"I am speaking, I believe, to Mrs. Glenarm?" she began.
The good-humored widow smiled and bowed graciously.
"I have come here, Mrs. Glenarm--by Mr. Delamayn's permission--to ask leave to speak to you on a matter in which you are interested."
Mrs. Glenarm's many-ringed fingers paused over the keys of the piano. Mrs. Gle narm's plump face turned on the stranger with a dawning expression of surprise.
"Indeed? I am interested in so many matters. May I ask what this matter is?"
The flippant tone of the speaker jarred on Anne. If Mrs. Glenarm's nature was as shallow as it appeared to be on the surface, there was little hope of any sympathy establishing itself between them.
"I wished to speak to you," she answered, "about something that happened while you were paying a visit in the neighborhood of Perth."
The dawning surprise in Mrs. Glenarm's face became intensified into an expression of distrust. Her hearty manner vanished under a veil of conventional civility, drawn over it suddenly. She looked at Anne. "Never at the best of times a beauty," she thought. "Wretchedly out of health now. Dressed like a servant, and looking like a lady. What does it mean?"
The last doubt was not to be borne in silence by a person of Mrs. Glenarm's temperament. She addressed herself to the solution of it with the most unblushing directness--dextrously excused by the most winning frankness of manner.
"Pardon me," she said. "My memory for faces is a bad one; and I don't think you heard me just now, when I asked for your name. Have we ever met before?"
"Never."
"And yet--if I understand what you are referring to--you wish to speak to me about something which is only interesting to myself and my most intimate friends."
"You understand me quite correctly," said Anne. "I wish to speak to you about some anonymous letters--"
"For the third time, will you permit me to ask for your name?"
"You shall hear it directly--if you will first allow me to finish what I wanted to say. I wish--if I can--to persuade you that I come here as a friend, before I mention my name. You will, I am sure, not be very sorry to hear that you need dread no further annoyance--"
"Pardon me once more," said Mrs. Glenarm, interposing for the second time. "I am at a loss to know to what I am to attribute this kind interest in my affairs on the part of a total stranger."
This time, her tone was more than politely cold--it was politely impertinent. Mrs. Glenarm had lived all her life in good society, and was a perfect mistress of the subtleties of refined insolence in her intercourse with those who incurred her displeasure.
Anne's sensitive nature felt the wound--but Anne's patient courage submitted. She put away from her the insolence which had tried to sting, and went on, gently and firmly, as if nothing had happened.
"The person who wrote to you anonymously," she said, "alluded to a correspondence. He is no longer in possession of it. The correspondence has passed into hands which may be trusted to respect it. It will be put to no base use in the future--I answer for that."
"You answer for that?" repeated Mrs. Glenarm. She suddenly leaned forward over the piano, and fixed her eyes in unconcealed scrutiny on Anne's face. The violent temper, so often found in combination with the weak nature, began to show itself in her rising color, and her lowering brow. "How do you know what the person wrote?" she asked. "How do you know that the correspondence has passed into other hands? Who are you?" Before Anne could answer her, she sprang to her feet, electrified by a new idea. "The man who wrote to me spoke of something else besides a correspondence. He spoke of a woman. I have found you out!" she exclaimed, with a burst of jealous fury. "You are the woman!"
Anne rose on her side, still in firm possession of her self-control.
"Mrs. Glenarm," she said, calmly, "I warn--no, I entreat you--not to take that tone with me. Compose yourself; and I promise to satisfy you that you are more interested than you are willing to believe in what I have still to say. Pray bear with me for a little longer. I admit that you have guessed right. I own that I am the miserable woman who has been ruined and deserted by Geoffrey Delamayn."
"It's false!" cried Mrs. Glenarm. "You wretch! Do you come to me with your trumped-up story? What does Julius Delamayn mean by exposing me to this?" Her indignation at finding herself in the same room with Anne broke its way through, not the restraints only, but the common decencies of politeness. "I'll ring for the servants!" she said. "I'll have you turned out of the house."
She tried to cross the fire-place to ring the bell. Anne, who was standing nearest to it, stepped forward at the same moment. Without saying a word, she motioned with her hand to the other woman to stand back. There was a pause. The two waited, with their eyes steadily fixed on one another--each with her resolution laid bare to the other's view. In a moment more, the finer nature prevailed. Mrs. Glenarm drew back a step in silence.
"Listen to me," said Anne.
"Listen to you?" repeated Mrs. Glenarm. "You have no right to be in this house. You have no right to force yourself in here. Leave the room!"
Anne's patience--so firmly and admirably preserved thus far--began to fail her at last.
"Take care, Mrs. Glenarm!" she said, still struggling with herself. "I am not naturally a patient woman. Trouble has done much to tame my temper--but endurance has its limits. You have reached the limits of mine. I have a claim to be heard--and after what you have said to me, I will be heard!"
"You have no claim! You shameless woman, you are married already. I know the man's name. Arnold Brinkworth."
"Did Geoffrey Delamayn tell you that?"
"I decline to answer a woman who speaks of Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn in that familiar way."
Anne advanced a step nearer.
"Did Geoffrey Delamayn tell you that?" she repeated.
There was a light in her eyes, there was a ring in her voice, which showed that she was roused at last. Mrs. Glenarm answered her, this time.
"He did tell me."
"He lied!"
"He did not! He knew. I believe him. I don't believe you."
"If he told you that I was any thing but a single woman--if he told you that Arnold Brinkworth was married to any body but Miss Lundie of Windygates--I say again he lied!"
"I say again--I believe him, and not you."
"You believe I am Arnold Brinkworth's wife?"
"I am certain of it."
"You tell me that to my face?"
"I tell you to your face--you may have been Geoffrey Delamayn's mistress; you are Arnold Brinkworth's wife."
At those words the long restrained anger leaped up in Anne--all the more hotly for having been hitherto so steadily controlled. In one breathless moment the whirlwind of her indignation swept away, not only all remembrance of the purpose which had brought her to Swanhaven, but all sense even of the unpardonable wrong which she had suffered at Geoffrey's hands. If he had been there, at that moment, and had offered to redeem his pledge, she would have consented to marry him, while Mrs. Glenarm s eye was on her--no matter whether she destroyed herself in her first cool moment afterward or not. The small sting had planted itself at last in the great nature. The noblest woman is only a woman, after all!
"I forbid your marriage to Geoffrey Delamayn! I insist on his performing the promise he gave me, to make me his wife! I have got it here in his own words, in his own writing. On his soul, he swears it to me--he will redeem his pledge. His mistress, did you say? His wife, Mrs. Glenarm, before the week is out!"
In those wild words she cast back the taunt--with the letter held in triumph in her hand.
Daunted for the moment by the doubt now literally forced on her, that Anne might really have the claim on Geoffrey which she advanced, Mrs. Glenarm answered nevertheless with the obstinacy of a woman brought to bay--with a resolution not to be convinced by conviction itself.
"I won't give him up!" she cried.