Page:Pierre.djvu/272

258 '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 baluster, 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 baluster 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.

IV

Passing through the broad courtyard's postern, Pierre closed it after him, and then turned and leaned upon it, his eyes fixed upon the great central chimney of the mansion, from which a light blue smoke was wreathing gently into the morning air.

'The hearth-stone from which thou risest, never more,