“And at night I suppose they rave quite awful,” the little dressmaker suggested, feeling vaguely that prisons and madhouses came very much to the same.
“Well, if they do we hush ’em up,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked rather portentously; while Miss Pynsent fidgeted to the door again, without results, to see if the child had become visible. She observed to her guest that she couldn’t call it anything but contrary that he shouldn’t turn up when he knew so well, most days in the week, when his tea was ready. To which Mrs. Bowerbank rejoined, fixing her companion again with the steady orb of justice: “And do he have his tea that way by himself, like a real little gentleman?”
“Well, I try to give it to him tidy-like, at a suitable hour,” said Miss Pynsent guiltily. “And there might be some who would say that, for the matter of that, he is a real little gentleman,” she added with an effort at mitigation which, as she immediately became conscious, only involved her more deeply.
“There are people silly enough to say anything. If it’s your parents that settle your station the child hasn’t much to be thankful for,” Mrs. Bowerbank went on in the manner of a woman accustomed to looking facts in the face.
Miss Pynsent was very timid, but she adored the aristocracy, and there were elements in the boy’s life which she was not prepared to sacrifice even to a person who represented such a possibility of grating bolts and clanking chains. “I suppose we oughtn’t to forget that his father was very high,” she suggested appealingly and with a tight clasp of her hands in her lap.
“His father? Who knows who he was? He doesn’t set up for having a father, does he?”
“But, surely, wasn’t it proved that Lord Frederick—?”
“My dear woman, nothing was proved except that she stabbed his lordship in the back with a very long knife, that he died of the blow, and that she got the full sentence. What does such a piece as that know about fathers? The less said about the poor child’s ancestors the better!”
This view of the case caused Miss Pynsent fairly to gasp, for it pushed over with a touch a tall fond fantastic structure that she had been piling up for years. Even as she heard it crash around her she couldn’t forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material. “Really—really,” she panted, “she never had to do with any one but the nobility!”
Mrs. Bowerbank surveyed her hostess with an expressionless eye. “My dear young lady, what does a respectable little body like you, that sits all day with her needle and scissors, know about the doings of a wicked low foreigner of the sort that carries a knife? I was there when she came in and I know to what she had sunk. Her conversation was choice, I assure you.”