But Mrs. Moulton was accustomed to self-control and to the exercise of the average amount of Christianity. Moreover, she had her standards of conduct, and held all exhibitions of feeling to be vulgar. Therefore, in spite of her growing and morbid desire to humble Catalina, she might have forborne to force an issue, and perhaps, had circumstances favored the alien, have grimly, however unwillingly, triumphed once more over self.
But these last days had unravelled her nerves. To passionate sympathy for her pale and persecuted daughter, misled in the first instance by the daily example of a barbarian, had recently been added a night of hideous discomfort, when, not one of the four speaking a language but their useless own, and without the invaluable Baedeker, they had fled from a ridiculous peasant, changing trains at midnight, waiting hours at way-stations, arriving at Toledo in the gray, cold dawn, hungry, worried, exhausted, to find neither omnibus nor cab at the station.
As Mrs. Moulton toiled up the steep road through the carven gates of terrible and romantic memory, she had heartily wished that modern enterprise had blown up the rock with dynamite or run an elevator from the Tagus. It was then that her hatred of Catalina—who at least with her knowledge of foreign languages had been an acceptable courier—became an obsession, and she could have shrieked it out like any common virago. The emotional wave had receded, but left a dark and poisonous deposit behind.
It was easy to convince herself that Catalina had lost the train at Albacete on purpose. When her husband had received Captain Over’s telegram she had assumed that the Englishman had persuaded the girl to return, eager, no doubt, to be rid of her. She was not prone to think evil, and had one of her daughters or the approved young women of her circle been left with a young man at a way-station for two days and nights, she might have given way to nerves but never to suspicion. But as the crowning iniquity of the author of her downfall, it gave her the opportunity she had coveted, and she burned to take advantage of it.
When Catalina finally announced herself, Mrs. Moulton was standing in the middle of her bedroom and Jane was reading by the window. The latter nodded as the prodigal entered, and returned to her book.