“We’re very glad you should have cared—that they look after you so well,” said Miss Pynsent confusedly and at random; feeling first that Hyacinth’s coldness was perhaps excessive and his scepticism too marked, and then that allusions to the way the poor woman was looked after were not exactly happy. These didn’t matter, however, for she evidently heard nothing, giving no sign of interest even when Mrs. Bowerbank, in a tone between a desire to make the interview more lively and an idea of showing she know how to treat the young, referred herself to the little boy.
“Is there nothing the little gentleman would like to say, now, to the unfortunate? Hasn’t he any pleasant remark to make to her about his coming so far to see her when she’s so sunk? It isn’t often that children are shown over the place (as the little man has been) and there’s many that’d think themselves lucky if they could see what he has seen.”
“Mon pauvre joujou, mon pauvre chéri,” the prisoner went on in her tender, tragic whisper.
“He only wants to be very good; he always sits that way at home,” said Miss Pynsent, alarmed at Mrs. Bowerbank’s address and hoping there wouldn’t be a scene.
“He might have stayed at home then—with this wretched person taking on so over him,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked with some sternness. She plainly felt the occasion threaten to be wanting in brilliancy, and wished to intimate that though she was to be trusted for discipline she thought they were all getting off too easily.
“I came because Pinnie brought me,” Hyacinth spoke up from his low perch. “I thought at first it would be pleasant. But it ain’t pleasant—I don’t like prisons.” And he placed his little feet on the crosspiece of the stool as if to touch the institution at as few points as possible.
The woman in bed continued her strange, almost whining plaint. “Il ne veut pas s’approcher, il a honte de moi.”
“There’s a many who begin like that!” laughed Mrs. Bowerbank, irritated by the boy’s contempt for one of Her Majesty’s finest establishments.
Hyacinth’s little white face exhibited no confusion; he only turned it to the prisoner again, and Miss Pynsent felt that some extraordinary dumb exchange of meanings was taking place between them. “She used to be so elegant; she was a fine woman,” she observed gently and helplessly.
“Il a honte de moi—il a honte, Dieu le pardonne!” Florentine Vivier went on, never moving her eyes.