‘You are in love with him!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, almost with a scream of scorn. The accusation was such that Millicent shrank before it for the moment, but she did not give way.
‘I wonder if I shall be in love with anybody again?’ she said; and then a sigh burst from her unawares. ‘Poor fellow! poor boy! He is so good, and he will never forget me!’
‘If he had really cared a straw for you he would never have come here!’ cried Mrs. Tracy. ‘Love!—call that love! for a man without a penny! I call it pure selfishness. But he shall never come near you again,—never. Oh, what am I to do?—where am I to take you? We cannot stay here.’
‘We are going to Wiesbaden, for your health,’ said Millicent. It came upon her all at once that she had told him so, making use, involuntarily, of her mother’s suggestion. ‘Wait, and see what comes of it,’ she added, with oracular meaning, which she did not herself understand. And after a while Mrs. Tracy’s passion sank into quiet too. When people live from day to day without any power of arranging matters beforehand, and specially when they live upon their wits, trusting to the scheme of the minute for such comforts as it can secure, they have to believe in chances good and evil. Something might come of it. Somehow, at the last moment, matters might mend. She sat down with that power of abstracting herself from her anxiety which is given to the mind of the adventurer, and recovered her breath, and took her cup of tea. She had scarcely finished that refreshment when the maid knocked at the drawing-room door with Ben’s letter. Mrs. Tracy flew at her daughter as though she would have torn the meaning out of the paper, which Millicent opened with the slowness of agitation; but she had to wait all the same while it was gone over twice, every word; the very enclosures in it,—and it was very evident that there were enclosures,—were hidden in Millicent’s clenched hand from her mother’s eyes. She was wilfully cruel in her self-humiliation. And yet it was Mrs. Tracy, and not Millicent, who answered the letter which poor Ben had written, as it were, with his heart’s blood.
CHAPTER VIII.
MRS. TRACY’S I. O. U.
Mrs. Tracy’s answer to Ben’s letter was as follows:—
‘My Dear Mr. Renton,—Millicent has placed your most kind and generous letter in my hands. It is everything I have said, but it is a very extraordinary letter as well; and it is impossible for a young creature without any knowledge of the world to answer it. It takes all my judgment,—and I have passed through a good deal,—to decide how to do it. I would not for the world hurt your feelings, dear Mr. Renton, and I am convinced that to act according to the dictates of pride, and decline your most kind little loan, would be to hurt your feelings. Therefore I make the sacrifice of my own. I don’t replace your notes in this, as pride tempts me to do. I keep them for your sake.
‘And, besides,—why should I hesitate to confess it?—we are poor. I cannot do for Millicent,—I cannot do for myself, though that matters less,—what I would. I don’t know how far my poor child went in her confidences to you to-day. She was agitated,—and she is still agitated,—though I have done all I could to soothe her. She is much affected by your sympathy and generosity; and yet, with the shrinking delicacy which characterises her, she cannot forgive herself for telling you. “I could not help it, mamma,—he was so feeling,” my poor darling says to me, with tears in her eyes. God bless you, dear Mr. Renton! With this timely aid, which I accept as a loan, my Millicent’s poor mother may still be spared to watch over her child. It would have been impossible for me to go, and I tried to hide from my pet the urging of my physicians. Now it is all clear before us. I enclose a memorandum for the amount at five per cent interest; but what interest can ever repay the kind consideration, the ready thoughtfulness? I can never forget it, and neither can Millicent. When I say that we shall leave almost immediately, I but say that we are carrying out your intention. We shall miss you in that strange land. How sweet if we could hope to meet our benefactor among its gay groups! Millicent tells me something about your circumstances, which it seems impossible to believe. But if it should be true, dear Mr. Renton, how sweet it will be to your mind to feel that your little savings, if diverted from their original intention, will yet go to carry out one of the most sacred offices of Christianity,—to save a mother, the sole guide and protector of her innocence, to her only child!
‘Believe me, my dear Mr. Renton, with the sincerest kind regards and good wishes,
‘Yours obliged and most truly,
‘Maria Tracy.’