"You have come at a strange time. And your note shows me that you chose it purposely."

Mrs. Twining gave a sombre laugh. What a.s.sociations the sound woke in its hearer!

"I was all ready for just this kind of a welcome," she said, knitting her brows. She began to stare about the room. "It's very fine. It's mighty splendid. But I wonder the walls of this house don't fall and crush you, Claire Twining! I wonder I ain't got the power, myself, to strike you dead with a look!" Her voice now became a growl of menace; there was something very genuine in her wrath, which she had persuaded herself to believe an outgrowth of hideous ingrat.i.tude. "But I didn't come to show you your own badness," she went on. "You know all about that a ready. What I've come for is quite another kind of a thing--oh, yes, quite." Here she laughed again, with her mouth curving downward grimly at each corner.

"What have you come for?" inquired Claire.

"To get my rights!--_that's_ what I've come for! To let people see who I am, and how you've cast me off--me, your mother. I d'clare I don't believe there ever was so horrible a case before. Perhaps some o' the folks in yonder can tell me if they ever knew one."

Claire kept silent for a moment. Her face was white to the lips, but there was no sign of flinching in it.

"I did not cast you off," she said. "I left you because you outraged and insulted the dead body of my father. I have never regretted the step I took, nor do I regret it now. You say you've come here to get your rights. What rights? Shelter and food? You shall receive these if you want them. I will ring and give orders at once that you shall be taken to a comfortable room and be treated with every care that it is in my power to bestow. In spite of what I said to you on the day when you shocked and tortured me into saying it, I would still have sought you out and rendered you my best aid, if I had known that you were ill. For I see that you have been ill--your appearance makes that very plain. But I had no knowledge of any such fact. You were stronger than I when we parted--stronger, indeed, and better able to work. This is all that I am willing to say at present. In an hour or two I will join you, and hear anything you may choose to tell me."

While Claire was in the midst of this rather prolonged reply, Mrs. Diggs quietly entered the room. The speaker saw her, and did not pause for an instant, but put forth her hand, which Mrs. Diggs took, while she steadily watched the large, gaunt, hollow-cheeked woman whom her friend addressed.

If anything could have intensified the vast sense of acc.u.mulated wrong in Mrs. Twining's breast, it was this placid appearance of one who so promptly indicated that she stood toward Claire in a supporting and accessory att.i.tude.

"So, you'll make terms, will you?" said the parent of Claire. "You'll browbeat me--_me_, your mother--with your fine clothes and fine house and fine servants? And where's my satisfaction, if you please, Miss?

Hey? Oh, I ain't any saint--you know that, by this time. I ain't going to forget how I laid eight months in Bellevue Hospital, crippled and nearly dying. First it was the typhoid fever, 'n then it was the pneumonia, 'n then it was the inflammatory rheumatism. And where was _you_, all that time? Spending your thousands as fast as the Wall Street stock-gambler you'd married could sc.r.a.pe 'em together. Who's this friend that steps in and looks as if she was going to protect you? Hey? You're both afraid I'll go in among those grand folks you've got eating and drinking somewheres, and speak my mind. You'll send me up to a comf'table room, will you? You'll give orders to your servants about me, will you? And s'pose I object to being treated like a troublesome tenth or 'leventh cousin? S'pose I go straight into where they all are, and just tell 'em the square, plain truth?" The scowl on her wasted face was very black, now. She had made several quick steps nearer to Claire and Mrs. Diggs. Once or twice during this acrid tirade she had waved one hand in front of her, and made its finger and thumb give a contemptuous audible click. But her voice had not noticeably lowered.

Claire had been watching her with great keenness. She had been reading her mood. By the light of the past--the retrospective light flung from weary years lived out at this mother's side, did this daughter now swiftly see and as swiftly understand.

"Claire," said Mrs. Diggs, spurred by an impulse of heroic interference no less than an alarmed one, "let me speak a few words; let me"--

"No," interrupted Claire. Her simple veto seemed to cut the air of the room. She turned and met Mrs. Diggs's gaze for a moment, while dropping her hand. "I thank you, Kate; but please leave all to me."

Then she faced her mother's irate glare. She was still decidedly pale, but in her clear voice there was no hint of tremor.

"Very well," she said, "suppose you _do_ go in and find my friends.

Suppose you _do_ tell them everything. I do not merely invite you to go; I challenge you to go. I will even show you the way myself."

"Claire!" faltered Mrs. Diggs, below her breath.

Claire walked toward the curtained doorway and slightly parted its draperies. She was looking at her mother across one shoulder.

"Will you come?" she asked. "I am quite ready."

The enraged look began to die from Mrs. Twining's face. She receded a little. "I can go myself when I choose," she muttered. "I can find the way myself, when I'm ready. I ain't ready yet."

Claire let the draperies fall. She resumed her former position. "You will never be ready," she said, with a melancholy scorn, "and you know it as well as I. You thought to come here and make me cringe with terror before you, while you threatened and stormed. But you had no intention of bringing matters to any crisis. You think me very prosperous, very powerful, and very rich. You are secretly glad that I am. You would not on any account harm me as a person of importance; but you wanted to keep me, as one, in a state of rule, a state of subjection. By that means you could climb up to a place something like my own ... so you have argued.

You would share what I have secured. You were always a very ambitious woman. Your sickness (which Heaven knows I am sorry enough to hear about) hasn't changed you a particle. I thought at first that it might have turned or clouded your brain--have made you reckless of consequences. But it has done nothing of the sort. You are precisely the same as ever."

Here Claire paused. Her mother had sunk into a chair. In her working lips and the uneasy roll of her eyes a great, abrupt dismay was evident.

