The Princess Casamassima Read online

  ‘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 would think they were lucky if they could see what he has seen.’

  ‘Mon pauvre joujou, mon pauvre chéri,’25 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 moaning after him,’ Mrs Bowerbank remarked, with some sternness. She plainly felt that the occasion threatened 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 declared, 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 cross-piece 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.’26

  ‘There’s a many that begin like that!’ laughed Mrs Bowerbank, who was 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!’27 Florentine Vivier went on, never moving her eyes.

  ‘She’s asking for something, in her language. I used to know a few words,’ said Miss Pynsent, stroking down the bed, very nervously.

  ‘Who is that woman? what does she want?’ Hyacinth asked, his small, clear voice ringing over the dreary room.

  ‘She wants you to come near her, she wants to kiss you, sir,’ said Mrs Bowerbank, as if it were more than he deserved.

  ‘I won’t kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!’ the child answered with resolution.

  ‘Oh, you dreadful – how could you ever?’ cried Pinnie, blushing all over and starting out of her chair.

  It was partly Amanda’s agitation, perhaps, which, by the jolt it administered, gave an impulse to the sick woman, and partly the penetrating and expressive tone in which Hyacinth announced his repugnance: at any rate, Florentine, in the most unexpected and violent manner, jerked herself up from her pillow, and, with dilated eyes and waving hands, shrieked out, ‘Ah, quelle infamie!28 I never stold a watch, I never stole anything – anything! Ah, par exemple!’29 Then she fell back, sobbing with the passion that had given her a moment’s strength.

  ‘I’m sure you needn’t put more on her than she has by rights,’ said Mrs Bowerbank, with dignity, to the dressmaker, laying a large red hand upon the patient, to keep her in her place.

  ‘Mercy, more? I thought it so much less!’ cried Miss Pynsent, convulsed with confusion and jerking herself, in a wild tremor, from the mother to the child, as if she wished to fling herself upon one for contrition and upon the other for revenge.

  ‘Il a honte de moi – il a honte de moi!’ Florentine repeated, in the misery of her sobs. ‘Dieu de bonté, quelle horreur!’30

  Miss Pynsent dropped on her knees beside the bed and, trying to possess herself of Florentine’s hand again, protested with a passion almost equal to that of the prisoner (she felt that her nerves had been screwed up to the snapping-point, and now they were all in shreds) that she hadn’t meant what she had told the child, that he hadn’t understood, that Florentine herself hadn’t understood, that she had only said she had been accused and meant that no one had ever believed it. The Frenchwoman paid no attention to her whatever, and Amanda buried her face and her embarrassment in the side of the hard little prison-bed, while, above the sound of their common lamentation, she heard the judicial tones of Mrs Bowerbank.

  ‘The child is 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; so we’ll just pass out again.’

  ‘I’m very sorry I made you cry. And you must excuse 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 upon the latter an effect even more powerful than his unfortunate speech of a moment before; for she found strength to raise herself, partly, in her bed again, and to hold out her arms to him, with the same thrilling sobs. She was talking still, but she had become quite inarticulate, and Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white, ravaged face, with 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, 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 protégée 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 Miss Pynsent 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, with closed eyes, to her pillow, and given Hyacinth a business-like little push, which sent him on in advance. Miss Pynsent went home in a cab – she was so shaken; though she reflected, very nervously, on 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 in silence, looking out of the window, till they re-entered Lomax Place.

  4

  ‘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 beveled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and gray, had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor was so resolute, the light filtered in from the street, through the narrow, dusty glass above it, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent; a kind of musty dimness, with the vision of a small, steep staircase at the end, covered with a strip of oilcoth which she recognised, and made a little less dark by a window in the bend (you could see it from the hall), from which you could almost bump your head against the house behind. Nothing was changed except Miss Pynsent, and of course the girl herself. She had noticed, outside, that 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 Miss Pynsent was looking at her hat, which was a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had travelled up and down Millicent’s whole person, but they rested in fascination on this ornament. The girl had forgotten how small the dressmaker was; she barely came up to her shoulder. She had lost her hair, an
d wore a cap, which Millicent noticed in return, wondering if that 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 that 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; and 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 is 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, covered with a light, shrunken shroud of a strange yellow stuff, the tinge of which revealed years of washing, and surmounted by a coloured print of Rebekah31 at the Well, balancing, in the opposite quarter, with a portrait of the Empress of the French,32 taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed in the manner of 1853. Millicent looked about her, 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 (they were stuck all over the front of her dress), but there were no rustling fabrics tossed in heaps about 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 hostess’s business had not increased, and felt a kind of good-humoured, 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 metropolis.

  ‘Now tell me, how is Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,’ she remarked, extending a pair of large protrusive feet and supporting herself on the sofa by her hands.

  ‘Hyacinth?’ Miss Pynsent repeated, with majestic blankness, as if she had never heard of such a person. She felt that the girl was cruelly, scathingly, well dressed; she couldn’t imagine who she was, nor with what design she could 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 see if I don’t!’

  ‘Bless my soul, you must be the little ’Enning!’ Miss Pynsent exclaimed, planted before her and going now into every detail.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you have made up your mind. I thought you’d know me directly. 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 so,’ Miss Pynsent rejoined, 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 dare say it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?’ said the dressmaker, seating herself, but quite unable to take up her work, absorbed as she was in the examination of her visitor.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right now,’ Miss Henning replied, with the air of one who had nothing to fear from human judgments.

  ‘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 twenty.’ 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 very handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine, free, facial oval, an abundance of brown hair, and a smile which showed the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set upon a fair, strong neck, and her tall 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 reflection that she was common, for all her magnificence; but there was something about her indescribably fresh, successful and satisfying. She was, to her blunt, expanded fingertips, a daughter of London, of the crowded streets and hustling 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 accumulated 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 made upon Millicent, and how the whole place seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and failure. Her childish image of Miss Pynsent had represented her as delicate and dainty, with round loops of hair fastened on her temples by combs, and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant manipulation of precious stuffs – tissues at least which 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 did not disguise her meagreness. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as she had often done before, that she had not 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 upon her good fortune in being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic, department of the dressmaking business, 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 Miss Pynsent’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that this lady felt very much upon her guard in the 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, whose vicissitudes she was able to follow, as she sat at her window at work, by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind her – these scenes, amid which the crash of crockery and the imprecations of the wounded were frequently audible, had long been the scandal of a humble but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr Henning was supposed to occupy 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 in 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,33 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 family 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 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 conviction that none of them would come to any good, and Millicent least of all.