Claire hesitated, and the lady looked steadily at her and waited. Simple truth should serve her again; it would be insulting to offer anything else.
"Mrs. Ansted, you will pardon me for referring to it, but I know from your son's own statements that he is tempted in the direction of liquor, and that he finds it hard to resist these temptations, and I am afraid he is in great danger. If I were his mother, and had confidence in this Mr. Chessney, I should beg him to go out with him, and break away from his present surroundings."
She was deceived in the mother—in the calm with which she listened to these words. She did not cry out like one amazed and hurt, nor did she look like one who was being shocked into a faint; and Claire, watching her, hurried on, determined to make her disagreeable revelations as brief as she could, and then to get away from the subject. Surely the mother could not feel much humiliated before her, when she confessed that she had received these intimations from the son.
But directly her voice ceased, the mother arose, her own tones low and ladylike as usual:
"I am not aware, Miss Benedict, that our kind treatment of you can have furnished any excuse for this direct and open insult. I did not know that you had succeeded in securing my son's confidence to such a degree that he had been led to traduce his friends. I can not imagine his motive; but allow me to say that yours is plain, and will fail. The lady to whom Mr. Louis Ansted has been paying special attention for years, can not be thrown off, even by his taking a trip to the Rocky Mountains; and if you hope to ingratiate yourself in the mother's heart by trying to arouse her fears, you have made a grievous mistake. My daughters are evidently more susceptible, and I now understand some things that were before mysterious to me.
"I am sorry for you, Miss Benedict. I can well imagine that it is a hard thing to be poor; but it is a pity to add disgrace to poverty. You have been unwise to try to work up fanatical ideas on my son. We are none of us temperance fanatics."
There was a dangerous fire in Claire's eyes, but she struggled to keep back the words that hurried forward, clamoring to be spoken. This woman before her was old enough to be her mother, and was the mother of a young man whom she would try to save.
Besides, she had the force of habit to help her. The controlled voice which belongs to the cultured lady, even under strong provocation, was as much a part of her as it was of Mrs. Ansted.
"I will pass by your personalities, Mrs. Ansted, as unworthy of you, and ask you to pardon my apparent intrusion into family affairs, on the sole ground that I have come into possession of some knowledge concerning your son's danger which I have reason to believe you do not possess, and I thought I ought, as a Christian woman, to warn you."