For a moment the other was too knocked out of time by this answer to do anything more purposeful than give a sort of stagger, and the combatants looked at each other in silence, Camilla noting, with a rather grudging, yet not shallow compassion, how dreadfully ill and aged her friend looked. She and her daughter were both dressed in black, as Volumnia and Virgilia had been on their mission, and though Mrs. Aylmer was as little like Volumnia as Bonnybell was like Coriolanus, the motive of their dusky habit was the same.
“I am sure that you would be the last person to encourage her in such a revengeful spirit,” Catherine said presently, speaking for the first time, and with a good deal less of heartbreak and a good deal more of resentment in her voice than had found place in her mother’s. “Of course, we had never wished to be connected with her. How could we? And when this hideous accusation came, we naturally waited for an explanation of it, but she would give none. She simply walked out of the house.”
“And in my judgment it was the only course of action open to a decent woman after such an insult,” replied Camilla, incisively. Mrs. Tancred had never been very fond of Miss Aylmer, but her conscience, alarmed now at the pleasure she was aware of deriving from snubbing her, drove her into an admission of the justice of a part, at least, of Catherine’s contention. “I perfectly agree with you in your unwillingness to be connected with Miss Ransome, and congratulate you sincerely on having escaped so very real a peril.”
“But we have not escaped it; we do not want to escape it! You must not call it a peril,” cried Mrs. Aylmer, incoherently, distracted at the injury which was evidently being done to the cause she had come prepared to spend her heart’s blood in pleading. “I dare not go back without her. You have no conception of the state he is in. He has renounced us all. He swears he will never see one of our faces again. He has said things that I could not have believed possible to me—his own mother. Oh, if you had children of your own, you would understand, but of course you cannot; how should you?”
Mrs. Tancred met the half-unconscious cruelty of this tearing open of one of the two lifelong raws of her life with Lacedæmonian fortitude. If she suffered she showed it only by a slight addition to the cold kindness in the controlled and measured words of her next speech.
“I am extremely sorry for his and your sufferings; even my naturally defective sympathy tells me how acute they are. My concern is the deeper as they have been inflicted by a member of my household.”
“Oh, we do not blame you for that!” put in Catherine, resuming the rôle of spokeswoman with something like eagerness. “We are not so unjust. Of course, when you took her in you had as little knowledge as we of what she really was.”
Camilla turned upon her apologist with a frosty rebuke in her keen eyes.
“I have no wish to be exonerated from blame for doing what I—mistakenly, perhaps—conceived to be my duty. Nor, since you need no longer lie under any apprehension of nearer connection with her, can it concern you what Miss Ransome really is or is not.”
“Oh, Catherine, what a false impression you are giving,” broke in Mrs. Aylmer, with something of the distraught readiness of the real mother in the Judgment of Solomon to say anything or do anything that would save her son. “It is no question of what she is or is not, and we are sure that she is everything that is nice and right, and we ought never to have taken any notice of that abominable letter. It was against my judgment that we did it.”