“There! I knew that that was what you came to spy out. Isn’t it enough that you’ve left your brother here to be a spy on all my comings and goings? It’s rather me that ought to be setting a spy on you, God knows, what with your studios and your models and your fashionable, false-hearted women. Well, there he is to witness, anyhow. We have had our fortnight at the sea-side. Haven’t we, Billy?”
Billy nodded.
“There! There’s your own brother to witness. We went last month, and all to save you money, though I know you think I’m making a stocking. They charged us so much last year for lodgings at Margate in August that I made up my mind I wouldn’t be swindled any more, and so we went in July. And we did save—it’s no use my denying it, with that spy of yours ever at my tail—but I’ve had to spend twice as much in London, with everything gone up in price. They’re asking a shilling a peck for peas—you can go round and ask Delton, the green-grocer, if you don’t believe me—it’s enough to ruin anybody. And then there was the rise in coals in the spring on account of the strike—something frightful, and such a lot of slag. And then poor Clara has been so poorly; I sent for the doctor once, and then he would keep on coming to see her every day—there was no getting rid of him, and that brother of yours hadn’t the spunk to tell him straight out not to come any more. Goodness knows what his bill has run up to. They’re simply blood-squeezers, these doctors. So there! If you think you’ve caught me out, coming down on me like a detective in my sea-side week, you’re nicely mistaken, Mr. Slyboots. What are you glaring at me for? Looking for the brown? I’d have given myself a coat of paint if I had known you were coming, though I don’t pretend to be so clever at it as you, or your fine ladies either, for the matter of that.”
As Rosina stood over him, breathlessly pouring forth her impassioned defence of the position she took up in financial matters, Matthew Strang felt he understood why men sometimes kill women. He had long since given up attempting to make her understand that her thoughts were not his thoughts, that, despite his hard training in the value of money, details of expenditure had ceased to occupy his consciousness the moment the pinch of need was become a thing of the past. He was inured to her financial apologetics, her tedious justifications of what he (in his ignorance that she was indeed hoarding money secretly, and, like all women, saving on her house-keeping) never called into question. He had steeled himself to a simulation of attention when she elaborately accounted for every farthing he had given her, and, habituated to money perpetually passing from his hands, he had never even reflected that her style of living could not possibly exhaust the sums with which he supplemented her own income; to his heedless mind a growing family vaguely explained everything. But to-day the prosaic minutiæ, though painfully familiar, set up an inward fume that, intensified by her misconstruction of his visit and by her digs at Billy, approached insanity. He controlled himself with a great effort.
“It is you that are mistaken, Rosina,” he rejoined, clinching his palms. “I came merely to propose that you should take your holiday now. I thought we might go somewhere together.”
“Well, then, you’re a bit too late,” she replied, with no diminution of ill-temper. “And what’s come over you that you want my company all of a sudden? I thought you couldn’t spare me a week ever. I reckon the truth is that work’s got slack.”
“Nonsense, I told you my hands were full,” he said, losing his self-control.
“That’s no reason why you should waste money on me. I can’t go twice to the sea-side.”
“I didn’t want you to go twice. I didn’t know you had been.”
“I explained to you why I went,” she retorted, hotly. “They wanted three guineas last year for a sitting-room and two poky bedrooms, and there was no key to the chiffonier, and I’m sure the landlady nibbled at our provisions.”