“The child’s delicate—you might well say! I’m disappointed in the effect—I was in hopes you’d hearten her up. The doctor’ll be down on me of course for putting her in such a state, so we’ll just pass out again.”
“I’m very sorry I made you cry. And you must pardon Pinnie—I asked her so many questions.”
These words came from close beside the prostrate dressmaker, who, lifting herself quickly, found the little boy had advanced to her elbow and was taking a nearer view of the mysterious captive. They produced on the latter an effect even more powerful than his misguided speech of a moment before; for she found strength partly to raise herself in her bed again and to hold out her arms to him with the same thrilling sobs. She was talking still, but had become quite inarticulate, and Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white ravaged face and the hollows of its eyes and the rude crop of her hair. Amanda caught the child with an eagerness almost as great as Florentine’s and, drawing him to the head of the bed, pushed him into his mother’s arms. “Kiss her—kiss her well, and we’ll go home!” she whispered desperately while they closed about him and the poor dishonoured head pressed itself against his young cheek. It was a terrible, irresistible embrace, to which Hyacinth submitted with instant patience. Mrs. Bowerbank had tried at first to keep her sad charge from rising, evidently wishing to abbreviate the scene; then as the child was enfolded she accepted the situation and gave judicious support from behind, with an eye to clearing the room as soon as this effort should have spent itself. She propped up her patient with a vigorous arm; Miss Pynsent rose from her knees and turned away, and there was a minute’s stillness during which the boy accommodated himself as he might to his strange ordeal. What thoughts were begotten at that moment in his wondering little mind his protectress was destined to learn at another time. Before she had faced round to the bed again she was swept out of the room by Mrs. Bowerbank, who had lowered the prisoner, exhausted and with closed eyes, to her pillow and given Hyacinth a businesslike little push which sent him on in advance. Miss Pynsent went home in a cab—she was so shaken; though she reflected very nervously, getting into it, on the opportunities it would give Hyacinth for the exercise of inquisitorial rights. To her surprise, however, he completely neglected them; he sat looking out of the window in silence till they re-entered Lomax Place.
IV
“Well, you’ll have to guess my name before I’ll tell you,” the girl said with a free laugh, pushing her way into the narrow hall and leaning against the tattered wall-paper which, representing blocks of marble with bevelled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and grey, had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor so resolute, the light filtered in from the street through the narrow dusty glass above, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent: the impression of a musty dimness with a small steep staircase at the end, covered with the very strip of oilcloth she could recognise and made a little less dark by a window in the turn (you could see it from the hall) where you might almost bump your head against the house behind. Nothing was changed but Miss Pynsent and of course the girl herself. She had noticed outside how the sign between the windows had not even been touched up; there was still the same preposterous announcement of “fashionable bonnets”—as if the poor little dressmaker had the slightest acquaintance with that style of head-dress, of which Miss Henning’s own knowledge was now so complete. She could see this artist was looking at her hat, a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had travelled up and down Millicent’s whole person, but they rested in fascination on that grandest ornament. The girl had forgotten how small the dressmaker was; she barely came up to her shoulder. She had lost her hair and wore a cap which Millicent noticed in return, wondering if it were a specimen of what she thought the fashion. Miss Pynsent stared up at her as if she had been six feet high; but she was used to that sort of surprised admiration, being perfectly conscious she was a magnificent young woman.
“Won’t you take me into your shop?” she asked. “I don’t want to order anything; I only want to inquire after your ’ealth. Isn’t this rather an awkward place to talk?” She made her way further in without waiting for permission, seeing that her startled hostess had not yet guessed.
“The show-room’s on the right hand,” said Miss Pynsent with her professional manner, which was intended evidently to mark a difference. She spoke as if on the other side, where the horizon was bounded by the partition of the next house, there were labyrinths of apartments. Passing in after her guest she found the young lady already spread out upon the sofa, the everlasting sofa in the right-hand corner as you faced the window, a piece of furniture covered with a tight shrunken shroud of strange yellow stuff, the tinge of which revealed years of washing, and surmounted by a coloured print of Rebekah at the Well, balancing, in the opposite quarter, against a portrait of the Empress of the French taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed in the manner of 1853. Millicent looked about, asking herself what Miss Pynsent had to show and acting perfectly the part of the most brilliant figure the place had ever contained. The old implements were there on the table: the pincushions and needle-books, the pink measuring-tape with which, as children, she and Hyacinth used to take each other’s height; and the same collection of fashion-plates (she could see in a minute) crumpled, sallow and fly-blown. The little dressmaker bristled, as she used to do, with needles and pins stuck all over the front of her dress—they might almost have figured the stiff sparse fur of a sick animal; but there were no rustling fabrics tossed in heaps over the room—nothing but the skirt of a shabby dress (it might have been her own) which she was evidently repairing and had flung upon the table when she came to the door. Miss Henning speedily arrived at the conclusion that her old friend’s business had not increased, and felt some safe luxurious scorn of a person who knew so little what was to be got out of London. It was Millicent’s belief that she herself was already perfectly acquainted with the resources of the capital.
“Now tell me, how’s old Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,” she remarked while she extended a pair of large protrusive feet and supported herself on the sofa by her hands.
“Old Hyacinth?” Miss Pynsent repeated with majestic blankness and as if she had never heard of such a person. She felt the girl to be cruelly, scathingly well dressed and couldn’t imagine who she was nor with what design she might have presented herself.
“Perhaps you call him Mr. Robinson to-day—you always wanted him to hold himself so high. But to his face at any rate I’ll call him as I used to: you just see if I don’t!”