“I hope you are better,” he said, not knowing how to begin; and then, after a pause, “Should not I go and tell Pamela that you are here? or would you like me to take you home?”
“I consider myself at home,” said Mrs. Preston, sitting up suddenly and bursting into speech. “I will send for Pamela, when it is all settled, I am very thankful to your sister for taking care of me last night. She shall find that it will be to her advantage. Sit down—I am sorry, Mr. John, that I can not say the same for you.”
“What is it you can not say for me?” said Jack: “I don’t know in the least what you would be at, Mrs. Preston; I suppose there must be some explanation of this strange conduct. What does it mean?”
“You will find that it means a great deal,” said the changed woman. “When you came to me to my poor little place, I did not want to have any thing to say to you; but I never thought of putting any meaning to what you, were doing. I was as innocent as a baby—I thought it was all love to my poor child. That was what I thought. And now you’ve stolen her heart away from me, and I know what it was for—I know what it was for.”
“Then what was it for?” said Jack, abruptly. He was by turns red and pale with anger. He found it very hard to keep his temper now that he was personally assailed.
“It was for this,” cried Pamela’s mother, with a shrill ring in her voice, pointing, as it seemed, to the pretty furniture and pictures round her—“for all this, and the fine house, and the park, and the money—that was what it was for. You thought you’d marry her and keep it all, and that I should never know what was my rights. But now I do know;—and you would have killed me last night!” she cried wildly, drawing back, with renewed passion—“you and your father; you would have killed me; I should have been a dead woman by this time if it had not been for her!”
Jack made a hoarse exclamation in his throat as she spoke. The room seemed to be turning round with him. He seemed to be catching glimpses of her meaning through some wild chaos of misunderstanding and darkness. He himself had never wished her ill, not even when she promised to be a burden on him. “Is she mad?” he said, turning to Sara; but he felt that she was not mad; it was something more serious than that.
“I know my rights,” she said, calming down instantaneously. “It’s my house you’ve been living in, and my money that has made you all so fine. You need not start or pretend as if you didn’t know. It was for that you came and beguiled my Pamela. You might have left me my Pamela; house, and money, and every thing, even down to my poor mother’s blessing,” said Mrs. Preston, breaking down pitifully, and falling into a passion of tears. “You have taken them all, you and yours; but you might have left me my child.”
Jack stood aghast while all this was being poured forth upon him; but Sara for her part fell a-crying too. “She has been saying the same all night,” said Sara; “what have we to do with her money or her mother’s blessing? Oh, Jack, what have we to do with them? What does it mean? I don’t understand any thing but about Pamela and you.”
“Nor I,” said Jack, in despair, and he made a little raid through the room in his consternation, that the sight of the two women crying might not make a fool of him; then he came back with the energy of desperation. “Look here, Mrs. Preston,” he said, “there may be some money question between my father and you—I can’t tell; but we have nothing to do with it. I know nothing about it. I think most likely you have been deceived somehow. But, right or wrong, this is not the way to clear it up. Money can not be claimed in this wild way. Get a lawyer who knows what he is doing to see after it for you; and in the mean time go home like a rational creature. You can not be permitted to make a disturbance here.”