Miss Susan once more cried out wildly in her misery, “It cannot be—it shall not be! I will not have it!” she said.
Once more Giovanna laughed, not offensively, but with a good-natured sense of fun. “Mon Dieu!” she said, “what can you do? Why should not we be bons amis? You cannot do anything, Madame Suzanne. It is all fixed and settled, and if you will think, it is for the best, it will arrange all.” Giovanna had a real desire to make peace, to secure de l’amitié, as she said. She went across the room toward Miss Susan, holding out her hand.
And then for a moment a mortal struggle went on in Susan Austin’s soul. She repulsed wildly, but mechanically, the offered hand, and stood there motionless, her breast panting, all the powers of nature startled into intensity, and such a conflict and passion going on within her as made her blind and deaf to the world outside. Then suddenly she put her hand upon the nearest chair, and drawing it to her, sat down, opposite to Herbert, with a nervous shiver running over her frame. She put up her hand to her throat, as if to tear away something which restrained or suffocated her; and then she said, in a terrible, stifled voice, “Herbert! first you must hear what I have got to say.”
CHAPTER XLV.
Giovanna looked at Miss Susan with surprise, then with a little apprehension. It was her turn to be uneasy. “Que voulez-vous? que voulez-vous dire?” she said under her breath, endeavoring to catch Miss Susan’s eye. Miss Susan was a great deal too impassioned and absorbed even to notice the disturbed condition of her adversary. She knew herself to be surrounded by an eager audience, but yet in her soul she was alone, insensible to everything, moved only by a passionate impulse to relieve herself, to throw off the burden which was driving her mad. She did not even see Giovanna, who after walking round behind Herbert, trying to communicate by the eyes with the woman whom all this time she had herself subdued by covert threats, sat down at last at the head of the sofa, putting her hand, which Herbert took into his, upon it. Probably this sign of kindness stimulated Miss Susan, though I doubt whether she was conscious of it, something having laid hold upon her which was beyond her power to resist.
“I have a story to tell you, children,” she said, pulling instinctively with her hand at the throat of her dress, which seemed to choke her, “and a confession to make. I have been good, good enough in my way, trying to do my duty most of my life; but now at the end of it I have done wrong, great wrong, and sinned against you all. God forgive me! and I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been trying to save myself from the—exposure—from the shame, God help me! I have thought of myself, when I ought to have thought of you all. Oh, I’ve been punished! I’ve been punished! But perhaps it is not yet too late. Oh, Herbert, Herbert! my dear boy, listen to me!”
“If you are going to say anything against Giovanna, you will lose your time, Aunt Susan,” said Herbert; and Giovanna leaned on the arm of the sofa, and kissed his forehead again in thanks and triumph.
“What I am going to say first is against myself,” said Miss Susan. “It is three years ago—a little more than three years; Farrel-Austin, who is dead, came and told me that he had found the missing people, the Austins whom you have heard of, whom I had sought for so long, and that he had made some bargain with them, that they should withdraw in his favor. You were very ill then, Herbert, thought to be dying; and Farrel-Austin—poor man, he is dead!—was our enemy. It was dreadful, dreadful to think of him coming here, being the master of the place. That was my sin to begin with. I thought I could bear anything sooner than that.”
Augustine came into the room at this moment. She came and went so noiselessly that no one even heard her; and Miss Susan was too much absorbed to note anything. The new-comer stood still near the door behind her sister, at first because it was her habit, and then, I suppose, in sympathy with the motionless attention of the others, and the continuance without a pause of Miss Susan’s voice.
“I meant no harm; I don’t know what I meant. I went to break their bargain, to show them the picture of the house, to make them keep their rights against that man. It was wicked enough. Farrel-Austin’s gone, and God knows what was between him and us; but to think of him here made me mad, and I went to try and break the bargain. I own that was what I meant. It was not, perhaps, Christian-like; not what your Aunt Augustine, who is as good as an angel, would have approved of; but it was not wicked, not wicked, if I had done no more than that!