Mrs. Fielding staggered to her feet. She stood looking at Flower with a
tortured face.
"Ah! even a mother's instinct has played me false in this. I thought,
I hoped--" she cried out, passionately, then checked herself, and the
agony of her face changed to wrath and fury.
Advancing toward the shrinking, terrified girl, she exclaimed,
hoarsely, angrily:
"So I have wasted my love on you--you, my rival's child! She had his
heart and you his face--my false husband's beautiful face! Are you not
afraid that I will strike you dead for having deceived me so bitterly!"
"I, mamma, I deceive you? Ah, no, no, for I did not know!" Flower
moaned, faintly, and shrinking in terror from the wild-eyed woman
towering over her so fiercely, and who cried out, scornfully, now:
"No, that is true, you did not know what a heritage of shame was yours,
what a cloud hung over your birth--and yet you proved yourself true to
your inherited nature, to your mother's false, light instincts. You
rushed into your sin, into shame--"
"Hush!" Flower cried, indignantly, her face dyed red with shame. She
stood upright, and holding to the arms of the chair to steady her
trembling form, said, eagerly: "I am Laurie Meredith's wife!"
"Ha! ha!" laughed Jewel, with scornful incredulity.
"Ha! ha!" echoed Mrs. Fielding, and there was a sound in her voice that
was terrible to hear--the tones of incipient madness.
There was madness in her eyes, too, so horribly they glittered as she
sprung toward Flower, and all in an instant buried her working white
fingers in the girl's long tresses.
"Daisy Forrest, I shall kill you!" she screamed, with an awful,
blood-curdling laugh; and dragging her victim down upon her knees, she
tried to clasp her fingers around the fair white throat of her hated
rival's child, and strangle her life out.
In another moment murder would have been done, but fortunately the
monomaniac was thwarted in her deadly purpose, for her maddened shriek
had brought the servants rushing to the scene, and Jewel, who had been
silently gloating over the terrible deed, realized that her plans would
be thwarted if this went further, and her crazed mother murdered poor
Flower for her unconscious transgression.
So with her own white, jeweled hands she assisted the servants in their
efforts to drag Mrs. Fielding away from her victim, succeeding only
just in time, for Flower was discovered unconscious upon the floor, and
some time elapsed before she even breathed again, so terrible had been
the onslaught of her enemy.
But Mrs. Fielding was for the time a raving mad woman. She had to be
bound and locked into a chamber alone while the man-servant ran all the
way to town to bring a physician.
The remaining servants crowded around Jewel and begged to hear what had
been the cause of the strange scene they had witnessed.
She explained satisfactorily to all, when she replied, angrily:
"My sister had gone astray and disgraced us, and when mamma found it
out quite suddenly just now she went mad with horror, and would have
slain her if your timely entrance had not prevented her rash deed."
Then she sent them all out, and sat down in the parlor to watch Flower,
who still lay on the floor breathing faintly, but in such a weak and
dazed condition that she realized nothing of what had happened or of
what was going on around her, still less of the baleful black eyes
that watched her so malevolently, as Jewel said to herself:
"My mother is crazed, and the task of punishing this hated girl has
fallen from her hands to mine. Let me think over all the most horrible
things I have ever heard of, and decide what I can do to make her
suffer the longest and worst in return for the torments I have borne
since she took my lover from me. Oh, I hate her as bitterly as my
mother hated her mother, and I swear I will have vengeance for my
wrongs!"
And those beautiful, evilly splendid black eyes, as they floated over
poor Flower's silent, unconscious form, looked baleful enough for their
very glances to kill.