It appeared that Waylao had been feeling sick for several weeks, and had become strangely absent-minded. Night after night the girl had gone off to get her mother’s stores and had completely forgotten them. One night Mrs Benbow went to bed enraged at her daughter’s absence from the domestic domicile. In the morning she got up full of suspicion, went into the misguided girl’s room and found Waylao fast asleep.
“Get up, you lazy hussys; to tink that I, yours old mothers, the descendant of great kinks [kings], should have to feed chicken while my lazy daughters lay in beds!” Saying this, the old woman pulled the bed-clothes right off Waylao—puff! As the girl stood before her irate parent attired in her night attire, trembling with fear, the native woman yelled fiercely: “Where yous go these nights after nights? What yous do? Now then, tell me! Your father is far at sea, so you tink you does as you likes with mees!”
Waylao said nothing. She hung her head and then stared through the little lattice window.
Suddenly the mother said with a startled voice, a voice that was shrill with horror:
“Gods Almighties! What you been doing?” This horrified shout was immediately followed by the frantic woman clutching the Oriental muslin robe from Waylao’s trembling figure.
The unhappy girl still stared, paralysed by the look of astonishment and rage on her mother’s face.
Old Lydia was speechless. Her eyes rolled as though she were in a fit. She opened her mouth wide, then the muscular rigidity of her face relaxed, the jaws met together with a frightful click. It was a convulsive movement, a faint expression of the horror she felt at the discovery of the secret—revealed at last.
For several minutes Benbow’s cottage fairly trembled. It seemed to Waylao that a flash of lightning came out of her mother’s eyes, followed by a mighty crash that split the universe in twain. The old woman clapped her hands together like an idiot, stamped her feet, then poured forth volleys of her fiercest invectives. She went mad, danced and whirled in a kind of heathen frenzy, leaping forward like a puppet, over and over again, to strike that unhappy sinner, the wretched victim of passion and romance.
Finally the demented old woman rushed into the next room, clutched hold of the new tea set that she had given Waylao on her last birthday, lifted each pretty china article above her head, and smashed it to atoms at her feet.
Like a beautiful, sculptured figure, emblematical of the forlorn betrayed, the poor girl still stood, silent, her eyes staring like glassy terror, one foot outstretched as though to help the better to bear the weight of humanity’s pious wrath on her guilty head. Old Lydia forgot her own sins (she admitted this after); she was a Christianised native woman; her daughter had disgraced her. It was terrible. The last thread of self-control snapped in that old barbarian’s brain as with a pious howl she rushed forward and fastened her teeth in the wretched girl’s arm.