CHAPTER XXVI.
“CLOSER AND CLOSER SWAM THE THUNDER-CLOUD.”
Eve was very sorry for her husband after that tragical scene in the study; but what profiteth a jealous wife’s sorrow if she is unconvinced; if heart and brain are still racked with doubts and angryquestionings, while her calmness, her submission are only on the surface, the subterranean fires still burning?
Vansittart took a high hand with the woman he loved. There must be no more quarrels, he told himself. He could not control his tongue even in his own interests, if she were to goad him any further. In their next encounter the secret would explode. He could not live this slave’s life for ever. It was not in him to go on prevaricating and fencing with the truth.
He told her, gently but firmly, that she must torment him no more with false imaginings. If she could not believe in his fidelity it would be wiser for them to part. Better to be miserable asunder, than to live together in an atmosphere of distrust.
At this hint of parting she flamed up, her doubt changed for a moment to conviction.
“Part!” she cried. “Perhaps that is what you would like?”
“I would like anything better than this madness, Eve,” he answered wearily. “We cannot be worse than utterly wretched, and we are that now, and shall be as long as you harbour unworthy suspicions.”
His face looked like truth, his voice rang true. She flung herself on her knees beside his chair, and clasped and cried over his hand.
“I will not torment you. I will not plague and torture myself any more,” she sobbed. “It is only because I love you too much, and a breath makes me fear I may lose you. I will trust you, Jack, in spite of your mysteriousness, in spite of your refusing to show me that letter, which I had a right to see, a right as your wife. No husband should receive a letter from any woman which he dare not show his wife.”
“I did not choose to show you that letter.”
“Well, you did not choose, perhaps. It was temper, I dare say. I was like the children who are refused a thing because they don’t ask properly. I did not ask properly, and you snubbed me, and treated me as a child. But I won’t be Fatima again, Jack. If there is a blue chamber in your life, I won’t tease you for the key.”
“That’s my own good wife. Remember how happy we were at Bexley Hill, Eve, in our courting days, when you knew me so little and trusted me so much. Surely after two years of wedlock you should trust me more and not less—two years in which you and I have been all the world to each other.”
“Yes, yes, I was foolish. I hate myself for my mad jealousy. You have found the ugly spot in my character, Jack. I did not know it was there.”
“Shall I be angry with my love for loving me too well?” he said, as he folded the slender form to his heart.
How slender, how ethereal she was, the tall slip of a girl whose graceful shape had never developed matronly solidity. A thrill offear ran through him at the thought of her fragility, too frail a sapling to stand firm against the storms of life.
“God keep her from knowing the truth,” he prayed dumbly, as she hung upon his breast. “It would break her heart.”
After this there came a halcyon interval. Eve was convinced that she was beloved, and what more could a woman want in this world? There was only one thing that stood in the way of perfect peace. Vansittart had business in the City on two other mornings, and those disappearances Citywards worried her. The City, as Sefton had said, was not in her husband’s line.
When she questioned him about the business that drew him eastward he answered lightly that he went to his stockbroker’s to make some small changes in his investments. That very lightness of his, which was meant to spare her a serious anxiety, awakened her suspicions. The actual cause of Vansittart’s unusual interest in the money market was sufficiently serious. A panic had occurred in some South American Railway Stock from which some part of his income was derived, and he was watching the market and the tide of affairs in Brazil, waiting the hour when it might be needful to sell out and snatch the remnant of his capital, or the turn of the tide which should justify his holding on and hoping for a renewal of the good days gone.
To this end he went to his stockbroker’s every day, and heard the latest news, the last opinions, dawdling in the office, hearing the wise men of the East and their counsel. The hazards, the suspense, excited him. He grew interested in the money market, and felt all the gambler’s keenness. The City drew him like the loadstone rock that took the nails out of Sinbad’s ship. It was better than Monte Carlo. A third of his fortune trembled in the balance.
He would not tell Eve the whole truth, believing that it would worry her into a fever. She would exaggerate this fear as she had exaggerated her jealous doubts. She would foresee beggary, and dream of houselessness and starvation. He did not know that to a woman money-troubles are the lightest of all woes. A husband suspected of infidelity, a child down with measles, will afflict the average woman more than the loss of a fortune.
