I
“Oh yes, I daresay I can find the child, if you would like to see
him,” Miss Pynsent said; she had a fluttered wish to assent to every
suggestion made by her visitor, whom she regarded as a high and rather
terrible personage. To look for the little boy she came out of her
small parlour, which she had been ashamed to exhibit in so untidy a
state, with paper “patterns” lying about on the furniture and snippings
of stuff scattered over the carpet—she came out of this somewhat
stuffy sanctuary, dedicated at once to social intercourse and to the
ingenious art to which her life had been devoted, and, opening the
house-door, turned her eyes up and down the little street. It would
presently be tea-time, and she knew that at that solemn hour Hyacinth
narrowed the circle of his wanderings. She was anxious and impatient
and in a fever of excitement and complacency, not wanting to keep Mrs.
Bowerbank waiting, though she sat there, heavily and consideringly, as
if she meant to stay; and wondering not a little whether the object
of her quest would have a dirty face. Mrs. Bowerbank had intimated
so definitely that she thought it remarkable on Miss Pynsent’s part
to have taken care of him gratuitously for so many years, that the
humble dressmaker, whose imagination took flights about every one but
herself and who had never been conscious of an exemplary benevolence,
suddenly aspired to appear, throughout, as devoted to the child as
she had struck her large, grave guest as being, and felt how much
she should like him to come in fresh and frank and looking as pretty
as he sometimes did. Miss Pynsent, who blinked confusedly as she
surveyed the outer prospect, was very much flushed, partly with the
agitation of what Mrs. Bowerbank had told her and partly because, when
she offered that lady a drop of refreshment at the end of so long
an expedition, she had said she couldn’t think of touching anything
unless Miss Pynsent would keep her company. The “cheffoneer,” as
Amanda was always careful to call it, yielded up a small bottle which,
formerly containing eau-de-cologne, now exhibited half a pint of a
rich gold-coloured liquid. Miss Pynsent was very delicate; she lived
on tea and watercress and kept the little bottle in the cheffoneer
only for great emergencies. She didn’t like hot brandy and water with a
lump or two of sugar, but she partook of half a tumbler on the present
occasion, which was of a highly exceptional kind. At this time of day
the boy was often planted in front of the little sweet-shop on the
other side of the street, an establishment where periodical literature,
as well as tough toffy and hard lollipops, was dispensed and where
song-books and pictorial sheets were attractively exhibited in the
small-paned dirty window. He used to stand there for half an hour at
a time and spell out the first page of the romances in the _Family
Herald_ and the _London Journal_, where he particularly admired the
obligatory illustration in which the noble characters (they were always
of the highest birth) were presented to the carnal eye. When he had
a penny he spent only a fraction of it on stale sugar-candy; for the
remaining halfpenny he always bought a ballad with a vivid woodcut at
the top. Now, however, he was not at his post of contemplation, nor was
he visible anywhere to Miss Pynsent’s impatient glance.
“Millicent ’Enning, tell me quickly, have you seen my child?” These
words were addressed by Miss Pynsent to a little girl who sat on
the doorstep of the adjacent house nursing a dingy doll and whose
extraordinary luxuriance of dark brown hair was surmounted by a torn
straw hat.
The child looked up from her dandling and patting and, after a stare
of which the blankness was visibly overdone, replied: “Law no, Miss
Pynsent, I never see him.”
“Aren’t you always messing about with him, you naughty little girl?”
the dressmaker returned with sharpness. “Isn’t he round the corner,
playing marbles or—or some jumping game?” Miss Pynsent went on, trying
to be suggestive.
“I assure _you_ he never plays nothing,” said Millicent Henning with
a mature manner which she bore out by adding: “And I don’t know why I
should be called naughty, neither.”
“Well, if you want to be called good please go find him and tell him
there’s a lady come here on purpose to see him this very instant.”
Miss Pynsent waited a moment to see if her injunction would be obeyed,
but she got no satisfaction beyond another gaze of deliberation, which
made her feel that the child’s perversity was as great as the beauty,
somewhat soiled and dimmed, of her insolent little face. She turned
back into the house with an exclamation of despair, and as soon as
she had disappeared Millicent Henning sprang erect and began to race
down the street in the direction of another, which crossed it. I take
no unfair advantage of the innocence of childhood in saying that the
motive of this young lady’s flight was not a desire to be agreeable to
Miss Pynsent, but an extreme curiosity on the subject of the visitor
who wanted to see Hyacinth Robinson. She wished to participate, if
only in imagination, in the interview that might take place, and she
was moved also by a quick revival of friendly feeling for the boy,
from whom she had parted only half an hour before with considerable
asperity. She was not a very clinging little creature, and there was no
one in her own domestic circle to whom she was much attached; but she
liked to kiss Hyacinth when he didn’t push her away and tell her she
was hateful. It was in this action and epithet he had indulged half an
hour ago; but she had reflected rapidly (while she made play with Miss
Pynsent) that it was the worst he had ever done. Millicent Henning was
only eight years of age, but she knew there was worse in the world than
that.
