She shrank back from him, clutching her fingers into the shawl which she held over her face and bosom. I could see that she was deathly white.
“Not that—no!” she whispered, as if half choking. “What right have you?”
“I should really be the last to insist on it,” he said. “You know my easy good nature, I congratulate you on your position with all my heart; and should never think of crossing your legitimate title to it, unless——”
“Unless what?” she said with difficulty, seeing he prolonged the pause wickedly.
“Unless you oblige me to, that’s all,” he said.
Now though she had been, as I considered, an inhuman mother to me, to see her, so obviously and so amazingly, held at the mercy of this man, filled me with a rage of fury. Not he, nor anyone but myself, I thought, should have the right or the power to exact retribution of her. If I hated her, I already hated him with a tenfold violence. What title had he to come between me and my vengeance?
“Why,” she cried, with one little broken note of protest, which she instantly subdued, as if knowing its uselessness, “have you come into my life again?”
“I am really sorry,” he said. “It became necessary, that’s all. I wouldn’t otherwise for the world have disturbed this dream of evangelical and aristocratic peace in which your soul has so long found its security from troublesome memories. But the plain truth is I had to look you up. It’s a vulgar confession; but I want money.”
“I thought—I heard—you married it.”
“My charmer, I did. But love, though a perpetual investment in itself, is far from guaranteeing the immaculateness of its brokers. From one of Mrs Dalston’s we suffered shattering losses. Nothing throughout our married life, in fact, has prospered with us. The heir I longed for has been persistently denied me” (a momentary emotion seemed to shake his voice; but he gripped and stilled it); “our house in London, heavily mortgaged as it is, refuses for some inexplicable reason to let; we have come down, down, down. Why this should be so, in the designs of a just but inscrutable Providence, I cannot pretend to explain. Our deserts have not been less than most men’s; our sins like others may be called the natural fruit of circumstance. At this moment, I am ashamed to say, I have not positively the wherewithal to meet a bill, which, dishonoured within the week, will ruin me. I speak most, of course, of the moral wreck which will result. To you, knowing you as I do, that will serve for my paramount appeal.”