She began to cry again, dropped her little cloak, and running back to Julie threw her arms round her neck and sobbed bitterly.
"Be quiet, Frances dear," Julie whispered to her. "We will go away to your father. You can ask him; he will tell you all that I can't tell you here. Come, be a good child--be my brave, sensible little Frances--"
"I must confess that this is the most extraordinary proceeding I ever heard of," said the countess, in a loud but perfectly indifferent voice. "Such language from such a mouth--une femme entretenue qui ne rougit pas de vouloir enlever un enfant à la mère légitime--"
"Countess," interrupted Julie, likewise raising her voice, "you said that in French; that relieves me from the disagreeable necessity of giving you the plain German answer that such an insult deserves--an insult which you yourself know to be false. Besides, I haven't to do with you, although you have permitted your rooms to be the theatre of this intrigue. I merely have to reply to the mother that I have a right to this child, a right that was voluntarily given me by its father, and that I certainly regret having to make use of this right in opposition to one who might have appealed to a holy right of Nature, had she not of her own accord relinquished it. You wished to steal the child from the father, and I, the betrothed of your former husband, fulfill only my motherly duty when I resist such a robbery. Get ready, Frances; we have nothing more to do here."
The face of the young woman had grown deadly pale, her soft eyes flashed fire, and she ground her little white teeth so that the sound was plainly audible.
"You allow yourself," she said, "to judge of circumstances you do not understand, that have never been told you except in a one-sided and distorted way. I have never renounced my natural right to call this child mine; I have merely been obliged to yield for a time to force, and I have always secretly hoped that time would come to my aid, that the father of my darling would acknowledge the deep wrong he had done me, and that the separation would tend to soften him. And who knows that this would not have come about had you not stepped in between us? Now, to be sure, that things have gone so far, there is no longer any hope of settling the matter amicably. If I would have back what belongs to me by sacred rights I was obliged to steal it as if it had been the property of another; and how hard it will be for me to make it mine again I have already discovered to my sorrow, for they have estranged the heart of this poor, motherless creature from its most natural home. Nevertheless, I will not cease to proclaim my right to the child and to its father. Why do you stand in the way of a deeply-injured woman, a robbed mother? Don't pretend you really care anything about becoming my successor to the child, as you have become to the father. Skillfully as you now play the rôle of the tender mother, in your heart you will be grateful to me if I relieve you of this burdensome duty; and he too, the most fickle of men--believe me, if he only had a reasonable pretext before the world, he would console himself in your possession, and would rejoice that I had been so good-natured as to have removed from his sight, without his express consent, the remembrance of an old guilt!"
She made a movement as if to draw the child to her arms, but it only clung the tighter to Julie.
"Take me away," it whispered to her, in a low voice. "Let us go away--to dear papa--I don't want to go to that woman again."
Julie stroked the little head, and pressed it to her side. She covered the child's ears so thickly with its soft hair that not a word of all this sad and bitter talk could reach its young soul.
"Thank you," she said, "you have drawn a thorn from my conscience by these disclosures. 'Perhaps, after all, he did her an injustice,' I said to myself. 'Perhaps he was too violent, too hasty; and even if she has been guilty of a great sin toward him, is it not punishment enough that the mother has been deprived of her child for so many years? And can I answer for it to this child for having forever destroyed all hopes of a reconciliation between her parents?' This often gave me some misgivings; but I candidly confess to you, from this day forth my conscience will be easy on that score. No matter what you may say in order to palliate what you have done, you cannot have the only real justification, a true and genuine love for your child; if you did, how could you entertain the thought that I would be glad to get rid of her? Such a thing could only be said and believed by a woman who let five years pass away without once trying to see, at any cost, the child she had borne; and who never even waited in the streets that she might have a chance to press it to her heart and kiss it once again. Such a thought could only be entertained by the woman who believed that the father of this child was capable of sacrificing it to his new-born happiness, and would look on with indifference while it pined and languished for want of a true mother's love. And you reproach me for having plighted my troth to this man who never belonged to you, for you never understood him, and never knew his worth, his nobility, and his greatness. You may do your best to destroy his happiness and to undermine his peace by your petty acts; in this plot you have failed, and, for the future, we shall take better care of ourselves and of the child. You have given us warning!"