The New Magdalen

There—as if in answer to the aspiration which was still in her mind; there, established in triumph on the chair that she had just left—sat Grace Roseberry, in sinister silence, waiting for her.

CHAPTER XIX. THE EVIL GENIUS.

RECOVERING from the first overpowering sensation of surprise, Mercy rapidly advanced, eager to say her first penitent words. Grace stopped her by a warning gesture of the hand. 'No nearer to me,' she said, with a look of contemptuous command. 'Stay where you are.'

Mercy paused. Grace's reception had startled her. She instinctively took the chair nearest to her to support herself. Grace raised a warning hand for the second time, and issued another command: 'I forbid you to be seated in my presence. You have no right to be in this house at all. Remember, if you please, who you are, and who I am.'

The tone in which those words were spoken was an insult in itself. Mercy suddenly lifted her head; the angry answer was on her lips. She checked it, and submitted in silence. 'I will be worthy of Julian Gray's confidence in me,' she thought, as she stood patiently by the chair. 'I will bear anything from the woman whom I have wronged.'

In silence the two faced each other; alone together, for the first time since they had met in the French cottage. The contrast between them was strange to see. Grace Roseberry, seated in her chair, little and lean, with her dull white complexion, with her hard, threatening face, with her shrunken figure clad in its plain and poor black garments, looked like a being of a lower sphere, compared with Mercy Merrick, standing erect in her rich silken dress; her tall, shapely figure towering over the little creature before her; her grand head bent in graceful submission; gentle, patient, beautiful; a woman whom it was a privilege to look at and a distinction to admire. If a stranger had been told that those two had played their parts in a romance of real life—that one of them was really connected by the ties of relationship with Lady Janet Roy, and that the other had successfully attempted to personate her—he would inevitably, if it had been left to him to guess which was which, have picked out Grace as the counterfeit and Mercy as the true woman.

Grace broke the silence. She had waited to open her lips until she had eyed her conquered victim all over, with disdainfully minute attention, from head to foot.

'Stand there. I like to look at you,' she said, speaking with a spiteful relish of her own cruel words. 'It's no use fainting this time. You have not got Lady Janet Roy to bring you to. There are no gentlemen here to-day to pity you and pick you up. Mercy Merrick, I have got you at last. Thank God, my turn has come! You can't escape me now!'

All the littleness of heart and mind which had first shown itself in Grace at the meeting in the cottage, when Mercy told the sad story of her life, now revealed itself once more. The woman who in those past times had felt no impulse to take a suffering and a penitent fellow-creature by the hand was the same woman who could feel no pity, who could spare no insolence of triumph, now. Mercy's sweet voice answered her patiently, in low, pleading tones.

'I have not avoided you,' she said. 'I would have gone to you of my own accord if I had known that you were here. It is my heartfelt wish to own that I have sinned against you, and to make all the atonement that I can. I am too anxious to deserve your forgiveness to have any fear of seeing you.'

Conciliatory as the reply was, it was spoken with a simple and modest dignity of manner which roused Grace Roseberry to fury.

'How dare you speak to me as if you were any equal?' she burst out. 'You stand there and answer me as if you had your right and your place in this house. You audacious woman! I have my right and my place here—and what am I obliged to do? I am obliged to hang about in the grounds, and fly from the sight of the servants, and hide like a thief, and wait like a beggar, and all for what? For the chance of having a word with you. Yes! you, madam! with the air of the Refuge and the dirt of the streets on you!'

Mercy's head sank lower; her hand trembled as it held by the back of the chair.

It was hard to bear the reiterated insults heaped on her, but Julian's influence still made itself felt. She answered as patiently as ever.

'If it is your pleasure to use hard words to me,' she said, 'I have no right to resent them.'

'You have no right to anything!' Grace retorted. 'You have no right to the gown on your back. Look at yourself, and look at Me!' Her eyes traveled with a tigerish stare over Mercy's costly silk dress. 'Who gave you that dress? who gave you those jewels? I know! Lady Janet gave them to Grace Roseberry. Are you Grace Roseberry? That dress is mine. Take off your bracelets and your brooch. They were meant for me.'

'You may soon have them, Miss Roseberry. They will not be in my possession many hours longer.'

'What do you mean?'

'However badly you may use me, it is my duty to undo the harm that I have done. I am bound to do you justice—I am determined to confess the truth.'

Grace smiled scornfully.

'You confess!' she said. 'Do you think I am fool enough to believe that? You are one shameful brazen lie from head to foot! Are you the woman to give up your silks and your jewels, and your position in this house, and to go back to the Refuge of your own accord? Not you—not you!'

A first faint flush of color showed itself, stealing slowly over Mercy's face; but she still held resolutely by the good influence which Julian had left behind him. She could still say to herself, 'Anything rather than disappoint Julian Gray.' Sustained by the courage which he had called to life in her, she submitted to her martyrdom as bravely as ever. But there was an ominous change in her now: she could only submit in silence; she could no longer trust herself to answer.

The mute endurance in her face additionally exasperated Grace Roseberry.

'You won't confess,' she went on. 'You have had a week to confess in, and you have not done it yet. No, no! you are of the sort that cheat and lie to the last. I am glad of it; I shall have the joy of exposing you myself before the whole house. I shall be the blessed means of casting you back on the streets. Oh! it will be almost worth all I have gone through to see you with a policeman's hand on your arm, and the mob pointing at you and mocking you on your way to jail!'