“Bless my soul, you must be the awful little ’Enning!” Miss Pynsent exclaimed, planted before her and going now into every detail.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve made up your mind. I thought you’d know me directly and I daresay I was awful. But I ain’t so bad now, hey?” the young woman went on with confidence. “I had a call to make in this part, and it came into my ’ead to look you up. I don’t like to lose sight of old friends.”
“I never knew you—you’ve improved as I couldn’t have believed,” Miss Pynsent returned with a candour justified by her age and her consciousness of respectability.
“Well, you haven’t changed; you were always calling me something horrid.”
“I daresay it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the dressmaker, seating herself but quite unable to take up her work, blank as she was before the greatness of her visitor.
“Oh, I’m all right now,” Miss Henning declared with the air of one who had nothing to fear from human judgements.
“You were a pretty child—I never said the contrary to that; but I had no idea you’d turn out like this. You’re too tall for a woman,” Miss Pynsent added, much divided between an old prejudice and a new appreciation.
“Well, I enjoy beautiful ’ealth,” said the young lady; “every one thinks I’m at least twenty-two.” She spoke with a certain artless pride in her bigness and her bloom and as if, to show her development, she would have taken off her jacket or let you feel her upper arm. She was certainly handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine, free, physiognomic oval, an abundance of brown hair and a smile that fairly flaunted the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set on a fair strong neck and her robust young figure was rich in feminine curves. Her gloves, covering her wrists insufficiently, showed the redness of those parts in the interstices of the numerous silver bracelets that encircled them, and Miss Pynsent made the observation that her hands were not more delicate than her feet. She was not graceful, and even the little dressmaker, whose preference for distinguished forms never deserted her, indulged in the mental reflexion that she was common, despite her magnificence; but there was something about her indescribably fresh, successful and satisfying. She was to her blunt, expanded finger-tips a daughter of London, of the crowded streets and bustling traffic of the great city; she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy courts and foggy thoroughfares and peopled its parks and squares and crescents with her ambitions; it had entered into her blood and her bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage of her head; she understood it by instinct and loved it with passion; she represented its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality and its knowingness, its good-nature and its impudence, and might have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the clustered parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of cockneyism. The restrictions under which Miss Pynsent regarded her would have cost the dressmaker some fewer scruples if she had guessed the impression she herself made on Millicent, and how the whole place seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and failure. Her childish image of its mistress had shown her as neat, fine, superior, with round loops of hair fastened on the temples by combs and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant manipulation of precious stuffs—tissues at least that Millicent regarded with envy. But the little woman before her was bald and white and pinched; she looked shrunken and sickly and insufficiently nourished; her small eyes were sharp and suspicious and her hideous cap didn’t disguise the way everything had gone. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as she had often done before, that she hadn’t been obliged to get her living by drudging over needlework year after year in that undiscoverable street, in a dismal little room where nothing had been changed for ages; the absence of change had such an exasperating effect upon her vigorous young nature. She reflected with complacency on her good fortune in being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic department of the great drapery interest, and noticed that though it was already November there was no fire in the neatly-kept grate beneath the chimney-piece, on which a design, partly architectural, partly botanical, executed in the hair of Miss Pynsent’s parents, was flanked by a pair of vases, under glass, containing muslin flowers.
