LITMIR.BIZ

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— suffered so much that it has made you good again.”

      “Has she suffered very much?”

      “For years and years. And now she is dying. It proves she is very good now, that she should want to see us.”

      “Do you mean because we are good?” Hyacinth went on, probing the matter in a way that made his companion quiver, and gazing away from her, very seriously, across the river, at the dreary waste of Battersea.

      “We shall be good if we are pitiful, if we make an effort,” said the dressmaker, seeming to look up at him rather than down.

      “But if she is dying? I don’t want to see any one die.”

      Miss Pynsent was bewildered, but she rejoined, desperately, “If we go to her, perhaps she won’t. Maybe we shall save her.”

      He transferred his remarkable little eyes — eyes which always appeared to her to belong to a person older than herself, to her face; and then he inquired, “Why should I save her, if I don’t like her?”

      “If she likes you, that will be enough.”

      At this Miss Pynsent began to see that he was moved. “Will she like me very much?”

      “More, much more than any one.”

      “More than you, now?”

      “Oh,” said Amanda quickly. “I mean more than she likes any one.”

      Hyacinth had slipped his hands into the pockets of his scanty knickerbockers, and, with his legs slightly apart, he looked from his companion back to the immense dreary jail. A great deal, to Miss Pynsent’s sense, depended on that moment. “Oh, well,” he said, at last, “I’ll just step in.”

      “Deary, deary!” the dressmaker murmured to herself, as they crossed the bare semicircle which separated the gateway from the unfrequented street. She exerted herself to pull the bell, which seemed to her terribly big and stiff, and while she waited, again, for the consequences of this effort, the boy broke out, abruptly: —

      “How can she like me so much if she doesn’t know me?”

      Miss Pynsent wished the gate would open before an answer to this question should become imperative, but the people within were a long time coming, and their delay gave Hyacinth an opportunity to repeat it. So the dressmaker rejoined, seizing the first pretext that came into her head, “It’s because the little baby she had, of old, was also named Hyacinth.”

      “That’s a queer reason,” the boy murmured, staring across again at the Battersea shore.

      A moment afterwards they found themselves in a vast interior dimness, with a grinding of keys and bolts going on behind them. Hereupon Miss Pynsent gave herself up to an overruling Providence, and she remembered, later, no circumstance of what happened to her until the great person of Mrs. Bowerbank loomed before her in the narrowness of a strange, dark corridor. She only had a confused impression of being surrounded with high black walls, whose inner face was more dreadful than the other, the one that overlooked the river; of passing through gray, stony courts, in some of which dreadful figures, scarcely female, in hideous brown, misfitting uniforms and perfect frights of hoods, were marching round in a circle; of squeezing up steep, unlighted staircases at the heels of a woman who had taken possession of her at the first stage, and who made incomprehensible remarks to other women, of lumpish aspect, as she saw them erect themselves, suddenly and spectrally, with dowdy untied bonnets, in uncanny corners and recesses of the draughty labyrinth. If the place had seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her devious way into the circular shafts of cells, where she had an opportunity of looking at captives through grated peepholes, and of edging past others who had temporarily been turned into the corridors — silent women, with fixed eyes, who flattened themselves against the stone walls at the brush of the visitor’s dress, and whom Miss Pynsent was afraid to glance at. She never had felt so immured, so made sure of; there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its color, and you couldn’t imagine what o’clock it was. Mrs. Bowerbank appeared to have failed her, and that made her feel worse; a panic seized her, as she went, in regard to the child. On him, too. the horror of the place would have fallen, and she had a sickening prevision that he would have convulsions after they got home. It was a most improper place to have brought him, no matter who had sent for him, and no matter who was dying. The stillness would terrify him, she was sure — the penitential dumbness of the clustered or isolated women. She clasped his hand more tightly, and she felt him keep close to her, without speaking a word. At last, in an open doorway, darkened by her ample person, Mrs. Bowerbank revealed herself, and Miss Pynsent thought it (afterwards) a sign of her place and power that she should not condescend to apologize for not having appeared till that moment, or to explain why she had not met the bewildered pilgrims near the principal entrance, according to her promise. Miss Pynsent could not embrace the state of mind of people who didn’t apologize, though she vaguely envied and admired it, she herself spending much of her time in making excuses for obnoxious acts she had not committed. Mrs. Bowerbank, however, was not arrogant, she was only massive and muscular; and after she had taken her timorous friends in tow, the dressmaker was able to comfort herself with the reflection that even so masterful a woman couldn’t inflict anything gratuitously disagreeable on a person who had made her visit in Lomax Place pass off so pleasantly.

      It was on the outskirts of the infirmary that she had been hovering, and it was into certain dismal chambers, dedicated to sick criminals, that she presently ushered her companions. These chambers were naked and grated, like all the rest of the place, and caused Miss Pynsent to say to herself that it must be a blessing to be ill in such a place, because you couldn’t possibly pick up again, and then your case was simple. Such simplification, however, had for the moment been offered to very few of Florentine’s fellow-sufferers, for only three of the small, stiff beds were occupied — occupied by white-faced women in tight, sordid caps, on whom, in the stale, ugly room, the sallow light itself seemed to rest without pity. Mrs. Bowerbank discreetly paid no attention whatever to Hyacinth; she only said to Miss Pynsent, with her hoarse distinctness, “You’ll find her very low; she wouldn’t have waited another day.” And she guided them, through a still further door, to the smallest room of all, where there were but three beds, placed in a row. Miss Pynsent’s frightened eyes rather faltered than inquired, but she became aware that a woman was lying on the middle bed, and that her face was turned toward the door. Mrs. Bowerbank led the way straight up to her, and, giving a businesslike pat to her pillow, looked invitation and encouragement to the visitors, who clung together not far within the threshold. Their conductress reminded them that very few minutes were allowed them, and that they had better not dawdle them away; whereupon, as the boy still hung back, the little dressmaker advanced alone, looking at the sick woman with what courage she could muster. It seemed to her that she was approaching a perfect stranger, so completely had nine years of prison transformed Florentine. She felt, immediately, that it was a mercy she hadn’t told Hyacinth she was pretty (as she used to be), for there was no beauty left in the hollow, bloodless mask that presented itself without a movement. She had told him that the poor woman was good, but she didn’t look so, nor, evidently, was he struck with it as he stared back at her across the interval he declined to traverse, kept (at the same time) from retreating by her strange, fixed eyes, the only portion of all her wasted person in which there was still any appearance of life. She looked unnatural to Amanda Pynsent, and terribly old; a speechless, motionless creature, dazed and stupid, whereas Florentine Vivier, in the obliterated past, had been her ideal of personal, as distinguished from social, brilliancy. Above all she seemed disfigured and ugly, cruelly misrepresented by her coarse cap and short, rough hair. Amanda, as she stood beside her, thought with a sort of scared elation that Hyacinth would never guess that a person in whom there was so little trace of smartness — or of cleverness of any kind — was his mother. At the very most it might occur to him, as Mrs. Bowerbank had suggested, that she was his grandmother. Mrs. Bowerbank seated herself on the further bed, with folded hands, like a monumental timekeeper, and remarked, in the manner of one speaking from a sense of duty, that the poor thing wouldn’t get much good of the

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