Her arm was crushed as in an iron vice. Body and soul she trembled before him. “Papa, let me go or I can say nothing! Let me go!”
He gave her arm one violent twist and then he dropped it. “What are you afraid of?” he said, with a gleam of those angry eyes. “Go on—go on—tell me what happened last night.”
Katherine’s narrative was confused and broken, and Mr. Tredgold was not usually a man of very clear intelligence. It must have been that his recollections, sent into the background of his mind by the extreme shock of last night, and by the opiate which had helped him to shake it off, had all the time been working secretly within him through sleeping and waking, waiting only for the outer framework of the story now told him. He understood every word. He took it all up point by point, marking them by the beating of his hand upon the arm of his chair. “That’s how it was,” he said several times, nodding his head. He was much clearer about it than Katherine, who did not yet realise the sequence of events or that Stella was already Charlie Somers’s wife when she came innocently back with her white flowers, and hung about her father at his luncheon, doing everything possible to please him; but he perceived all this without the hesitation of a moment and with apparent composure. “It was all over, then,” he said to himself; “she had done it, then. She took us in finely, you and me, Kate. We are a silly lot—to believe what everyone tells us. She was married to a fine gentleman before she came in to us all smiling and pleasant;” and, then, speaking in the same even tone, he suddenly cursed her, without even a pause to distinguish the words.
“Papa, papa!” Katherine cried, almost with a shriek.
“What is it, you little fool? You think perhaps I’ll say ‘Bless you, my children,’ and have them back? They think so themselves, I shouldn’t wonder; they’ll find out the difference. What about those diamonds that I gave her instead of him—instead of——” And here he laughed, and in the same steady tone bade God curse her again.
“I cannot hear you say that—I cannot, I cannot! Oh, God bless and take care of my poor Stella! Oh, papa, little Stella, that you have always been so fond of——”
Mr. Tredgold’s arm started forth as if it would have given a blow. He dashed his fist in the air, then subsided again and laughed a low laugh. “I shan’t pay for those diamonds,” he said. “I’ll send them back, I’ll—— And her new clothes that she was to get—God damn her. She can’t have taken her clothes, flying off from a ball by night.”
“Oh, what are clothes, or money, or anything, in comparison with Stella!” Katherine said.
“Not much to you that don’t have to pay for them,” he said. “I shan’t pay for them. Go and pack up the rags, don’t you hear? and bring me the diamonds. She thinks we’ll send ’em after her.” And here the curse again. “She shan’t have one of them, not one. Go and do what I tell you, Katie. God damn her and her——”
“Oh, papa, for the sake of everything that is good! Yes, I will go—I will go. What does it matter? Her poor little frocks, her——”