LITMIR.BIZ

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as if he had been a bishop — or more, indeed, for she didn’t think much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his work before she had gone; and tonight Hyacinth could see for himself how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling, high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished, of a poor North Country house, bedecked with penny ornaments, and related in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed estates. He spent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd, crippled, chattering, clever, trenchant sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far better than Pinnie, or than Millicent Henning), and who startled, puzzled, and at the same time rather distressed him by the manner in which she referred herself to the most abject class — the class that prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter in the presence of its betters. That was Pinnie’s turn, of course; but Hyacinth had long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian patience in her blood, and that, though she had a tender soul, she had not a great one. She was more entertained than afflicted, however, by Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered about; this was the first time he had heard it described with that degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually, almost morbidly, conscious that the circle in which he lived was an infinitesimally small, shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London, and his imagination plunged again and again into the waves that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter, happier vision — the vision of societies in which, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked about art, literature, and history. When Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject of Lady Aurora, she became more quiet, asking, as yet, however, no questions about Hyacinth, whom she seemed to take very much for granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon again, and he added, to explain this wish, “You know you seem to me very curious people.”

      Miss Muniment did not in the least repudiate the imputation. “Oh, yes, I dare say we seem very curious. I think we are generally thought so, especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.” And she laughed till her bed creaked again.

      “Perhaps it’s lucky you are ill; perhaps if you had your health you would be all over the place,” Hyacinth suggested. And he went on, candidly, “I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.”

      “I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you had known my father and mother.” “Were they such a rare lot?” “I think you would say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the mines, where the filthy coal is dug out. That’s where my father came from — he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He never had a day’s schooling in his life; but he climbed up out of his black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of the pits and misery, too. My father was short arid stumpy, but she was magnificent — the finest woman in the country, and the bravest, and the best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was small and quick and black: I know I’m just his pattern, barring that he did have his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. But between him and my mother, for grand, high intelligence, there wasn’t much to choose. But what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father had no more of that in his character than I have in my poor body. He invented a machine, and he sold it, at Bradford, for fifteen pounds: I mean the whole right of it, and every hope and pride of his family. He was always straying, and my mother was always bringing him back. She had plenty to do, with me a puny, ailing brat from the moment I opened my eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came back; or only came back a loose bloody bundle of clothes. Pie had fallen into a gravel-pit; he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my brother will never touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and that I only have a drop once a week or so, in the way of a strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more. If she could have come to us before my mother went, that would have been a saving. I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept us decent — if such a scrap as me can be said to be decent. At any rate, she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She went to the wash-tub, and she might have been a queen, as she stood there with her bare arms ill the foul linen and her long hair braided on her head. She was wonderful handsome, but he would have been a bold man that would have taken upon himself to tell her so. And it was from her we got our education — she was determined we should rise above the common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go into such things; but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book. She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t; and her idea, for us, was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You can see for yourself that that’s what has come about. How he got it is more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s cleverness wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t been clever himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow placard pasted on a wall, or a time - table at a railway station, than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad — picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing — only that I ‘d have made a poor feast — and just lay that gallant creature on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds; straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rosy Muniment, in conclusion; “but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had intellect, at least, to give us.”

      Hyacinth listened to this recital with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvelous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment sounded the word “intellect” made him feel this; she pronounced it as if she were distributing prizes for a high degree of it. No doubt the tipsy inventor and the queenly laundress had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence upon her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb — the chord of melancholy, bitter, aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made in his spirit if there had been some pure, honorable figure like that to shed her influence over it.

      “Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired, after a little.

      The eyes of his hostess glittered at him for a moment. “If you ever quarrel with him, you will see whose side I’ll take.”

      “Ah, before that I shall make you like me.”

      “That’s very possible, and you’ll see I will fling you over!”

      “Why, then, do you object so to his views — his ideas about the way the people will come up?”

      “Because I think he’ll get over them.”

      “Never — never!” cried Hyacinth. “I have only known him an hour or two, but I deny that with all my strength.”

      “Is that the way you are going to make me like you — contradicting me so?” Miss Muniment inquired, with familiar archness.

      “What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.”

      “I don’t believe you ‘re a lamb at all. Certainly you are not, if you want all the great people pulled down, and the most dreadful scenes enacted.”

      “Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything

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