“You do not say anything,” she cried. “You allow me to speak without an answer. What do you mean me to understand by this—that you defy me? I have treated you as a friend all along. I thought you were good, and honourable, and true. I have always stood up for you—treated you almost like a son! And is this to be the end of it? You defy me! You teach my own child to resist my will! You do not even keep up the farce of respecting my opinion—now that she has gone over to your side!”
Here poor Lady Augusta got up from her chair, flushed and trembling, with the tears coming to her eyes, and an angry despair warring against very different feelings in her mind. She rose up, not looking at either of the culprits, and leant her arm on the mantelpiece, and gazed unawares at her own excited, troubled countenance in the glass. Yes, they had left her out of their calculations; she who had always (she knew) been so good to them! It no longer seemed worth while to send Gussy away, to treat her as if she were innocent of the complot. She had gone over to the other side. Lady Augusta felt herself deserted, slighted, injured, with the two against her—and determined, doubly determined, never to yield.
“Mamma,” said Gussy, softly, “do not be angry with Edgar. Don’t you know, as well as I, that I have always been on his side?”
“Don’t venture to say a word to me, Gussy,” said Lady Augusta. “I will not endure it from you!”
“Mamma, I must speak. It was you who turned my thoughts to him first. Was it likely that I should forget him because he was in trouble? Why, you did not! You yourself were fond of him all along, and trusted him so that you took his pledge to give up his own will to yours. But I never gave any pledge,” said Gussy, folding her hands. “You never asked me what I thought, or I should have told you. I have been waiting for Edgar. He has not dared to come to me since he came back to England, because of his promise to you; and I have not dared to go to him, because—simply because I was a woman. But when we met, mamma—when we met, I say—not his seeking or my seeking—by accident, as you call it——”
“Oh! accident!” cried Lady Augusta, with a sneer, which sat very strangely upon her kind face. “Accident! One knows how such accidents come to pass!”
“If you doubt our truth,” cried Gussy, in a little outburst, “of course there is no more to say.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the mother, faintly. She had put herself in the wrong. The sneer, the first and only sneer of which poor Lady Augusta had known herself to be guilty, turned to a weapon against her. Compunction and shame filled up the last drop of the conflicting emotions that possessed her. “It is easy for you both to speak,” she said, “very easy; to you it is nothing but a matter of feeling. You never ask yourself how it is to be done. You never think of the thousand difficulties with the world, with your father, with circumstances. What have I taken the trouble to struggle for? You yourself do me justice, Gussy! Not because I would not have preferred Edgar—oh! don’t come near me!” she cried, holding out her hand to keep him back; as he approached a step at the softening sound of his name—“don’t work upon my feelings! It is cruel; it is taking a mean advantage. Not because I did not prefer him—but because life is not a dream, as you think it, not a romance, nor a poem. What am I to do?” cried Lady Augusta, clasping her hands, and raising them with unconscious, most natural theatricalness. “What am I to do? How am I to face your father, your brothers, the world?”
I do not know what the two listeners could have done, after the climax of this speech, but to put themselves at her feet, with that instinct of nature in extreme circumstances which the theatre has seized for its own, and given a partially absurd colour to; but they were saved from thus committing themselves by the sudden and precipitate entrance of Lady Mary, who flung the door open, and suddenly rushed among them without warning or preparation.
“I come to warn you,” she cried, “Augusta!” Then stopped short, seeing at a glance the state of affairs.