Rightly or wrongly, I fancied that she softened slightly, so feeling that I should do myself more justice if I told my story while her manner was less freezing, I came to the point at once.
"May I tell you what I know, and how I came to know, of the business which has detained your father?" I inquired. "I shall not keep you many minutes."
"I shall be curious to hear it," she answered, speaking more graciously than hitherto, and, seating herself in a dark corner where I could not see her face, she prepared to listen.
I told the thing well, better—though, of course, much more briefly—than I have told it in these pages, for the excitement with which she listened, suppressed and controlled though it was, seemed to communicate itself to me. The only moment when she bristled, if I may use so inapplicable a word about so lovely a woman, was at the start.
"All that I have to tell has happened within the last twenty-four hours," I began, "for only yesterday I was taking a country holiday, and, I fear, kicking up my heels like a mischievous colt who has broken out of bounds, and is sadly in need of a sound whipping to teach him to behave himself. But," I made haste to get on, for the air around me seemed suddenly to turn chilly, "since then, short time ago as it is, I have had a 'breaking in,' and been made to answer to lash and spur, and to look death in the face, and to fight for my life, in so extraordinary a way, that my only fear is you'll not believe my story when you hear it."
Then I told of my recall to town, of my commission to visit the opium den, and of the subsequent happenings up to the moment when I had stepped out of the cab and into her house. As I brought my recital to a close, the door opened, and a lumpy-figured, masculine-looking woman, hard-faced, large-featured, entered the room. Her skin was rough, red and grained like brick-dust, and on either cheek was a patch of darker red—almost of purple—which might have been put on by means of a stencil plate, so hard, so abrupt, and so definite were the lines where it began or ended. An incipient moustache and a deep voice seemed to enter a protest, less against the petticoats she was wearing than against her small and well-formed hands and feet.
"Clara!" she exclaimed menacingly, "who is this?"
Knowing that Miss Carleton's name was Kate, I was somewhat astonished to hear her thus addressed, for it was not until later that I learned the facts. The elder lady, who was Miss Carleton's only aunt, had felt not a little aggrieved that her niece had not been called after herself. So, by way of entering a protest against the omission of the compliment which she felt ought to have been paid to her, and notwithstanding Mr. Carleton's annoyance, and the fact that everybody else called the girl Kate, the elder lady insisted upon addressing her niece as Clara, as though the girl were actually her namesake.
"Clara!" she repeated. "Who is this?"
The rising remonstrant inflexion which she placed upon her niece's name, and the way in which she said "Who is this?" her deep voice booming like a three-peal bell, sounding first a high, then a low, and then a deep bass growling note, took me so by surprise that I stared at her open-mouthed.