"I think I can guess just what has occurred to send you here," Claire soon proceeded. "You became sick; you got into the hospital. While you were there a certain lady now and then visited your bedside. You told this lady who you were. Perhaps she asked you questions, and drew out all your history--perhaps you gave her all of it voluntarily. The lady was an enemy of mine. She put this and that together. She began by suspecting; she finished by being certain. We will say that you described me to her with great accuracy; or we will say that she knew I had once lived with the Bergemann family, and that you easily recalled the fact of Sophia Bergemann having been my friend long ago at Mrs.

Arcularius's school. It is of no consequence how the real truth transpired; it _did_ transpire. As you grew better, the lady formed a little plot. I think you perceived this; it is like you to have perceived it. You saw that the lady wanted to make you her tool, her cat's-paw."

Here Mrs. Twining rose, and put out both hands. "She didn't do it, though," was her flurried exclamation. "She thought she'd have me come here and get up a scene. I was 'cute enough to see that. I was reading her just like a book, all the time."

"I have no doubt of it," said Claire, with the same melancholy scorn.

"But you chose _this time_ at which to come. You were willing to be her accomplice _that far_."

"She wouldn't tell me where you lived nor what was your name," protested Mrs. Twining. "She kept putting me off whenever I asked her. She fixed things at the hospital so's I only left it to-day; she made 'em keep me there, though I was well enough to quit more 'n a week ago."

"She told you to-day, then, of this entertainment? She told you that if you came to-day, at a certain hour, you would find me surrounded by friends?"

Mrs. Twining set her eyes on the floor. She had begun to tremble a little. "Well, yes, she said something of that sort. And I knew what she was up to, just as clear as if she'd told me she had a grudge against you and was crazy to pay it. I was going to stay away till the party was all over--but I ... well, I" ...

Here the speaker raised her eyes and flashed them confusedly at her daughter. That glance was like the expiring glow of her conquered, treacherous wrath.

"Look here, Claire, I'm weak, and I can't stand this kind of thing much longer. Let me go up to that room and lay down. I'll wait till you come up. We can talk more when all your big friends have gone."

"I will send a woman to you," said Claire. "You can give her what orders you please." ...

"Do you feel strong enough to go back at once?" asked Mrs. Diggs, when she and Claire stood, presently, in the front drawing-room.

"Oh, yes, perfectly," was Claire's answer.

Mrs. Diggs kissed her. "Claire," she said, "the more I see of you, the more you astonish me. I thought everything was lost, and how splendidly you turned the tables! Ah, my dear, you were born for great things. You ought to have been on a throne. I hate thrones. I'm a Red Republican, as I told you the first time we met. But I'd change my politics in a minute if you represented an absolute monarchy."

Claire smiled. The color was coming back to her cheeks. "I am on a kind of throne now," she said. "Only it is going to pieces. Kate, you have seen that woman. She is my mother. I wish you had seen and known my father. Whatever strength there is in me comes from _her_. But what little good there is in me comes from _him_."

They went back into the dining-room immediately afterward, and Claire spoke with lightness to a few of the ladies about having felt a temporary indisposition which had now entirely ceased. She at once changed the subject, and throughout the remainder of the repast betrayed not a sign by which the most alert watcher could have detected the least mental disturbance.

A watcher of this sort was Mrs. Lee, and both Claire and Mrs. Diggs were certain of it. "She hasn't tasted a morsel for three courses," soon whispered the latter. "Upon my word, I don't think I could be restrained from throwing a gla.s.s or a plate at her, if I were sure it wouldn't hit somebody else. I was always a wretched shot."

But Mrs. Diggs delivered another kind of missile after the banquet had broken up and the ladies had all pa.s.sed once again into the drawing-rooms.

"I want to speak with you, Sylvia, if you don't object," she said dryly to Mrs. Lee. The latter had opportunely strayed away from her companions; she was pretending to scrutinize a certain painting in the front apartment. This gave Mrs. Diggs precisely her desired chance.

"You know I've never liked you, Sylvia, and I don't think you've ever liked me," her cousin began. She showed no anger; her voice was so ordinary in tone that she might have been discussing the most commonplace of matters.

Mrs. Lee started, and twisted herself, as usual, into a fresh pose. "I really don't see the occasion, Kate," she murmured, "for this vast amount of candor." She had got back her old drawl. She was concerned with a knot of roses at her bosom, which had or had not become partially unfastened; her gaze was drooped toward the roses, and thus avoided that of her kinswoman.

"You don't see the occasion for candor, Sylvia? I do. You know just what you have tried to do this morning. There is no use of denying."

"Tried to do?" she repeated, raising her eyes.

"Yes," sped Mrs. Diggs, with a kind of snap in every word. "We've never liked each other, as I said, and I preluded my remarks with this statement because I want to show you why, from to-day henceforward, we are open foes. You would have had Claire Hollister's mother rush like a mad woman into that dining-room. You wanted it. You planned, you plotted it. There's no use of a.s.serting that you didn't."

Mrs. Lee quietly threw back her head. "Oh, very well, since the poor woman," she began, "has really betrayed me, I"--

"Betrayed you?" broke in Mrs. Diggs. "She has done nothing of the sort.

If you exacted any promise from her, I know nothing of that--nor does Claire. We both understood that you were behind the whole affair, and when Mrs. Twining was taxed with your complicity she did not presume to disavow it."

Mrs. Lee looked at her roses again, and touched some of their petals with a caressing hand.

"If you think me culpable to have told a poor wretch in a hospital the address of the daughter who had deserted her," she said, "I am only sorry that your code of morals should so materially differ from mine."