“My motive! what motive can I have but justice?” the young man said.
“Oh, Geoffrey! hush, my dear. When you know it is your aunt’s way. Why should there be any quarrelling, to make everything worse?”
“Yes, it is his aunt’s way. I am not the sort of fool that accepts everything,” said Miss Anna. “I can read him like a book. He has had to have his living doled out to him through you and me, and now he sees a way of getting the better of us—of turning the tables upon us. Oh, it is clear enough. Two girls—two silly creatures that will believe every word he says; but take my advice, Geoffrey, and choose the little one. She is the one that you can turn round your little finger; the other has a will of her own. Though it is against my own interest, you see, I can still give you good advice.”
Geoffrey made no reply to this speech. His mother fluttered between him and Miss Anna with her hands spread out like the wings of a protecting bird, ready to burst in and forestall him had he attempted to reply; but he did not speak for some minutes. Then he said coldly, “We must not quarrel, as my mother says. We are all threatened with a great danger. For anything we can tell, the girls you are talking of so lightly can take the greater part of our living from us. The question not only is, have they a real claim? but can they establish it? and how far are we ready to go in the way of resistance? Rather, how far are you ready to go? Will moral certainty be enough for you, or do you demand legal proof?”
“Moral fiddlestick!” said Miss Anna. “Morals have nothing to do with it. We were always as near in blood as Leonard was; we had as good a right as he had; indeed, we had a better right, being girls, to be provided for. Uncle Abraham thought of the name when he chose his nephew instead of his nieces. And that showed his folly—for the nephew seems to have thrown off the name the moment he left the country: and of all the claimants there is only one Crosthwaite, and that is me. I do not care a brass farthing for your moral certainty. All it means is, that you have made up your mind to stand by your opinion through thick and thin. It is your opinion that the man who came here the other night was Leonard. Well! you think so, and he said so—but that is no proof.”
“Oh, Anna!” cried her sister, “speak of him kindly. Poor Leonard! when you have just heard that he is dead——”
“What is his dying to me?” she cried, with a glance of fury. “That’s the man that was held up to us all as the image of faithfulness. Not one of you but has told me if I had not treated him so badly, this and that would not have happened; and the hound had changed his name, and married, and been happy all the time!” Then she stopped and looked at Geoffrey with a contemptuous laugh. “Mind you, I don’t acknowledge that he was Leonard Crosthwaite. It suits my purpose a great deal better to believe that he was the pink of fidelity, and died of a broken heart.”
“Very few people, they say,” said Mrs Underwood, in a reluctant voice, “die of broken hearts.”
Miss Anna’s bright eyes seemed to give out gleams of malice and scorn and indignant ridicule. “But I believe in them,” she said. “I am romantic, not prosaic like you. When you know it’s for your sake, then, naturally, you believe in it.” She stopped to laugh, her bosom panting with a mixture of contempt and fury. “If Leonard did not die for me as he promised he would, he was a poor creature. Heirs! what had he to do with heirs? If he did not die he was a traitor and a liar. Geoff, there is no poetry in you; you are a commonplace being; that is why you are capable of believing that Leonard Crosthwaite lived, and throve, and married, and had heirs. I do not believe a word of it,” she said. And again she laughed. After all, there was something behind the self-interest that determined her resistance—something which the more honourable people who gazed at her with so much wonder and alarm did not understand. Her laugh was not of merriment but of that last scorn of humanity which is despair. It made her furious, it transported her beyond all limits of nature. She had believed in this one man as true and faithful beyond all question; and he had been the greatest deceiver of all. This put such fierce scorn into her breast that she could not contain herself. The more selfish a nature is the more is it lacerated by desertion. This was a woman who had put herself above others all her life, and had been punished by the gradual failure of all whose worship she had once believed in. It was the final blow to her self-esteem, and she resented it with wild wrath and frantic ridicule of the traitor. But nobody knew the tragic element in it, or that her belief in the possibility of honour and truth went with this discovery. She appeared to the others like an unscrupulous woman, firmly determined to hold by her inheritance against all claimants—which she was: but also something more.
“All that is beyond the question,” said Geoffrey; “it is very possible that legal proof may be hard to get. We might fight it out at law for years; we might ruin them and ourselves too in the effort to make it quite clear. The question is for you, mother, as well as Aunt Anna. If you are sure these are the heirs, though they cannot prove it in law, what will you do?”