LITMIR.BIZ

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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 behavior 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 placid 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?”

Chapter III

       Table of Contents

      MRS. BOWERBANK had let her know she would meet her, almost at the threshold of the dreadful place; and this thought had sustained Miss Pynsent in her long and devious journey, performed partly on foot, partly in a succession of omnibuses. 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 of London. 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 had 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: —

      “And hadn’t she any children — hadn’t she a little boy?”

      This inquiry seemed to Miss Pynsent a portent of future embarrassments, but she met it as bravely as she could, and replied that she believed the wretched victim of the law had had (once upon a time) a very small baby, but she was afraid she had completely lost sight of it. He must know they didn’t allow babies in prisons. To this Hyacinth rejoined that of course they would allow him, because he was — really — big. Miss Pynsent fortified herself with the memory of her other pilgrimage to Newgate, upwards of ten years before; she had escaped from that ordeal, and had even had the comfort of knowing that in its fruits the interview had been beneficent. The responsibility, however, was much greater now, and, after all, it was not on her own account she was in a nervous tremor, but on that of the urchin over whom the shadow of the house of shame might cast itself.

      They made the last part of their approach on foot, having got themselves deposited as near as possible to the river, and keeping beside it (according to advice elicited by Miss Pynsent, on the way, in a dozen confidential interviews with policemen, conductors of omnibuses, and small shopkeepers), till they came to a big, dark building with towers, which they would know as soon as they looked at it. They knew it, in fact, soon enough, when they saw it lift its dusky mass from the bank of the Thames, lying there and sprawling over the whole neighborhood, with brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, truncated pinnacles, and a character unspeakably sad and stern. It looked very sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent’s eyes, and she wondered why a prison should have such an evil face, if it was erected in the interest of justice and order — an expression of the righteous forces of society. This particular penitentiary struck her as about as bad and wrong as those who were in it; it threw a blight over the whole place and made the river look foul and poisonous, and the opposite bank, with its protrusions of long-necked chimneys, unsightly gasometers, and deposits of rubbish, wear the aspect of a region at whose expense the jail had been populated. She looked up at the dull, closed gates of the place, tightening her grasp of Hyacinth’s small hand; and if it was hard to believe anything so blind and deaf and closely fastened would relax itself to let her in, there was a dreadful premonitory sinking of the heart attached to the idea of its taking the same trouble to let her out. As she hung back, murmuring vague ejaculations, at the very goal of her journey, an incident occurred which fanned all her scruples and reluctances into life again. The child suddenly jerked his hand out of her own, and placing it behind him, in the clutch of the other, said to her, respectfully but resolutely, while he planted himself at a considerable distance: —

      “I don’t like this place.”

      “Neither do I like it, my darling,” cried the dressmaker, pitifully. “Oh, if you knew how little!”

      “Then we will go away. I won’t go in.”

      She would have embraced this proposition with alacrity, if it had not become very vivid to her while she stood there, in the midst of her shrinking, that behind those sullen walls the mother who bore him was even then counting the minutes. She was alive, in that huge< dull tomb, and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that they had already entered into relation with her. They were near her, and she knew it; in a few minutes she would taste the cup of the only mercy (except the reprieve from hanging!) she had known since her fall. A few, a very few minutes would do it, and it seemed to Miss Pynsent that if she should fail of her charity now, the watches of the night, in Lomax Place, would be haunted with remorse and perhaps even with something worse. There was something inside that waited and listened, something that would break, with an awful sound, a shriek, or a curse, if she were to lead the boy away. She looked into his pale face for a moment, perfectly conscious that it would be vain for her to take the tone of command; besides, that would have seemed to her shocking. She had another inspiration, and she said to him in a manner in which she had had occasion to speak before: —

      “The reason why we have come is only to be kind. If we are kind we shan’t mind its being disagreeable.”

      “Why should we be kind, if she’s a bad woman?” Hyacinth inquired. “She must be very low; I don’t want to know her.”

      “Hush, hush,” groaned poor Amanda, edging toward him with clasped hands. “She is not bad now; it has all been washed away — it has been expiated.”

      “What’s expiated?” asked the child, while she almost

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