The astonished doorkeeper had received a blow on the chest, and had gone spinning into a corner of the fireplace, whence he skipped nimbly and stared at his assailant; tattered, unspeakably dirty, Mrs. Frispi, who towered in the doorway wrathful and menacing, mumbling something in a drunken fury at him, which no one understood.
With a low, joyful cry Stargarde sprang up and went to her. At last the woman had come to the Pavilion of her own accord.
“You be a beauty, bain’t you?” said the woman thickly, “barrin’ the door to yer own mother.”
Stargarde did not quite catch her words. Camperdown did, and tried to draw his fiancée back.
“No, Brian,” she said firmly. “I have waited a long time for this. Let us get her in by the fire.”
Close at the woman’s heels, like a cowed, sulky dog, walked the small man, her husband. “Come in too,” said Stargarde, extending a hand to him.
“We be turned out,” he said, with a covert glance about the room, and hanging his head as if the bright light hurt his eyes. “No money; big man say, ‘You go to de streeta.‘”
The woman in exasperation at the withdrawal of attention from her, seized Stargarde by the shoulder. “Don’t you hear?” she gasped hoarsely. “I—be—your—mother.”
The words were audible, though indistinct. A surprised, incredulous look overspread Stargarde’s beautiful face. “Brian,” she said, turning to him as if she could not trust the evidence of her own sense of hearing, “what does she say?”
He would not repeat the words, but in his ashamed, mortified face she received confirmation of her own half-born idea.