“Is my true name Flemington?” he asked abruptly.
“You are my own flesh and blood,” said she, “or you would not be standing here. Their fear was that the Chevalier would marry her privately, but they got him out of the way, and your father seduced the girl. Then, to make the Chevalier doubly safe, they forced him to make her his wife—he who was only nineteen! They did it secretly, but when the marriage was known, I would not receive her, and I left the court and went to Rouen. I have lived ever since in the hope of seeing the Stuarts swept from the earth. Your father is gone, and you are all I have left, but you shall go too if you join yourself to them.”
“I shall not do that,” said he.
“Do you understand now what it costs me to see you turn back?” said Madam Flemington.
The mantle had slipped from her shoulders, and her white hands, crossed at the wrists, lay with the fingers along her arms. She stood trying to dissect the component parts of his trouble and to fashion something out of them on which she might make a new attack. Forces outside her own understanding were at work in him which were strong enough to take the fine edge of humiliation off the history she had just told him; she guessed their presence, unseen though they were, and her acute practical mind was searching for them. She was like an astronomer whose telescope is turned on the tract of sky in which, as his science tells him, some unknown body will arise.
She had always taken his pride of race for granted, as she took her own. The influx of the base blood of the “slut” had been a mortification unspeakable, but to Madam Flemington, the actual treachery practised on her had not been the crowning insult. The thing was bad, but the manner of its doing was worse, for the Queen and Lady Despard had used young Flemington as though he had been of no account. The Flemingtons had served James Stuart whole-heartedly, taking his evil fortunes as though they had been their own; they had done it of their own free will, high-handedly. But Mary Beatrice and her favourite had treated Christian and her son as slaves, chattels to be sacrificed to the needs of their owner. There was enough nobility in Christian to see that part of the business as its blackest spot.
She had kept the knowledge of it from Archie, because she had the instinct common to all savage creatures (and Christian’s affinity with savage creatures was a close one) for the concealment of desperate wounds. Her silks, her ruby earrings, her physical indolence, her white hands, all the refinements that had accrued to her in her world-loving life, all that went to make the outward presentment of the woman, was the mere ornamental covering of the savage in her. That savage watched Archie now.
Madam Flemington was removed by two generations from Archie, and there was a gulf of evolution between them, unrealized by either. Their conscious ideals might be identical; but their unconscious ideals, those that count with nations and with individuals, were different. And the same trouble, one that might be accepted and acknowledged by each, must affect each differently. The old regard a tragedy through its influences on the past, and the young through its influences on the future. To Archie, Madam Flemington’s revelation was an insignificant thing compared to the horror that was upon him now. It was done and it could not be undone, and he was himself, with his life before him, in spite of it. It was like the withered leaf of a poisonous plant, a thing rendered innocuous by the processes of nature. What process of nature could make his agony innocuous? The word ‘treachery’ had become a nightmare to him, and on every side he was fated to hear it.
Its full meaning had only been brought home to him two days ago, and now the hateful thing was being pressed on him by one who had suffered from it bitterly. What could he say to her? How was he to make her see as he saw? His difficulty was a sentimental one, and one that she would not recognize.