And then May giggled, nervously, as if she were smirking at the veiled improprieties which her mother kept concealed. The sound was more terrible than the scraping of the fork against the cold plate, for suddenly May stood revealed, and Clarence, in the nicety of his soul, was horrified.
“I couldn’t tell you the whole story,” continued Mrs. Seton. “Perhaps Mr. Seton could. I think you ought to know.”
But the thoughts of Clarence had wandered away from the little group, away from the goose and cranberry sauce on his plate. Indeed they had wandered a long way, for they were centered now on the great black house he had seen for an instant high above the flames of the furnaces, so distant, so unattainable. In his mind he had created a picture of the house, of what sort of a dinner must be in progress within its sooty, decaying walls. It was a picture, to be sure, far more magnificent than the reality and therefore more fatal to his happiness. The old ambitions began to stir once more, ponderously and terribly.
And far away he heard May saying, “She doesn’t stay much in the Town. She thinks it isn’t good enough for her.” And then following the cue of so bad a campaigner as her mother, “Neither does Ellen. They’re both stuck up. They think there’s nothing good enough for them in the Town.”
“You’d think,” rejoined Mrs. Seton, “to see Ellen in her homemade clothes that she was a princess!”
A fierce resentment, bordering upon savagery, colored her voice. In the course of the conversation the fat, complacent woman became transformed into a spiteful, witch-like creature. And in the brain of Clarence there echoed a soft voice which said, “Ah, the Setons! To be sure, I know who they are but I don’t know them,” dismissing them all quite easily, without resentment, without savagery, even without thought, forgetting in the next moment their very existence.
And then the lightning struck.
The shrill voice of Jimmy, impatient of results, suddenly cut the dampish air like a knife. “I know what it is! She’s had a baby and she was never married!... She’s had a baby and she was never married!”
14
DUSK had already fallen and the black servants had placed silver candlesticks among the wreckage of the Christmas feast before the first chair was drawn back with a scraping sound in the paneled dining room of Shane’s Castle.