“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.”