“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 angry
questionings, 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 of fear
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 was enjoying 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 more
_savoir faire_. Poor Sophy had always prided herself upon her _savoir
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 entirely his 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 ‘Marriage _à 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 by Mr.
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 from _Don 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 quite
_peuple_.”
“Yes, it is _peuple_. 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--and
the 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?”