‘If I thought that she had encouraged him, knowing his drift, if I knew that she had been false to me by so much as one erring thought, I would have done with her at once and for ever. She owes me too much. No, it is impossible. It isn’t in human nature to be so base. And that pretty little smiling face of hers—no, that could not lie.’
This was how he argued with himself. Yet there was no assurance in his mind. His self-respect was strong still, his belief in his own claims and merits still unshaken; but there had appeared to him a vision of a phenomenal falsehood, a preternatural iniquity in woman.
‘If he spent his money for that horse, and she accepted the gift knowingly, it was not his first gift,’ he said to himself. ‘There have been letters passing between them, perhaps. I’ll search her room, and if I find one shred of evidence against her she shall stand condemned. I’ll have no half-measures. Either she’s my true and honest wife, or she’s—something that shall have no shelter under my roof. She must be all or nothing to me.’
He went back to the house.
‘Has your missus come back?’ he asked the footman idling in the hall.
‘No, sir.’
It was nearly three o’clock, long past the usual hour for luncheon. Mr. Piper passed the open doorway of the dining-room, through which he could see the table laid for the mid-day meal, with that modern elegance and glow of colour which Bella had substituted for the commonplace arrangements that had obtained before her time. He went upstairs with a heavy step, and walked straight to his wife’s boudoir. It was a gem of a room at the end of the corridor, with a large bow-window overlooking the garden, a room bright with all the luxuries and frivolities the second Mrs. Piper had accumulated during her brief reign, buhl, Sèvre, ormolu, tortoiseshell, ivory, malachite, celadon, turquoise, rose Du Barry, every colour and every substance, rosebud chintz, old lace, a carpet of velvet pile.
Mr. Piper, standing at gaze and breathing his hardest, in the centre of this crowded toy-shop-room, looked very like the traditional bull in the china-shop, and an infuriated bull to boot. He had come there with a purpose, but for the moment he paused irresolute. He felt ashamed of himself for doubting his wife ever so little. The sight of this room reassured him.
‘Didn’t I give her every one of these things?’ he said to himself. ‘How can she help being fond of me?’
And then, just at that moment, his eye lighted upon something which he had not given her. A Parian statuette, on a black marble base, Danneker’s famous Ariadne.