“To death! Let me pass.”
Ascending toward his mother’s chamber, he heard a coming step, and met her on the great middle landing of the stairs, where in an ample niche, a marble group of the temple-polluting Laocoon and his two innocent children, caught in inextricable snarls of snakes, writhed in eternal torments.
“Mother, go back with me to thy chamber.”
She eyed his sudden presence with a dark but repressed foreboding; drew herself up haughtily and repellingly, and with a quivering lip, said, “Pierre, thou thyself hast denied me thy confidence, and thou shall not force me back to it so easily. Speak! what is that now between thee and me?”
“I am married, mother.”
“Great God! To whom?”
“Not to Lucy Tartan, mother.”
“That thou merely sayest ’tis not Lucy, without saying who indeed it is, this is good proof she is something vile. Does Lucy know thy marriage?”
“I am but just from Lucy’s.”
Thus far Mrs. Glendinning’s rigidity had been slowly relaxing. Now she clutched the balluster, bent over, and trembled, for a moment. Then erected all her haughtiness again, and stood before Pierre in incurious, unappeasable grief and scorn for him.