“Come back?” she cried; “he will never come back--how dare you stand there and look at his letters that are like his graveclothes, and ask ‘Has he come back?’ You that have driven him from his home--that have turned his sweetness into bitterness; that have driven my boy from me, and broken my heart. Oh, you may shake your fist at me! What do I care? what do you suppose I care? Do you think I mind if you killed me? You have done far worse; you have driven away my boy, and in all the world I do not know where he is. Oh man, get out of my sight. I cannot endure the sight of you. I cannot endure the sight of you!” she cried.
And Joscelyn stood aghast. He was pale at first, then a purple flood of rage came over him. “You dashed old witch--you miserable blanked old cat--you ---- ---- ----” He caught his breath in his consternation and fury. He did not know what to say.
“Oh, what do I care for your swearing,” she cried, with an almost majestic wave of her thin white hand. “Go away, for God’s sake, go away--what are your oaths and your bad words to me? I’m used to them now. Many a time I have been terrified by them; but you can’t frighten me now. What do they mean?--nothing! I am used to them; you might as well save yourself the trouble. I am not afraid of anything you can do. You’ve done your worst, Ralph Joscelyn; you have driven away my boy, my boy. Oh Joan, where is my boy?” the poor woman cried, turning from her husband with another indignant wave of her hand, to her daughter, with whom she never had been linked in such tender and close union before.
“By ----!” cried Joscelyn, “I’ll teach you, madam, to defy me. Your boy, as you call him, had better never show his face again here. _Your_ boy! if you come to that, what have you got to do with one of them? They’re _my_ children, and you’re my wife, and it’s me you’ve got to look to and take your orders from, you dashed old wild-cat, you blanked old ----!”
“Oh, hold your tongue, father!” Joan cried, turning her head in angry impatience. “Mother’s quite right, we’re used to all that.”
What could a man so assailed do? He could not get over his astonishment. He remained finally master of the field, in so far that they left him there volleying forth those thunders which they disdained, and saw to be nothing but words. Joscelyn recognized with the strangest humiliation that they were but words, when his women, his slaves, first ventured to let him know that they saw through him, and found them all to be froth and emptiness. If somebody had discovered Jove’s thunderbolts to be but fireworks, the Father of the Gods must have fallen to the ground like an exhausted rocket. Joscelyn felt something like this. He came down whirling from his imaginary eminence, down into an abyss of emptiness and darkness, and struck blankly against a real something which resisted him, which he could move no longer. He was not without feeling, and he became suddenly dumb as they closed the door, leaving him a much discomfited hero in possession of the field. Rebellion in his house, his slaves emancipated, the boy lost, and the whole story likely to be published over the length and breadth of the county, and himself exposed to every petty gossip and critical assembly in it. This was a terrible downfall for such a man to bear.