Very mildly, she had asked Miss Winter if she might not have seen the keys, and “picked them up without thinking.” Miss Winter permitted herself to smile in denying the suggestion; the smile irritated Mrs. Mant; and in a moment the floodgates were opened. She saw nothing to smile at in her question—unless it was of a kind that Miss Winter was already used to, prepared for ... with that sort of background ... her unfortunate father....
“Stop!” Lizzie Winter cried. She remembered now, as if it had happened yesterday, the abyss suddenly opening at her feet. It was her first direct contact with human cruelty. Suffering, weakness, frailties other than Mrs. Mant’s restricted fancy could have pictured, the girl had known, or at least suspected; but she had found as much kindness as folly in her path, and no one had ever before attempted to visit upon her the dimly-guessed shortcomings of her poor old father. She shook with horror as much as with indignation, and her “Stop!” blazed out so violently that Mrs. Mant, turning white, feebly groped for the bell.
And it was then, at that very moment, that Charles Hazeldean came in—Charles Hazeldean, the favourite nephew, the pride of the tribe. Lizzie had seen him only once or twice, for he had been absent since her return to New York. She had thought him distinguished-looking, but rather serious and sarcastic; and he had apparently taken little notice of her—which perhaps accounted for her opinion.
“Oh, Charles, dearest Charles—that you should be here to hear such things said to me!” his aunt gasped, her hand on her outraged heart.
“What things? Said by whom? I see no one here to say them but Miss Winter,” Charles had laughed, taking the girl’s icy hand.
“Don’t shake hands with her! She has insulted me! She has ordered me to keep silence—in my own house. ‘Stop!’ she said, when I was trying, in the kindness of my heart, to get her to admit privately.... Well, if she prefers to have the police....”
“I do! I ask you to send for them!” Lizzie cried.
How vividly she remembered all that followed: the finding of the keys, Mrs. Mant’s reluctant apologies, her own cold acceptance of them, and the sense on both sides of the impossibility of continuing their life together! She had been wounded to the soul, and her own plight first revealed to her in all its destitution. Before that, despite the ups and downs of a wandering life, her youth, her good looks, the sense of a certain bright power over people and events, had hurried her along on a spring tide of confidence; she had never thought of herself as the dependent, the beneficiary, of the persons who were kind to her. Now she saw herself, at twenty, a penniless girl, with a feeble discredited father carrying his snowy head, his unctuous voice, his edifying manner from one cheap watering-place to another, through an endless succession of sentimental and pecuniary entanglements. To him she could be of no more help than he to her; and save for him she was alone. The Winter cousins, as much humiliated by his disgrace as they had been puffed-up by his triumphs, let it be understood, when the breach with Mrs. Mant became known, that they were not in a position to interfere; and among Dr. Winter’s former parishioners none was left to champion him. Almost at the same time, Lizzie heard that he was about to marry a Portuguese opera-singer and be received into the Church of Rome; and this crowning scandal too promptly justified his family.
The situation was a grave one, and called for energetic measures. Lizzie understood it—and a week later she was engaged to Charles Hazeldean.
She always said afterward that but for the keys he would never have thought of marrying her; while he laughingly affirmed that, on the contrary, but for the keys she would never have looked at him.