"You have come at a strange time. And your note shows me that you chose it purposely."
Mrs. Twining gave a sombre laugh. What associations the sound woke in its hearer!
"I was all ready for just this kind of a welcome," she said, knitting her brows. She began to stare about the room. "It's very fine. It's mighty splendid. But I wonder the walls of this house don't fall and crush you, Claire Twining! I wonder I ain't got the power, myself, to strike you dead with a look!" Her voice now became a growl of menace; there was something very genuine in her wrath, which she had persuaded herself to believe an outgrowth of hideous ingratitude. "But I didn't come to show you your own badness," she went on. "You know all about that a ready. What I've come for is quite another kind of a thing—oh, yes, quite." Here she laughed again, with her mouth curving downward grimly at each corner.
"What have you come for?" inquired Claire.
"To get my rights!—that's what I've come for! To let people see who I am, and how you've cast me off—me, your mother. I d'clare I don't believe there ever was so horrible a case before. Perhaps some o' the folks in yonder can tell me if they ever knew one."
Claire kept silent for a moment. Her face was white to the lips, but there was no sign of flinching in it.
"I did not cast you off," she said. "I left you because you outraged and insulted the dead body of my father. I have never regretted the step I took, nor do I regret it now. You say you've come here to get your rights. What rights? Shelter and food? You shall receive these if you want them. I will ring and give orders at once that you shall be taken to a comfortable room and be treated with every care that it is in my power to bestow. In spite of what I said to you on the day when you shocked and tortured me into saying it, I would still have sought you out and rendered you my best aid, if I had known that you were ill. For I see that you have been ill—your appearance makes that very plain. But I had no knowledge of any such fact. You were stronger than I when we parted—stronger, indeed, and better able to work. This is all that I am willing to say at present. In an hour or two I will join you, and hear anything you may choose to tell me."
While Claire was in the midst of this rather prolonged reply, Mrs. Diggs quietly entered the room. The speaker saw her, and did not pause for an instant, but put forth her hand, which Mrs. Diggs took, while she steadily watched the large, gaunt, hollow-cheeked woman whom her friend addressed.
If anything could have intensified the vast sense of accumulated wrong in Mrs. Twining's breast, it was this placid appearance of one who so promptly indicated that she stood toward Claire in a supporting and accessory attitude.
"So, you'll make terms, will you?" said the parent of Claire. "You'll browbeat me—me, your mother—with your fine clothes and fine house and fine servants? And where's my satisfaction, if you please, Miss? Hey? Oh, I ain't any saint—you know that, by this time. I ain't going to forget how I laid eight months in Bellevue Hospital, crippled and nearly dying. First it was the typhoid fever, 'n then it was the pneumonia, 'n then it was the inflammatory rheumatism. And where was you, all that time? Spending your thousands as fast as the Wall Street stock-gambler you'd married could scrape 'em together. Who's this friend that steps in and looks as if she was going to protect you? Hey? You're both afraid I'll go in among those grand folks you've got eating and drinking somewheres, and speak my mind. You'll send me up to a comf'table room, will you? You'll give orders to your servants about me, will you? And s'pose I object to being treated like a troublesome tenth or 'leventh cousin? S'pose I go straight into where they all are, and just tell 'em the square, plain truth?" The scowl on her wasted face was very black, now. She had made several quick steps nearer to Claire and Mrs. Diggs. Once or twice during this acrid tirade she had waved one hand in front of her, and made its finger and thumb give a contemptuous audible click. But her voice had not noticeably lowered.