“Aunt, you must not, you shall not—” cried Vincent; but there was no staying the rushing flow of bitter words. Clemence endured them as the tree, whose leafy honours have been struck down by the woodman’s axe, endures the pelting rain upon its prostrate form. It has felt the cold steel dividing its very core; the sharp blow, the heavy fall, have been its fate; the furious shower may now do its worst, it cannot lay it lower, any more than it has power to restore life to the withered foliage! But when Lady Selina paused at length, mortified, perhaps, to find that her fiercest invectives could awake no answering flash of angry retort, Clemence quietly expressed her hope that she might be enabled so to economize as to live upon her limited resources without incurring debt.
“Resources!” exclaimed Lady Selina with ineffable contempt; “the paltry interest of two or three thousand pounds, of which an hospital has the reversion! If you can reduce yourself, madam, to such pauper allowance for the future, how extricate yourself from the meshes of present difficulties? You speak of avoiding debt—you are in debt at the present moment to myself!”
Clemence unclasped the massive bracelet on her arm, and silently laid it on the table. It was her only reply. She then turned and quitted the apartment.
“I wish that she had flung it at aunt’s head!” was Vincent’s muttered comment on the scene.
A servant met Clemence as she was about to ascend the staircase. “Please, ma’am, Madame La Voye is at the door, and says that she must see you directly.”
“Send her away,” began Clemence, who felt as though her patience had already been tried to its utmost power of endurance; but as the man hesitated before again attempting a task in which he had already failed, she altered her resolution. “No; let her be shown into my room. Better meet this difficulty at once, and end it,” murmured Clemence to herself, as the footman turned to obey.
Madame La Voye had, like all the rest of the world, heard of the bankruptcy of Mr. Effingham, and trembled for her unpaid bill. Her indignation had been inflamed to a high pitch by the article in the Times. Mr. Effingham she had denounced, and loudly, as a swindler, a cheat, and a felon; and she resolved, come what might, to have justice done to herself. She called at his house on Monday, and heard that Mrs. Effingham refused to see any one. Driven with difficulty from the door, the dressmaker repeated her call on the next day, with yet more fixed resolution to assert her claim. She would not be one of the miserable creditors who suffered themselves to be quietly robbed; she would not leave the house till she had received her money! Madame La Voye had worked herself up to an effervescence of indignation very unlike, indeed, to the smooth-tongued politeness with which she had received Mrs. Effingham into her show-apartments.
The Frenchwoman entered the house prepared to do battle for her rights, and the first words which she addressed to Clemence were abrupt almost to rudeness; but even she was in some degree awed by that pale, meek face, stamped with such deep impression of sorrow, and the first gentle tones of the silvery voice stilled her anger as if by a charm.
Clemence owned her debt and her inability to pay it (“Was all false, then, about the fortune?” thought La Voye); “But”—the lady hesitated and glanced at her wardrobe—“perhaps;” the Frenchwoman was not slow in comprehension—she spared the lady the humiliation of an explanation.
Pride was not Mrs. Effingham’s besetting sin; but, in one form or other, perhaps no human heart is entirely free from it. It was painful to the lady to hear the value of her wardrobe estimated in her presence—repugnant to her feelings to hear this mantle depreciated as no longer à la mode—that dress, because the folds of the velvet had been slightly ruffled in wearing. Madame La Voye was not without a heart, and her anger had subsided into pity; but the coarseness of her nature appeared even in what she intended for kindness, and in her compassion for the reduced lady she never for an instant forgot self-interest. Balancing, doubting, chaffering, making a parade of “a wish to oblige,” forming a shrewd calculation that a beautiful Indian shawl, “thrown into the lot, would make all even between them,” for almost an hour Madame La Voye made her victim do bitter penance for a day’s extravagance. The mortifying interview, however, ended at last; the Frenchwoman, well satisfied with her bargain, quitted the house, and Clemence held in her hand, receipted, that bill which had been the cause of so much annoyance.