Part 5

Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts) and remarked that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world without one’s wanting him to be any lower. “But by the time he’s twenty he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar, and that when an old friend came to see you late at night it was not your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.”

“Do you mean he’ll forget _me_, he’ll deny me?” cried Miss Pynsent, stopping the movement of her needle short off for the first time.

“As the person designated in that attractive blazonry on the outside of your house decidedly he will; and me, equally, as a bald-headed, pot-bellied fiddler who regarded you as the most perfect lady of his acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never knew you: I don’t think he’ll ever be such an odious little cad as that; he probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some affection and possibly even some gratitude in him. But his imagination (which will always give him his cue about everything) shall subject you to some extraordinary metamorphosis. He’ll dress you up.”

“He’ll dress me up?” Amanda ejaculated, quite ceasing to follow the train of Mr. Vetch’s demonstration. “Do you mean he’ll have the property—that his relations will take him up?”

“My dear, delightful, idiotic Pinnie, I’m speaking in a figurative manner. I don’t pretend to say what his precise position will be when we’re relegated; but I’m sure relegation will be our fate. Therefore don’t stuff him with any more false notions and fine illusions than are necessary to keep him alive; he’ll be sure to pick up enough on the way. On the contrary, give him a good stiff dose of the truth at the start.”

“Deary me, of course you see much further into it than I could ever do,” Pinnie murmured as she threaded a needle.

Mr. Vetch paused a minute, but apparently not out of deference to this amiable interruption. He went on suddenly with a ring of feeling in his voice. “Let him know, because it will be useful to him later, the state of the account between society and himself; he can then conduct himself accordingly. If he’s the illegitimate child of a French impropriety who murdered one of her numerous lovers, don’t shuffle out of sight so important a fact. I regard that as a most valuable origin.”

“Lord, Mr. Vetch, how you _can_ talk!” cried Miss Pynsent with her ever-fresh faculty of vain protest. “I don’t know what one would think, to hear you.”

“Surely, my dear lady, and for this reason: that those are the people with whom society has to count. It hasn’t with you and me.” Miss Pynsent gave a sigh which might have meant either that she was well aware of that or that Mr. Vetch had a terrible way of enlarging a subject, especially when it was already too big for her; and her philosophic visitor went on: “Poor little devil, let him see her, take him straight.”

“And if later, when he’s twenty, he says to me that if I hadn’t meddled in it he need never have known, need never have had that shame, pray what am I to say to him then? That’s what I can’t get out of my head.”

“You can say to him that a young man who’s sorry for having gone to his mother when, in her last hours, she lay crying for him on a pallet in a penitentiary, deserves more than the sharpest pang he can possibly feel.” And the little fiddler, getting up, went over to the fireplace and shook out the ashes of his pipe.

“Well, I’m sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent, folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated her through the evening.

“I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly; that’s not the worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull acceptance, the absence of reflexion, the impenetrable density.” Here Mr. Vetch stopped short; his hostess stood before him with eyes of entreaty, with clasped hands.

“Now, Anastasius Vetch, don’t go off into them dreadful wild theories!” she cried, always ungrammatical when she was strongly moved. “You always fly away over the house-tops. I thought you liked him better—the dear little unfortunate.”

Anastasius Vetch had pocketed his pipe; he put on his hat with the freedom of old acquaintance and of Lomax Place, and took up his small coffin-like fiddle-case. “My good Pinnie, I don’t think you understand a word I say. It’s no use talking—do as you like!”

“Well, I must say I don’t think it was worth your coming in at midnight only to tell me that. I don’t like anything—I hate the whole dreadful business!”

He bent over, for all his figure, to kiss her hand with the flourish of a troubadour and as he had seen people do on the stage. “My dear friend, we’ve different ideas, and I never shall succeed in driving mine into your head. It’s because I _am_ fond of him, poor little devil; but you’ll never understand that. I want him to know everything, and especially the worst—the very worst, as I’ve said. If I were in his position I shouldn’t thank you for trying to make a fool of me.”

“A fool of you?—as if I thought of anything but his ’appiness!” Amanda Pynsent exclaimed. She stood looking at him but following her own reflexions; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She remembered what she had noticed in other occurrences, that his reasons were always more extraordinary than his behaviour itself. If you only considered his life you wouldn’t have thought him so immoral. “Very likely I think too much of that,” she added. “She wants him and cries for him; that’s what keeps coming back to me.” She took up her lamp to light Mr. Vetch to the door (for the dim luminary in the passage had long since been extinguished), and before he left the house he turned suddenly, stopping short and with his composed face taking a strange expression from the quizzical glimmer of his little round eyes.

“What does it matter after all, and why do you worry? What difference can it make what happens—on either side—to such low people?”

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.