Mrs. Bowerbank, in a leisurely, roundabout way, wandered off to her
sister, Mrs. Chipperfield, whom she had come into that part of the
world to see, and the whole history of the dropsical tendencies of
whose husband, an undertaker with a business that had been a blessing
because you could always count on it, she unfolded to Miss Pynsent
between the sips of a second glass. She was a high-shouldered, towering
woman, and suggested squareness as well as a pervasion of the upper
air, so that Amanda reflected that she must be very difficult to fit,
and had a sinking at the idea of the number of pins she would take.
Her sister had nine children and she herself had seven, the eldest of
whom she left in charge of the others when she went to her service. She
was on duty at the prison only during the day; she had to be there at
seven in the morning, but she got her evenings at home, quite regular
and comfortable. Miss Pynsent thought it wonderful she could talk of
comfort in such a life as that, but could easily imagine she should be
glad to get away at night, for at that time the place must be much more
terrible.
“And aren’t you frightened of them—ever?” she inquired, looking up at
her visitor with her little heated face.
Mrs. Bowerbank, who was very slow, considered her so long before
replying that she felt herself to be, to an alarming degree, in the
eye of the law; for who could be more closely connected with the
administration of justice than a female turnkey, especially so big and
majestic a one? “I expect they’re more frightened of me,” she declared
at last; and it was an idea into which Miss Pynsent could easily enter.
“And at night I suppose they rave quite awful,” the little dressmaker
suggested, feeling vaguely that prisons and madhouses came very much to
the same.
“Well, if they do we hush ’em up,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked rather
portentously; while Miss Pynsent fidgeted to the door again, without
results, to see if the child had become visible. She observed to her
guest that she couldn’t call it anything but contrary that he shouldn’t
turn up when he knew so well, most days in the week, when his tea was
ready. To which Mrs. Bowerbank rejoined, fixing her companion again
with the steady orb of justice: “And do he have his tea that way by
himself, like a real little gentleman?”
“Well, I try to give it to him tidy-like, at a suitable hour,” said
Miss Pynsent guiltily. “And there might be some who would say that, for
the matter of that, he is a real little gentleman,” she added with an
effort at mitigation which, as she immediately became conscious, only
involved her more deeply.
“There are people silly enough to say anything. If it’s your parents
that settle your station the child hasn’t much to be thankful for,”
Mrs. Bowerbank went on in the manner of a woman accustomed to looking
facts in the face.
Miss Pynsent was very timid, but she adored the aristocracy, and there
were elements in the boy’s life which she was not prepared to sacrifice
even to a person who represented such a possibility of grating bolts
and clanking chains. “I suppose we oughtn’t to forget that his father
was very high,” she suggested appealingly and with a tight clasp of her
hands in her lap.
“His father? Who knows who he was? He doesn’t set up for having a
father, does he?”
“But, surely, wasn’t it proved that Lord Frederick—?”
“My dear woman, nothing was proved except that she stabbed his lordship
in the back with a very long knife, that he died of the blow, and that
she got the full sentence. What does such a piece as that know about
fathers? The less said about the poor child’s ancestors the better!”
This view of the case caused Miss Pynsent fairly to gasp, for it
pushed over with a touch a tall fond fantastic structure that she had
been piling up for years. Even as she heard it crash around her she
couldn’t forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material.
“Really—really,” she panted, “she never had to do with any one but the
nobility!”
Mrs. Bowerbank surveyed her hostess with an expressionless eye. “My
dear young lady, what does a respectable little body like you, that
sits all day with her needle and scissors, know about the doings of
a wicked low foreigner of the sort that carries a knife? I was there
when she came in and I know to what she had sunk. Her conversation was
choice, I assure you.”
“Oh, it’s very dreadful, and of course I know nothing in particular,”
Miss Pynsent quavered. “But she wasn’t low when I worked at the same
place with her, and she often told me she would do nothing for any one
that wasn’t at the very top.”
