I am weary of hearing of Mercy Merrick. Have you any more questions to ask me?"
"I have one more."
"Yes?"
"I wish to ask your ladyship whether you propose to recognize me in the presence of your household as the late Colonel Roseberry's daughter?"
"I have already recognized you as a lady in embarrassed circumstances, who has peculiar claims on my consideration and forbearance. If you wish me to repeat those words in the presence of the servants (absurd as it is), I am ready to comply with your request."
Grace's temper began to get the better of her prudent resolutions.
"Lady Janet!" she said; "this won't do. I must request you to express yourself plainly. You talk of my peculiar claims on your forbearance. What claims do you mean?"
"It will be painful to both of us if we enter into details," replied Lady Janet. "Pray don't let us enter into details."
"I insist on it, madam."
"Pray don't insist on it."
Grace was deaf to remonstrance.
"I ask you in plain words," she went on, "do you acknowledge that you have been deceived by an adventuress who has personated me? Do you mean to restore me to my proper place in this house?"
Lady Janet returned to the arrangement of her papers.
"Does your ladyship refuse to listen to me?"
Lady Janet looked up from her papers as blandly as ever.
"If you persist in returning to your delusion," she said, "you will oblige me to persist in returning to my papers."
"What is my delusion, if you please?"
"Your delusion is expressed in the questions you have just put to me. Your delusion constitutes your peculiar claim on my forbearance. Nothing you can say or do will shake my forbearance. When I first found you in the dining-room, I acted most improperly; I lost my temper. I did worse; I was foolish enough and imprudent enough to send for a police officer. I owe you every possible atonement (afflicted as you are) for treating you in that cruel manner. I offered you the use of my boudoir, as part of my atonement. I sent for you, in the hope that you would allow me to assist you, as part of my atonement. You may behave rudely to me, you may speak in the most abusive terms of my adopted daughter; I will submit to anything, as part of my atonement. So long as you abstain from speaking on one painful subject, I will listen to you with the greatest pleasure. Whenever you return to that subject I shall return to my papers."
Grace looked at Lady Janet with an evil smile.
"I begin to understand your ladyship," she said. "You are ashamed to acknowledge that you have been grossly imposed upon. Your only alternative, of course, is to ignore everything that has happened. Pray count on my forbearance. I am not at all offended--I am merely amused. It is not every day that a lady of high rank exhibits herself in such a position as yours to an obscure woman like me. Your humane consideration for me dates, I presume, from the time when your adopted daughter set you the example, by ordering the police officer out of the room?"
Lady Janet's composure was proof even against this assault on it. She gravely accepted Grace's inquiry as a question addressed to her in perfect good faith.
"I am not at all surprised," she replied, "to find that my adopted daughter's interference has exposed her to misrepresentation. She ought to have remonstrated with me privately before she interfered. But she has one fault--she is too impulsive. I have never, in all my experience, met with such a warm-hearted person as she is. Always too considerate of others; always too forgetful of herself! The mere appearance of the police officer placed you in a situation to appeal to her compassion, and her impulses carried her away as usual. My fault! All my fault!"
Grace changed her tone once more. She was quick enough to discern that Lady Janet was a match for her with her own weapons.
"We have had enough of this," she said. "It is time to be serious. Your adopted daughter (as you call her) is Mercy Merrick, and you know it."
Lady Janet returned to her papers.
"I am Grace Roseberry, whose name she has stolen, and you know that."
Lady Janet went o n with her papers.
Grace got up from her chair.
"I accept your silence, Lady Janet," she said, "as an acknowledgment of your deliberate resolution to suppress the truth. You are evidently determined to receive the adventuress as the true woman; and you don't scruple to face the consequences of that proceeding, by pretending to my face to believe that I am mad. I will not allow myself to be impudently cheated out of my rights in this way. You will hear from me again madam, when the Canadian mail arrives in England."
She walked toward the door. This time Lady Janet answered, as readily and as explicitly as it was possible to desire.
"I shall refuse to receive your letters," she said.
Grace returned a few steps, threateningly.
"My letters shall be followed by my witnesses," she proceeded.
"I shall refuse to receive your witnesses."
"Refuse at your peril. I will appeal to the law."
Lady Janet smiled.
"I don't pretend to much knowledge of the subject," she said; "but I should be surprised indeed if I discovered that you had any claim on me which the law could enforce. However, let us suppose that you can set the law in action. You know as well as I do that the only motive power which can do that is--money. I am rich; fees, costs, and all the rest of it are matters of no sort of consequence to me. May I ask if you are in the same position?"
The question silenced Grace. So far as money was concerned, she was literally at the end of her resources. Her only friends were friends in Canada. After what she had said to him in the boudoir, it would be quite useless to appeal to the sympathies of Julian Gray. In the pecuniary sense, and in one word, she was absolutely incapable of gratifying her own vindictive longings. And there sat the mistress of Mablethorpe House, perfectly well aware of it.
Lady Janet pointed to the empty chair.
"Suppose you sit down again?" she suggested. "The course of our interview seems to have brought us back to the question that I asked you when you came into my room. Instead of threatening me with the law, suppose you consider the propriety of permitting me to be of some use to you. I am in the habit of assisting ladies in embarrassed circumstances, and nobody knows of it but my steward--who keeps the accounts--and myself. Once more, let me inquire if a little advance of the pecuniary sort (delicately offered) would be acceptable to you?"
Grace returned slowly to the chair that she had left. She stood by it, with one hand grasping the top rail, and with her eyes fixed in mocking scrutiny on Lady Janet's face.
"At last your ladyship shows your hand," she said. "Hush-money!"
"You will send me back to my papers," rejoined Lady Janet. "How obstinate you are!"
Grace's hand closed tighter and tighter round the rail of the chair. Without witnesses, without means, without so much as a refuge--thanks to her own coarse cruelties of language and conduct-- in the sympathies of others, the sense of her isolation and her helplessness was almost maddening at that final moment.