The Princess Casamassima Read online

  ‘After all, he isn’t hers any more – he’s mine, mine only, and mine always. I should like to know if all I have done for him doesn’t make him so!’ It was in this manner that Amanda Pynsent delivered herself, while she plied her needle, faster than ever, in a piece of stuff that was pinned to her knee.

  Mr Vetch watched her awhile, blowing silently at his pipe, with his head thrown back on the high, stiff, old-fashioned sofa, and his little legs crossed under him like a Turk’s. ‘It’s true you have done a good deal for him. You are a good little woman, my dear Pinnie, after all.’ He said ‘after all’, because that was a part of his tone. In reality he had never had a moment’s doubt that she was the best little woman in the north of London.

  ‘I have done what I could, and I don’t want no fuss made about it. Only it does make a difference when you come to look at it – about taking him off to see another woman. And such another woman – and in such a place! I think it’s hardly right to take an innocent child.’

  ‘I don’t know about that; there are people that would tell you it would do him good. If he didn’t like the place as a child, he would take more care to keep out of it later.’

  ‘Lord, Mr Vetch, how can you think? And him such a perfect little gentleman!’ Miss Pynsent cried.

  ‘Is it you that have made him one?’ the fiddler asked. ‘It doesn’t run in the family, you’d say.’

  ‘Family? what do you know about that?’ she replied, quickly, catching at her dearest, her only hobby.

  ‘Yes, indeed, what does any one know? what did she know herself?’ And then Miss Pynsent’s visitor added, irrelevantly, ‘Why should you have taken him on your back? Why did you want to be so good? No one else thinks it necessary.’

  ‘I didn’t want to be good. That is, I do want to, of course, in a general way: but that wasn’t the reason then. But I had nothing of my own – I had nothing in the world but my thimble.’

  ‘That would have seemed to most people a reason for not adopting a prostitute’s bastard.’

  ‘Well, I went to see him at the place where he was (just where she had left him, with the woman of the house), and I saw what kind of a shop that was, and felt it was a shame an innocent child should grow up in such a place.’ Miss Pynsent defended herself as earnestly as if her inconsistency had been of a criminal cast. ‘And he wouldn’t have grown up, neither. They wouldn’t have troubled themselves long with a helpless baby. They’d have played some trick on him, if it was only to send him to the workhouse. Besides, I always was fond of tiny creatures, and I have been fond of this one,’ she went on, speaking as if with a consciousness, on her own part, of almost heroic proportions. ‘He was in my way the first two or three years, and it was a good deal of a pull to look after the business and him together. But now he’s like the business – he seems to go of himself.’

  ‘Oh, if he flourishes as the business flourishes, you can just enjoy your peace of mind,’ said the fiddler, still with his manner of making a small dry joke of everything.

  ‘That’s all very well, but it doesn’t close my eyes to that poor woman lying there and moaning just for the touch of his little ’and before she passes away. Mrs Bowerbank says she believes I will bring him.’

  ‘Who believes? Mrs Bowerbank?’

  ‘I wonder if there’s anything in life holy enough for you to take it seriously,’ Miss Pynsent rejoined, snapping off a thread, with temper. ‘The day you stop laughing I should like to be there.’

  ‘So long as you are there, I shall never stop. What is it you want me to advise you? to take the child, or to leave the mother to groan herself out?’

  ‘I want you to tell me whether he’ll curse me when he grows older.’

  ‘That depends upon what you do. However, he will probably do it in either case.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, because you like him,’ said Amanda, with acuteness.

  ‘Precisely; and he’ll curse me too. He’ll curse every one. He won’t be happy.’

  ‘I don’t know how you think I bring him up,’ the little dressmaker remarked, with dignity.

  ‘You don’t bring him up; he brings you up.’

  ‘That’s what you have always said; but you don’t know. If you mean that he does as he likes, then he ought to be happy. It ain’t kind of you to say he won’t be,’ Miss Pynsent added, reproachfully.

  ‘I would say anything you like, if what I say would help the matter. He’s a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That’s why he won’t be happy.’

  Miss Pynsent listened to this description of her protégé with an appearance of criticising it mentally; but in reality she didn’t know what ‘morbid’ meant, and didn’t like to ask. ‘He’s the cleverest person I know, except yourself,’ she said in a moment; for Mr Vetch’s words had been in the key of what she thought most remarkable in him. What that was she would have been unable to say.

  ‘Thank you very much for putting me first,’ the fiddler rejoined, after a series of puffs. ‘The youngster is interesting, one sees that he has a mind, and in that respect he is – I won’t say unique, but peculiar. I shall watch him with curiosity, to see what he grows into. But I shall always be glad that I am a selfish brute of a bachelor, that I never invested in that class of goods.’

