THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA. Генри ДжеймÑЧитать онлайн книгу.
in him. What that was she would have been unable to say.
“Thank you very much for putting me first,” the fiddler rejoined, after a series of puffs. “The youngster’s interesting, one sees that he has a mind, and in that respect he is — I won’t say unique, but peculiar. I shall watch him with curiosity, to see what he grows into. But I shall always be glad that I’m a selfish brute of a bachelor; that I never invested in that class of goods.”
“Well, you are comforting. You would spoil him more than I do,” said Amanda.
“Possibly, but it would be in a different way. I wouldn’t tell him every three minutes that his father was a duke.”
“A duke I never mentioned!” the little dressmaker cried, with eagerness. “I never specified any rank, nor said a word about any one in particular. I never so much as insinuated the name of his lordship. But I may have said that if the truth was to be found out, he might be proved to be connected — in the way of cousinship, or something of the kind, — with the highest in the land. I should have thought myself wanting if I hadn’t given him a glimpse of that. But there is one thing I have always added — that the truth never is found out.”
“You are still more comforting than I!” Mr. Vetch exclaimed. He continued to watch her, with his charitable, round-faced smile, and then he said, “You won’t do what I say; so what is the use of my telling you?”
“I assure you I will, if you say you believe it’s the only right,”
“Do I often say anything so asinine? Right — right? what have you to do with that? If you want the only right, you are very particular.”
“Please, then, what am I to go by?” the dressmaker asked, bewildered.
“You are to go by this, by what will take the youngster down.”
“Take him down, my poor little pet?”
“Your poor little pet thinks himself the flower of creation. I don’t say there is any harm in that: a fine, blooming, odoriferous conceit is a natural appendage of youth and cleverness. I don’t say there is any great harm in it, but if you want a guide as to how you are to treat a boy, that’s as good a guide as any other.”
“You want me to arrange the interview, then?”
“I don’t want you to do anything, but give me another sip of brandy. I just say this: that I think it’s a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don’t live in a fool’s paradise. I did that till I was nearly forty; then I woke up and found I was in Lomax Place.” Whenever Mr. Vetch said anything that could be construed as a reference to a former position which had had elements of distinction, Miss Pynsent observed a discreet, a respectful silence, and that is why she did not challenge him now, though she wanted very much to say that Hyacinth was no more “presumptuous” (that was the term she should have used) than he had reason to be, with his genteel figure and his wonderful intelligence; and that as for thinking himself a “flower” of any kind, he knew but too well that he lived in a small black-faced house, miles away from the West End, rented by a poor little woman who took lodgers, and who, as they were of such a class that they were not always to be depended upon to settle her weekly account, had a strain to make two ends meet, in spite of the sign between her windows —
MISS AMANDA PYNSENT. MODES ET ROBES. dressmaking in all its branches. court-dresses, mantles. and fashionable bonnets.
Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts), and remarked that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world, without one’s wanting him to be any lower. “But by the time he’s twenty, he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar, and that when an old friend came to see you late at night, it was not your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.”
“Do you mean he’ll forget me, he’ll deny me?” cried Miss Pynsent, stopping the movement of her needle, short off, for the first time.
“As the person designated in that attractive blazonry on the outside of your house, decidedly he will; and me, equally, as a bald-headed, pot-bellied fiddler, who regarded you as the most graceful and refined of his acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never knew you: I don’t think he will ever be such an odious little cad as that; he probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some love, and possibly even some gratitude, in him. But he will, in his imagination (and that will always persuade him), subject you to some extraordinary metamorphosis; he will dress you up.”
“He’ll dress me up!” Amanda ejaculated, quite ceasing to follow the train of Mr. Vetch’s demonstration. “Do you mean that he’ll have the property — that his relations will take him up?”
“My dear, delightful, idiotic Pinnie, I am speaking in a figurative manner. I don’t pretend to say what his precise position will be when we are relegated; but I affirm that relegation will be our fate. Therefore don’t stuff him with any more illusions than are necessary to keep him alive; he will be sure to pick up enough on the way. On the contrary, give him a good stiff dose of the truth at the start.”
“Dear me, dear me, of course you see much further into it than I could ever do,” Pinnie murmured, as she threaded a needle.
Mr. Vetch paused a minute, but apparently not out of deference to this amiable interruption. He went on suddenly, with a ring of feeling in his voice. “Let him know, because it will be useful to him later, the state of the account between society and himself; he can then conduct himself accordingly. If he is the illegitimate child of a French good-for-naught who murdered one of her numerous lovers, don’t shuffle out of sight so important a fact. I regard that as a most valuable origin.”
“Lord, Mr. Vetch, how you talk!” cried Miss Pynsent, staring. “I don’t know what one would think, to hear you.”
“Surely, my dear lady, and for this reason: that those are the people with whom society has to count. It hasn’t with you and me.” Miss Pynsent gave a sigh which might have meant either that she was well aware of that, or that Mr. Vetch had a terrible way of enlarging a subject, especially when it was already too big for her; and her philosophic visitor went on: “Poor little devil, let him see her, let him see her.”
“And if later, when he’s twenty, he says to me that if I hadn’t meddled in it he need never have known, he need never have had that shame, pray what am I to say to him then? That’s what I can’t get out my head.”
“You can say to him that a young man who is sorry for having gone to his mother when, in her last hours, she lay groaning for him on a pallet in a penitentiary, deserves more than the sharpest pang he can possibly feel.” And the little fiddler, getting up, went over to the fireplace and shook out the ashes of his pipe.
“Well, I am sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent, folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated her throughout the evening.
“I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly: that’s not the worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull acceptance, the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density.” Here Mr. Vetch stopped short; his hostess stood before him with eyes of entreaty, with clasped hands.
“Now, Theophilus Vetch, don’t go off into them dreadful wild theories,” she cried, always ungrammatical when she was strongly moved. “You always fly away over the housetops. I thought you liked him better — the dear little unfortunate.”
Theophilus Vetch had pocketed his pipe; he put on his hat with the freedom of old acquaintance and of Lomax Place, and took up his small, coffinlike fiddle-case.