She tore her hand away.
“Why, you’re crazy,” she cried. “There’ll never be any of it. Never be any claim made or contest, or anything that you talk of. You want me to make money out of my mother’s story that was a tragedy—that I can hardly think of myself! Oh!—” She turned around, speechless, and put her hand to her mouth.
She thought of her dying mother, and grief for that smitten soul, so deeply loved, so tenderly loving, rent her with a throe of pity, poignant as bodily pain.
“Your mother is dead,” he said, understanding her and feeling some real sympathy for her. “It can’t hurt her now.”
“Drag it all out into the light,” she went on. “Fight in a court with those horrible Shackletons! Have it in the papers and all the mean, low people in California, who couldn’t for one moment understand anything that was pure and noble, jeering and talking over my father and mother! That’s what you call establishing my claim, isn’t it?”
“That’s not all of it,” he stammered, taken aback by her violence. “And, anyway, it’s all true.”
“Well, then, I’ll lie and say it was false. If it came to fighting I’d say it was false. That I was not Jake Shackleton’s daughter, and that my mother never knew him, or saw him, or heard of him. I’d burn that certificate and say there never was such a thing, and that anybody who suggested it was a liar or a madman. And when it comes to you, there’s just one thing to say: I wouldn’t marry you if forty fortunes hung on it. I’d rather beg or steal than be your wife if you owned all the Comstock mines. That’s the future you think is going to tempt me—you for a husband and a fortune for us both, made by proving that my mother was never really married to the man I called my father!”
“But—but,” he said, not heeding her anger in his bewildered amazement, “you intended it sooner or later yourself?”
“I?—I?—Betray my parents for money? I do that?”
She stared at him, with eyes of wild indignation. He began to have a cold comprehension of what she felt, and it shook him as violently as his passion for her had ever done.