But if Bessie heard or understood him she made no sign, and sat with her hands locked tightly together and her eyes looking far away across the sea of heads and the rapidly moving line of carriages.
This man knew her mother at her worst--not sweet, loving and kind as she was sometimes at Stoneleigh, but as a gambler, an adventuress, a woman of whom men jested and made sport--a woman who had probably ensured and fleeced him, as Neil would have expressed it. Bessie knew all the miserable catalogue of expedients resorted to by her mother to extort money from her victims; cards, chess, bets, philopenas, loans she never intended to pay, and which she accepted as gifts the instant the offer was made, and when these failed, pitiful tales of scanty means and pressing needs, an invalid husband at home, and a daughter who must be supported.
She knew the whole, for she had seen a letter to her father written by Lady Jane, who stated the case in plain language, and, denouncing Daisy as a disgrace to the McPherson family, asked that Archie should exercise his marital authority and keep his wife at home.
This letter had hurt Bessie cruelly, and when next her mother came to Stoneleigh she had begged of her to give up the life she was leading, and stay in her own home.
"And so all starve together," Daisy had answered her. "Do you know, child, that you would not have enough to eat or wear, if it were not for me? Your father has never earned a shilling in his life, and never will. It is not in him. We are owing everybody, and somebody must work. If I am that somebody, I choose to do it in my own way, and I am not the highly demoralized female Lady Jane thinks me to be. Her bosom friend, old Lady Oakley, plays at Monte Carlo, and so do many high-bred English dames, and Americans, too, for that matter. I am no worse than scores of women, except that I am poor and play from necessity, while they do it for pastime. I have never been false to your father; no man has ever insulted me that way, or ever will. If he did, I would shoot him as I would a dog. I cannot help being pretty any more than you; I cannot sew myself up in a bag, and shall not try to catch the small-pox, so do not worry me again with this sickly sentiment about respectability, and the duties of a wife. I know my own business, and can protect my own reputation."