CHAPTER XXXVII.
SORROWS, DOUBTS AND CONJECTURES.
The cold dash of water on my face aroused me, and I awoke gasping for breath as if my very soul had felt the icy deluge. Only one person remained in the room, and he was so white that it seemed like waking among the dead. A heavy weight still rested on my brain, and after a struggle or two I felt myself sinking as one falls from some precipice in a dream. All at once it appeared to me that I had been pulled back with violence. My lips burned as if a handful of thorns had been drawn across them, and again my heavy eyelids were lifted. Lady Catherine had entered the room. It was the antipathy of our natures that dragged me violently back from unconsciousness. Instantly the pang of remembrance returned, and its agony gave me strength to hear but not to move.
“Is she conscious yet?” said Lady Catherine, touching me with the point of her satin slipper.
“She has moved a little,” answered a voice, so deep and sorrowful that my heart stood still to listen.
“Let something be done; I am sick of her! Burn feathers, bring aromatic vinegar—why, is no servant at hand?”
“You would not expose the poor child thus to our servants, mother?” was the reply.
“The poor child, indeed! George, George, this is too much! Yes, I would expose her to the lowest scullion about the place—poor child! The thief!—the”——
“Mother!”
My heart leaped at the stern rebuke conveyed in this single word. I broke through the leaden feeling that held me motionless and rose to my feet, reeling and half blind, but stung into life by the epithet that unwomanly lady had applied to me.
“Madam,” I said, striving to sweep the mist from my eyes with one hand—“madam, you are false, body and soul. You know that I could not steal the picture of my own mother. God gives to every child a mother. Who shall say that the shadow of mine can belong to any one else; or, if it did, that I might not look at it?”