Sophy was enjoying herself to her uttermost capacity of enjoyment. This was life indeed. It was the last week of the season, the week before Goodwood, and there was a sense of the end of all things in the air. A good many of the people who were not going to Goodwood were going away, starting for Homburg, Marienbad, Wildbad, Auvergne, or the Pyrenees, in advance of the universal rush which would make sleeping-cars impossible, and travelling odious. It annoyed Sophy to hear people talk of getting away; as if London were worn out and done with, London which she wasenjoying so intensely. This was the fly in the ointment for Sophy. She felt aggrieved that her sister should have invited her at the end of the season. Yet there was one compensating delight. The sales were on: those delicious drapery sales, which had always been Sophy’s highest ideal of earthly happiness, even when her strained resources had compelled her to turn with unsatisfied longing from a counter where odd lengths of silk and velvet were being all but given away. She had lain broad awake in her attic chamber at Fernhurst regretting those bargains, which would have made her a richly dressed woman at the most moderate cost. The counters of Marshall, and Debenham, and Robinson, and Lewis, at the end of the season, were to Sophy as the board of green cloth to the gambler. She felt that fortunes were to be won for those who had money to stake, fifteen guinea frocks for three pounds, two guinea parasols at nine and eleven-pence.
Eve took her sister to the sales, and financed the situation. With a judicious expenditure of twenty pounds Sophy secured treasures that would last her through the coming autumn and winter, and, with Eve at her elbow, resisted the allurements of unsuitable finery. These shopping mornings were rapture to Sophy, and not without pleasure to Eve. It was pleasant to see Sophy’s joyous excitement, as she hung tremulously between two fabrics which the shopman exhibited for her choice—a bengaline at three and ninepence, which had been seven shillings—a watered silk at two and eleven-pence, which had been eight and sixpence. After intense consideration Sophy settled on the watered silk, not because she liked it best, but because of the “had been.” The original price decided her—not taking into account that the price was reduced in the exact ratio of the material’s unfashionableness, and that she might find herself next winter the only young woman in watered silk. There was for Eve also the pleasure of buying presents for Jenny and Hetty, the two sisters who were pining in their rustic bower, while Sophy was draining the wine-cup of London gaieties. It was delightful to Eve to feel that a few pounds could buy them happiness: and she brought all her knowledge of good and evil to bear upon her selections for those absent ones.
“You have such a very quiet taste,” said Sophy, rather regretfully. “I call those cottons and foulards you have chosen almost dowdy.”
“You won’t think so when you see them made up. I’m afraid your scarlet pongee will look rather too showy for country lanes.”
“My dear Eve, I shall keep it for garden-parties till it begins to get shabby. Scarlet gives just the right touch of colour in a landscape.”
“Yes, but I think one would always rather that somebody else should give the touch.”
“Mr. Sefton said yesterday that fair-haired women should wear scarlet.”
Sefton was Sophy’s great authority. He had been very polite to her, very pleasant, very confidential, talking to her about London society as if she were to the manner born, and had been brought up in the very midst of these people whom she saw to-day for the first time. This flattered her; indeed, his whole speech was made up of flattery, that subtle adulation which did not express itself in mere words, but which was indicated rather by a deference to her opinion, a quickness in laughing at her little jokes, an acceptance of her as on his own intellectual level. “You and I know better than the common herd,” was expressed in all his conversation with her.
When they met in the evening it was only natural she should tell him her sister’s plans for the next day, whether they were going to spend the morning in the Park or at the picture-galleries. Sophy was eager for picture-seeing when there was nothing better to be done. Those galleries would give her so much to talk about at autumn tea-parties, such a superior air among women who thought they did a great deal for art when they fatigued themselves at the Royal Academy.
If they sat in the Park for an hour or so before luncheon Sefton contrived to find them there—if they were picture-seeing he dropped into the gallery, and criticized the pictures in technical phraseology which provided Sophy with a treasury of art talk especially adapted for country use. If they were at a theatre in the evening he was there too. Eve warned Sophy that he was only a philanderer.
“You remember how disagreeably attentive he was to me,” she said, reddening at the recollection, “and yet, you see, he never meant anything.”
“We were worse detrimentals then than we are now,” argued Sophy. “Your marriage has altered our position, and now that the father lives abroad a man need not be afraid of marrying one of us. I don’t mean to say that Mr. Sefton is going to make me an offer; but he is certainly very attentive.”
“Yes, he is very attentive, I admit. He likes being attentive to girls. Nothing pleases him better than to try the effect of that musical voice of his, and his nicely chosen phrases, upon any girl who will listen to him—like Orpheus leading the brute beasts with his lyre. I doubt if he cares any more for the girls than Orpheus cared for the beasts. He is false for falsehood’s sake.”
