“Oh, I did! I did! I groveled at his feet. I cried, I shrieked, I adjured him to pardon you—I, who never knelt to God or man before—and he refused! I kissed the dust at his feet, and he replied by a cold refusal. But woe to thee, Earl De Courcy!” she cried, bounding to her feet, and dashing back her wild black hair. “Woe to thee, and all thy house! for it were safer to tamper with the lightning’s chain than with the aroused tigress Ketura.”
“Mother, nothing is gained by working yourself up to such a pitch of passion; you only beat the air with your breath. I am calm.”
“Yes, calm as a volcano on the verge of eruption,” she said, looking in his gleaming eyes and icy smile.
“And I am submissive, forbearing, and forgiving.”
“Yes, submissive as a crouching lion—forgiving as a tiger robbed of its young—forbearing as a serpent preparing to spring.”
He had awed her—even her, that raving maniac—into calm, by the cold, steely glitter of his dark eyes; by the quiet, chilling smile on his lip. In that fixed, iron, relentless look, she read a strong, determined purpose, relentless as death, or doom, or the grave; terrific in its very quiet, implacable in its very depth of calm, overtopping and surmounting her own.
“We understand each other, I think,” he said, quietly. “You perceive, mother, how utterly idle these mad threats and curses of yours are. They will effect nothing but to have you imprisoned as a dangerous lunatic; and it is necessary you should be free to fulfill my last bequest.”
Another mood had come over the dark, fierce woman while he spoke. The demoniac look of passion that had hitherto convulsed her face, gave way to one of despairing sorrow, and stretching out her arms, she passionately cried:
“Oh, my son! my only one! the darling of my old age! my sole earthly pride and hope! Oh, Reginald! would to God we had both died ere we had lived to see this day!”
It was the very agony of grief—the last passionate, despairing cry of a mother’s utmost woe, wrung fiercely from her tortured heart.