She looked at him with fury suppressed; and at last, when she had controlled herself enough to speak, said, in a low tone, full of the sense of insult and degradation which our false social conditions have forced on thinking womanhood: “I have just that against you, which you would have against me, if my character, through and through, was a facsimile of yours. Sir, that is what I have against you!”
He looked at her dumb. “I don’t understand, I—”
“Oh, well, take the night to it! Think your life over, every step of the way up, since you have entered young hoodlumism; and just fancy that a twin sister of yours had kept with you all the way, step by step, in all your paths—where would she—”
Reginald had leaned against the balustrade perfectly white. “You are a very fiend,” he said; and then he pulled up stairs as a man gropes who has been struck by blindness.
Mrs. Mancredo was frightened. She wanted to help him up. “You—you’ve done enough,” he said thickly, without looking at her. And she went into her parlor and he went up to the next flight.
When Reginald had closed and locked his door and mechanically thrown himself on a sofa, he lay there for some time—not thinking, yet not unconscious. The room had been quite shut up, and the bud, now half opened, had filled the air with its exquisite fragrance. He sensed this fragrance, and, in the half stupor which had come to him, he felt the presence of tender, soothing hands passing, not over his head, but near the very brain substance within his head. His mind seemed reëchoing the speech he had made about Petrarch’s Laura, on which he had prided himself. And as it repeated itself, there were withdrawn all gross elements, until the spiritualized worship which Petrarch had for his paragon of true virtue, seemed to enswathe his being with a heavenly marvel of pure love. A mellifluous rapture of mind, all separate from the senses, overflowed his highest being; and then, as clearly as ever he felt the sun’s rays, he felt his own mother’s presence, and knew, or thought he knew, that he was falling down and down serenely into her care, with an ecstasy of the annihilation of self, and all self-burdens.
The next morning Mrs. Mancredo took an early breakfast, and then stayed in the parlor a while, looking about. She breakfasted three times that morning, and then asked if any one had seen Mr. Grove. It was discovered that no one had. Then Mrs. Mancredo, remembering how he had groped up stairs, followed the matter through. The result was, they found him insensible in his room, and one glance at him told it was no inebriate’s sleep.
CHAPTER III.
A partial paralysis had befallen Reginald Grove. At his first stage of consciousness, Mrs. Mancredo noticed that when a servant in clearing the room took up the withered rosebud, his heavy gaze followed it. She replaced it, and then bending over him said: “Do you want to see her?”