“Yes,” Margery replied; “but it will be better for mother to tell you.”
“Mother! Do you call her that still?” Queenie asked, and her voice expressed all the bitter scorn which she then felt for the woman who had so injured her.
“Yes, I call her mother still,” Margery answered, softly. “She is all the mother I have ever known, she was more sinned against than sinning. She did not understand what she was doing. She is not a bad woman. Our father was the most in fault, for she was young and ignorant and foolish enough to believe that she was his wife. She is purer far than many a woman of to-day who stands high in society, and before whom the world bows down because of her position.”
Margery was pleading for the woman who had done the greater wrong to her, and Queenie listened wonderingly, while there came back to her some words her father had said to her when dying: “If you find your mother, remember I was more to blame than she.” She had found her, but she could not at once forgive her, but she said at last: “Where is she, Margie? Ask her to come up.”
CHAPTER XLII.
CHRISTINE’S STORY.
Margery found her mother in the library standing by the window, with that gloomy abstracted look upon her face which she had so often seen there before she learned the cause and knew of the keen remorse always gnawing at her heart-strings and making her life so wretched. Christine had done the worst she could do to Queenie. She had told her the truth; and though a great burden was lifted from her, and in one sense she felt freer and happier than she had felt in years, she was weighed down with a sense of remorse and regret, and filled with a dread of the future. That Queenie could ever love, or even respect her, was impossible, reared as she had been in a very hot-bed of pride and aristocracy, and taught from her infancy that such as Christine Bodine were creatures of an entirely different grade from herself.
“She may compel herself to be civil to me,” Christine thought, “though I ought not to hope for that; but if she only knew how much I love her and how the affection, smothered so long, has grown since I confessed myself her mother, she would forgive me, perhaps.”
“Mother,” Margery said just here, and with a start Christine turned toward her; “Mother, Queenie wishes to see you. Will you go to her now?”
“Yes,” Mrs. La Rue replied, in a frightened voice, for there swept over her a great fear of the girl to whom she must tell her story, and grasping Margery’s arm she whispered, “Does she hate me? Will she scorn me? Will she make me feel that I am but the dust beneath her feet? Oh, Margie, go with me. I cannot meet her alone. She is so hot, so imperious, so proud, so different from you, who have never reproached me, except for her sake. Come, Margie, you must go, too; and if she is too hard upon me, say a word for me, will you, Margie?”