She had never yet spoken of Maria in this way. Even her voice seemed to be changed. Instead of betraying the usual angry abruptness, her tones coldly indicated impenetrable contempt. In the silence that ensued, she looked up, and saw Carmina’s eyes resting on her anxiously and kindly.
“Any other human being but you,” she said, “would find me disagreeable and rude—and would be quite right, too. I haven’t asked after your health. You look paler than usual. Have you, too, had a bad night?”
“I fell asleep towards the morning. And—oh, I had such a delightful dream! I could almost wish that I had never awakened from it.”
“Who did you dream of?” She put the question mechanically—frowning, as if at some repellent thought suggested to her by what she had just heard.
“I dreamed of my mother,” Carmina answered.
Miss Minerva raised herself at once in the chair. Whatever that passing impression might have been, she was free from it now. There was some little life again in her eyes; some little spirit in her voice. “Take me out of myself,” she said; “tell me your dream.”
“It is nothing very remarkable, Frances. We all of us sometimes see our dear lost ones in sleep. I saw my mother again, as I used to see her in the nursery at bedtime—tall and beautiful, with her long dark hair failing over her white dressing-gown to the waist. She stooped over me, and kissed me; and she looked surprised. She said, ‘My little angel, why are you here in a strange house? I have come to take you back to your own cot, by my bedside.’ I wasn’t surprised or frightened; I put my arms round her neck; and we floated away together through the cool starry night; and we were at home again. I saw my cot, with its pretty white curtains and pink ribbons. I heard my mother tell me an English fairy story, out of a book which my father had given to her—and her kind voice grew fainter and fainter, while I grew more and more sleepy—and it ended softly, just as it used to end in the happy old days. And I woke, crying. Do you ever dream of your mother now?”
“I? God forbid!”
“Oh, Frances, what a dreadful thing to say!”
“Is it? It was the thought in me, when you spoke. And with good reason, too. I was the last of a large family—the ugly one; the ill-tempered one; the encumbrance that made it harder than ever to find money enough to pay the household expenses. My father swore at my mother for being my mother. She reviled him just as bitterly in return; and vented the rest of her ill-temper on my wretched little body, with no sparing hand. Bedtime was her time for beating me. Talk of your mother—not of mine! You were very young, were you not, when she died?”