“Very well. I have warned you.”
“Then you won’t ask the baron’s pardon?”
“No.”
They stood confronting each other, and the mother knew her authority was at stake.
“Then you will stay up here and eat by yourself, and you won’t be allowed to come to table and sit with us until you have asked his pardon. I’ll teach you manners. You won’t budge from this room until I give you permission to, do you hear?”
Edgar smiled. That cunning smile seemed to be part of his lips now. Inwardly he was angry at himself. How foolish to have let his heart run away with him again and to have tried to warn her, the liar.
His mother rustled out without giving him another glance. That caustic gaze of his frightened her. The child had become an absolute annoyance to her since she realized that he had his eyes open and said the very things she did not want to know or hear. It was uncanny to have an inner voice, her conscience, dissevered from herself, incorporated in her child, going about as her child, warning her and making fun of her. Until then the child had stayed alongside of her life, as an ornament, a toy, a thing to love and have confidence in, now and then perhaps a burden, but always something that floated along in the same current as her own life, keeping even pace with it. For the first time this something reared itself up and opposed her will. A feeling akin to hate mingled itself in her thoughts of her child now. And yet, as she was descending the stairs, a little tired, childish voice came from her own breast, saying, “You ought to be careful of him.”
On one of the landings was a mirror. The gleam of it struck her eyes, and she paused to scrutinize herself questioningly. She looked deeper and deeper into her own face until the lips of her image parted in a light smile and formed themselves as if to utter a dangerous word. The voice within her was still speaking, but she threw back her shoulders as though to shake off all those invisible thoughts gave her reflection in the glass a bright glance, caught up her skirt, and descended the rest of the stairs with the determined manner of a player who has tossed his last coin down on the table.
CHAPTER X
ON THE TRAIL
THE waiter, after serving Edgar with dinner in his room, closed and locked the door behind him. The child started up in a rage. His mother’s doings! She must have given orders for him to be locked in like a vicious beast.