“To make of yourself, pledged to Heaven, a shame and a wanton in his eyes! O, ’twas infamous!—Not that,” she checked herself hurriedly, “I blame him—not altogether. Art is a strange creditor, that makes demands, scarce comprehensible to us, upon those who practise it. But, you”—
“Are you blaming me, madam,” I cried, “because he has not paid you to your liking?”
She turned away, as if quite sick. Father Pope took up the tale.
“Silence!” he roared, “you little dirty liar and trollop!”
“O, no doubt!” I piped him back, “because I rejected your attentions.”
He took a step forward, his great fist clenched, his glasses blazing. I don’t know how he might not have forgotten himself, had not Lady Sophia come quickly between.
“Hush!” she said. “It is all to end here, Father.” She turned quietly on me. “Father Pope is, I am sorry to say, justified. You have deceived us in more things than one, Diana. It is not so long, I must tell you, since I heard from the Sisters of les Madelonnettes that your original story of your unhappy mother’s death was false, she having but a few months ago returned penitent and broken to die in the very convent she had so shamed and disgraced.”
I gazed at her, bewildered, for an instant, and then, as the truth penetrated me, with a horror and passion beyond control.
“O,” I cried, “this is too much! And I believed her long dead of grief; and you never told me—never let me see her: and I think you are the wickedest woman in the world!”
She stood staring at me, silent, as if stricken.