The words appeared to horrify her. She looked at him with streaming eyes, while a positive shudder shook her frame.
"Oh, Beverley, what degradation this seems to me! Degradation of yourself! You may call me as proud as you choose. It is no insult. It is a compliment, even. I am proud of being proud. I had never given up hope that you would marry some woman of good birth, good antecedents, your equal and mine—young enough, too, to bear you children. I am childless, myself—how I would have loved your children! Their own mother would not have loved them more. Every penny of my large fortune should have gone to them. This has been my dream for years past, and now you shatter it by telling me that an upstart, a parvenu, a nobody from nowhere, holds you ensnared beyond escape!"
Thurston was not at all touched. This outburst, so uncharacteristic and so unexpected, did not bear for him a grain of pathos. He saw behind it nothing save an implacable selfishness that chose to misname itself affection. The ambition of Claire saddened him to contemplate; it had so rich a potentiality for its background. He was forever seeing the true and wise woman that she might have been. Even the nettles in her soil flourished with a certain beauty of their own, proving its fertile resources if more wholesome growths had taken root there. But in Cornelia Van Horn's nature all was barren and arid. The very genuineness of her present grief was its condemnation. Her tears were as chilly to him as the light of her bravest diamonds; they had something of the same hard sparkle; she wept them only from her brain, as it were; her heart did not know that she was shedding them.
"The bitter epithets which you apply to my ensnarer," he said, with a momentary curve of the lips too austere to be termed a smile, "make me the more suspicious that you harbor against her designs of practical spite. I want your promise that you will refrain from the least active injury—that you will never use the great social power you possess, either by speech or deed, to her disadvantage. Do you give me this promise, or do you refuse it? If the latter, everything is at an end between us. The monetary trusts you have consigned to me shall be at once transferred to whatever lawyer you may appoint as their recipient, and from to-night henceforward we meet as total strangers."
"A quarrel between you and me, Beverley!" said his sister, trying to choke back her sobs, and rising with a cobweb handkerchief pressed in fluttered alternation to either humid eye. "A family quarrel! And I have been so guarded—so careful that the world should hold us and our name in perfect esteem!—Oh, it is horrible!"
"I did not infer that it would be pleasant," he answered. "You yourself have power to avert or bring it about. All remains with yourself."
"I—I must make you a promise," she retorted, in what would have been, if louder, a peevish wail, "just as though I had really intended some—some gross, revengeful act! You—you are ungentlemanly to impose such a condition! You—you are out of your senses! That creature has bewitched you!"
He saw her eye, tearful though it was, quail before his own narrowed and penetrating look. He felt his suspicion strengthen within him.
"I do impose the condition," he said, perhaps more determinedly than he had yet spoken. "I do exact the promise. Now decide, Cornelia. There is no hard threat on my part, remember. You don't like the idea of an open rupture with me, you don't think it would be respectable; it would make a little mark on your ermine—a défaut de la cuirasse, so to speak. But your beloved world would possibly side with you and against me; you would not lose a supporter; you would still remain quite the grand personage you are. Only, I should never darken your doors again; that is all. Come, now, be good enough to decide."
She sank into her seat once more; her eyes had drooped themselves; the tears were standing on her pale cheeks. "I did not know you had it in you to be so cruel," she said, uttering the words with apparent difficulty.