If she thought that lady’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that her hostess felt much on her guard in presence of so unexpected and undesired a reminder of one of the least honourable episodes in the annals of Lomax Place. Miss Pynsent esteemed people in proportion to their success in constituting a family circle—in cases, that is, when the materials were under their hand. This success, among the various members of the house of Henning, had been of the scantiest, and the domestic broils in the establishment adjacent to her own, the vicissitudes of which she was able to follow, as she sat near her window at work, by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind her—these scenes, rendering the crash of crockery and the imprecations of the wounded frequently and peculiarly audible, had long been the scandal of a humble but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr. Henning was supposed to fill a place of confidence in a brush factory, while his wife, at home, occupied herself with the washing and mending of a considerable brood, mainly of sons. But economy and sobriety and indeed a virtue more important still had never presided at their councils. The freedom and frequency of Mrs. Henning’s relations with a stove-polisher off the Euston Road were at least not a secret to a person who lived next door and looked up from her work so often that it was a wonder it was always finished so quickly. The little Hennings, unwashed and unchidden, spent most of their time either in pushing each other into the gutter or in running to the public-house at the corner for a pennyworth of gin, and the borrowing propensities of their elders were a theme for exclamation. There was no object of personal or domestic use which Mrs. Henning had not at one time or another endeavoured to elicit from the dressmaker; beginning with a mattress, on an occasion when she was about to take to her bed for a considerable period, and ending with a flannel petticoat and a pewter teapot. Lomax Place had eventually, from its over-peeping windows and doorways, been present at the seizure, by a long-suffering landlord, of the chattels of this interesting race and at the ejectment of the whole insolvent group, who departed in a straggling, jeering, unabashed, cynical manner, carrying with them but little of the sympathy of the street. Millicent, whose childish intimacy with Hyacinth Robinson Miss Pynsent had always viewed with vague anxiety—she thought the girl a nasty little thing and was afraid she would teach the innocent orphan low ways—Millicent, with her luxuriant tresses, her precocious beauty, her staring, mocking manner on the doorstep, was at this time twelve years of age. She vanished with her vanishing companions; Lomax Place saw them double the cape, that is turn the corner, and returned to its occupations with a conviction that they would make shipwreck on the outer reefs. But neither spar nor splinter floated back to their former haunts, and they were engulfed altogether in the fathomless deeps of the town. Miss Pynsent drew a long breath; it was her judgement that none of them would come to any good whatever, and Millicent least of all.
When therefore this young lady reappeared with all the signs of accomplished survival she couldn’t fail to ask herself whether, under a specious seeming, the phenomenon didn’t simply represent the triumph of vice. She was alarmed, but she would have given her silver thimble to know the girl’s history, and between her shock and her curiosity she passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt the familiar mysterious creature to be playing with her; revenging herself for former animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a prying little spinster who could now make no figure beside her. If it was not the triumph of vice it was at least the triumph of impertinence, as well as of youth, health and a greater acquaintance with the art of dress than Miss Pynsent could boast, for all her ridiculous signboards. She perceived, or she believed she perceived, that Millicent wanted to scare her, to make her think she had come after Hyacinth, that she wished to get hold of him and somehow mislead and tempt him. I should be sorry to impute to Miss Henning any motive more complicated than the desire to amuse herself, of a Saturday afternoon, by a ramble her vigorous legs had no occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed that with her shrewd guess of this estimate of her as a ravening wolf and of her early playmate as an unspotted lamb she laughed out, in Miss Pynsent’s anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly and without deigning to explain. But what indeed had she come for if she hadn’t come for Hyacinth? It was not for the love of the dressmaker’s pretty ways. She remembered the boy and some of their tender passages, and in the wantonness of her full-blown freedom—her attachment also to any tolerable pretext for wandering through the streets of London and gazing into shop-windows—had said to herself she might dedicate an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, might revisit the scenes of her childhood. She considered that her childhood had ended with the departure of her family from Lomax Place. If the tenants of that scarce-dissimulated slum had never learned what their banished fellows were to go through she herself had at least retained a deep impression of those horrible intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone downhill, to the very bottom; and in her humbler moments Millicent sometimes wondered what lucky star had checked her own descent and indeed enabled her to mount the slope again. In her humbler moments, I say, for as a general thing she was provided with an explanation of any good fortune that might befall her. What was more natural than that a girl should achieve miracles when she was at once so handsome and so clever? Millicent thought with compassion of the young persons whom a niggardly fate had endowed with only one of these advantages. She was good-natured, but she had no idea of gratifying Miss Pynsent’s curiosity: it seemed to her quite a sufficient kindness to stimulate it.