Chapter X: Loathing Her Victory

Clara let her work fall as she rose slowly from her seat. Pride like iron kept her from betraying any physical weakness, although the room reeled around her and she clutched the back of her chair for support.

Her whole being was in tumult. She only wanted to wound herself in the bitterest, most fatal way possible, to overwhelm the coarse man with a sense of her scorn.

She turned and confronted the Judge, who fairly shrank from the whiteness of her face and the intolerable fire of her eyes.

“I have heard you through,” she said, “now hear me.”

The Judge glanced helplessly toward the door, ready to believe himself in the presence of a maniac. Perhaps physical courage was not the quality upon which he most strongly founded his sense of importance.

“Your son did make my acquaintance—I will not even answer the gross insult conveyed in the accusation you bring against me. He loved me, he told me so! What my feelings were he does not yet know nor shall you. As your son, as the brother of your daughters, I have only pity for him now. After he had gone away I heard the reports which you and your family spread abroad regarding me—the insults you have offered me now were intensified into slander then. Had I possessed a father or a brother, you would never have dared to speak against me! Your cowardice is safe—I am a defenceless woman! But from the depths of my soul I loathe the slanderers, high or low, who have been base enough to malign me.”

The Judge lifted his hand as if to ward off these thrilling words, but he was beyond the power of speech, and Clara went on:

“When your son came back I told him of these things. He had lost nothing of his original manliness and considered an insult to me an outrage to himself. I told him that I could never marry him—”

“Was he mad enough for that?” broke in Mr. Lane, so bewildered that he was unconscious of his words.

“Ah, you expected him to prove himself altogether your son. I know he would have been more worthy in your eyes had he insulted me as you are doing, but he is human. He begged me to marry him then; but I refused. Judge Lane, had I loved that man better than Heaven itself, had my very existence depended upon it, I would have refused to become his wife. Every noble feeling of my nature revolted at the proposal. I felt and knew that the real disgrace would have been for me, for so matching myself.”

Those last words roused her listener into some signs of life. He rose to his feet and stammered out—

“I have heard enough, young woman, quite enough; I shall know how to act.”

Clara stepped between him and the door; he drew back his chair and stared at her.

She spoke low, now her anger had half spent itself in those scathing words.

“You have forced me to speak,” she said; “you must hear all that I have to say.”

The Judge fluttered his hands in a deprecating way and made faint contortions with his once handsome mouth, which, like that of many stout men, had grown too small for his face, but beyond that he could exhibit no signs of resistance. Her vehement eloquence had wrecked all his ideas.

“I know all the disgrace your son has brought upon himself—he has been suspended from college. Blame neither him nor me—but yourself—for you alone have been the cause.”

Another sound from the Judge’s throat, as if he were being strangled still tighter, but not a word.

“Your visit here, sir, was paid too late; you cannot even have the petty consolation of thinking that you broke off all acquaintance between your son and myself. It was done on my own behalf.”

Another struggle from the Judge, but no words.

“Sir, I could not marry him—but your opposition would have been a feeble reason! I dared not trust myself to him—his faults—his vices—all prevent it—he was not worthy of himself.”

She paused and leaned more heavily upon the chair; she had done her worst now both by herself and the man before her.

But the fearful tumult in her soul, made up of so many contending emotions that it would have been impossible to analyze them, had forced her to speak. She felt a fearful joy in the contempt she had hurled at the father, a terrible exultation in the fury which had moved her to fling back insult for insult!

The Judge had sunk into his chair again and was staring at her still with a blank, hopeless look. Then he made an effort and arose. The indignity thus hurled upon him made him faint.

He reached the door and turned to look upon the beautiful young creature whose best feelings he had come to insult. There was something imposing in her fierce anger that fascinated him.

She neither spoke nor looked at him, so he passed out, feeling a glow of cowardly relief when he found himself in the open air.

When the door closed, Clara’s unnatural strength gave way, she tottered, stretched out her arms, and fell slowly forward upon her knees. She had not fainted, her eyes were open, full of anguish and shame.

The unworthy contest in which she had triumphed had tortured every delicate sense of womanhood in her nature, till the remembrance became torture.