"Out of my sight, you beggar's brat!" he cried huskily. "Yes, I have been tricked, deluded, cozened damnably. But by whom? There could be only two concerned in it. Bridget and that other one—that she-devil. Follow me, both of you. We'll have it out! We'll have it out!"
He dashed out of the room and along the corridor with the rapid movements of a madman, and they followed him to Mrs. Layburne's room.
She who had once been the delight of crowded playhouses, the admired of bucks and wits in the days of the Godolphin ministry, now presented the saddest spectacle of hopeless decay.
She lay on a sofa beside a pinched and poverty-stricken fire, burning dully in one of those iron grates by means of which our forefathers contrived to keep themselves cold while they were mocked by the semblance and abstract idea of heat. A small table with a basin that had held broth, and two or three medicine bottles, stood near her. Her gaunt and wasted form was clad in a dingy printed calico dressing-gown, over which her white hair fell in neglect and abandonment. Her eyes—once the stars of a playhouse—now looked unnaturally large in her pinched and shrunken countenance—unnaturally bright, too, with the lustre of disease; while on each hollow cheek there burned a hectic spot, which made the sickly pallor of the skin only the more livid by contrast.
She looked up with a startled air when the Squire burst into her room, followed immediately by Herrick and Irene. She struggled into a sitting position, and sat trembling, either with the effort of shifting her attitude, or with the agitation caused by this strange intrusion.
"Do you see this girl?" demanded Bosworth, thrusting Irene in front of him. "Do you see her, woman?"
"Ay, sir, I see her well enough. My sight is not yet so dim but I can recognise a familiar face."
"Who and what is she?"
"Your daughter; your disobedient rebellious daughter, whom you were howling about yesterday, and whom you welcome home to-day."
"She is not my daughter, and you know it. She is a pauper's nameless brat, foisted upon me by you, by you, she-devil, so that you might be able to twit and laugh at me, to revel in the sight of my discomfiture, before you sink into the grave. This was your vengeance upon me, was it—your vengeance upon me for not having been more your victim than I was, though God knows I paid dear enough for my folly! This is what your innuendoes and mysterious speeches of yesterday hinted at, though I was too dull to understand them."