THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA. Генри ДжеймÑ
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dear woman, nothing was proved except that she stabbed his lordship in the back with a very long knife, that he died of the blow, and that she got the full sentence. What does such a piece as that know about fathers? The less said about the poor child’s papa, the better!”
This view of the case caused Miss Pynsent fairly to gasp, for it pushed over, with a touch, a certain tall imaginative structure which she had been piling up for years. Even as she heard it crash around her she couldn’t forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material. “Really — really,” she panted, “she never had to do with any one but the nobility!”
Mrs. Bowerbank surveyed her hostess with an expressionless eye. “My dear young lady, what does a respectable little body like you, that sits all day with her needle and scissors, know about the doings of a wicked, low foreigner that carries a knife? I was there when she came in, and I know to what she had sunk. Her conversation was choice, I assure you.”
“Oh, it’s very dreadful, and of course I know nothing in particular,” Miss Pynsent quavered. “But she wasn’t low when I worked at the same place with her, and she often told me she would do nothing for any one that wasn’t at the very top.”
“She might have talked to you of something that would have done you both more good,” Mrs. Bowerbank remarked, while the dressmaker felt rebuked in the past as well as in the present. “At the very top, poor thing! Well, she’s at the very bottom now. If she wasn’t low when she worked, it’s a pity she didn’t stick to her work; and as for pride of birth, that’s an article I recommend your young friend to leave to others. You had better believe what I say, because I’m a woman of the world.”
Indeed she was, as Miss Pynsent felt, to whom all this was very terrible, letting in the cold light of the penal system on a dear, dim little theory. She had cared for the child because maternity was in her nature, and this was the only manner in which fortune had put it in her path to become a mother. She had as few belongings as the baby, and it had seemed to her that he would add to her importance in the little world of Lomax Place (if she kept it a secret how she came by him), quite in the proportion in which she should contribute to his maintenance. Her weakness and loneliness went out to his, and in the course of time this united desolation was peopled by the dressmaker’s romantic mind with a hundred consoling evocations. The boy proved neither a dunce nor a reprobate; but what endeared him to her most was her conviction that he belonged, “by the left hand,” as she had read in a novel, to an ancient and exalted race, the list of whose representatives and the record of whose alliances she had once (when she took home some work and was made to wait, alone, in a lady’s boudoir) had the opportunity of reading in a fat red book, eagerly and tremblingly consulted. She bent her head before Mrs. Bowerbank’s overwhelming logic, but she felt in her heart that she shouldn’t give the child up, for all that, that she believed in him still, and that she recognized, as distinctly as she revered, the quality of her betters. To believe in Hyacinth, for Miss Pynsent, was to believe that he was the son of the extremely immoral Lord Frederick. She had told him so, from the earliest age, and as Mrs. Bowerbank would be sure not to approve of such indiscretions, Miss Pynsent prayed she might not question her on that part of the business. It was not that, when it was necessary, the little dressmaker had any scruple about using the arts of prevarication; she was a kind and innocent creature, but she told fibs as freely as she invented trimmings. She had, however, not yet been questioned by an emissary of the law, and her heart beat faster when Mrs. Bowerbank said to her, in deep tones, with an effect of abruptness, “And pray, Miss Pynsent, does the child know it?”
“Know about Lord Frederick?” Miss Pynsent palpitated.
“Bother Lord Frederick! Know about his mother.”
“Oh, I can’t say that. I have never told him.”
“But has any one else told him?”
To this inquiry Miss Pynsent’s answer was more prompt and more proud; it was with an agreeable sense of having conducted herself with extraordinary wisdom and propriety that she replied, “How could any one know? I have never breathed it to a creature!”
Mrs. Bowerbank gave utterance to no commendation; she only put down her empty glass and wiped her large mouth with much thoroughness and deliberation. Then she said, as if it were as cheerful an idea as, in the premises, she was capable of expressing, “Ah, well, there’ll be plenty, later on, to give him all information!”
“I pray God he may live and die without knowing it!” Miss Pynsent cried, with eagerness.
Her companion gazed at her with a kind of professional patience. “You don’t keep your ideas together. How can he go to her, then, if he’s never to know?”
“Oh, did you mean she would tell him?” Miss Pynsent responded, plaintively.
“Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and gives him — what she told me.”
“What she told you?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed.
“The kiss her lips have been famished for for years.”
“Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured, with her pity gushing up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she pursued, simply. Then she added, with an inspiration more brilliant, “We might tell him she’s his aunt!”
“You may tell him she’s his grandmother, if you like. But it’s all in the family.”
“Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent, musingly and irrepressibly. “And will she speak French?” she inquired. “In that case he won’t understand.”
“Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs. Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort. But she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which bristled with dangers, “Of course, it’s just according to your own conscience. You needn’t bring the child at all, unless you like. There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.”
“And would nothing be done to me, if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent asked, unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the arm of the law that was stretched out to touch her.
“The only thing that could happen to you would be that he might throw it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed, with a gloomy impartiality.
“Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.”
“Oh, he ‘d be sure to know, one of these days. We see a great deal of that — the way things come out,” said Mrs. Bowerbank, whose view of life seemed to abound in cheerless contingencies. “You must remember that it is her dying wish, and that you may have it on your conscience.”
“That’s a thing I never could abide!” the little dressmaker exclaimed, with great emphasis and a visible shiver; after which she picked up various scattered remnants of muslin and cut paper, and began to roll them together with a desperate and mechanical haste. “It’s quite awful, to know what to do — if you are very sure she is dying.”
“Do you mean she’s shamming? we have plenty of that — but we know how to treat ‘em.”
“Lord, I suppose so,” murmured Miss Pynsent; while her visitor went on to say that the unfortunate person on whose behalf she had undertaken this solemn pilgrimage might live a week and might live a fortnight, but if she lived a month, would violate (as Mrs. Bowerbank might express herself) every established law of nature, being reduced to skin and bone, with nothing left of her but the main desire to see her child.
“If you ‘re afraid of her talking, it isn’t much she ‘d be able to say. And we shouldn’t allow you more than about eight minutes,” Mrs. Bowerbank pursued, in a tone that seemed to refer itself to an iron discipline.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t want more; that would be enough to last me many a year,” said Miss Pynsent, plaintively. And then she added, with another illumination,