“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.”