'Thank you, dear,' she said gratefully. 'You re very good to me. I know
you mean it, too. Only, you re not placed as he is. If you were my
daughter, you would think as he thinks--you would not live under my
roof! Perhaps you would not even see me when we met in the street! You
would look the other way!' Margaret could not have told, for her life, what she would have done,
but she was far too kind-hearted not to protest.
'Indeed I wouldn't!' she cried, with so much energy that Madame Bonanni
believed her.
'No matter what I had done?' asked she pathetically eager for the
assurance.
'You'd have been my mother just the same,' answered Margaret softly.
As the girl spoke, she felt a little sharp revolt in her heart against
what she had said, at the mere thought of associating the word 'mother'
with Madame Bonanni.
There was nothing at all psychological in that, and it would hardly
bear analysing even by a professional dissector of character. It was
just the natural feeling, in a natural girl, whose mother had been
honest and good. But Madame Bonanni only heard the kind words.
'Yes,' she answered, 'I should have been your mother, just the same.
But I couldn't have been a better mother to you than I've been to Tom.
I couldn't, indeed!' 'No,' Margaret said, in the same gentle tone as before, 'you've been
very good to him.' 'Yes! I have! He knows it, and he does not deny it!' Madame Bonanni
suddenly sat up quite straight and squeezed Margaret's hands by way of
emphasis. 'But he does not care,' she went on, her anger rising a
little. 'Not he! He would rather that I should have been any sort of
miserable little proper middle-class woman, if I could only have been
technically "virtuous"! If I had been that, I might have beaten him to
an omelette every day when he was a boy, and tormented him like a
gadfly when he was a man! He would have preferred it--oh, by far! That
is the logic of men, my dear, their irrefutable logic that they are
always talking about and facing us down with! The miserable little
animal! I will give up loving him, I will hate him, as he deserves, I
will tell him to go to Peru, where he will never see his wicked old
mother again! Then he will be sorry, he will wish he were dead, but I
shall not go to him, never, never, never!' She spoke the last words with tremendous energy, and a low echo of her
voice came back out of the open piano from the strings. She clenched
her fist and shook it at an imaginary Lushington in space, and for a
moment her face wore a look of Medean menace.