Strand: that’s a great point. She wants very much to see the Pearl of Paraguay. I don’t wish to pay anything, if possible; I am sorry to say I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres, and I have heard you say that you do each other little favors, from place to place — a charge de revanche, as the French say — it occurred to me that you might be able to get me an order. The piece has been running a long time, and most people (except poor devils like me) must have seen it: therefore there probably isn’t a rush.”
Mr. Vetch listened in silence, and presently he said, “Do you want a box?”
“Oh, no; something more modest.”