“I do not believe one word of it. It is all a piece of fraud to cheat me out of my rights,” she cried at length, while her own blazing eyes threatened to annihilate the beautiful girl, her successful rival, who sat opposite with downcast eyes, and feeling really sorry, in spite of all that she had suffered at Mrs. Richards’ hands, for her distress over this terrible defeat.
“Do not allow yourself to become unreasonable over the matter, madam, I pray. There has not been, I assure you, even the suspicion of a fraud,” Mr. Compton said, his own eyes beginning to take fire at this assertion. “The papers are all there on my table; everything has been written out in the plainest manner, and copies made of all the records which go to prove what I have told you. You can examine them, if you choose; but there cannot be the slightest doubt regarding Miss Gladstone’s claim. She alone inherits everything belonging to the late Sir Charles Thornton.”
“Oh, she has been the bane of our lives; she has ruined and upset every plan that we have made since the day when she first set foot in our house—since she came to us like the beggar that she was,” sobbed the wretched woman, giving way utterly to her misery.
“Ah! then you are the woman to whom Albert Thornton confided his orphan daughter when he knew that he could not live?” said Mr. Compton, quickly, his keen mind at once grasping certain facts which Star, from a feeling of delicacy, had withheld from him, when, to her surprise, she learned that Mrs. Richards had also come to England to claim the Thornton estates.
“That has nothing to do with the case. She has ruined us, and that is enough to think about for one day, I should imagine,” she retorted, angrily, and flushing.
“Ellen!” and Mr. Richards spoke very sternly; “you are as unreasonable as a child. Star has been kindly disposed from the first. It is you who have tried to ruin her—who have oppressed and sought to degrade her in a way that is a shame to you and your promises to her dead father. It is a bitter thing to be obliged to condemn my own wife thus publicly, but I cannot calmly listen to your calumniations of her, for, instead of being our ruin, she has been our salvation. Only this fall, when my business was tottering, and my reason with it—when I was upon the verge of bankruptcy—of self-destruction—I confess it with shame and sorrow now—she came to me like a beam of light and saved me from becoming both a bankrupt and a suicide. She gave me, or caused to be given to me, a check for ten thousand dollars, which set me upon my feet again. She spoke, too, such solemn, gentle words to me as I shall never forget, and which kept me from the horrible pit into which I was stumbling, and we owe all that we are and have to her. To go still farther back, you owe your life to her mother. Josephine was saved from a dreadful death by Star’s bravery; and, instead of hating her because unforeseen circumstances have raised her to a high social position, we should rejoice that it is so. Star, my dear girl, you have at least one grateful heart in my family.”
He went over to her side and put out his hand to her, though he was so deeply moved that it shook like a leaf, and she took it with streaming eyes, and wholly unable to utter a single word in reply.
What a wreck that heartless woman had made of his life, she thought. He was naturally a kind and tender-hearted man, and deserving of a better fate than had been his.
But his wife bridled angrily, losing all control over her tongue.
“I wish I had never set eyes on her face; and I wish your hand had been palsied before it ever took that ten thousand dollars from her. She came into our family and stole your heart from me by her arts and sly speeches; she wheedled out of Jacob Rosevelt the fortune that should have been mine; she tricked Josephine out of the man who should have married her—who would have done so but for her; and now she has come to steal the inheritance which ought to have been mine. I hate her, and I curse her from the bottom of my heart!”