"Because--because I always thought Rachel liked you, and you might have
prevented it somehow! I felt that she was--well, just sacrificed for
Eva."
"I can't imagine why she should have been," he said hoarsely. "Good
God, Pamela, don't make it any worse!"
Pamela, who had been using a plummet-line to sound the depths, was
filled with awe at her discovery.
"I don't believe she ever cared a rap for Belhaven!" she climaxed.
"I don't see that that makes it any better."
"It doesn't make it any worse, and--"
"Perhaps not." Charter's face was very white. "Pamela, suppose we talk
of something else!"
X
The slow weeks that had dragged by had not been happy ones for Eva
Astry. Her first feeling of relief that it was done, the ordeal of
Rachel's marriage and the risk that Astry would discover the motive
that had prompted it, was over, and she had long ago begun to feel
that she had purchased her immunity at too heavy a price. The cost of
it, indeed, was chiefly revealed to her by Belhaven's attitude. The
cruelty of his position began to appear to her in various aspects and
she saw that her betrayal of him had cost her the chief place in his
regard. She began to be vaguely aware that she had given him the right
to hate her, that the sort of love she had inspired was not of a fiber
to resist such an attack, that it was not even equal to the demands of
common self-sacrifice. Unconsciously, too, she began to compare his
attitude at the time of Astry's discovery with that of Rachel. Her
sister had sacrificed herself to save her from the shadow of dishonor,
while her lover had not even had the manhood to face her husband. No
light in which she could view it made the situation seem less ugly, and
at no time did Belhaven figure as a hero. Yet her affection for him
had been strong enough to torture her with jealousy when she saw him
stand up to be married to her sister. Although she knew that Rachel
probably despised him, her own nature--soft and pleasure-loving--was
not one to readily yield an admirer to another woman. It had been that
reluctance to part with one that had made her recall Belhaven after her
marriage with Astry. She could have married him in the first place but
she had greatly preferred the Astry millions. It had seemed to her that
all the accessories and comforts of wealth were necessary to her, that
her beauty, always of a rare and lovely type, demanded the setting that
Astry offered her.
She had always affected a mode of living and a class of society which
had drained every purse in the family to keep her afloat, even as a
young girl, and she had always intended to achieve a dazzling marriage.
Astry, while failing to offer her a title and a place in Europe which
she had coveted, did present the next thing to it,--the possession of
a great fortune and the power to purchase the place in society which
she had failed to attain through her mere beauty and charm. If she
could not be a princess in a small European State, like one of her
cousins, she could be the wife of an American millionaire, and she did
not hesitate long over her decision. Belhaven, whose fortune was much
smaller and who had squandered a large part of his income, was no
match for Astry, and Eva's marriage to the latter had been celebrated
with all the pomp that the Leven family, reinforced by the maternal
relatives, the Sterrits, had been able to achieve. The paying for it,
indeed, had driven poor Aunt Drusilla Leven into the retirement of an
obscure Italian town where, as she frankly wrote her friends, washing
was fabulously cheap. Profiting by this financial sacrifice, Eva had
made the great match of the season and had never bestowed a thought
upon poor Aunt Drusilla in her exile, except to be thankful that she
did not have to invite that "old frump" to her dinners. But, after the
first few months, even the society of a frump would have been more
desirable than the continued criticism of a watchful, jealous, and
uncongenial husband.
After his first discovery that Eva was not, as he had supposed, a
beautiful and delicate replica of Rachel, Astry had been frankly
disappointed. They had very little in common and he could not remain
long unaware that, if Eva did not love money for its own sake, she
cared greatly for the luxuries and privileges that money could obtain
for her. Finding himself, therefore, an object of indifference to his
young and beautiful wife, he met her with a like coldness and reserve,
so that Eva was soon, like a naughty child, shut out of the inner
circle of her husband's confidence. It was at this point, when they
were both to blame, that she began to encourage Belhaven's renewed
devotion. The result had been that Astry, no longer trusting her, had
taken alarm, and there had been many quarrels, at first petty and then
so serious that they led up to the moment when she had feared for
Belhaven's life. Then had come the climax and her falsehood about her
sister, Rachel's sacrifice to protect her, and the marriage.
Now that it was over and she was left to view the matter from every
standpoint, in the cold light of common sense, she was filled with
horror at the tangle she had made; and the continued necessity of
acting it all out, of keeping up the tissue of falsehood that she had
woven, was wearing her out. Her beauty, of that delicate and ephemeral
type that is dependent on color and light, was visibly diminished.
Mrs. Van Citters, happening in upon her at the unfortunate hour of
noon, when all the defects are most fiercely revealed, thought that
she looked absolutely pinched and white, and that only her peculiarly
lovely hair and eyes saved her from being what Aunt Drusilla Leven
would have called "real peaked."
Pamela, who had been carefully instructed by her husband to attend
strictly to her own business, found it difficult to refrain from
remarking upon Eva's looks, but she began the conversation with the
determination to be very guarded and to only skim the surface.
"Are you really going to stay all summer?" she inquired casually, as
she folded her parasol and tossed it with her gloves on a convenient
chair in the breakfast-room, where Eva had just been taking coffee and
toast. "Paul and I get off to-morrow. Mother took the baby last week;
it's abominable in the city now."
"Well, you see we're not in the city," Eva drawled, "and Johnstone's
been interested in the tariff. Besides, I suppose we'll go to Florida
this winter and--" she shrugged her shoulders--"what's the use?"
Pamela stretched out an absent-minded hand and, picking up a strawberry
from the cut-glass dish on the table, dangled it by its green stem. "I
suppose you like to be here on Rachel's account; she isn't going away,
is she?"
"I'm sure I don't know; I suggested the pyramids of Egypt."
Pamela clung to the surface. "There are such horrible cockroaches on
those Nile boats," she observed.
"I can't imagine why people here have made such a fuss about Rachel's
marriage," said Eva fretfully. "One would think a bomb had exploded;
they seem to catalogue it with murder and sudden death."
Pamela looked vacant. "Do they? You know I've been simply taken up
with trying to keep John Charter with us; Paul and I offered all sorts
of inducements but he wouldn't stay."
"Good gracious, hadn't you Mrs. Prynne? I thought they were engaged."
"Nonsense! Imagine John marrying a paper doll! I don't know who started
that report unless it was Mrs. Billop."
"She's equal to anything, but I can't see her object unless she thought
Mrs. Prynne had designs on Sidney."
"Poor Lottie! I think even she'd draw the line there! I was perfectly
amazed when Paul told me about that supposed engagement, the day that
Rachel's was announced, but I fancy that was really what put it into
Mrs. Billop's head."
"I don't see why."
"Why of course you know John was in love with Rachel?"