“Between us? But it’s the word that’s been between us since the beginning—the very beginning! Since the day when you discovered that Clement Spender hadn’t quite broken his heart because he wasn’t good enough for you; since you found your revenge and your triumph in keeping me at your mercy, and in taking his child from me!” Charlotte’s words flamed up as if from the depth of the infernal fires; then the blaze dropped, her head sank forward, and she stood before Delia dumb and stricken.
Delia’s first movement was one of an indignant recoil. Where she had felt only tenderness, compassion, the impulse to help and befriend, these darknesses had been smouldering in the other’s breast! It was as if a poisonous smoke had swept over some pure summer landscape....
Usually such feelings were quickly followed by a reaction of sympathy. But now she felt none. An utter weariness possessed her.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I sometimes believe you really have hated me from the very first; hated me for everything I’ve tried to do for you.”
Charlotte raised her head sharply. “To do for me? But everything you’ve done has been done for Clement Spender!”
Delia stared at her with a kind of terror. “You are horrible, Charlotte. Upon my honour, I haven’t thought of Clement Spender for years.”
“Ah, but you have—you have! You’ve always thought of him in thinking of Tina—of him and nobody else! A woman never stops thinking of the man she loves. She thinks of him years afterward, in all sorts of unconscious ways, in thinking of all sorts of things—books, pictures, sunsets, a flower or a ribbon—or a clock on the mantelpiece,” Charlotte broke off with her sneering laugh. “That was what I gambled on, you see—that’s why I came to you that day. I knew I was giving Tina another mother.”
Again the poisonous smoke seemed to envelop Delia: that she and Charlotte, two spent old women, should be standing before Tina’s bridal altar and talking to each other of hatred, seemed unimaginably hideous and degrading.
“You wicked woman—you are wicked!” she exclaimed.
Then the evil mist cleared away, and through it she saw the baffled pitiful figure of the mother who was not a mother, and who, for every benefit accepted, felt herself robbed of a privilege. She moved nearer to Charlotte and laid a hand on her arm.