‘It does not matter much what you wish—your curse! you have not made your blessing a thing to be desired, Cecile. Oh, I am not blaming you; it is not my affair, but I don’t believe in the curse, you know. He will do it, and the woman whom you have ruined will marry him, for she will have no other resource. And Leo will find me wherever you hide me: no, it is for you to choose—between love and hate, Cecile.’
‘I will never,’ she said between her closed teeth, ‘let that woman go.’
‘Then you choose hate? I knew you would,’ said Mrs. Brown, still perfectly calm; ‘and now, my dear, you must hear me. For I never meant to serve your hate all the time; I never meant to let Emily be ruined. If she needs me I shall reappear. Yes, wherever I am. I am going away, but I shall leave my address with Leo, or with Jim, or with——’
‘Artémise!’ she cried.
It was rarely that the sound of a raised voice was heard out of Mrs. Swinford’s room. She had nobody there to excite her to anger, but on this occasion she was no longer the sovereign in her own palace. It was not rebellion that moved her, for Artémise had always retained her independence; nor defiance, for nothing could be more quiet than Mrs. Brown’s tone. It was the impatience of contradiction, the surprise at opposition which a woman to whom everybody has yielded feels at the first check, and the sound was so sharp and keen, and raised to such an unusual pitch of surprised exasperation, that when a knock came immediately after to the door, and Leo’s voice was heard asking ‘May I come in?’ it was impossible for his mother to stop him with the languid, ‘No, I do not wish to be disturbed,’ with which she had often closed the door upon him. Julie, the usual sentinel, had stolen away, believing her mistress to be too much occupied to miss her—unhappy Julie when the moment of retribution came.
There was not a word said. Mrs. Swinford had not recovered her composure when her son opened the door.
‘You do not say anything; so I suppose I may come in,’ he said.
The man’s intrusion was strange in this chamber never intended for him. A man and a son!—that is something different from a man and a brother. Mrs. Swinford gave her visitor a sharp and meaning look, and then said:
‘What may you want, Leo, coming upon us in such a sudden way?’
‘Was I sudden? I heard you with some one, and I thought I might venture also, as you were evidently talking. And here I find precisely the person I wanted.’