Transcriber’s Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
THE PRINCESS
CASAMASSIMA
BY
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1921
COPYRIGHT
First published in 1886
BOOK THIRD
XXII
Hyacinth got up early—an operation attended withvery little effort, as he had scarce closed his eyes allnight. What he saw from his window made him dressas quickly as a young man might who desired morethan ever that his appearance shouldn’t give strangeideas about him: an old garden with parterres incurious figures and little intervals of lawn that seemedto our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green. Atone end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brickwhich looked down on the other side into a canal, amoat, a quaint old pond (he hardly knew what tocall it) and from the same standpoint showed aconsiderable part of the main body of the house—Hyacinth’s room belonging to a wing that commandedthe extensive irregular back—which wasrichly grey wherever clear of the ivy and the otherdense creepers, and everywhere infinitely a picture:with a high-piled ancient russet roof broken by hugechimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner ofodd gables and windows on different lines, with allmanner of antique patches and protrusions and witha particularly fascinating architectural excrescencewhere a wonderful clock-face was lodged, a clock-facecovered with gilding and blazonry but showingmany traces of the years and the weather. He hadnever in his life been in the country—the real country,as he called it, the country which was not the mere4ravelled fringe of London—and there entered throughhis open casement the breath of a world enchantinglynew and after his recent feverish hours unspeakablyrefreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingledodours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of amusical silence that consisted for the greater part ofthe voices of many birds. There were tall quiet treesnear by and afar off and everywhere; and the groupof objects that greeted his eyes evidently formedonly a corner of larger spaces and of a more complicatedscene. There was a world to be revealedto him: it lay waiting with the dew on it underhis windows, and he must go down and take of itsuch possession as he might.
On his arrival at ten o’clock the night before hehad only got the impression of a mile-long stretchof park, after turning in at a gate; of the crackingof gravel under the wheels of the fly and of the glowof several windows, suggesting indoor cheer, in afront that lifted a range of vague grand effects intothe starlight. It was much of a relief