“You are very bitter against him, Eve,” retorted Sophy. “Yet I dare say you would have married him if he had asked you.”
“I think not.”
“Oh, nonsense. You would not have refused to be mistress of the Manor. Merewood is a hovel in comparison.”
“Merewood has the man I love for master. If Jack had been the lodge-keeper I would have married him, and washed and cooked and mended for him, and opened the gate and curtsied to the gentry, and been happy.”
“Bosh!” said Sophy, very angry. “That’s the way girls talk when they are first engaged. It sounds ridiculously sentimental from an old married woman like you. You are absurdly prejudiced against Mr. Sefton.”
“Call it prejudice, if you like. I call it instinct. Birds are prejudiced against cats. I look upon Mr. Sefton as my natural enemy.”
“And I suppose, if he should call, you will be uncivil, and spoil my chances?”
“No, I will not spoil your chances—such as they are.”
“How disagreeably you say that. One would think you were jealous of an old admirer.”
“No, I am not jealous; only I don’t like to see you duped by meaningless attentions. I have no doubt Mr. Sefton does admire you—I only fear his admiration is worthless—but I will do everything that a sister can do to encourage him.”
After this conversation Eve was particularly polite to Mr. Sefton. Poor Sophy was so terribly in earnest in her desire to make a good marriage. The elder sister’s success had been so startling, so easy a conquest, so delightful a settlement in life, that it was natural the younger sister should cherish hopes on her own account. People told Sophy that she was growing more and more like Eve. Hope’s flattering tale told her that she was quite as pretty, while vanity suggested that she had moresavoir faire. Poor Sophy had always prided herself upon hersavoir faire, though how a quality which is, as it were, the final polish produced by society friction, could have been acquired by a young lady in a cottage at Fernhurst, must needs remain a mystery. Eve looked at her sister, and saw that she was prettier than the ruck of girls to be met in a London season. Her beauty had the dewy freshness that comes of a rustic rearing; her eyes were brighter than the eyes of the hardened fashionable belle. Her complexion had the delicacy of colouring which was characteristic of Colonel Marchant’s daughters—which had been, alas! Peggy’s chief beauty.
Sophy, dressed as Eve had dressed her, and with her somewhat rebellious hair treated artistically by the skilful Benson, was certainly a very attractive young woman; and it seemed to Eve not impossible that Sefton, beginning the flirtation without any serious aim, might end by asking Sophy to be his wife. He was entirelyhis own master, could marry to please himself, without consideration of worldly advantage; only, unhappily, those are just the men who marry for self-aggrandizement rather than for simple inclination. It is not as if all heiresses were hideous or disagreeable, ignorant or underbred. Even England can furnish richly dowered young women who are both handsome and amiable; so why, asks the youthful peer or landowner, should I marry some portionless beauty, when I may as easily add to my revenue or treble my acreage? The original possessor considers his estate as the nucleus of a great property, which he and each successive holder should increase by judicious alliances; until the rolling mass swells into a territory like the duchy of Cleveland, and its acres are reckoned by thousands. Eve had heard the mothers and fathers talk of their sons’ views and duties, even if the sons themselves did not openly avow their intention of marrying to better themselves.
The only hope in Sophy’s case lay in a certain eccentricity of temper in Wilfred Sefton which might show itself in a disadvantageous marriage. The very fact that he had remained so long a bachelor indicated that he was not eager for a prize in the matrimonial market. He had been content to stand by and see many prizes carried off by men who were personally and socially his inferiors.
He had been a frequent visitor in Charles Street since Sophy’s arrival. Her liveliness evidently pleased him; they were always talking and laughing in corners wherever they met, and seemed to have worlds to say to each other.
“It is delightful to meet any one so fresh as your sister at the end of the season,” he explained to Eve, “just when most of us are feeling dull and jaded, and almost ready to yawn in each other’s faces, like my lord and my lady in the ‘Marriageà la Mode.’”
He invited Mrs. Vansittart and her sister to a tea-party, given in honour of Sophy, who had expressed an ardent desire to see the house in Tite Street—the bachelor den which little Mr. Tivett had described to her in glowing colours. Eve hesitated about accepting the invitation, knowing that her husband disliked Sefton as much as she did herself; but the hesitation was overcome by Sophy’s arguments.
