“Family? what do you know about that?” she returned quickly, catching at her dearest, her only hobby.
“Yes indeed, what does any one know? what did she know herself?” And then Miss Pynsent’s visitor added irrelevantly: “Why should you have taken him on your back? Why did you want to be so extra good? No one else thinks it necessary.”
“I didn’t want to be extra good. That is I do want to, of course, in a general way: but that wasn’t the reason then. You see I had nothing of my own—I had nothing in the world but my thimble.”
“That would have seemed to most people a reason for not adopting a prostitute’s bastard.”
“Well, I went to see him at the place where he was (just where she had left him, with the woman of the house) and I saw what kind of a shop that was, and felt it a shame an unspotted child should grow up in such a place.” Miss Pynsent defended herself as earnestly as if her inconsistency had been of a criminal cast. “And he wouldn’t have grown up neither. They wouldn’t have troubled themselves long with a helpless baby. They’d have played some bad trick on him, if it was only to send him to the workhouse. Besides, I always was fond of tiny creatures and I’ve been fond of this one,” she went on, speaking as if with a consciousness, on her own part, of almost heroic proportions. “He was in my way the first two or three years, and it was a good deal of a pull to look after the business and him together. But now he’s like the business—he seems to go of himself.”
“Oh, if he flourishes as the business flourishes you can just enjoy your peace of mind,” said the fiddler, still with his manner of making a small dry joke of everything.
“That’s all very well, but it doesn’t close my eyes to that poor woman lying there and moaning just for the touch of his little ’and before she passes away. Mrs. Bowerbank says she believes I’ll bring him.”
“Who believes? Mrs. Bowerbank?”
“I wonder if there’s anything in life holy enough for you to take it seriously,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, snapping off a thread with temper. “The day you stop laughing I should like to be there.”
“So long as you’re there I shall never stop. What is it you want me to advise you? to take the child, or to leave the mother to wail herself away?”