Hyacinth had long since convinced himself that he had acquired a manner with which he could meet allusions of this kind: he had had, first and last, so many opportunities to practise it. Therefore he looked at his companion very steadily while he said, “My mother died many years ago; she was a great invalid. But Pinnie has been awfully good to me.”
“My mother’s dead, too,” Miss Henning remarked. “She died very suddenly. I dare say you remember her in the Place.” Then, while Hyacinth disengaged from the past the wavering figure of Mrs Henning, of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him as dirty, the girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment, “But I have had no Pinnie.”
“You look as if you could take care of yourself.”
“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 gaby! 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 for ever 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 accordeon.”