“He is giving the party on purpose for me,” she pleaded. “The invitation arose out of my wish to see his library, which Mr. Tivett had been praising. He could not pay me a more marked attention, could he now?”
“It is certainly an attention,” assented Eve, distressed by Sophy’s sanguine hopes, so likely to end in disappointment.
“Don’t spoil all my chances by refusing,” urged Sophy. “He would be offended—and men are so easily choked off.”
“Not a man who is really in earnest.”
“Perhaps not—but he may not be quite in earnest yet. He may not have made up his mind. Of course I should be a very bad match. He cannot forget that all at once. There is a stage in which a man who is inclined to fall in love lets himself drift, don’t you know, Eve? He may be drifting—and it would be a pity to discourage him.”
Every woman is at heart a matchmaker. Eve yielded, and accepted Sefton’s invitation for five o’clock tea and a little music.
“Shall you have any singing?” she asked, with a sudden fear of meeting Signora Vivanti.
No—there would be no singing.
“I only asked the American banjo man to amuse you,” said Mr. Sefton. “He is a capital fellow, and he does the most wonderful things with his banjo. He is a Paganini among banjoists. That, with the inevitable piano, will be more than enough music.”
The afternoon, at the end of a brilliant July, was delightful, and the Embankment, with its red-brick palaces and its little bit of old Chelsea, looked just the one perfect place in which to live; to live an idle, artistic life,bien intendu, and bask in sunshine reflected from blue water. The tide was at the flood, the gardens were full of gaudy July flowers.
“How horrid Fernhurst will be after this!” sighed Sophy. “What a lucky man Mr. Sefton is to have a house in Tite Street, as well as the Manor!”
“Ah, but it is only a bachelor den, remember,” said Eve. “He will do away with it when he marries.”
“Not if his wife has any sense—unless she makes him change it for a larger house facing the river.”
Mr. Sefton’s house was near the corner, and commanded a sidelong view of the Thames from all the front windows, and a still better view from an oriel in the library, which projected so as to rake the street. Sophy thought this small house in Tite Street, with its rich and sombre furniture and subdued colouring, one of the most enchanting houses she had ever entered, second only to the Manor House, which she had seen some years before on the never-to-be-forgotten occasion of a Primrose League garden-party given by Mr. Sefton in the interests of the cause. The Manor House and its splendours of art, its old gardens, and antique furniture, were the growth of centuries, and owed their existence to Seftons who were dust. This twelve-roomed house in Tite Street was an emanation of the man himself. His temperament, his education, his tastes were all embodied here. This was the pleasure dome which he had built for himself—this was his palace of art.
She went about peeping and peering at everything, escorted byMr. Tivett, who expatiated and explained to his heart’s content, pointing out the workmanship which made a mahogany table as precious as jasper or ivory; the artistic form of those high-backed chairs, copied from an old French model; the Gobelin tapestry, which had neither the glow nor sheen of silken fabrics, and yet was six times as costly.
“This house of Sefton’s just serves to remind one of what a parvenu’s house is not,” said little Tivett, sententiously.
Sophy looked at the titles of the books. How ignorant they made her feel! There was hardly one that she had ever seen before; and yet no doubt they were the very cream of classic and modern literature, not to have read which stamped one as illiterate.
“I have been looking at your books,” she said, when Sefton came in with Eve. “They are too lovely.”
“Rather nicely bound, aren’t they?” he said, smiling gently at her enthusiasm. “They are a somewhat scratch collection, not quite family literature; but those vellum bindings with the blue labels give a nice tone of colour against the prevailing brown.”
“That is so like Sefton,” said Mr. Tivett. “He values his books from an æsthetic standpoint. Thinks of the effect of their bindings, not of the literature inside.”
“As one gets older reading becomes more and more impossible. There is a satisfaction in possessing books, but one’s chief pleasure is in their outsides. I sit here sometimes after midnight, smoking the pipe of the lotus-eater and looking at my bindings, and I feel as if that were enough for culture.”
“I dare say that is quite the pleasantest way of enjoying a library,” said Mr. Tivett, as if he saw the matter in a new light.
“Of course it is. There’s no use in thinking of the lifetime it would need to read all the great books. That way madness lies. De Quincey went into the question once arithmetically, and to read his bare statement is distraction. I think it was that calculation of his which first put me off reading.”
“Then your books are only ornaments?” said Sophy, disappointed.
