“I don’t know, Moss,” said Eugenia. “I daresay not, but it doesn’t matter. What makes you ask?”
“What does ‘failed off’ mean?” continued Floss, pursuing her own train of thought.
“I won’t answer silly questions, Floss,” replied her aunt, her face flushing, nevertheless.
“’Tisn’t silly,” said Floss, indignantly. “Big people said it. Mamma said you had failed off tewibly, and Uncle Beachey looked cross and said it was your own fault. I don’t think Uncle Beachey is nice at all. He spoke so cwoss. I thought falling off meant tumbling and hurting yourself, but it doesn’t. It’s something about being pwetty and ugly. And mamma said she wished she hadn’t interfered once, and then somebody else who wouldn’t have failed off would have been here. Does it mean about widing? Everybody says Aunty Woma looks pwetty widing, and I know mamma meant her.”
So far, in a sort of stupor of bewildered amazement, Eugenia had listened in silence to the child’s curiously jumbled revelation. Suddenly she recollected herself.
“Floss,” she said, sternly, “you must not repeat what you were not meant to hear, and I will not listen to you.”
“It wasn’t not meant for me not to hear. I was just playing with my new doll. I never listened behind the curtains. I never did,” said Floss, “not since the day I cut the worm up, and Uncle Beachey scolded me. The day Aunty Woma said she’d go away, and Uncle Beachey was angwy. And I never told that mamma scolded Aunty Woma till she cwied. Aunty Woma didn’t go away, but Uncle Beachey did, and when he comed back he bwought you, Aunty ’Genia, and I wish you wouldn’t look so gwave. Please don’t be angwy with me.” There was an “et tu, Brute,” inflection in the child’s tone which, through all her tumultuous feelings, touched Eugenia. She stooped to kiss Floss, promising her not to be angry if she would never again talk about what she heard big people say. Then she sent her away to her dolls, and sat by herself trying to think over what she had heard, calmly; trying to persuade herself the inference to be drawn from Floss’s garbled communication was not what her first instinct had told her it was; trying to believe it could not be true that her husband had never really cared for her—that he had married her merely in a fit of mortified vanity, “out of pique.”
Beauchamp was away that day. He had left home on a two days’ visit in the neighbourhood, in which, greatly to her disgust, Mrs Eyrecourt had not been invited to accompany him. Had he been at home, doubtless Eugenia, in her first impetuous excitement, would have rushed to him for confirmation or refutation of what her morbid imagination had already worked up into a plausible history of deception and concealment on his part—of cruel advantage taken of her inexperience and confiding trust—an explanation, she told herself, of his having so quickly grown weary of her, to which it now seemed to her innumerable, little-considered trifles pointed as the true one.
“Not that I blame him for loving Roma,” she thought. “Oh no—not that. But he knew I was giving him my all, and he took it, sought it, knowing he had nothing to give me in return. Ah, it was cruel!”
She pressed her hands to her throbbing temples and burning eyes. It was too late in the day for any relief by tears; she felt as if she could never cry again. For a long time she sat there motionless. Then a sudden thought struck her. “I will hear the whole truth,” she said, with a sudden fierce determination. “I will make his sister tell it all. There is nothing dishonourable in forcing her to tell me what he has wilfully concealed, if, as the child says, they talk together of the past, and wish now—now that I am his wife, the mother of his child,” (this thought, alas! bringing no softening influence with it) “that it could be undone. Yes, I will make her tell it all, and she shall see what she has done—ruined two lives, if not three.”