THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA. Генри ДжеймÑ
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book-bindery, and had served an apprenticeship at an establishment where they turned out the best work of that kind that was to be found in London.
“Bookbindery? Laws!” said Miss Henning. “Do you mean they get them up for the shops? Well, I always thought he would have something to do with books.” Then she added, “But I didn’t think he would ever follow a trade.”
“A trade?” cried Miss Pynsent. “You should hear Mr. Robinson speak of it. He considers it one of the fine arts.”
Millicent smiled, as if she knew how people often considered things, and remarked that very likely it was tidy, comfortable work, but she couldn’t believe there was much to be seen in it. “Perhaps you will say there is more than there is here,” she went on, finding at last an effect of irritation, of reprehension, an implication of aggressive respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker, sitting for so many years in her close brown little dress, with the foggy familiarities of Lomax Place on the other side of the pane. Millicent liked to think that she herself was strong, and she was not strong enough for that.
This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very cruel; but she reflected that it was natural one should be insulted if one talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner of a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference between them, she was right in feeling it to be in her favor. Miss Pynsent’s “cut,” as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and in the application of gimp and the distribution of ornament she was not to be trusted; but, morally, she had the best taste in the world. “I have n ‘t so much work as I used to have, if that’s what you mean. My eyes are not so good, and my health has failed with advancing years.”
I know not to what extent Millicent was touched by the dignity of this admission, but she replied, without embarrassment, that what Miss Pynsent wanted was a smart young assistant, some nice girl with a pretty taste, who would brighten up the business and give her new ideas. “I can see you have got the same old ones, always: I can tell that by the way you have stuck the braid on that dress,” and she directed a poke of her neat little umbrella to the drapery in the dressmaker’s lap. She continued to patronize and exasperate her. and to offer her consolation and encouragement with the heaviest hand that had ever been applied to Miss Pynsent’s sensitive surface. Poor Amanda ended by gazing at her as if she were a public performer of some kind, a ballad-singer or a conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself whether the hussy could be (in her own mind) the “nice girl” who was to regild the tarnished sign. Miss Pynsent had had assistants, in the past — she had even, once, for a few months, had a “forewoman;” and some of these damsels had been precious specimens, whose misdemeanors lived vividly in her memory. Never, all the same, in her worst hour of delusion, had she trusted her interests to such an extravagant baggage as this. She was quickly reassured as to Millicent’s own views, perceiving more and more that she was a tremendous high-flyer, who required a much larger field of action than the musty bower she now honored, Heaven only knew why, with her presence. Miss Pynsent held her tongue, as she always did, when the sorrow of her life had been touched, the thought of the slow, inexorable decline on which she had entered that day, nearly ten years before, when her hesitations and scruples resolved themselves into a hideous mistake. The deep conviction of error, on that unspeakably important occasion, had ached and throbbed within her ever since like an incurable disease. She had sown in her boy’s mind the seeds of shame and rancor; she had made him conscious of his stigma, of his exquisitely vulnerable spot, and condemned him to know that for him the sun would never shine as it shone for most others. By the time he was sixteen years old she had learned — or believed she had learned — the judgment he passed upon her, and at that period she had lived through a series of horrible months, an ordeal in which every element of her old prosperity perished. She cried her eyes out, on coming to a sense of her aberration, blinded and weakened herself with weeping, so that, for a moment, it seemed as if she should never be able to touch a needle again. She lost all interest in her work, and that artistic imagination which had always been her pride deserted her, together with the reputation of keeping the tidiest lodgings in Lomax Place. A couple of commercial gentlemen and a Scotch plumber, of religious tendencies, who for several years had made her establishment their home, withdrew their patronage on the ground that the airing of her beds was not what it used to be, and disseminated cruelly this injurious legend. She ceased to notice or to care how sleeves were worn, and on the question of flounces and gores her mind was a blank. She fell into a grievous debility, and then into a long, low, languid fever, during which Hyacinth tended her with a devotion which only made the wrong she had done him seem more bitter, and in which, so soon as she was able to hold up her head a little, Mr. Vetch came and sat with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She reestablished to a certain extent, after a while, her connection, so far as the letting of her rooms was concerned (from the other department of her activity the tide had ebbed apparently forever); but nothing was the same again, and she knew it was the beginning of the end. So it had gone on, and she watched the end approach; she felt it was very near indeed when a child she had seen playing in the gutters came to flaunt it over her in silk and lace. She gave a low, inaudible sigh of relief when at last Millicent got up and stood before her, smoothing the glossy cylinder of her umbrella.
“Mind you give my love to Hyacinth,” the girl said, with an assurance which showed all her insensibility to tacit protests. “I don’t care if you do guess that if I have stopped so long it was in the hope he would be dropping in to his tea. You can tell him I sat an hour, on purpose, if you like; there’s no shame in my wanting to see my little friend. He may know I call him that!” Millicent continued, with her showroom laugh, as Miss Pynsent judged it to be; conferring these permissions, successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do give him my love, and tell him I hope he’ll come and see me. I see you won’t tell him anything. I don’t know what you ‘re afraid of; but I’ll leave my card for him, all the same.” She drew forth a little bright-colored pocketbook, and it was with amazement that Miss Pynsent saw her extract from it a morsel of engraved pasteboard — so monstrous did it seem that one of the squalid little Hennings should have lived to display this emblem of social consideration. Millicent enjoyed the effect she produced as she laid the card on the table, and gave another ringing peal of merriment at the sight of her hostess’s half-hungry, half-astonished look. “What do you think I want to do with him? I could swallow him at a single bite!” she cried.
Poor Amanda gave no second glance at the document on the table, though she had perceived it contained, in the corner, her visitor’s address, which Millicent had amused herself, ingeniously, with not mentioning: she only got up, laying down her work with a trembling hand, so that she should be able to see Miss Henning well out of the house. “You needn’t think I shall put myself out to keep him in the dark. I shall certainly tell him you have been here, and exactly how you strike me.”
“Of course you’ll say something nasty — like you used to when I was a child. You let me ‘ave it then, you know!”
“Ah, well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at being reminded of an acerbity which the girl’s present development caused to appear ridiculously ineffectual, “you are very different now, when I think what you’ve come from.”
“What I’ve come from?” Millicent threw back her head, and opened her eyes very wide, while all her feathers and ribbons nodded. “Did you want me to stick fast in this low place for the rest of my days? You have had to stay in it yourself, so you might speak civilly of it.” She colored, and raised her voice, and looked magnificent in her scorn. “And pray what have you come from yourself, and what has he come from — the mysterious ‘Mr. Robinson,’ that used to be such a puzzle to the whole Place? I thought perhaps I might clear it up, but you haven’t told me that yet!”
Miss Pynsent turned straight away, covering her ears with her hands. “I have nothing to tell you! Leave my room — leave my house!” she cried, with a trembling voice.
Chapter V
IT WAS IN this way that the dressmaker failed either