“Mamma, you will kill me if you talk like that.”
“Then I will talk like that, and save myself from temptation more than I can bear,” cried the woman fiercely. “What has love done for the son of whom I was so proud—my gallant-looking, handsome boy? Why, with his bold, noble, Spanish face and dark eyes, he might have wed some heiress, married whom he liked—and what does he do? turns himself into a galley slave.”
“Mamma, what are you saying?” cried the girl faintly.
“The truth. What has he done? Married a woman without a sou, and had to accept that post at the mines. Isn’t that being a galley slave?”
“But he loved Delia, mamma.”
“Loved her! Curse love! I tell you. The ass! The idiot, to be led away by that sickly, washed-out creature—the Honourable Delia Dymcox,” she continued, with an intensity of scorn in her tones.
“But she is a lady, mamma.”
“Lady? The family are paupers, and, forsooth, they must look down on him—on us because we have no blood. Well, she is justly punished, and he too. I hope they like Auvergne.”
“Oh, mother,” sighed the girl weakly, “you are very cruel.”
“Cruel? I wish I had been cruel enough to have strangled you both at birth. I wish our family were at an end—that it would die out as Julian’s brats waste away there in that hot, dry, sun-cursed region.”