Mrs. Romaine looked pained, and kept for a few moments a pained silence.
"My poor friend!" she said at last. "This is very sad! Could she"—and Brooke knew that the pronoun referred to Lady Alice, not to Lesley—"could she not be content with abandoning you, without poisoning your daughter's mind against you?"
Caspar said nothing. He leaned forward, tea-cup in hand, and studied the carpet. It was, perhaps, hard for him to find a suitable reply.
"It is too much," Rosalind continued, with increasing energy. "You have taken not a daughter, but an enemy into your house. She sits and criticizes all you do—sends accounts to her mother, doubtless, of all your comings and goings. She looks upon you as a tyrant, and a disreputable person,
too. She has been taught to hate you, and she carries out the teaching—oh, I can see it in every line of her face, every inflection of her voice: she has been taught to loathe you, my poor, misjudged friend, and she does not disguise her loathing!"
It is not quite pleasant for a man to hear that his daughter hates him, and makes no secret of the hatred. Caspar immediately concluded that Lesley had made some outspoken remarks upon the subject to Mrs. Romaine. Secretly he felt hurt and angry: outwardly he smiled.
"What would you have?" he said, lightly but bitterly. "Lady Alice has no doubt indoctrinated her daughter, as you say; all that I can expect from Lesley is civility. And I generally get that."
"Civility? Between father and daughter? When she ought to be proud of such a father—proud of all that you are, and all that you have done! She should be adoring you, slaving for you, ready to sacrifice herself at your smallest word—and see what she is! A machine, silent, useless, unwilling—from whom all that you can claim is—civility! Oh, women are capable sometimes of taking a terrible revenge!"
She threw her hands out with a gesture of despair and deprecation, which was really fine in its way; then she rose from her chair, went to the mantelpiece, and stood with her face bent upon her clasped hands. Caspar rose too, and stood on the hearthrug beside her, looking down at the pretty ruffled head, with something very like affection in his eye.
He did not quite understand this emotion of hers, but its sincerity touched as well as puzzled him. For she was sincere as far as he was concerned, and this sincerity gave her a certain amount of power, such as sincerity always gives. The ring of true feeling in her voice could not be counterfeited, and Caspar was flattered by it, as any man would have been flattered at having excited so much sympathy in the heart of a talented and beautiful woman.