“My books are a dado by Riviere and Zaehnsdorf. There are a great many of them with the leaves unopened. I take out a volume now and then, and peep between the pages. One gets the best of a book that way—the flavour without the substance of the author. But I came to take you down to tea, Miss Marchant. My banjoist has arrived, and Lady Hartley and Mrs. Montford are doing all they can to spoil him.”
“Is Lady Hartley here? How nice!” exclaimed Sophy, to whom Lady Hartley’s dress, manners, and way of thinking were a continual study.
Eve’s sister-in-law was Sophy’s ideal fine lady.
“Lady Hartley is always nice to me,” replied Sefton. “She never misses one of my afternoons if she is in town. She would sacrifice the Marlborough House garden-party for my tea and muffins.”
“Ah, but I dare say you contrive to make your tea-parties exceptional. This banjoist, now. Everybody is dying to hear him.”
They went down to tea, which was served in a little bit of a room at the back of the dining-room, from which it was divided only by a curtain of old Italian tapestry; a mere alcove in which eight or ten people made a mob. Flowers, ices, tea, chocolate, cakes, china, silver, damask embroidered by industrious Bavarians, everything was the choicest of its kind; and Mr. Sefton’s valet, with a footman and a smart parlour-maid, waited admirably. The squeeziness of the room made the entertainment all the more enjoyable. The banjoist stood in the centre of the crowd, talking in the true American style, with an incisive cleverness, and a clear metallic enunciation which made everybody else’s speech sound slipshod and slovenly.
People were amused and delighted. He told anecdotes, firing them off as fast as the crackers which demon boys explode on the pavement. The admiring circle forgot that his distinction was the banjo, and began to accept him as a wit. Mrs. Montford asked him to lunch; Lady Hartley booked him for her next cosy little dinner.
After tea they all trooped up the narrow staircase to the library which had to serve Mr. Sefton for a drawing-room. More people dropped in—neighbours, most of them, including Mervyn Hawberk and his wife—and the room filled before the banjoist began to play.
He played wonderfully, surprising the metallic instrument into melodious utterances. He sang and accompanied himself; he played in a concertante duet for banjo and piano—a delightful arrangement of the serenade fromDon Giovanni, in which the banjo was now the melody, and now the accompaniment; he played on his banjo with a bow, as if it had been a violin, and produced an effect which was remarkable, although somewhat distressing. His banjo laughed; his banjo cried; and with those wailing notes there stole over the senses of his audience a dream of weary Ethiopians resting from their labours amidst the sunlit verdure beside some broad Virginian river.
Mr. Sefton’s visitors, who were chiefly feminine, flocked round the American, praising and descanting upon his talent. Little Tivett went about explaining, after his wont. He talked as if he had invented the banjoist.
“Did you really know him in America?” inquired Mrs. Montford, deluded by this little way of Mr. Tivett’s.
“No, no; I was never in America in my life; but I knew him when first he came to London, before people began to talk about him. I told him what a hit he was going to make.”
While Society was prostrating itself before a novel entertainer, Mr. Sefton and Sophy had drifted through the curtained archway to the little back room, which seemed, from its smallness, a kind of inner temple, where the treasures of the house might be found; as in the smallest rooms in old Italian palaces one looks for the choicest gems in the princely collection.
Sophy was talking and laughing with her host, radiant and happy. This tea-party seemed to her full of meaning. It was assuredly given for her pleasure. Mr. Sefton had said so. She had expressed a curiosity about his small house in Chelsea, and he had said instantly, “You must come and see it. I will ask some people to tea.” What more could a man do for the woman he meant to marry? Sophy was intoxicated with this delicate token of subjugation. She imagined herself looked at and talked about as the future Mrs. Sefton. Unconsciously she gave herself some small airs of an affianced wife; chiding him; making little jokes at his expense; pretending to underrate his surroundings—the pretty childish graces and little pettish tricks which come naturally to the weaker sex before marriage, as if they were recompensing themselves in advance for the iron heel under which they are to exist afterwards.
They sauntered into the inner room, brushing against the tapestry curtains, and one glance at the sanctuary sent the blood to Sophy’s cheeks in a hot, angry blush.
The most prominent position in the room was filled by an easel draped with orange and gold brocade, and on the easel appeared a full-length portrait of Signora Vivanti in her character of “Fanchonette.”
