On perceiving Marryott she rose, and to the inquiry: "What was her business?" the stranger put back her veil, and showing her pale and anxious countenance, in tremulous accents murmured: "Mother!"
Surprise was at first strongly depicted on Marryott's countenance; but the next instant the hard impenetrable expression of her face returned, in a cold measured tone she demanded what it might be that brought her there?
"Mother; have you no words of kindness to give your daughter?" faltered the poor woman.
"Words of kindness—pshaw! is that all you have come this long way for," the other answered impatiently.
"Alas! no mother," was the sorrowful reply, drooping her head despairingly; "but if you have not even those to give me, how can I ask for more."
"More! ah, I thought so—I thought that pride would have a fall at last: that you would put your virtue into your pocket, and be coming one day crawling on your knees to beg a morsel of bread, or a hole in this house, from the mother who was not good enough for you some years ago. So I suppose your lover won't have you now that you are old and ugly—bah! don't think that I will take you in here; if this house was not good enough for you then, it's none the better now. At any rate there's no place in it for you, so you must go back from whence you came."
"Mother, mother—do not speak so cruelly—do not blame me, if knowing what was good and what was evil, I could not come to live here, hearing of you what I did. But alas! my spirit indeed waxeth faint, and my strength faileth me. I am worn out with useless labour, and I come to ask a little help from the mother who bore me, trusting that God will forgive both her and me, for we have all sinned—all stand in need of forgiveness. * * Yes, I come to ask for a little help to take me to America—to Henry Wilson, who still waits for and expects me."
"Oh, that's it,"—with a scornful laugh—"it's money you want; those 'wages of iniquity,' which you scorned at so finely long ago."
"Mother—those were strong words perhaps for a daughter so young to use towards a mother, but my heart was grieved for you; it was in sorrowful affection, not undutiful scorn, that I thus spoke."
Mabel Marryott sat down—she had hitherto remained coldly standing—and signed to her daughter to do the same. The submissive manner Jane had assumed, probably in a degree mollifying her hardened spirit; or rather perhaps it was a sort of triumph, to see her virtuous child thus brought low before her. She had quite lived down any womanly or maternal feeling; and would probably, without the slightest compunction, have turned her from the door penniless as she came: yet something—perhaps the idea that it would be disagreeable and degrading to her high pretensions, to have that poor, shabby creature coming begging at the house as her daughter—made her calculate that it might be a better plan to get rid of her at once—easily as it was in her power now to accomplish it. Those notes still in her pocket, she had begun already to repent not having left them in their hiding place—bank notes were terrible things to meddle with, but at any rate no harm could come of their being put in use by one under Jane Marryott's circumstances.