"Would you like to see my mother?"
"You wouldn't let her see me?"
"She's asleep, and the nurse is at supper—not that she'd matter. Come along."
He turned and began to walk quickly toward the house; Mina followed him as though in a dream. They entered a large hall. It was dark, save for one candle, and she could see nothing of its furniture. He led her straight up a broad oak staircase that rose from the middle of it, and then along a corridor. The polished oak gleamed here and there as they passed candles in brackets on the wall, and was slippery under her unaccustomed feet. The whole house was very still—still, cool, and very peaceful.
Cautiously he opened a door and beckoned her to follow him. Lights were burning in the room. Lady Tristram lay sleeping; her hair, still fair and golden, spread over the pillow; her face was calm and unlined. She seemed a young and beautiful girl wasted by a fever; but the fever was the fever of life as well as of disease. Thus Mina saw again the lady she had seen at Heidelberg.
"She won't wake—she's had her sleeping draught," he said; and Mina took him to mean that she might linger a moment more. She cast her eyes round the room. Over the fireplace, facing the bed, was a full-length portrait of a girl. She was dressed all in red; the glory of her white neck, her brilliant hair, and her blue eyes rose out of the scarlet setting. This was Addie Tristram in her prime; as she was when she fled with Randolph Edge, as she was when she cried in the little room at Heidelberg,
"Think of the difference it makes, the enormous difference!"
"My mother likes to have that picture there," Harry explained.
The sleeping woman stirred faintly. In obedience to a look from Harry, Mina followed him from the room, and they passed downstairs and through the hall together in silence. He came with her as far as the bridge. There he paused. The scene they had left had apparently stirred no new emotion in him; but Mina Zabriska was trembling and moved to the heart.
"Now you've seen her—and before that you'd seen me. And perhaps now you'll understand that we're the Tristrams of Blent, and that we live and die that." His voice grew a little louder. "And your nonsense!" he exclaimed; "it's all a lie. But if it was true? It's the blood, isn't it, not the law, that matters? It's her blood and my blood. That's my real title to Blent!"