The unemployed waiter was on the house-steps, looking about him—with nothing to see. He made his bow to Mrs. Vimpany, and informed her that the landlady had gone out.
"You will do as well," was the reply. "Is Mr. Vimpany here?"
The waiter smiled, and led the way through the passage to the foot of the stairs. "You can hear him, ma'am." It was quite true; Mr. Vimpany's snoring answered for Mr. Vimpany. His wife ascended the first two or three stairs, and stopped to speak again to the waiter. She asked what the two gentlemen had taken to drink with their dinner. They had taken "the French wine."
"And nothing else?"
The waiter ventured on a little joke. "Nothing else," he said—"and more than enough of it, too."
"Not more than enough, I suppose, for the good of the house," Mrs. Vimpany remarked.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am; the claret the two gentlemen drank is not charged for in the bill."
"What do you mean?"
The waiter explained that Mr. Mountjoy had purchased the whole stock of the wine. Suspicion, as well as surprise, appeared in Mrs. Vimpany's face. She had hitherto thought it likely that Miss Henley's gentleman-like friend might be secretly in love with the young lady. Her doubts of him, now, took a wider range of distrust. She went on up the stairs by herself, and banged the door of the private room as the easiest means of waking the sleeping man. To the utmost noise that she could make in this way, he was perfectly impenetrable. For a while she waited, looking at him across the table with unutterable contempt.
There was the man to whom the religion of the land and the law of the land, acting together in perfect harmony, had fettered her for life! Some women, in her position, might have wasted time in useless self-reproach. Mrs. Vimpany reviewed her miserable married life with the finest mockery of her own misfortune. "Virtue," she said to herself, "is its own reward."