“I’ll go now,” with unexpected alacrity, and he darted from the room.
Ten minutes later he stood wiping the perspiration from his heated brow, and wondering whether he was still in the possession of his senses, or whether he had fallen a prey to some hideous nightmare.
He had mounted to the crazy attic den which for some weeks had been little Zeb’s home, and had been bidden to enter. Before him he saw a bit of tawdry womanhood at which he gazed in stupid and angry fascination.
A transformation had been effected in Zeb’s mother. Her old rags were gone, and she had been trying to dress herself like a lady. Was it a ghastly, bedraggled imitation of his own Stargarde that he saw there, or did his eyes deceive him? If he could imagine Stargarde twenty years older than she was, a ruined, hardened, degraded creature, a drunkard dragged through the mud of several large cities, he might have conjured up something like this bold and hard-featured woman of unusually large stature who sat in a rickety armchair by the fire, her dress twitched aside to show the cheap embroidery of her petticoat, steam rising in a cloud from her wet boots that she held pressed close against the bars of the grate.
The most horrible part of the thing to him was that she saw his emotion, and plainly understood the cause of it. “Do you think I look like her?” she asked complacently.
There was no light in the room except that coming from the fire, and he stood a little farther back in the shadow, so that she might not read so well the expression of his face, nor hear the sharp click in his throat which was all he could manage by way of reply to her.
She shrugged her shoulders, and coolly drinking from a cup that she held in her hand, said in a coarse and cynical voice: “You will excuse me; I am having afternoon tea to refresh myself after a long walk. Sorry I can’t offer you some, but really I don’t know where to lay my hand on another cup and saucer.”
She had been drinking something stronger than tea, he could tell by her voice, probably at the moment she had some brandy in her cup, but she was not by any means overcome by what she had been taking, and was able to carry on a conversation.
He mastered his emotion, and moistening his lips, which were as dry as if some one had strewn ashes across them, said sternly: “I came here to see on what terms you will part with the child Zeb.”
“Who wants her?” she asked sneeringly.