"Oh, what a fool I am!" she exclaimed."As if you could understand--as if you could care!"Struggle as she might to be defiant, she was breaking, Lady Mallowe repeated to herself.She followed her as a hunter might have followed a young leopardess with a wound in its flank.
"I came here because it _is_ your last chance.Palliser knew what he was saying when he made a joke of it just now.He knew it wasn't a joke.You might have been the Duchess of Merthshire; you might have been Lady St.Maur, with a husband with millions.And here you are.
You know what's before you--when I am out of the trap."Joan laughed.It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no sense in it.
"I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia's Home for Decayed Gentlewomen," she said.
Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.
"Apply, then.There will be no place for you in the home I am going to live in," she retorted.
Joan ceased moving about.She was about to hear the one argument that was new.
"You may as well tell me," she said, wearily.
"I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini.He is to be at Broome Haughton.He is going there purposely to meet me.What he writes can mean only one thing.He means to ask me to marry him.I'm your mother, and I'm nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I'm out of the trap first.""I knew you would be," answered Joan.
"He detests you," Lady Mallowe went on."He will not hear of your living with us--or even near us.He says you are old enough to take care of yourself.Take my advice.I am doing you a good turn in giving it.This New York newsboy is mad over you.If he hadn't been we should have been bundled out of the house before this.He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess.Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can.Go!" And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet.
Joan's thunder-colored eyes seemed to grow larger as she stared at her.Her breast lifted itself, and her face slowly turned pale.
Perhaps--she thought it wildly--people sometimes did die of feelings like this.
"He would crawl at your feet," her mother went on, pursuing what she felt sure was her advantage.She was so sure of it that she added words only a fool or a woman half hysteric with rage would have added.
"You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you."She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment.If she had had an advantage, she had lost it.Wickedly, without a touch of mirth, Joan laughed in her face.
"Jem's house and Jem's money--and the New York newsboy in his shoes,"she flung at her."T.Tembarom to live with until one lay down on one's deathbed.T.Tembarom!"Suddenly, something was giving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again.
Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the table.
"Oh! Mother! Mother!" she ended."Oh! Jem! Jem!"Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to be lost.Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before.
"Crying!" there was absolute spite in her voice."That shows you know what you are in for, at all events.But I've said my last word.What does it matter to me, after all? You're in the trap.I'm not.Get out as best you can.I've done with you."She turned her back and went out of the room--as she had come into it--with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had seen it.As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her ladyship was vulgar.
But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden.Something in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt.That bitter, sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it.Who had time to remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world.Who had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time enough to give to living ones.It was true--true! When a man is dead, it is too late.The wall had built itself until it reached her sky;but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over.It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem's face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem's face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room.She forgot everything else on earth.She forgot where she was.She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it.
"Oh Jem! Jem!" she cried."If you were only in the same world with me!
If you were just in the same world!"
She had forgotten all else, indeed.She forgot too long.She did not know how long.It seemed that no more than a few minutes had passed before she was without warning struck with the shock of feeling that some one was in the room with her, standing near her, looking at her.
She had been mad not to remember that exactly this thing would be sure to happen, by some abominable chance.Her movement as she rose was almost violent, she could not hold herself still, and her face was horribly wet with shameless, unconcealable tears.Shameless she felt them--indecent--a sort of nudity of the soul.If it had been a servant who had intruded, or if it had been Palliser it would have been intolerable enough.But it was T.Tembarom who confronted her with his common face, moved mysteriously by some feeling she resented even more than she resented his presence.He was too grossly ignorant to know that a man of breeding, having entered by chance, would have turned and gone away, professing not to have seen.He seemed to think--the dolt!--that he must make some apology.
"Say! Lady Joan!" he began."I beg your pardon.I didn't want to butt in.""Then go away," she commanded."Instantly--instantly!"She knew he must see that she spoke almost through her teeth in her effort to control her sobbing breath.But he made no move toward leaving her.He even drew nearer, looking at her in a sort of meditative, obstinate way.