Mary blushed hotly. The moment that she had dreaded for years was upon her. That dreadful secret, the consciousness of which had always clouded her intimate thoughts, was about to be revealed. She must steel herself to hear the proclamation of her illegitimacy. The definition in the dictionary flamed across her memory ... not authorized by law ... improper ... not born in lawful wedlock ... bastard. Bâtard! How often had she shivered over that in the French dictionary. How sedulously had she tried to ascertain what it really meant, in the way that no dictionary dares to reveal. And then those sickening hints from horrid girls ... the girls who came from South America were always the horridest....
No wonder Grandmamma looked serious and uncomfortable. If only a small portion of what was hinted were true, she must scarcely know how she was to look her granddaughter in the face and tell her not merely about herself, but about life and those mysterious beginnings of life that seemed to involve men and women in such horrors.
"I have guessed a good deal," Mary admitted bravely.
"Naturally, you must have done so. And I dare say those people with whom you lived. What was their name? Fox? Fawkes?"
"The Fawcuses," said Mary. From the past the vision of Mrs. Fawcus came back to her like the page of a fairy tale. In all stories about illegitimate children, there was a woman like Mrs. Fawcus who looked after them, kept them hidden, and guarded their secret. Why had she not made another effort to read Jane Eyre since it was taken away from her by Mademoiselle Lucinge only the week before she left school? In that book she might have pierced the dreadful mystery.
"You may have guessed," Grandmamma was saying, "that your father married beneath him, married a very beautiful girl, the daughter of one of our own tenant farmers."
"Then I'm not illegitimate!" Mary could not help exclaiming.
"Good gracious me!" said Lady Flower crossly. "What minds modern young women have. Is no kind of decent veil to be left over the unpleasant side of life? Why, at your age I did not know the meaning of illegitimate."
Mary would have liked to retort that she only knew the endless circle of a dictionary's definitions, that she did not really know its meaning. However, let her mother have been never so humble, she was married to her father.