“My mother!” she exclaimed, still in a dazed state of semi-belief; “my mother that I have searched for so long!”
“Yes; you be my daughter, and what be daughters for but to work for their mothers?” snarled Mrs. Frispi, suddenly collapsing and sinking into a chair. “And—who’s that?” she stammered, turning her swollen, distorted face toward Stanton Armour, who stood in handsome, deathly pallor, and as motionless as a statue beyond her.
“Oh, my God!” and mouthing, swearing, unutterably foul and repulsive, she groveled from her chair to the floor.
“Oh, tell me, some one,” cried Stargarde wildly, “what is it she says? Is it true?”
“It be true,” said Frispi eagerly. Then stepping forward he plunged his hand among the rags over his wife’s broad chest and withdrew a filthy envelope, out of which he drew a photograph that he handed to Stargarde.
It was a picture of Mrs. Frispi, taken in her palmy days. Stargarde laid a hand on her own fluttering breast. There was a counterpart of this florid, sensuous face that she had treasured for years.
She drew out her own photograph. It was exactly like the other; her intense blue eyes darted to the floor. There in that tall form, in the evil face, she could see a faint, disfigured likeness to herself.
“O God, I thank thee!” she said, and fell on her knees to put her arms about the degraded creature before her.
Where was the terror, the repulsion, the anguish that the sight was to cause her? Camperdown gazed at her in distracted astonishment, then hopelessly surveyed the hushed, motionless ring of people beyond them.
“Brian,” said Stargarde, in tones of ineffable love, “we must take her home.”