“You have hit the mark,” he said. “A man who has no specific occupation never has time to be punctual. Nobody respects him. He can’t look at his watch in the middle of a friend’s prosing and pretend important business. I think I shall article myself to a civil engineer; and then when people are boring I can say I am waited for about the caissons for the new bridge. What bridge? My dear fellow, no time to explain! One springs into a hansom, and is gone. Your idler can’t extricate himself from the Arachne web of boredom. His time is everybody’s property.”
“Elaborate, but not convincing,” said Mrs. Montford, smiling at him, as he helped himself with a leisurely air to a cutlet en papillote. “I would wager all the gloves that I shall wear at Etretat that you were lying in your easiest chair, with your feet on that high fender of yours, reading Maupassant’s new story.”
“For once in your life you have succeeded as a reader of character—or no character. I was reading Le Pas Perdu. Don’t you see how red my eyelids are?”
“Exactly. You are the kind of man who can weep over a book and refuse a sovereign to a poor relation.”
“That,” said Sefton, “was almost unkind.”
Sophy now claimed her right of being talked to.
“Why were you not at Lady Dalborough’s last night?” she asked.
“My dear Miss Marchant, you can’t expect to see me at all the stupidest parties in London.”
“The party was rather dull,” assented Sophy, who until this moment had thought it brilliant, “but there was some good music.”
“One can have that for filthy lucre at the St. James’s Hall. I adore Oscar de Lampion’s love ditties, but not at the price of perspiring in a mob of second-best people.”
“It was my fault that we went to Lady Dalborough’s,” said Sophy, remorsefully.
“Oh, I forgive anybody for going there—once. You will be wiser next year.”
His eyes were watching Eve across the table, while he talked with Sophy. She was very pale, and instead of the delicate blush rose of her complexion there were hectic spots under the eyes, which accentuated her pallor. He who once cared for her almost to the point of passion, felt a thrill of pain at seeing in a face a hint of the consumptive tendency which he had heard of about Peggy. “Those girls are all consumptive,” some village gossip had said to him, with the morbid relish of gloomy possibilities which is an outcome of village monotony. He was shocked to think that she, too, perhaps, was doomed; but the thought suggested no pity for her husband—not even that pity which would have prevented him striking at his enemy through her. The rage that consumed him knew no restraining power. If he had lived in the Middle Ages that rage would have meant murder—but bloodshed in the nineteenth century involves too many inconvenient possibilities to be thought of lightly by a man of landed estate. It means throwing up everything for the rapture of gratified revenge—melting all the pearls of life into one fiery draught.
“Why is not Vansittart with you?” he asked Sophy, still looking at Eve.
“He had business in the City this morning.”
“Business—in the City? What could take Vansittart to the City? That seems quite out of his line.”
“Yes, it does, don’t it,” said Sophy, impressed by the significance of his tone, which seemed to veil a deeper meaning. “What should a Hampshire squire have to do in the City?”
Sefton did not dwell upon the question. He saw that he had awakened vague suspicions in Sophy’s mind, the first faint hint of a domestic mystery. He talked of other things—of people—lightly, delightfully, Sophy thought. He told her of two marriages which had just occurred, on the summit of the fashionable mountain—took her behind the scenes, as it were, and introduced her to the inner life of the chief actors in those elegant ceremonials—the impecunious father of one bride selling his daughter to a man she hated, the angry mother of the bridegroom in the other marriage raging against the girl her son had chosen.
“You don’t know the bad blood which was hidden among the champagne bottles on the buffet,” he said.
Sophy was charmed to hear about these smart people—charmed most of all at the idea that they were miserable—that the women whose toilettes her soul sickened for often wore the hair-shirt of the penitent under a gown which Society papers extolled.
Sefton was very attentive to Sophy, albeit his furtive glances were always returning to the lovely face on the other side of the table. Poor Sophy thrilled at startling possibilities. He had admired Eve in the past, had seemed devoted almost to the point of proposing. And she, Sophy, had been told she was growing daily more like Eve. More wonderful things had happened than that he should fall in love with her—the old fancy for Eve reviving for Eve’s younger sister. Now that the detrimental father had taken up his abode permanently on the Continent, his domestic responsibilities much lightened by Eve’s liberality to her sisters, there could be less objection to an alliance with the house of Marchant. Mr. Sefton was his own master. He had lost Eve by his hesitancy and hanging back. Might he not act more nobly in his dealings with Eve’s sister? That low, thrilling note which he knew how to put into his voice, which was a mere mechanism of the man, touched Sophy’s senses like exquisite music. Her eyelids sank, her cheek kindled, though he talked only of common things.
He had seen enough of Eve, while thus entertaining Sophy, to be assured that she had lately suffered some painful experience—a quarrel with Vansittart, perhaps. Or it might be that silent jealousy had been gnawing at her heart since that day on the river. No woman could see Lisa’s behaviour and not be jealous. The husband
