Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall—even taller than her daughter; and her form had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as "fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now—the truth must be told—it was not a specially lovable face to the acute observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow, and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned humility—that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was pride—pride in its most intense and concentrated form—pride in blood, wealth, personal appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view, from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident, to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less attractive,—and that she must have inherited from her dead father that softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her worthy of affection as well as admiration.
As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this connection.
"You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher than ourselves overrules all these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments."
A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the driving-wheel—as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,—and the human buzz-saw whirled once more.
"I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a changed heart—a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still ran after the pomps and vanities of the world—those pomps and vanities which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs. Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed in garments the least possible like those with which people content themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world," either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner motive—the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an unbeliever and a man of the world—a man without principle, I dare say, as you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is in his family (and they do say that the Brands have not much and never have had much!)—all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life, say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"
Margaret Hayley had not replied a word during the whole application of that verbal instrument of torture, though it seemed evident from the context that some conversation employing the tongues of both must have passed at an earlier period of the interview. She had merely writhed in body and groaned in spirit, as every moment told her more and more distinctly that in her dark hour she had no mother who could understand and sympathize with her—that cant phrases and pious generalizations were to be hurled against her at that moment when most of all she needed to be treated by that mother like a wearied child, drawn home to her bosom and cradled to sleep amid soothing words and loving kisses.
But Margaret Hayley did something else than writhe when the accusation of having acquired his wealth by dishonesty was cast upon the man whom she had worshipped—yes, the man whom she worshipped still, in spite of the one terrible defect which seemed to draw an eternal line of separation between them. She started up from her recumbent position, her hair dishevelled, her eyes red with weeping, and her whole face marked and marred by the anguish she had been suffering,—sprang up erect at once, with all her mother's pride manifest in voice and gesture, and said:
"Mother, are you a rank hypocrite, or have you neither sense nor memory?"
A strange question, from a daughter to her mother! The reply was not quite so strange, and it seemed to have much more of earnest in it than any portion of the long tirade she had before been delivering:
"Margaret Hayley, how dare you!"