“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.