“Don’t say anything about _her_,” the young man interposed, trembling.
“And pray why not about ‘her’, I should like to know? You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.
“My dear fellow, you know you _have_ been to her,” Captain Sholto remarked, smiling.
Hyacinth turned upon him, staring, at once challenged and baffled by his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but it was not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly, I have been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and begged me, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, any way, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled him and eluded him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had entertained and gratified him.
“My dear fellow, whatever I am, I am not an ass,” this gentleman replied, with imperturbable good-humour. “I don’t reproach you with anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good friends—my good friends,” and he laid a hand, in his practised way, on Hyacinth’s shoulder, while, with the other pressed to his heart, he bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in it, “I am determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’ quarrels ought always to end.”
Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to Millicent, “You are not really jealous of—of any one. You pretend that, only to throw dust in my eyes.”
To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests. He pronounced them a dear delightful, abominable young couple; he declared it was most interesting to see how, in people of their sort, the passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s arms; and he wound up by proposing that they should all terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the Pavilion music-hall, the nearest place of entertainment in that neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her mistress’s wig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is justified when I relate that he placed this idea in so attractive a light that his companions finally entered a hansom with him and rattled toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the seat, between the others. Two or three times his ears burned; he felt that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If it was at his expense, the whole evening constituted for them, indeed, an opportunity, and this thought rendered his diversion but scantily absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a private box and ordered ices to be brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own. It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he withheld a question which rose to his lips repeatedly—a disposition to inquire of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out of the public-house, if he had not been waiting there, preconcertedly, for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked himself if a girl could change, that way, from one month to the other. This was optimistic, but, all the same, he reflected, before leaving the Pavilion, that he could see quite well what Lady Aurora meant by thinking Captain Sholto vulgar.