III

Mrs. Bowerbank had let her know she would meet her almost at the

threshold of the dreadful place; and this thought had sustained Miss

Pynsent in her long and devious journey, performed partly on foot,

partly in a succession of omnibuses. She had had ideas about a cab,

but she decided to reserve the cab for the return, as then, very

likely, she should be so prostrate with emotion, so overpoweringly

affected, that it would be a comfort to escape from observation. She

had no confidence that if once she passed the door of the prison she

should ever be restored to liberty and her customers; it seemed to

her an adventure as dangerous as it was dismal, and she was immensely

touched by the clear-faced eagerness of the child at her side, who

strained forward as brightly as he had done on another occasion, still

celebrated in Miss Pynsent’s industrious annals, a certain sultry

Saturday in August when she had taken him to the Tower. It had been a

terrible question with her, once she had made up her mind, what she

should tell him about the nature of their errand. She determined to

tell him as little as possible, to say only that she was going to see

a poor woman who was in prison on account of a crime committed many

years before, and who had sent for her and caused her to be told at

the same time that if there was any child she could see—as children (if

they were good) were bright and cheering—it would make her very happy

that such a little visitor should come as well. It was very difficult,

with Hyacinth, to make reservations or mysteries; he wanted to know

everything about everything and he projected the fierce light of his

questions on Miss Pynsent’s incarcerated friend. She had to admit that

she had been her friend (since where else was the obligation to go

to see her?) but she spoke of the acquaintance as if it were of the

slightest (it had survived in the memory of the prisoner only because

every one else—the world was so very severe!—had turned away from

her) and she congratulated herself on a happy inspiration when she

represented the crime for which such a penalty had been exacted as the

theft of a gold watch in a moment of cruel want. The woman had had a

wicked husband who maltreated and deserted her; she had been very poor,

almost starving, dreadfully pressed. Hyacinth listened to her history

with absorbed attention and then said:

“And hadn’t she any children—hadn’t she a little boy?”

This inquiry seemed to Miss Pynsent an omen of future embarrassments,

but she met it as bravely as she could, replying that she believed the

wretched victim of the law had had (once upon a time) a very small

baby, but was afraid she had completely lost sight of it. He must

know they didn’t allow babies in prisons. To this Hyacinth rejoined

that of course they would allow him, because of his size. Miss Pynsent

fortified herself with the memory of her other pilgrimage, the visit

to Newgate upwards of ten years before; she had escaped from _that_

ordeal and had even had the comfort of knowing that in its fruits the

interview had been beneficent. The responsibility, however, was much

greater now, and, after all, it was not on her own account she faltered

and feared, but on that of the tender sensibility over which the shadow

of the house of shame might cast itself.

They made the last part of their approach on foot, having got

themselves deposited as near as possible to the river and keeping

beside it (according to advice elicited by Miss Pynsent, on the way,

in a dozen confidential interviews with policemen, conductors of

omnibuses and small shopkeepers) till they came to a big dark-towered

building which they would know as soon as they looked at it. They

knew it in fact soon enough when they saw it lift its dusky mass from

the bank of the Thames, lying there and sprawling over the whole

neighbourhood with brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, truncated

pinnacles and a character unspeakably sad and stern. It looked very

sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent’s eyes, and she wondered why a

prison should have such an evil air if it was erected in the interest

of justice and order—a builded protest, precisely, against vice and

villainy. This particular penitentiary struck her as about as bad and

wrong as those who were in it; it threw a blight on the face of day,

making the river seem foul and poisonous and the opposite bank, with a

protrusion of long-necked chimneys, unsightly gasometers and deposits

of rubbish, wear the aspect of a region at whose expense the jail had

been populated. She looked up at the dull, closed gates, tightening her

grasp of Hyacinth’s small hand; and if it was hard to believe anything

so barred and blind and deaf would relax itself to let her in, there

was a dreadful premonitory sinking of the heart attached to the idea of

its taking the same trouble to let her out. As she hung back, murmuring

vague ejaculations, at the very goal of her journey, an incident

occurred which fanned all her scruples and reluctances into life again.

The child suddenly jerked away his hand and, placing it behind him in

the clutch of the other, said to her respectfully but resolutely, while

he planted himself at a considerable distance:

“I don’t like this place.”

“Neither do I like it, my darling,” cried the dressmaker pitifully.

“Oh, if you knew how little!”

“Then we’ll go away. I won’t go in.”