It was a bold sketch in water-colours, suggested by a photograph, but with all the grace and power of a picture painted from the living model. The painter had caught the fire and sparkle of the Italian face, the richness of colouring, the wealth of a somewhat vulgar beauty. The photographer had seized a happy moment of graceful abandon—not a photographer’s pose.
She was half reclining in her chair, with averted shoulder, and looking backward out of the picture with a most provoking smile—Fanchonette’s audacious smile, which had taken the town by storm.
The velvet bodice set off the bust and shoulders in all their beauty, the blue and white striped petticoat was short enough to show the well-shaped leg and large useful foot in scarlet stocking and neat buckled shoe. A grisette’s little white muslin cap sat airily upon the splendid coils of blue-black hair. Beauty of the plebeian type could go no further. Eyes, hair, complexion, figure, all were perfect;and over and above all there was the charm of mutinous lip and flashing smile, a look that was bold without immodesty, the frank outlook of a nature unacquainted with guile.
Sefton watched Sophy’s face as she stared at the portrait, and her pinched lips, her sickly pallor, smote him with a sudden remorse. He had been fooling this rustic for his own purposes, making her an instrument in his scheme of evil. He felt that he had gone too far. Poor simpleton! What had she done that he should give her pain? Eve had slighted him; Eve’s husband had come between him and the woman who was his passion; but this simpering, chattering, giggling girl had done him no wrong; and it was a base treachery to have deluded her with flattering speeches and meaningless attentions. However, the harm was done, done with deliberate purpose; and he had only to carry out his plan to the end. He meant Sophy to be his means of communication with Eve. He meant to reach the wife’s ear through the sister.
“I’ll make his life as miserable as he has made mine, if I can,” he said to himself.
Sophy stood before the portrait, dumb with misery. What did he mean—what could he mean by placing the singer’s portrait there, the crowning gem of his luxurious rooms, a portrait which even her ignorant eye told her must be by the brush of a master, so bold and brilliant was the handling? Even the easel, with its costly draping of orange and gold, was a work of art. What right had he to exhibit such a portrait; the portrait of an improper young woman, in all probability?
She felt sorry that she had accepted his invitation. She felt as if she had been brought to a house which was hardly fit for her to enter. And yet there were the Montfords and Lady Hartley chattering at their ease in the next room; so it could hardly be “bad form” to come here.
“What do you think of the likeness?” asked Sefton, lolling against a tall Versailles chair, and contemplating the brilliant face in the picture with a smile.
“I suppose it is a very good likeness,” said Sophy, “but of a vulgar face—very handsome, no doubt; nobody can deny that—but quitepeuple.”
“Yes, it ispeuple. That is one of its charms. It has all the fire and freshness of an unsophisticated race, generations of fishermen, sailors, gondoliers, all that there is of a frank free life between sea and sky. You can’t get such beauty as that from a race reared indoors. It is an open-air loveliness, as rich in grace and colouring as one of those sea-flowers that unfold their living petals under the clear bright water.”
“You admire her very much?” faltered Sophy.
“Yes, I admire her very much. You and I have got on so well together, Miss Marchant, that I feel I may talk to you with all the freedom of friendship—and confide in you as I have confided in no one else. I do admire that woman, have admired her ever since she made her first appearance at the Apollo. I began by liking to hear her sing, liking to watch her bright spontaneous acting, like the acting of a clever child in its naturalness. Even her beauty charmed me less than that delicious spontaneity which struck a new chord in the genius of the stage. I went night after night to see her and hear her, without fear of danger; and one day I awoke and found myself her slave. I love her as I never loved before—not even when I used to fancy myself in love with your charming sister. Against every other love, a selfish desire to retain my liberty, a vacillating temper, which made the desire of to-morrow unlike the desire of yesterday, have prevailed; but against the love I bear that woman,” pointing to the laughing face in that picture, “reason has been powerless. Another man in my position might have tried to do what other men have been doing, ever since the first girl-Desdemona disgusted John Evelyn and began the long line of actresses who have charmed the civilized world. Another man might have tried to win her by dishonourable means. I was not base enough for that.”
Sophy crimsoned, remembering that dark story of the farmer’s daughter, which Nancy had related to her, that well-meaning woman not being over scrupulous in her communications to the ear of girlhood.
She waited silently, and Sefton went on, looking at the portrait, not at the woman to whom he was talking. An angry glow was on his cheek. An angry light was in his eyes. The thought of the social sacrifice he had been prepared to make and the futility of his offer lashed him to fury.
