“Oh, Mrs. Schuyler,” she said, meeting the lady at the foot of the stairs, and detaining her there while she spoke. “Wait a moment, please, before you go up. I have some good news for you, real good, too. And you will be so glad. I was, and she is nothing to me either. Guess who has come?”
Edith could not guess, though a thrill ran through her nerves, and without the slightest reason for it she felt the touch of the iron fingers at her throat, and her voice was a whisper as she asked:
“Who is it, Gertie?”
“Your mother, and she is so tired and pale, and is trembling all over to see you,” Gertie replied, surer than ever, from the expression of Edith’s face, that there was something unpleasant between them.
“My mother! My mother here, in this house,” Edith said, and her voice, which she had recovered, reached to the upper hall where her mother stood, hearing the words and feeling them like so many stabs, for she knew now she was not welcome.
Edith was not glad, though her feelings were less for herself than for her husband. Try as she might she had never been able quite to forgive her mother for the false position in which her falsehood had placed her, and she felt she could never trust her again. Still she was her mother, and nothing could undo that, and she was there in her house, unasked, it is true, but as a mother, she had, perhaps, a right to come; or would have had, if the husband had not expressed himself so decidedly against it; and that was where Edith felt most keenly. What would Col. Schuyler say? Would he blame her? And would the result be estrangement and coldness between them? That something would come of it she was sure, and as if she already felt the shadow of the something which would result from that visit of her mother’s, and threaten both her life and reason, she stood a moment unable to move while Gertie stared at her amazed, and the mother still stood waiting in the hall above. Recovering herself at last she went slowly up the stairs, and on toward her own room, where she naturally expected to find her visitor. But Mrs. Barrett was at the other end of the hall, and called to her: “Here, Edith; here I am; here’s your poor old mother.”
Then Edith turned and went swiftly to the spot, and, touched by the trembling voice and the tired, white face, which had grown so old, forgot everything for a moment, and winding her arms around her mother’s neck, kissed her lovingly, and then leading her to her own room, shut the door and sat down to look at her.
“You didn’t expect me, I know,” Mrs. Barrett began, in a half defiant, half apologetic tone; “and perhaps I did wrong to come; but I was so tired of living alone, with nothing to do but think from one day to another; and then I wanted so much to see you, in the handsome home I got for you. A mother has a right to visit her child, you know.”
This she said because of the expression on Edith’s face, which she could not understand any more than she could realize that the refined, elegant woman clad in velvet and ermine was her daughter,—her own flesh and blood. Edith had grown far away from her mother, and there was scarcely a sentiment in common between them. Still she wished to do right, and when her mother said what she did, she replied:
“Yes, certainly, you have a right; and I am——”