"Pour me out a cup of tea," she said; "and don't excite yourself, my dear. Why do you speak to _me_ about this? Why don't you speak to your father?""I have tried to speak to papa," said Neelie. "But it's no use;he is too good to know what a wretch she is. She is always on her best behavior with him; she is always contriving to be useful to him. I can't make him understand why I dislike Miss Gwilt; Ican't make _you_ understand--I only understand it myself." She tried to pour out the tea, and in trying upset the cup. "I'll go downstairs again!" exclaimed Neelie, with a burst of tears. "I'm not fit for anything; I can't even pour out a cup of tea!"Mrs. Milroy seized her hand and stopped her. Trifling as it was, Neelie's reference to the relations between the major and Miss Gwilt had roused her mother's ready jealousy. The restraints which Mrs. Milroy had laid on herself thus far vanished in a moment--vanished even in the presence of a girl of sixteen, and that girl her own child!
"Wait here!" she said, eagerly. "You have come to the right place and the right person. Go on abusing Miss Gwilt. I like to hear you--I hate her, too!""You, mamma!" exclaimed Neelie, looking at her mother in astonishment.
For a moment Mrs. Milroy hesitated before she said more. Some last-left instinct of her married life in its earlier and happier time pleaded hard with her to respect the youth and the sex of her child. But jealousy respects nothing; in the heaven above and on the earth beneath, nothing but itself. The slow fire of self-torment, burning night and day in the miserable woman's breast, flashed its deadly light into her eyes, as the next words dropped slowly and venomously from her lips.
"If you had had eyes in your head, you would never have gone to your father," she said. "Your father has reasons of his own for hearing nothing that you can say, or that anybody can say, against Miss Gwilt."Many girls at Neelie's age would have failed to see the meaning hidden under those words. It was the daughter's misfortune, in this instance, to have had experience enough of the mother to understand her. Neelie started back from the bedside, with her face in a glow. "Mamma!" she said, "you are talking horribly!
Papa is the best, and dearest, and kindest--oh, I won't hear it!
I won't hear it!"
Mrs. Milroy's fierce temper broke out in an instant--broke out all the more violently from her feeling herself, in spite of herself, to have been in the wrong.
"You impudent little fool!" she retorted, furiously. "Do you think I want _you_ to remind me of what I owe to your father? Am I to learn how to speak of your father, and how to think of your father, and how to love and honor your father, from a forward little minx like you! I was finely disappointed, I can tell you, when you were born--I wished for a boy, you impudent hussy! If you ever find a man who is fool enough to marry you, he will be a lucky man if you only love him half as well, a quarter as well, a hundred-thousandth part as well, as I loved your father. Ah, you can cry when it's too late; you can come creeping back to beg your mother's pardon after you have insulted her. You little dowdy, half-grown creature! I was handsomer than ever you will be when I married your father. I would have gone through fire and water to serve your father! If he had asked me to cut off one of my arms, I would have done it--I would have done it to please him!" She turned suddenly with her face to the wall, forgetting her daughter, forgetting her husband, forgetting everything but the torturing remembrance of her lost beauty. "My arms!" she repeated to herself, faintly. "What arms I had when I was young!"She snatched up the sleeve of her dressing-gown furtively, with a shudder. "Oh, look at it now! look at it now!"Neelie fell on her knees at the bedside and hid her face. In sheer despair of finding comfort and help anywhere else, she had cast herself impulsively on her mother's mercy; and this was how it had ended! "Oh, mamma," she pleaded, "you know I didn't mean to offend you! I couldn't help it when you spoke so of my father.
Oh, do, do forgive me!"
Mrs. Milroy turned again on her pillow, and looked at her daughter vacantly. "Forgive you?" she repeated, with her mind still in the past, groping its way back darkly to the present.
"I beg your pardon, mamma--I beg your pardon on my knees. I am so unhappy; I do so want a little kindness! Won't you forgive me?""Wait a little," rejoined Mrs. Milroy. "Ah," she said, after an interval, "now I know! Forgive you? Yes; I'll forgive you on one condition." She lifted Neelie's head, and looked her searchingly in the face. "Tell me why you hate Miss Gwilt! You've a reason of your own for hating her, and you haven't confessed it yet."Neelie's head dropped again. The burning color that she was hiding by hiding her face showed itself on her neck. Her mother saw it, and gave her time.
"Tell me," reiterated Mrs. Milroy, more gently, "why do you hate her?"The answer came reluctantly, a word at a time, in fragments.
"Because she is trying--"
"Trying what?"
"Trying to make somebody who is much--"
"Much what?"
"Much too young for her--"
"Marry her?"
"Yes, mamma."
Breathlessly interested, Mrs. Milroy leaned forward, and twined her hand caressingly in her daughter's hair.
"Who is it, Neelie?" she asked, in a whisper.
"You will never say I told you, mamma?"
"Never! Who is it?"
"Mr. Armadale."