Miss Pynsent turned straight away, covering her ears with her hands. “I have nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried, with a trembling voice.
V
It was in this way that the dressmaker failed either to see or to hear the opening of the door of the room, which obeyed a slow, apparently cautious impulse given it from the hall, and revealed the figure of a young man standing there with a short pipe in his teeth. There was something in his face which immediately told Millicent Henning that he had heard, outside, her last resounding tones. He entered as if, young as he was, he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called upon to be headlong, and evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s brilliant adversary might be. She recognised on the instant her old playmate, and without reflection, confusion or diplomacy, in the fullness of her vulgarity and sociability, she exclaimed, in no lower pitch, “Gracious, Hyacinth Robinson, is that your form?”
Miss Pynsent turned round, in a flash, but kept silent; then, very white and trembling, took up her work again and seated herself in her window.
Hyacinth Robinson stood staring; then he blushed all over. He knew who she was, but he didn’t say so; he only asked, in a voice which struck the girl as quite different from the old one—the one in which he used to tell her she was beastly tiresome—“Is it of me you were speaking just now?”
“When I asked where you had come from? That was because we ’eard you in the ’all,” said Millicent, smiling. “I suppose you have come from your work.”
“You used to live in the Place—you always wanted to kiss me,” the young man remarked, with an effort not to show all the surprise and agitation that he felt. “Didn’t she live in the Place, Pinnie!”
Pinnie, for all answer, fixed a pair of strange, pleading eyes upon him, and Millicent broke out, with her recurrent laugh, in which the dressmaker had been right in discovering the note of affectation, “Do you want to know what you look like? You look for all the world like a little Frenchman! Don’t he look like a little Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?” she went on, as if she were on the best possible terms with the mistress of the establishment.
Hyacinth exchanged a look with that afflicted woman; he saw something in her face which he knew very well by this time, and the sight of which always gave him an odd, perverse, unholy satisfaction. It seemed to say that she prostrated herself, that she did penance in the dust, that she was his to trample upon, to spit upon. He did neither of these things, but she was constantly offering herself, and her permanent humility, her perpetual abjection, was a sort of counter-irritant to the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever, which had often made him cry with rage at night, in his little room under the roof. Pinnie meant that, to-day, as a matter of course, and she could only especially mean it in the presence of Miss Henning’s remark about his looking like a Frenchman. He knew he looked like a Frenchman, he had often been told so before, and a large part of the time he felt like one—like one of those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle. He had picked up the French tongue with the most extraordinary facility, with the aid of one of his mates, a refugee from Paris, in the workroom, and of a second-hand dog’s-eared dictionary, bought for a shilling in the Brompton Road, in one of his interminable, restless, melancholy, moody, yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it (as he believed) as if by instinct, caught the accent, the gesture, the movement of eyebrow and shoulder; so that if it should become necessary in certain contingencies that he should pass for a foreigner he had an idea that he might do so triumphantly, once he could borrow a blouse. He had never seen a blouse in his life, but he knew exactly the form and colour of such a garment, and how it was worn. What these contingencies might be which should compel him to assume the disguise of a person of a social station lower still than his own, Hyacinth would not for the world have mentioned to you; but as they were very present to the mind of our imaginative, ingenious youth we shall catch a glimpse of them in the course of a further acquaintance with him. At the present moment, when there was no question of masquerading, it made him blush again that such a note should be struck by a loud, laughing, handsome girl, who came back out of his past. There was more in Pinnie’s weak eyes, now, than her usual profession; there was a dumb intimation, almost as pathetic as the other, that if he cared to let her off easily he would not detain their terrible visitor very long. He had no wish to do that; he kept the door open, on purpose; he didn’t enjoy talking to girls under Pinnie’s eyes, and he could see that this one had every disposition to talk. So without responding to her observation about his appearance he said, not knowing exactly what to say, “Have you come back to live in the Place?”
“Heaven forbid I should ever do that!” cried Miss Henning, with genuine emotion. “I have to live near the establishment in which I’m employed.”