“She might have talked to you of something that would have done you
both more good,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked, while the dressmaker felt
rebuked in the past as well as in the present. “At the very top, poor
thing! Well, she’s at the very bottom now. If she wasn’t low when she
worked, it’s a pity she didn’t stick to her work; and as for pride
of birth, that’s an article I recommend your young friend to leave to
others. You had better believe what I say, because I’m a woman of the
world.”
Indeed she was, as Miss Pynsent felt, to whom all this was very
terrible, letting in the cold light of the penal system on a dear,
dim little theory. She had cared for the child because maternity
was in her nature and this was the only manner in which fortune had
put it in her path to become a mother. She had had herself as few
belongings as the desolate baby, and it had seemed to her he would
add to her importance in the little world of Lomax Place (if she kept
it a secret how she came by him) quite in the proportion in which she
should contribute to his maintenance. Her own isolation went out to
his, and in the course of time their associated solitude was peopled
by the dressmaker’s romantic mind with a hundred consoling evocations.
The boy proved neither a dunce nor a reprobate; but what endeared him
to her most was her conviction that he belonged, “by the left hand,”
as she had read in a novel, to a proud and ancient race, the list of
whose representatives and the record of whose alliances she had once
(when she took home some work and was made to wait, alone, in a lady’s
boudoir) had the opportunity of reading in a fat red book, eagerly
and tremblingly consulted. She bent her head before Mrs. Bowerbank’s
overwhelming logic, but she felt in her heart that she shouldn’t give
the child up for mere words she couldn’t answer—of course she couldn’t
answer them—that she believed in him still, and that she recognised
as distinctly as she revered the quality of her betters. To believe in
Hyacinth, for Miss Pynsent, was to believe that he _was_ the son of the
extremely immoral Lord Frederick. She had from his earliest age made
him feel that there was a grandeur in his past, and as Mrs. Bowerbank
would be sure not to approve of such aberrations she prayed she might
not be questioned on that part of the business. It was not that when
it was necessary the little dressmaker had any scruple about using
the arts of prevarication; she was a kind and innocent creature, but
she told fibs as freely as she applied trimmings. She had, however,
not yet been questioned by an emissary of the law, and her heart beat
faster when Mrs. Bowerbank said to her in deep tones, with an effect of
abruptness: “And pray, Miss Pynsent, does the innocent child know it?”
“Know about Lord Frederick?” Miss Pynsent palpitated.
“Bother Lord Frederick! Know about his mother.”
“Oh, I can’t say that. I’ve never told him.”
“But has any one else told him?”
To this inquiry Miss Pynsent’s answer was more prompt and more proud;
it was with an agreeable sense of having conducted herself with
extraordinary wisdom and propriety that she replied: “How could any one
know? I’ve never breathed it to a creature!”
Mrs. Bowerbank gave utterance to no commendation; she only put down
her empty glass and wiped her large mouth with much thoroughness and
judgement. Then she said, as if it were as cheerful an idea as, in the
premises, she was capable of expressing: “Ah, well, there’ll be plenty
later on to give him all information!”
“I pray God he may live and die without knowing it!” Miss Pynsent cried
with intensity.
Her companion gazed at her with a kind of professional patience. “You
don’t keep your ideas together. How can he go to her then, if he’s
never to know?”
“Oh, did you mean she’d tell him?” Miss Pynsent plaintively gasped.
“Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and
gives him—what she mentioned to me.”
“What she mentioned—?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed.
“The kiss her lips have been famished for all these years.”
“Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured while her
pity gushed up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she
pursued simply. Then she added with an inspiration more brilliant: “We
might tell him she’s his aunt!”
“You may tell him she’s his grandmother if you like. But it’s all in
the family.”
“Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent musingly and irrepressibly. “And
will she speak that fluent French?” she inquired as from a full mind.
“In that case he won’t understand.”
“Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs.
Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort.
But she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which
bristled with dangers: “Of course it’s just according to your own idea.
You needn’t bring the child at all unless you like. There’s many a one
that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.”
“And would nothing be done to me if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent asked,
unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the arm of
the law that was stretched out to touch her.
“The only thing that could happen to you would be that _he_ might throw
it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed with a
gloomy breadth of view.
“Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.”
“Oh, he’d be sure to know, one of these days. We see a great deal
of that—the way things come out,” said Mrs. Bowerbank, whose outlook
appeared to abound in cheerless contingencies. “You must remember that
it’s her dying wish and that you may have it on your conscience.”
