"That girl the grandchild of Leicester's murderer!" she exclaimed. "Why the very flowers I tread on turn to serpents beneath my feet!"
"The old man did not kill this Leicester," answered the woman, and her rude face grew white also; "or if he did, it was but as the instrument of God's vengeance on a monster—a hideous, vile monster, who crawled over everything good in his way, crushing it as he went. If he had killed him—if I believed it, no Catholic saint was ever idolized as I would worship that old man!"
"Woman, what had Leicester done to you that you should thus revile him in his grave?"
A cloud of inexplicable passion swept over the woman's face. She drew close to Ada, and as she answered, her breath, feverish with the dregs of intoxication, and laden with words that stung like reptiles, sickened the wretched woman to the heart's core. She had no strength to check the fierce torrent that rushed over her; but folded her white arms closer and closer over her heart, as if to shield it somewhat from the storm of bitter eloquence her question had provoked.
"What has Leicester done to me?" said the woman. "Look, look at me, I am his work from head to foot, body and soul, all of his fashioning!"
"How? Did you love him also?"
A glow of fierce disgust broke over the woman's features, gleaming in her eye and curling her lip.
"Love him, I never sunk so low as that; he scarcely disturbed the froth upon my heart, the wine below was not for him. Had I loved him, he might have been content with my ruin only; as it was, madam, it is a short story, very short, you shall have it—but I'll have drink after."
"Compose yourself—do not be so violent," said Ada, shrinking from the storm she had raised, with that sensitiveness which makes the wounded bird shield its bosom from a threatened arrow, "I do not wish to give you pain!"