The Judgment of Eve

by May Sinclair

She stopped her brain before it could answer for her! “You wouldn’t be sitting here now stitching at that coat.”

She stitched on till she could see to stitch no more; for tears came and blinded her eyes, and fell upon the coat.

That was just after she had kissed it.

X

It was Easter, three weeks after Susie’s visit; and Arthur was going away for a fortnight, his first real holiday in seven years. For some time he had been lengthening out his office hours, and increasing his salary, by adding night to day. And now he had worn himself out by his own ferocious industry. He knew, and Aggie knew, that he was in for a bad illness if he didn’t get away, and at once. He had written in his extremity to a bachelor brother, known in the little house at Camden Town as the Mammon of Unrighteousness. The brother had a big house down in Kent; and into that house, though it was the house of Mammon, Arthur proposed that he should be received for a week or two. He took care to mention, casually, and by way of a jest after the brother’s own heart, that for those weeks he, Arthur, would be a lonely widower.

The brother was in the habit of remembering Arthur’s existence once a year at Christmas. He would have had him down often enough, he said, if the poor beggar could have come alone. But he barred Aggie and the children. Aggie, poor dear, was a bore; and the children, six, by Jove (or was it seven?), were just seven (or was it six?) blanked nuisances. Though uncertain about the number of the children, he always sent seven or eight presents at Christmas to be on the safe side. So when Arthur announced that he was a widower, the brother, in his bachelor home, gave a great roar of genial laughter. He saw an opportunity of paying off all his debts to Arthur in a comparatively easy fashion all at once.

“Take him for a fortnight, poor devil? I’d take him for ten fortnights. Heavens, what a relief it must be to get away from ‘Aggie’!”

And when Arthur got his brother’s letter, he and Aggie were quite sorry that they had ever called him the Mammon of Unrighteousness.

But the brother kept good company down in Kent. Aggie knew that, in the old abominable Queningford phrase, he was “in with the county.” She saw her Arthur mixing in gay garden scenes, with a cruel spring sun shining on the shabby suit that had seen so many springs. Arthur’s heart failed him at the last moment, but Aggie did not fail. Go he must, she said. If the brother was the Mammon of Unrighteousness, all the more, she argued, should he be propitiated—for the children’s sake. (The Mammon was too selfish ever to marry, and there were no other nieces and nephews.) She represented the going down into Kent as a sublime act of self-sacrifice by which Arthur, as it were, consecrated his paternity. She sustained that lofty note till Arthur himself was struck with his own sublimity. And when she told him to stand up and let her look at him, he stood up, tired as he was, and let her look at him.

Many sheepfolds have delivered up their blameless flocks to Mammon. But Aggie, when she considered the quality of the god, felt dimly that no more innocent victim was ever yet provided than poor, jaded Arthur in his suit of other years. The thought in her mind was that it would not do for him to look too innocent. He must go—but not like that.