“I don’t belong to any place,” she answered suddenly, yet fiercely; “and I haven’t made a mistake in coming here. You’re Daniel Standring, and I’m Jessica’s mother.”
Daniel reeled for a instant as if he had been struck by a very heavy blow. He had long ago ceased to trouble himself about Jessica’s mother, or to dread her reappearance; and the minister had assured him that, if she should ever return to claim her daughter, he would use all his influence to protect Jessica from her, as being an unfit person to have the training of a child. The woman was standing up now, but leaning her back against his door, snapping her fingers at him with her face stretched out, with a glare of angry defiance in her bright eyes which sparkled through the gloom.
“I’ve nearly had the door down,” she said, with a hoarse laugh, “till all your neighbors came out to see what was the matter; but I scared them in again. The police himself turned tail like a coward.” And she laughed again so loud that the quiet court seemed to ring with the sound, and a door or two was cautiously opened, and Daniel saw his neighbors peeping out; all of them decent people, who held him in respect as the chapel-keeper of so fashionable a chapel.
“I want my daughter,” she cried, in high, shrill notes; “my Jessica, my daughter. Where is she, you scoundrel?”
“Come, now, then,” answered Daniel, emboldened by the advance of two or three of the men, who came up to form a flank of defence or resistance, “this behavior won’t do. Jessica isn’t here; so you’d better take yourself off. I wouldn’t give her up to you if she was here; but she isn’t here, and there’s an end of it.”
The woman seated herself once more upon the sill and leaned her head against the door-post.
“If you go in, I go in,” she said, doggedly; “and if I stay out, you stay out. I want my Jessica.”
It was an embarrassing position for Daniel. He did not like to resort to force in order to enter his house, for several reasons. First, and chiefly, he was now too sincere a Christian to choose any violent or ungentle measures, but, besides this, the person before him was a woman, and the mother of Jessica; and he was himself in a softened mood, from the excitement and sorrow of the evening. He stretched out his arm and fitted the key into the lock, but before he turned it he looked as closely as he could through the gloom into the woman’s face.
“You’re not drunk, are you?” he said.
“Neither sup nor drop has passed my lips to-day,” she answered, with a groan of suffering.