  ‘Well, you are comforting. You would spoil him more than I do,’ said Amanda.

  ‘Possibly, but it would be in a different way. I wouldn’t tell him every three minutes that his father was a duke.’

  ‘A duke I never mentioned!’ the little dressmaker cried, with eagerness. ‘I never specified any rank, nor said a word about any one in particular. I never so much as insinuated the name of his lordship. But I may have said that if the truth was to be found out, he might be proved to be connected – in the way of cousinship, or something of the kind – with the highest in the land. I should have thought myself wanting if I hadn’t given him a glimpse of that. But there is one thing I have always added – that the truth never is found out.’

  ‘You are still more comforting than I!’ Mr Vetch exclaimed. He continued to watch her, with his charitable, round-faced smile, and then he said, ‘You won’t do what I say; so what is the use of my telling you?’

  ‘I assure you I will, if you say you believe it’s the only right.’

  ‘Do I often say anything so asinine? Right—right? what have you to do with that? If you want the only right, you are very particular.’

  ‘Please, then, what am I to go by?’ the dressmaker asked, bewildered.

  ‘You are to go by this, by what will take the youngster down.’

  ‘Take him down, my poor little pet?’

  ‘Your poor little pet thinks himself the flower of creation. I don’t say there is any harm in that: a fine, blooming, odoriferous conceit is a natural appendage of youth and cleverness. I don’t say there is any great harm in it, but if you want a guide as to how you are to treat the boy, that’s as good a guide as any other.’

  ‘You want me to arrange the interview, then?’

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything but give me another sip of brandy. I just say this: that I think it’s a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don’t live in a fool’s paradise. I did that till I was nearly forty; then I woke up and found I was in Lomax Place.’ Whenever Mr Vetch said anything that could be construed as a reference to a former position which had had elements of distinction, Miss Pynsent observed a respectful, a tasteful, silence, and that is why she did not challenge him now, though she wanted very much to say that Hyacinth was no more ‘presumptious’ (that was the term she should have used) than he had reason to be, with his genteel figure and his wonderful intelligence; and that as for thinking himself a ‘flower’ of any kind, he knew but too well that he lived in a small black-faced house, miles away from the West End, rented by a poor little woman who took lodgers, and who, as they were of su
ch a class that they were not always to be depended upon to settle her weekly account, had a strain to make two ends meet, in spite of the sign between her windows –

  MISS AMANDA PYNSENT

  Modes et Robes.18

  DRESSMAKING IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. COURT-DRESSES, MANTLES AND FASHIONABLE BONNETS.

  Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts), and remarked that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world, without one’s wanting him to be any lower. ‘But by the time he’s twenty, he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar, and that when an old friend came to see you late at night it was not your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.’

  ‘Do you mean he’ll forget me, he’ll deny me?’ cried Miss Pynsent, stopping the movement of her needle, short off, for the first time.

  ‘As the person designated in that attractive blazonry on the outside of your house, decidedly he will; and me, equally, as a bald-headed, pot-bellied fiddler, who regarded you as the most graceful and refined of his acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never knew you: I don’t think he will ever be such an odious little cad as that; he probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some love, and possibly even some gratitude, in him. But he will, in his imagination (and that will always persuade him), subject you to some extraordinary metamorphosis; he will dress you up.’

  ‘He’ll dress me up!’ Amanda ejaculated, quite ceasing to follow the train of Mr Vetch’s demonstration. ‘Do you mean that he’ll have the property – that his relations will take him up?’

  ‘My dear, delightful, idiotic Pinnie, I am speaking in a figurative manner. I don’t pretend to say what his precise position will be when we are relegated; but I affirm that relegation will be our fate. Therefore don’t stuff him with any more illusions than are necessary to keep him alive; he will be sure to pick up enough on the way. On the contrary, give him a good stiff dose of the truth at the start.’

  ‘Dear me, dear me, of course you see much further into it than I could ever do,’ Pinnie murmured, as she threaded a needle.

  Mr Vetch paused a minute, but apparently not out of deference to this amiable interruption. He went on suddenly, with a ring of feeling in his voice. ‘Let him know, because it will be useful to him later, the state of the account between society and himself; he can then conduct himself accordingly. If he is the illegitimate child of a French good-for-naught who murdered one of her numerous lovers, don’t shuffle out of sight so important a fact. I regard that as a most valuable origin.’

  ‘Lord, Mr Vetch, how you talk!’ cried Miss Pynsent, staring. ‘I don’t know what one would think, to hear you.’