She would have embraced this proposition with alacrity if it had not

become very vivid to her while she stood there, in the midst of her

shrinking, that behind those sullen walls the mother who bore him was

even then counting the minutes. She was alive in that huge dark tomb,

and Miss Pynsent could feel that they had already entered into relation

with her. They were near her and she was aware; in a few minutes

she would taste the cup of the only mercy (except the reprieve from

hanging) she had known since her fall. A few, a very few minutes would

do it, and it seemed to our pilgrim that if she should fail of her

charity now the watches of the night in Lomax Place would be haunted

with remorse—perhaps even with something worse. There was something

inside that waited and listened, something that would burst, with an

awful sound, a shriek or a curse, were she to lead the boy away. She

looked into his pale face, perfectly conscious it would be vain for

her to take the tone of command; besides, that would have seemed to her

shocking. She had another inspiration, and she said to him in a manner

in which she had had occasion to speak before:

“The reason why we’ve come is only to be kind. If we’re kind we shan’t

mind its being disagreeable.”

“Why should we be so kind if she’s a bad woman?” Hyacinth demanded.

“She must be very low; I don’t want to know her.”

“Hush, hush,” groaned poor Amanda, edging toward him with clasped

hands. “She’s not bad now; it has all been washed away—it has been

expiated.”

“What’s ‘expiated’?” asked the child while she almost kneeled down in

the dust to catch him to her bosom.

“It’s when you’ve suffered terribly—suffered so much that it has made

you good again.”

“Has _she_ suffered very much?”

“For years and years. And now she’s dying. It proves she’s very good

now—that she should want to see us.”

“Do you mean because _we_ are good?” Hyacinth went on, probing

the matter in a way that made his companion quiver and gazing away

from her, very seriously, across the river, at the dreary waste of

Battersea.

“We shall be good if we’re compassionate, if we make an effort,” said

the dressmaker, seeming to look up at him rather than down.

“But if she’s dying? I don’t want to see any one die.”

Miss Pynsent was bewildered, but her desperation helped. “If we go to

her perhaps she won’t. Maybe we shall save her.”

He transferred his remarkable little eyes—eyes which always appeared to

her to belong to a person older and stronger than herself—to her face;

and then he put to her: “Why should I save such a creature if I don’t

like her?”

“If she likes you, that will be enough.”

At this Miss Pynsent began to see that he was moved. “Will she like me

very much?”

“More, much more, than any one—ever.”

“More than you, now?”

“Oh,” said Amanda quickly, “I mean more than she likes any one.”

Hyacinth had slipped his hands into the pockets of his scanty

knickerbockers and, with his legs slightly apart, looked from his

companion back to the immense dreary jail. A great deal, to her sense,

depended on the moment. “Oh well,” he said at last, “I’ll just step

in.”

“Deary, deary!” the dressmaker murmured to herself as they crossed

the bare semicircle which separated the gateway from the unfrequented

street. She exerted herself to pull the bell, which seemed to her

terribly big and stiff, and while she waited again for the consequences

of this effort the boy broke out abruptly:

“How can she like me so much if she has never seen me?”

Miss Pynsent wished the gate would open before an answer to this

question should become imperative, but the people within were a long

time arriving, and their delay gave Hyacinth an opportunity to repeat

it. So she replied, seizing the first pretext that came into her head:

“It’s because the little baby she had of old was also named Hyacinth.”

“That’s a rummy reason,” the boy murmured, still staring across at the

Battersea shore.

A moment later they found themselves in a vast interior dimness,

while a grinding of keys and bolts went on behind them. Hereupon Miss

Pynsent gave herself up to an overruling providence, and she remembered

afterwards no circumstance of what happened to her till the great

person of Mrs. Bowerbank loomed up in the narrowness of a strange, dark

corridor. She had only had meanwhile a confused impression of being

surrounded with high black walls, whose inner face was more dreadful

than the other, the one that overlooked the river; of passing through

grey, stony courts, in some of which dreadful figures, scarcely female,

in hideous brown misfitting uniforms and perfect frights of hoods, were

marching round in a circle; of squeezing up steep unlighted staircases

at the heels of a woman who had taken possession of her at the first

stage and who made incomprehensible remarks to other women, of lumpish

aspect, as she saw them erect themselves, suddenly and spectrally, with

dowdy untied bonnets, in uncanny corners and recesses of the draughty

labyrinth. If the place had seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker

