PART III.
Chapter I.
For the first time in her life Lucy Brothertoft failed to kiss her mother on the morning of the dinner to Sir Henry Clinton.
A great pang went to the guilty woman’s heart.
She perceived that her daughter knew her at last.
Ah, miserable woman! She did not dare turn her great black eyes reproachfully upon Lucy, and demand the omitted caress.
She did not dare say tenderly, “What, my daughter, are you forgetting me?”
She did not dare go forward and press her own unworthy lips to those virgin lips.
For one instant a great tumult of love and remorse stirred within her. She longed to fling herself on her knees before her daughter, to bury her face in Lucy’s lap, and there, with tears and agony, cry out: —
“O my child! pity me, do not hate me, for the lie I have been. Ah! you do not know the misery of wearing an undetected falsehood in the heart! You do not know the torture of hypocrisy. You do not know how miserably base it is to be loved for what you are not, — to be trusted as a true and loyal heart, when every moment of such false pretence is another film of falsehood over the deep-seated lie. You cannot know how we tacit liars long for betrayal, while we shrink and shudder when it approaches!
“And you, my gentle daughter, have been my vengeance. Listen to me now! The old pride breaks. The old horror passes. I confess. Before you, the very image of my husband in his young and hopeful days, I confess my shameful sin. I have been a foul wife and a false mother. Do not scorn me, Lucy. I have suffered, and shall suffer till I die.
“Ah! thank Heaven, my child, that you do not feel and cannot divine half my degradation. My agony you see, — let it be the lesson of your life! Here I hide my face, and dare to recall that brave and noble lover, your father. So gentle he was, so tender, so utterly trustful! And I was mean enough to think he triumphed over me because his soul was fine, and mine was coarse. So I took my coarse revenge.
“O fool, fool! that I could not comprehend that pure and lofty nature. O base! that I must grovel and rank myself with the base. O cruel! that I must trample upon him. O dastardly! for the unwomanly sneers, for the studied insults, by which I bore him down, and broke at last that high, chivalric heart. It seems to me that I was not sane, but mad all those miserable years.
“But now, my daughter, see me weep! I repent. My soul repents and loathes this guilty woman here. I have spoken, I have told you fully what I am. I look up. I see your father’s patient, pitying glance upon your face. Speak, with his voice, and say I may be slowly pardoned, if my penitence endures. And kiss me, Lucy! not my tainted lips; but kiss my forehead with a kiss of peace!”
Such a wild agony of love and remorse stirred within this wretched woman’s heart.
But she battled it down, down, down.
The virago in her struck the woman to the earth, and throttled her. No yielding. No tears. No repentance. She scorned the medicine of shame.
Lucy’s presence cowed her. She did not dare look at that gentle, earnest face, except covertly, and as an assassin looks.
The Furies, her old companions, thickened about her, like a mist pregnant with forms. There was a whispering in the air. Did others see those shadowy images? Did others hear their words? To her they were loud and emphatic. “Stab the meek-faced girl! Be rid of this spy! Shall she sit there and shame you?” — so the Furies whispered and shouted. And the woman replied within herself: “Am I not stabbing her? See, here is my hired bravo, my future son-in-law, the very Honorable Major Kerr, — le bel homme! He will give the puny thing troubles of her own to mind. We will see whether she is always to stay so meek and patient. We will see whether these Brothertofts are so much better than other people. She has learnt to suspect me at last. I knew the time would come, and I have made ready for it. Day after to-morrow they are to be married, and then I shall be rid of Miss Monitress.”
With such passions at work, breakfast at Brothertoft, on the morning of Putnam’s Council, and the dinner to Clinton, was not a very cheerful meal. Mother and daughter were silent. Kerr took his cue, and played knife and fork.