“I would not degrade her by a dishonourable proposal. No—though I knew she was not spotless—though I knew her as the mother of a nameless child. She was all the world to me, and what social consideration should a man set against that which is his all of happiness or hope? I asked her to be my wife, offered her my place in society, my passionate love, a life’s devotion; and she refused me—refused me after more than a year of friendship, a friendship which had seemingly brought us very near to each other.”
“She refused you?” exclaimed Sophy, beholding in one comprehensive glance this charming house in Tite Street, the Manor, and all its belongings dead and alive, together with this remarkably handsome and agreeable man to whom these things belonged! “She refused you! Why, what a preposterous minx she must be!”
“Yes, that’s the word, Miss Marchant. It seems preposterous, doesn’t it, that a Venetian peasant, with only her voice and good looks—andthe hazardous fortunes of an opera singer—should refuse an English gentleman with a handsome rent-roll. But the thing is true all the same. She refused me. Can you guess why?”
“I can only imagine that she is a brainless idiot,” said Sophy, feeling that she might be tempted to take out her bonnet pin and run it into that vivid face, if it were not for the glass which protected the picture.
She was too angry with Signora Vivanti for having won Mr. Sefton’s affections to be grateful to her for having refused his hand.
“There is always a reason for everything,” said Sefton, after a backward glance at the other room, which showed him that there was no one near enough or unoccupied enough to overhear or observe him; the banjoist being still the centre of attraction, and everybody grouped about him in the neighbourhood of the piano. “There is always a reason if one will only look for it. Signora Vivanti refused me because she was in love with another man, the man she knew and loved in Venice, the man who brought her to London and established her in the house she occupies, and had her trained for the stage. Forgive me, Miss Marchant, if I go a step further and say the man who is the father of her son!”
Sophy drew herself up with an offended air, and flashed an angry look at him.
“You have no right to talk to me in this way, Mr. Sefton. I don’t understand why you should select me for your confidante,” she said icily, moving towards the next room.
“Pray forgive me. You are clever and sympathetic. I have no sister, and in certain crises of life a man feels the need of a woman’s sympathy. And then there were other reasons; or at least there was another reason.”
He stopped, embarrassed, looking at her with a curious hesitation; looking from her to the group by the piano, where Eve’s face shone out among the rest, smiling at the American’s last ebullition.
“You are hinting at something dreadful,” Sophy said, with a scared look. “Do you mean that the man is—is some one I know?”
“Don’t tell her, Miss Marchant. I would not for worlds have her know. It would do no good. It might make her miserable. Women are so sensitive, even about the past, and I fear this affair is going on in the present.”
“Don’t tell her!” echoed Sophy. “You mean my sister! And the man is—Jack! Oh, what a wretch he must be!”
“Weak rather than wicked, perhaps. Don’t be too hard upon him in your innocence of life. When a man has forged fetters of that kind it ain’t easy to break them.”
“A man so fettered has no right to marry. It would break her heart if she knew.”
“She need not know. You won’t tell her; and you may be sure I shan’t. But you are a girl with strong sense; and you love your sister. I thought it only right that you should know.”
“You may be mistaken.”
“Hardly likely. It is an open secret that he established her in lodgings and paid for her education. And over and above that evidence there is the fact that he still visits her. I met him leaving her rooms only a few days ago.”
“The wretch! The hypocrite! He seems to idolize Eve!”
“And your sister is happy in that idolatry. For pity’s sake, Miss Marchant, don’t let her see the seamy side of a husband’s character.”
Eve came towards the archway at this moment.
“You have lost ever so many amusing stories,” she said to Sophy. “Your banjoist is the most entertaining person I have met this season, Mr. Sefton, and he has made us all oblivious of time. I have just discovered that it is ever so much past six.”
“‘Ever so much’ meaning a quarter of an hour,” retorted Sefton, laughing.
He dropped a fold of the brocade drapery as Eve drew near, and the portrait was hidden before her face appeared in the curtained arch.
He looked at her, trying to recall his feelings of a time gone by, when he had been—or had fancied himself—in love with her. Oh, what a weak, hesitating love that had been, as measured against his devotion to this scum of the lagunes—this gutter-bred minx who had scorned him!
“A preposterous minx!” he repeated to himself by-and-by, when he was alone. “I thank thee, child, for teaching me that word. Well, I have sown the wind; I wonder whether I shall have a prosperous harvest, and reap the whirlwind?”