outside, it may be trusted not to have struck her as an abode of

mercy while she pursued her tortuous way into the circular shafts

of cells where she had an opportunity of looking at captives through

grated peepholes and of edging past others who had temporarily been

turned into the corridors—silent women, with fixed eyes, who flattened

themselves against the stone walls at the brush of the visitor’s

dress and whom Miss Pynsent was afraid to glance at. She never had

felt so immured, so made sure of; there were walls within walls and

galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour and

you couldn’t imagine what o’clock it was. Mrs. Bowerbank appeared to

have failed her, and that made her feel worse; a panic seized her, as

she went, in regard to the child. On him too the horror of the scene

would have fallen, and she had a sickening prevision that he would have

convulsions after they got home. It was a most improper place to have

brought him to, no matter who had sent for him and no matter who was

dying. The stillness would terrify him, she was sure—the penitential

dumbness of the clustered or isolated women. She clasped his hand more

tightly and felt him keep close to her without speaking a word. At

last in an open doorway darkened by her ample person Mrs. Bowerbank

revealed herself, and Miss Pynsent thought it subsequently a sign of

her place and power that she should not condescend to apologise for not

having appeared till that moment, or to explain why she had not met

the bewildered pilgrims near the principal entrance according to her

promise. Miss Pynsent couldn’t embrace the state of mind of people who

didn’t apologise, though she vaguely envied and admired it, she herself

spending much of her time in making excuses for obnoxious acts she had

not committed. Mrs. Bowerbank, however, was not arrogant, she was only

massive and muscular; and after she had taken her timorous friends

in tow the dressmaker was able to comfort herself with the reflexion

that even so masterful a woman couldn’t inflict anything gratuitously

disagreeable on a person who had made her visit in Lomax Place pass off

so pleasantly.

It was on the outskirts of the infirmary she had been hovering, and

it was into certain dismal chambers dedicated to sick criminals she

presently ushered her guests. These chambers were naked and grated,

like all the rest of the place, and caused Miss Pynsent to say to

herself that it must be a blessing to be ill in such a hole, because

you couldn’t possibly pick up again, whereby your case was simple. Such

simplification, nevertheless, had for the moment been offered to very

few of Florentine’s fellow-sufferers, for only three of the small stiff

beds were occupied—occupied by white-faced women in tight, sordid caps,

on whom, in the stale ugly room, the sallow light itself seemed to rest

without pity. Mrs. Bowerbank discreetly paid no attention whatever to

Hyacinth; she only said to Miss Pynsent with her hoarse distinctness:

“You’ll find her very low; she wouldn’t have waited another day.”

And she guided them, through a still further door, to the smallest

room of all, where there were but three beds placed in a row. Miss

Pynsent’s frightened eyes rather faltered than inquired, but she became

aware that a woman was lying on the middle bed and that her face was

turned toward the door. Mrs. Bowerbank led the way straight up to her

and, giving a businesslike pat to her pillow, signed invitation and

encouragement to the visitors, who clung together not far within the

threshold. Their conductress reminded them that very few minutes were

allowed them and that they had better not dawdle them away; whereupon,

as the boy still hung back, the little dressmaker advanced alone,

looking at the sick woman with what courage she could muster. It seemed

to her she was approaching a perfect stranger, so completely had nine

years of prison transformed Florentine. She felt it immediately to

have been a mercy she hadn’t told Hyacinth she was pretty (as she used

to be) since there was no beauty left in the hollow bloodless mask

that presented itself without a movement. She _had_ told him the poor

woman was good, but she didn’t look so, nor evidently was he struck

with it as he returned her gaze across the interval he declined to

traverse, though kept at the same time from retreating by this appeal

of her strange, fixed eyes, the only part of all her wasted person in

which was still any appearance of life. She looked unnatural to Amanda

Pynsent, and terribly old; a speechless, motionless creature, dazed and

stupid, whereas Florentine Vivier, in the obliterated past, had been

her idea of personal as distinguished from social brilliancy. Above all

she seemed disfigured and ugly, cruelly misrepresented by her coarse

cap and short rough hair. Amanda, as she stood beside her, thought

with a degree of scared elation that Hyacinth would never guess that a

person in whom there was so little trace of smartness, or of cleverness

of any kind, was his mother, which would be quite another matter. At

the very most it might occur to him, as Mrs. Bowerbank had suggested,

that she was his grandmother. Mrs. Bowerbank seated herself on the

further bed with folded hands, a monumental timekeeper, and remarked,

in the manner of one speaking from a sense of duty, that the poor thing

wouldn’t get much good of the child unless he showed more confidence.

This observation was evidently lost on the boy; he was too intensely

absorbed in watching the prisoner. A chair had been placed near her

pillow, and Miss Pynsent sat down without her appearing to notice it.

