“But you accepted him?” the mother asked hoarsely, almost fiercely.
“Accepted him? No, of course not—he—why, mother, what is the matter?”
Engrossed in the telling of her story, the girl had not noticed her mother’s agitation, but at her last words, at the answer to the question, her wrist had been caught as in a vise, and eyes that she no longer recognized—eyes dilated with anger, desperation and revulsion of feeling—were staring into her own. Instinctively she drew back—“Oh, mother, what is it?” And the mother bending forward, even as the daughter retreated, hissed, “You shall accept him—I say you shall!”
“Mother, mother,” the girl moaned, helplessly.
“You shall accept him, do you hear me?”
“But, mother, how can I?” The tears were rolling down her cheeks, she was frightened—the acute, agonizing fright of a child pursued. She tried to free herself, but the hands on her wrist only tightened, and her mother’s face, livid now, was close to her own.
“You shall accept him,” she repeated with the insistence of a monomaniac. And the girl, with bended head, through the paroxysms of her sobs, could only murmur in piteous, beseeching tones, “Mother! mother!”
But to the plaint the woman was as deaf as her heart was dumb. She indeed loosened her hold and the girl fell back on the lounge from which they had both arisen, but it was only to summon from the reservoirs of her being some new strength wherewith to vanquish. For a moment she stood motionless, watching the girl quiver in her emotion, and as the sobbing subsided, she stretched forth her hand again, and caught her by the shoulder.
“Look up at me,” she said, and the girl, obedient, rose from her seat and gazed imploringly in her mother’s face. No Neapolitan fish-wife was ever more eager to barter her daughter than was this lady of acknowledged piety and refinement, and the face into which her daughter looked and shrank from bore no trace of pity or compassion. “Tell me if you dare,” she continued, “tell me why it is that you refuse? What more do you want? Are you a princess of the blood? Perhaps you will say you don’t love him! And what if you don’t? I loved your father and look at me now! Beside, you have had enough of that—there, don’t stare at me in that way. I know, and so do you. Now take your choice—accept this offer or get to your lover—and this very night. As for me, I disown you, I—”
But the flood of words was interrupted—the girl had fainted. The simulachre of death had extended its kindly arms, and into them she had fallen as into a grateful release.