“That’s a thing I _never_ could abide!” the little dressmaker exclaimed
with great emphasis and a visible shiver; after which she picked up
various scattered remnants of muslin and cut paper and began to roll
them together with a desperate and mechanical haste. “It’s quite awful,
to know what to do—if you’re very sure she _is_ dying.”
“Do you mean she’s shamming? We’ve plenty of that—but we know how to
treat ’em.”
“Lord, I suppose so,” murmured Miss Pynsent; while her visitor went on
to say that the unfortunate person on whose behalf she had undertaken
this solemn pilgrimage might live a week and might live a fortnight,
but if she lived a month would violate (as Mrs. Bowerbank might express
herself) every established law of nature, being reduced to skin and
bone and with nothing left of her but the main desire to see her child.
“If you’re afraid of her talking, it isn’t much she’d be able to
say. And we shouldn’t allow you more than about eight minutes,” Mrs.
Bowerbank pursued in a tone that seemed to refer itself to an iron
discipline.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t want more; that would be enough to last me many
a year,” said Miss Pynsent accommodatingly. And then she added with
another illumination: “Don’t you think he might throw it up against me
that I _did_ take him? People might tell him about her in later years;
but if he hadn’t seen her he wouldn’t be obliged to believe them.”
Mrs. Bowerbank considered this a moment as if it were rather an
intricate argument, and then answered quite in the spirit of her
official pessimism. “There’s one thing you may be sure of: whatever you
decide to do, as soon as ever he grows up he’ll make you wish you had
done the opposite.” Mrs. Bowerbank called it oppos_ite_.
“Oh dear then, I’m glad it will be a long time.”
“It will be ever so long, if once he gets it into his head! At any rate
you must do as you think best. Only if you come you mustn’t come when
it’s all over.”
“It’s too impossible to decide.”
“It is indeed,” said Mrs. Bowerbank with superior consistency. And she
seemed more placidly grim than ever when she remarked, gathering up
her loosened shawl, that she was much obliged to Miss Pynsent for her
civility and had been quite freshened up: her visit had so completely
deprived her hostess of that sort of calm. Miss Pynsent gave the
fullest expression to her perplexity in the supreme exclamation:
“If you could only wait and see the child I’m sure it would help you to
judge!”
“My dear woman, I don’t want to judge—it’s none of our business!” Mrs.
Bowerbank exclaimed; and she had no sooner uttered the words than the
door of the room creaked open and a small boy stood there gazing at
her. Her eyes rested on him a moment, and then, most unexpectedly, she
gave an inconsequent cry. “Is that the child? Oh, Lord o’ mercy, don’t
take _him_!”
“Now _ain’t_ he shrinking and sensitive?” demanded Miss Pynsent, who
had pounced upon him and, holding him an instant at arm’s length,
appealed eagerly to her visitor. “Ain’t he delicate and high-bred,
and wouldn’t he be thrown into a state?” Delicate as he might be the
little dressmaker shook him smartly for his naughtiness in being out of
the way when he was wanted, and brought him to the big square-faced,
deep-voiced lady who took up, as it were, all that side of the room.
But Mrs. Bowerbank laid no hand upon him; she only dropped her gaze
from a tremendous height, and her forbearance seemed a tribute to that
fragility of constitution on which Miss Pynsent desired to insist, just
as her continued gravity was an implication that this scrupulous woman
might well not know what to do. “Speak to the lady nicely and tell her
you’re very sorry to have kept her waiting.”
The child hesitated while he repaid with interest Mrs. Bowerbank’s
inspection, and then he said with a cool, conscious indifference which
Miss Pynsent instantly recognised as his aristocratic manner: “I don’t
think she can have been in a very great hurry.”
There was irony in the words, for it is a remarkable fact that even
at the age of ten Hyacinth Robinson was ironic; but the subject of his
allusion, who was not nimble withal, appeared not to interpret it; so
that she met it only by remarking over his head to Miss Pynsent: “It’s
the very face of her again—only for the complexion!”
“Of _her_? But what do you say to Lord Frederick?”
“I _have_ seen lords that wasn’t so dainty!”
Miss Pynsent had seen very few lords, but she entered with a passionate
thrill into this generalisation; controlling herself, however, for she
remembered the child was tremendously sharp, sufficiently to declare in
an edifying tone that he would look more like what he ought to if his
face were a little cleaner.
“It was probably Millicent Henning dirtied my face when she kissed
me,” the boy announced with slow gravity, looking all the while at Mrs.
