THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA. Генри Джеймс

taking a nearer view of the mysterious captive. They produced upon the latter an effect even more powerful than his unfortunate speech of a moment before; for she found strength to raise herself, partly, in her bed again, and to hold out her arms to him, with the same thrilling sobs. She was talking still, but she had become quite inarticulate, and Miss Pynsent had but a glimpse of her white, ravaged face, with the hollows of its eyes and the rude crop of her hair. Amanda caught the child with an eagerness almost as great as Florentine’s, and, drawing him to the head of the bed, pushed him into his mother’s arms. “Kiss her — kiss her, and we’ll go home!” she whispered desperately, while they closed about him, and the poor dishonored head pressed itself against his little cheek. It was a terrible, tremendous embrace, to which Hyacinth submitted with instant patience. Mrs. Bowerbank had tried at first to keep her protegee from rising, evidently wishing to abbreviate the scene; then, as the child was enfolded, she accepted the situation and gave judicious support from behind, with an eye to clearing the room as soon as this effort should have spent itself. She propped up her patient with a vigorous arm: Miss Pynsent rose from her knees and turned away, and there was a minute’s stillness, during which the boy accommodated himself as he might to his strange ordeal. What thoughts were begotten at that moment in his wondering little mind Miss Pynsent was destined to learn at another time. Before she had faced round to the bed again she was swept out of the room by Mrs. Bowerbank, who had lowered the prisoner, exhausted, with closed eyes, to her pillow, and given Hyacinth a businesslike little push, which sent him on in advance. Miss Pynsent went home in a cab — she was so shaken; though she reflected, very nervously, on getting into it, on the opportunities it would give Hyacinth for the exercise of inquisitorial rights. To her surprise, however, he completely neglected them; he sat in silence, looking out of the window, till they reentered Lomax Place.

Chapter IV

       Table of Contents

      “WELL, YOU’LL have to guess my reason before I’ll tell you,” the girl said, with a free laugh, pushing her way into the narrow hall and leaning against the tattered wall-paper, which, representing blocks of marble with beveled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and gray, had not been renewed for years, and came back to her out of the past. As Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor was so resolute, the light filtered in from the street, through the narrow, dusty glass above it, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent; a kind of musty dimness, with the vision of a small, steep staircase at the end, covered with a strip of oilcloth which she recognized, and made a little less dark by a window in the bend (you could see it from the hall), from which you could almost bump your head against the house behind. Nothing was changed except Miss Pynsent, and of course the girl herself. She had noticed, outside, that the sign between the windows had not even been touched up; there was still the same preposterous announcement of “fashionable bonnets” — as if the poor little dressmaker had the slightest acquaintance with that style of headdress, of which Miss Henning’s own knowledge was now so complete. She could see Miss Pynsent was looking at her hat, which was a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had traveled up and down Millicent’s whole person, but they rested in fascination upon that ornament. The girl had forgotten how small the dressmaker was; she barely came up to her shoulder. She had lost her hair, and wore a cap, which Millicent noticed, in return, wondering if that were a specimen of what she thought the fashion. Miss Pynsent stared up at her as if she had been six feet high; but she was used to that sort of surprised admiration, being perfectly conscious that she was a magnificent young woman.

      “Won’t you take me into your-shop?” she asked. “I don’t want to-order anything; I only want to inquire after your ‘ealth: and isn’t this rather an awkward place to talk?” She made her way further in, without waiting for permission, seeing that her startled hostess had not yet guessed.

      “The showroom is on the right hand,” said Miss Pynsent, with her professional manner, which was intended, evidently, to mark a difference. She spoke as if on the other side, where the horizon was bounded by the partition of the next house, there were labyrinths of apartments. Passing in after her guest, she found the young lady already spread out upon the sofa, the everlasting sofa, in the right-hand corner as you faced the window, covered with a light, shrunken shroud of a strange yellow stuff, the tinge of which revealed years of washing, and surmounted by a colored print of Rebekah at the Well, balancing, in the opposite quarter, with a portrait of the Empress of the French, taken from an illustrated newspaper, and framed and glazed in the manner of 1853. Millicent looked about her, asking herself what Miss Pynsent had to show, and acting perfectly the part of the most brilliant figure the place had ever contained. The old implements were there on the table: the pincushions and needle-books; the pink measuring-tape with which, as children, she and Hyacinth used to take each other’s height; and the same collection of fashion-plates (she could see in a minute), crumpled, sallow, and fly-blown. The little dressmaker bristled, as she used to do, with needles and pins (they were stuck all over the front of her dress), but there were no rustling fabrics tossed in heaps about the room — nothing but the skirt of; a shabby dress (it might have been her own), which she was evidently repairing, and had flung upon the table when she came to the door. Miss Kenning speedily arrived at the conclusion that her hostess’s business had not increased, and felt a kind of good-humored, luxurious scorn of a person who knew so little what was to be got out of London. It was Millicent’s belief that she herself was already perfectly acquainted with the resources of the metropolis.

      “Now tell me, how Is Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,” she remarked, extending a pair of large, protrusive feet, and supporting herself on ‘the sofa by her hands.

      “Hyacinth”?” Miss Pynsent repeated, with majestic blankness, as if she had never heard of such a person. She felt that the girl was cruelly, scathingly, well dressed; she couldn’t imagine who she was, nor with what design she could have presented herself.

      “Perhaps you call him Mr. Robinson, to-day — you always wanted him to hold himself so high. But to his face, at any rate, I’ll call him as I used to: you see if I don’t!”

      “Bless my soul, you must be the little ‘Enning!” Miss Pynsent exclaimed, planted before her, and going now into every detail.

      “Well, I’m glad you have made up your mind. I thought you ‘d know me directly. I had a call to make in this part, and it came into my ‘ead to look you up. I don’t like to lose sight of old friends.”

      “I never knew you — you’ve improved so,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, with a candor justified by her age and her consciousness of respectability.

      “Well, you haven’t changed; you were always calling me something horrid.”

      “I dare say it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the dressmaker, seating herself, but quite unable to take up her work, absorbed as she was in the examination of her visitor.

      “Oh, I’m all right now,” Miss Henning replied, with the air of one who had nothing to fear from human judgments.

      “You were a pretty child — I never said the contrary to that: but I had no idea you ‘d turn out like this. You ‘re too tall for a woman,” Miss Pynsent added, much divided between an old prejudice and a new appreciation.

      “Well, I enjoy beautiful ‘ealth,” said the young lady; “every one thinks I’m twenty.” She spoke with a certain artless pride in her bigness and her bloom, and as if, to show her development, she would have taken off her jacket or let you feel her forearm. She was very handsome, with a shining, bold, goodnatured eye, a flue, free, facial oval, an abundance of brown hair, and a smile which showed the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set upon a fair, strong neck, and her tall young figure was rich in feminine curves. Her gloves, covering her wrists insufficiently, showed the redness of those parts, in the interstices of the numerous silver bracelets that encircled them, and Miss Pynsent made the observation that her hands were not more delicate than her feet. She was not graceful, and even the little dressmaker, whose preference for distinguished forms never deserted her, indulged in the mental