In a moment, however, she lifted her hand a little, pushing it out from

under the coverlet, and the dressmaker laid her own hand softly on it.

This gesture elicited no response, but after a little, still gazing at

the boy, Florentine murmured in words no one present was in a position

to understand—

“_Dieu de Dieu, qu’il est donc beau!_”

“She won’t speak nothing but French since she has been so bad—you can’t

get a natural word out of her,” Mrs. Bowerbank said.

“It used to be so pretty when she spoke her odd English—and so very

amusing,” Miss Pynsent ventured to mention with a feeble attempt to

brighten up the scene. “I suppose she has forgotten it all.”

“She may well have forgotten it—she never gave her tongue much

exercise. There was little enough trouble to keep _her_ from

chattering,” Mrs. Bowerbank rejoined, giving a twitch to the prisoner’s

counterpane. Miss Pynsent settled it a little on the other side and

considered, in the same train, that this separation of language was

indeed a mercy; for how could it ever come into her small companion’s

head that he was the offspring of a person who couldn’t so much as say

good-morning to him? She felt at the same time that the scene might

have been somewhat less painful if they had been able to communicate

with the object of their compassion. As it was they had too much the

air of having been brought together simply to look at each other, and

there was a gruesome awkwardness in that, considering the delicacy

of Florentine’s position. Not indeed that she looked much at her old

comrade; it was as if she were conscious of Miss Pynsent’s being there

and would have been glad to thank her for it—glad even to examine her

for her own sake and see what change for her too the horrible years had

brought, yet felt, more than this, how she had but the thinnest pulse

of energy left and how not a moment that could still be of use to her

was too much to take in her child. She took him in with all the glazed

entreaty of her eyes, quite giving up his substituted guardian, who

evidently would have to take her gratitude for granted. Hyacinth, on

his side, after some moments of embarrassing silence—there was nothing

audible but Mrs. Bowerbank’s breathing—had satisfied himself, and he

turned about to look for a place of patience while Miss Pynsent should

finish her business, which as yet made so little show. He appeared to

wish not to leave the room altogether, as that would be the confession

of a broken spirit, but to take some attitude that should express

his complete disapproval of the unpleasant situation. He was not in

sympathy, and he could not have made it more clear than by the way he

presently went and placed himself on a low stool in a corner near the

door by which they had entered.

“_Est-il possible, mon Dieu, qu’il soit gentil comme ça?_” his mother

moaned just above her breath.

“We’re very glad you should have cared—that they look after you so

well,” said Miss Pynsent confusedly and at random; feeling first

that Hyacinth’s coldness was perhaps excessive and his scepticism too

marked, and then that allusions to the way the poor woman was looked

after were not exactly happy. These didn’t matter, however, for she

evidently heard nothing, giving no sign of interest even when Mrs.

Bowerbank, in a tone between a desire to make the interview more

lively and an idea of showing she know how to treat the young, referred

herself to the little boy.

“Is there nothing the little gentleman would like to say, now, to

the unfortunate? Hasn’t he any pleasant remark to make to her about

his coming so far to see her when she’s so sunk? It isn’t often that

children are shown over the place (as the little man has been) and

there’s many that’d think themselves lucky if they could see what he

has seen.”

“_Mon pauvre joujou, mon pauvre chéri_,” the prisoner went on in her

tender, tragic whisper.

“He only wants to be very good; he always sits that way at home,” said

Miss Pynsent, alarmed at Mrs. Bowerbank’s address and hoping there

wouldn’t be a scene.

“He might have stayed at home then—with this wretched person taking on

so over him,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked with some sternness. She plainly

felt the occasion threaten to be wanting in brilliancy, and wished to

intimate that though she was to be trusted for discipline she thought

they were all getting off too easily.

“I came because Pinnie brought me,” Hyacinth spoke up from his

low perch. “I thought at first it would be pleasant. But it ain’t

pleasant—I don’t like prisons.” And he placed his little feet on the

crosspiece of the stool as if to touch the institution at as few points

as possible.

The woman in bed continued her strange, almost whining plaint. “_Il ne

veut pas s’approcher, il a honte de moi._”

“There’s a many who begin like that!” laughed Mrs. Bowerbank, irritated

by the boy’s contempt for one of Her Majesty’s finest establishments.

Hyacinth’s little white face exhibited no confusion; he only turned it

to the prisoner again, and Miss Pynsent felt that some extraordinary

dumb exchange of meanings was taking place between them. “She used

to be so elegant; she _was_ a fine woman,” she observed gently and

helplessly.

