Alone in her room Eva went over her accounts, studying them with an anxiety new to her. She wrote an eager note to one of her father's trustees suggesting a new investment that would bring greater results; then she remembered Aunt Drusilla Leven, still in her self-imposed exile. An appeal to her would, perhaps, avert the danger if Aunt Drusilla had managed to recuperate financially in the interval. Meanwhile Eva could only spare two hundred for the cormorant which is called blackmail. Only two hundred—that made five thousand in five months. The sum was appalling. Eva rebelled against it, and she rose and paced the room angrily, her cheeks red. She needed a great deal of money herself; she was wildly extravagant, and she would have to curtail her own luxuries for this. It was odious! A servant, a little French girl, a worthless creature, who was to be feared chiefly because she would not hesitate to falsify the matter from the beginning to the end and make a mountain out of a mole-hill! She would not endure it, and she tore up the cheque and wrote one for fifty and a note to say it was the last, she had paid enough.
She received no reply to this letter; no word was said, no sign made. After all, she reflected, she had won the victory; she had only needed a little courage. What a fool she had been!
Yes, what a fool, but the piper must always be paid.
XI
That night was a sleepless one for Eva. Not only did the thought of that little blue note recur to her constantly, but also the remembrance of Pamela's talk about Charter. Could it possibly be true? She recalled Rachel's face that night with a new perception of its anguish. At the time she had been too much absorbed in her own misery to see her sister's distress, but now her quickened mind leaped to conclusions. Was it possible that the announcement of Mrs. Prynne's engagement had influenced Rachel, that she had taken the leap in the dark because she was hurt to the quick? If so, the return of Charter a free man and still in love with her must have been the crowning agony of it all.
Eva sat up in bed in the soft darkness of the summer night and conjured up the past weeks, and at every point she found evidence, at every turn she saw the mark of Rachel's footprints ahead of her. It has been said that it is natural to hate one whom we have deeply injured, and at first Eva had recoiled from Rachel, but now a sudden rush of feeling carried her back to the days when they had been children together and Rachel had always given up to her, always petted her. Rachel's love had been like a well that was too deep for Eva's shallow plummet to fathom. Reviewing all the events that had crowded on the heels of Astry's accusation, Eva found no crumb of comfort for herself. She had suffered loss and mortification and a keen and excruciating anxiety; she had saved herself, as it were, at the slippery edge of the chasm, but she had been forced to crawl and cling to that edge ever since. She had sacrificed her sister, but, although she had saved herself for the moment, she had not achieved security, for there was Zélie. The little French girl who had discovered how near Mrs. Astry had been to running away with Belhaven held a rod of iron over her head that not even Rachel could avert. If it fell, it would not only ruin Eva but it would involve her innocent sister in the disgrace. It was characteristic of Eva that she nearly got out of bed to write another and larger cheque for Zélie, but she had not the courage; instead she shrank back into the pillows, afraid of the darkness and the solitude, afraid that if she moved Astry might hear her.
Through her terror and anxiety, too, filtered the thought, vague at first but crystallized at last into coherent shape, that she had gained nothing at all, not even the love of Belhaven, for, when she forced him to the alternative of his cowardly marriage to save her reputation, she had lost his affection, if she had ever had it! That was a question that tore her heart, for Eva, loving admiration and worship at her shrine, was disgusted with the idea that perhaps after all she had got herself into this horrible tangle for a man who had never really loved her and who, therefore, gave her up the more easily. She had lost everything then, she argued, and not even gained her own soul. Eva was just beginning to recognize that the Way of the Transgressors is hard.
In the morning she was troubled again at the new aspect in which her husband appeared. He was grave and almost kind; if he watched her, she was not aware of it, and he made no reference to those awful blue notes. She looked at him covertly, while trying to swallow her coffee, and discovered new lines about his eyes and mouth, a certain settled gravity of demeanor that seemed to remove him further and further from her, to alienate even his admiration and the keener tribute of his jealousy; she began to be vaguely aware that she was no longer first even with him. She had never loved him, and while she thought he loved her it was pleasant to flout him, but his indifference was altogether another matter. If blessings brighten as they take their flight, Astry's love certainly increased in value as it diminished. She was conscious, too, that he talked less than had been his custom when they were first married; he had dropped into the habit of absorbing his newspaper with his coffee and she found herself in the common wifely predicament of either remaining quiescent or trying to read the news upside down across the breakfast-table. Eva, who had been spoiled all her life, chafed under this commonplace treatment; it was disgusting to find herself suddenly of no importance. She did not yet recognize the inalienable truth of the maxim that indifference is the death of love, that no human being can go on forever loving another without the shadow of a return, and that there are few so humble that they care to pick up the crumbs that fall under the table. She had treated Astry with a pretty and languid indifference; she had violated his sense of the proprieties by encouraging the love-making of other men, and she had finally, it seemed, murdered his love for her.
The situation was quite unbearable and, pushing aside her plate, she rose from the table and began to tie on a large sun-hat of lace and muslin that framed her delicate face in its soft and filmy folds.
Astry glanced up from his paper. "You'll find it warm; it's eighty-five in the shade."