III.
“Is my mother up yet?” said he to Dates, whom he met in
the hall.
“Not yet, sir;—heavens, sir! are you sick?”
“To death! Let me pass.”
Ascending toward his mother's chamber, he heard a coming
step, and met her on the great middle landing of the stairs,
where in an ample niche, a marble group of the temple-polluting
Laocoon and his two innocent children, caught in inextricable
snarls of snakes, writhed in eternal torments.
“Mother, go back with me to thy chamber.”
She eyed his sudden presence with a dark but repressed foreboding;
drew herself up haughtily and repellingly, and with a
quivering lip, said, “Pierre, thou thyself hast denied me thy
confidence, and thou shalt not force me back to it so easily.
Speak! what is that now between thee and me?”
“I am married, mother.”
“Great God! To whom?”
“Not to Lucy Tartan, mother.”
“That thou merely sayest 'tis not Lucy, without saying who
indeed it is, this is good proof she is something vile. Does
Lucy know thy marriage?”
“I am but just from Lucy's.”
Thus far Mrs. Glendinning's rigidity had been slowly relaxing.
Now she clutched the balluster, bent over, and trembled,
for a moment. Then erected all her haughtiness again, and
stood before Pierre in incurious, unappeasable grief and scorn
for him.
“My dark soul prophesied something dark. If already thou
hast not found other lodgment, and other table than this house
supplies, then seek it straight. Beneath my roof, and at my
table, he who was once Pierre Glendinning no more puts himself.”
She turned from him, and with a tottering step climbed the
winding stairs, and disappeared from him; while in the balluster
he held, Pierre seemed to feel the sudden thrill running
down to him from his mother's convulsive grasp.
He stared about him with an idiot eye; staggered to the
floor below, to dumbly quit the house; but as he crossed its
threshold, his foot tripped upon its raised ledge; he pitched forward
upon the stone portico, and fell. He seemed as jeeringly
hurled from beneath his own ancestral roof.