“_Il a honte de moi—il a honte, Dieu le pardonne!_” Florentine Vivier

went on, never moving her eyes.

“She’s asking for something, in her language. I used to know a few

words,” said Miss Pynsent, stroking down the bed very nervously.

“Who is that woman? what does she want?” Hyacinth broke out again, his

small, clear voice ringing over the dreary room.

“She wants you to come near her, she wants to kiss you, sir,” said Mrs.

Bowerbank, as if it were more than he deserved.

“I won’t kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!” the child answered

with resolution.

“Oh, you dreadful—how could you ever?” cried Pinnie, blushing all over

and starting out of her chair.

It was partly Amanda’s agitation perhaps, which by the jolt it

administered gave an impulse to the sick woman, and partly the

penetrating and expressive tone in which Hyacinth announced his

repugnance: at any rate Florentine, in the most unexpected and violent

manner, jerked herself up from her pillow and, with dilated eyes and

protesting hands, shrieked out, “_Ah quelle infamie!_ I never stole

a watch, I never stole anything—anything! _Ah par exemple!_” Then

she fell back sobbing with the passion that had given her a moment’s

strength.

“I’m sure you needn’t put more on her than she has by rights,” said

Mrs. Bowerbank with dignity to the dressmaker, and laid a large red

hand on the patient to keep her in her place.

“Mercy, more? I thought it so much less!” cried Miss Pynsent, convulsed

with confusion and jerking herself in a wild tremor from the mother to

the child, as if she wished to fling herself on the one for contrition

and the other for revenge.

“_Il a honte de moi—il a honte de moi!_” Florentine repeated in the

misery of her sobs. “_Dieu de bonté, quelle horreur!_”

Miss Pynsent dropped on her knees beside the bed and, trying to possess

herself of the unfortunate’s hand again, protested with an almost

equal passion (she felt that her nerves had been screwed up to the

snapping-point, and now they were all in shreds) that she hadn’t meant

what she had told the child, that he hadn’t understood, that Florentine

herself hadn’t understood, that she had only said she had been accused

and meant that no one had ever believed it. The Frenchwoman paid

no attention to her whatever, and Amanda buried her face and her

embarrassment in the side of the hard little prison-bed, while, above

the sound of their common lamentation, she heard the judicial tones of

Mrs. Bowerbank.

“The child’s delicate—you might well say! I’m disappointed in the

effect—I was in hopes you’d hearten her up. The doctor’ll be down on

_me_ of course for putting her in such a state, so we’ll just pass out

again.”

“I’m very sorry I made you cry. And you must pardon Pinnie—I asked her

so many questions.”

These words came from close beside the prostrate dressmaker, who,

lifting herself quickly, found the little boy had advanced to her elbow

and was taking a nearer view of the mysterious captive. They produced

on the latter an effect even more powerful than his misguided speech

of a moment before; for she found strength partly to raise herself in

her bed again and to hold out her arms to him with the same thrilling

sobs. She was talking still, but had become quite inarticulate, and

Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white ravaged face and the

hollows of its eyes and the rude crop of her hair. Amanda caught the

child with an eagerness almost as great as Florentine’s and, drawing

him to the head of the bed, pushed him into his mother’s arms. “Kiss

her—kiss her well, and we’ll go home!” she whispered desperately while

they closed about him and the poor dishonoured head pressed itself

against his young cheek. It was a terrible, irresistible embrace, to

which Hyacinth submitted with instant patience. Mrs. Bowerbank had

tried at first to keep her sad charge from rising, evidently wishing

to abbreviate the scene; then as the child was enfolded she accepted

the situation and gave judicious support from behind, with an eye to

clearing the room as soon as this effort should have spent itself. She

propped up her patient with a vigorous arm; Miss Pynsent rose from her

knees and turned away, and there was a minute’s stillness during which

the boy accommodated himself as he might to his strange ordeal. What

thoughts were begotten at that moment in his wondering little mind his

protectress was destined to learn at another time. Before she had faced

round to the bed again she was swept out of the room by Mrs. Bowerbank,

who had lowered the prisoner, exhausted and with closed eyes, to her

pillow and given Hyacinth a businesslike little push which sent him on

in advance. Miss Pynsent went home in a cab—she was so shaken; though

she reflected very nervously, getting into it, on the opportunities it

would give Hyacinth for the exercise of inquisitorial rights. To her

surprise, however, he completely neglected them; he sat looking out of

the window in silence till they re-entered Lomax Place.