Bowerbank. He exhibited not a symptom of shyness.
“Millicent ’Enning’s a very bad little girl; she’ll come to no good,”
said Miss Pynsent with familiar decision and also, considering the
young lady in question had been her effective messenger, with marked
ingratitude.
Against this qualification the child instantly protested. “Why is she
bad? I don’t think she’s bad; I like her awfully.” It came over him
that he had too hastily shifted to her shoulders the responsibility
of his unseemly appearance, and he wished to make up to her for this
betrayal. He dimly felt that nothing but that particular accusation
could have pushed him to it, for he hated people with too few fair
interspaces, too many smutches and streaks. Millicent Henning generally
had two or three of these at least, which she borrowed from her doll,
into whom she was always rubbing her nose and whose dinginess was
contagious. It was quite inevitable she should have left her mark under
his own nose when she claimed her reward for coming to tell him about
the lady who wanted him.
Miss Pynsent held the boy against her knee, trying to present him
so that Mrs. Bowerbank should agree with her about his having the
air of race. He was exceedingly diminutive, even for his years,
and though his appearance was not so sickly as to excite remark, it
seemed written in his attenuated little person that he would never
be either tall or positively hard. His dark blue eyes were separated
by a wide interval, which increased the fairness and sweetness of his
face, and his abundant curly hair, which grew thick and long, had the
golden brownness predestined to elicit exclamations of delight from
ladies when they take the inventory of a child. His features were
formed and distributed; his head was set on a slim, straight neck;
his expression, grave and clear, showed a quick perception as well as
a great credulity; and he was altogether, in his tender fineness, an
interesting, an appealing little person.
“Yes, he’s one that would be sure to remember,” said Mrs. Bowerbank,
mentally contrasting him with the undeveloped members of her own brood,
who had never been retentive of anything but the halfpence which they
occasionally contrived to filch from her. Her eyes descended to the
details of his dress: the careful mending of his short breeches and his
long, coloured stockings, which she was in a position to appreciate,
as well as the knot of bright ribbon which the dressmaker had passed
into his collar, slightly crumpled by Miss Henning’s embrace. Of course
Miss Pynsent had only one to look after, but her visitor was obliged
to recognise that she had the highest standard in respect to buttons.
“And you _do_ turn him out so it’s a pleasure,” she went on, noting
the ingenious patches in the child’s shoes, which, to her mind, were
repaired for all the world like those of a little nobleman.
“I’m sure you’re very civil,” said Miss Pynsent, in a state of severe
exaltation. “There’s never a needle but mine has come near him. That’s
exactly what I think: the impression would go so deep.”
“Do you want to see me only to look at me?” Hyacinth inquired with a
candour which, though unstudied, had again much satiric force.
“I’m sure it’s very kind of the lady to notice you at all!” cried his
protectress, giving him an ineffectual jerk. “You’re no bigger than a
flea; there are many that wouldn’t know you from one, and not one of
them ‘performing’ ones either.”
“You’ll find he’s big enough, I expect, when he begins to go,” Mrs.
Bowerbank remarked tranquilly; and she added that now she saw how he
was done for she couldn’t but feel the other side was to be considered.
In her effort to be discreet by reason of his being present (and so
precociously attentive) she became slightly enigmatical; but Miss
Pynsent gathered her meaning, which was that it was very true the
child would take everything in and keep it, yet that at the same time
it was precisely his being so attractive that made it a kind of sin
not to gratify the poor woman, who, if she knew what he looked like
to-day, wouldn’t forgive the person who had stepped into her place for
not producing him. “Certainly, in her position, I should go off easier
if I had seen them curls,” Mrs. Bowerbank declared with a flight of
maternal imagination which brought her to her feet; while Miss Pynsent
felt she was leaving her dreadfully ploughed up and without any really
fertilising seed sown. The little dressmaker packed the child upstairs
to tidy himself for his tea, and as she accompanied her visitor to the
door pleaded that if the latter would have a little more patience she
would think a day or two longer what was best and write when she should
have decided. Mrs. Bowerbank continued to move in a realm superior to
poor Miss Pynsent’s vacillations and timidities, and her detachment
gave her hostess a high idea of her respectability; but the way was
a little smoothed when, after Amanda had moaned once more, on the
threshold, helplessly and irrelevantly, “Ain’t it a pity she’s so bad?”
the ponderous lady from the prison rejoined in those tones which seemed
meant to resound through corridors of stone: “I assure you there’s a
many that’s ever so much worse!”