  ‘Surely, my dear lady, and for this reason: that those are the people with whom society has to count. It hasn’t with you and me.’ Miss Pynsent gave a sigh which might have meant either that she was well aware of that, or that Mr Vetch had a terrible way of enlarging a subject, especially when it was already too big for her; and her philosophic visitor went on: ‘Poor little devil, let him see her, let him see her.’

  ‘And if later, when he’s twenty, he says to me that if I hadn’t meddled in it he need never have known, he need never have had that shame, pray what am I to say to him then? That’s what I can’t get out of my head.’

  ‘You can say to him that a young man who is sorry for having gone to his mother when, in her last hours, she lay groaning for him on a pallet in a penitentiary, deserves more than the sharpest pang he can possibly feel.’ And the little fiddler, getting up, went over to the fireplace and shook out the ashes of his pipe.

  ‘Well, I am sure it’s natural he should feel badly,’ said Miss Pynsent, folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated her throughout the evening.

  ‘I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly; that’s not the worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull acceptance, the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density.’ Here Mr Vetch stopped short; his hostess stood before him with eyes of entreaty, with clasped hands.

  ‘Now, Anastasius Vetch, don’t go off into them dreadful wild theories!’ she cried, always ungrammatical when she was strongly moved. ‘You always fly away over the housetops. I thought you liked him better – the dear little unfortunate.’

  Anastasius Vetch had pocketed his pipe; he put on his hat with the freedom of old acquaintance and of Lomax Place, and took up his small coffin-like fiddle-case. ‘My good Pinnie, I don’t think you understand a word I say. It’s no use talking – do as you like!’

  ‘Well, I must say I don’t think it was worth your coming in at midnight only to tell me that. I don’t like anything – I hate the whole dreadful business!’

  He bent over, in his short plumpness, to kiss her hand, as he had seen people do on the stage. ‘My dear friend, we have different ideas, and I never shall succeed in driving mine into your head. It’s because I am fond of him, poor little devil; but you will never understand that. I want him to know everything, and especially the worst – the worst, as I have said. If I were in his position, I shouldn’t thank you for trying to make a fool of me!’

  ‘A fool of you? as if I thought of anything but his ’appiness!’ Amanda Pynsent exclaimed. She stood looking at him, but following her own reflections; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She remembered, what she had noticed before, in other occurrences, that his reasons were always more extraordinary than his behaviour itself; if you only considered his life you wouldn’t have thought him so fanciful. ‘Very likely I think too much of that,’ she added. ‘She wants him and cries for him; that’s what keeps coming back to me.’ She took up her lamp to light Mr Vetch to the door (for the dim luminary in the passage had long since been extinguished), and before he left the house he turned, suddenly, stopping short, and said, his composed face taking a strange expression from the quizzical glimmer of his little round eyes –

  ‘What does it matter after all, and why do you worry? What difference can it make what happens – on either side – to such low people?’

  3

  Mrs Bowerbank had let her know she would meet her, almost at the threshold of the dreadful place;19 and this thought had sustained Miss Pynsent in her long and devious journey, performed partly on foot, partly in a succession of omnibuses.20 She had had ideas about a cab, but she decided to reserve the cab for the return, as then, very likely, she should be so shaken with emotion, so overpoweringly affected, that it would be a comfort to escape from observation. She had no confidence that if once she passed the door of the prison she should ever be restored to liberty and her customers; it seemed to her an adventure as dangerous as it was dismal, and she was immensely touched by the clear-faced eagerness of the child at her side, who strained forward as brightly as he had done on another occasion, still celebrated in Miss Pynsent’s industrious annals, a certain sultry Saturday in August, when she had taken him to the Tower.21 It had been a terrible question with her, when once she made up her mind, what she should tell him about the nature of their errand. She determined to tell him as little as possible, to say only that she was going to see a poor woman who was in prison on account of a crime she had committed years before, and who had sent for her, and caused her to be told at the same time that if there was any child she could see – as children (if they were good) were bright and cheering – it would make her very happy that such a little visitor should come as well. It was very difficult, with Hyacinth, to make reservations or mysteries; he wanted to know everything about everything, and he projected the light of a hundred questions upon Miss
Pynsent’s incarcerated friend. She had to admit that she had been her friend (for where else was the obligation to go to see her?); but she spoke of the acquaintance as if it were of the slightest (it had survived in the memory of the prisoner only because every one else – the world was so very hard! – had turned away from her), and she congratulated herself on a happy inspiration when she represented the crime for which such a penalty had been exacted as the theft of a gold watch, in a moment of irresistible temptation. The woman had had a wicked husband, who maltreated and deserted her, and she was very poor, almost starving, dreadfully pressed. Hyacinth listened to her history with absorbed attention, and then he said: