He tore the letter across and across, and dropped the pieces into his wastepaper basket.
“Your thought is as far from the truth as it is unworthy of you, Eve,” he said, with grave displeasure. “This young woman has never been more to me than I have told you. A woman in whom I was interested, chiefly because she was friendless.”
“Chiefly,” she cried, catching at the qualifying word; “and the other reason?”
“If there was another reason, it had nothing to do with love. Does that satisfy you?”
“No,” she answered gloomily. “Nothing you can say will prevent my being miserable. That woman has come into my life and spoilt it.”
“Only because you are unreasonably and absurdly jealous. You are miserable of your own choice. You have me here, your faithful husband, unchanged in thought, act, or feeling since the day we rowed down the river; and yet you choose to torture yourself with vile suspicions, unworthy of a lady, unworthy of a wife.”
“I cannot help it,” she said. “We all have some latent sin, I suppose. Perhaps jealousy is mine. I never knew what it was to feel wicked before. Forgive me, Jack, if you can.”
She took up his hand, kissed it, and then sank sighing into her chair, the chair she had christened Joan, while his, the colossal armchair, was Darby.
“I forgive you with all my heart, Eve, on condition that this little storm is the last outbreak. I should be sorry to think our married life was to be a succession of tempests in teacups.”
“I promise to behave better in future. I hate myself for my folly.”
Vansittart resumed his newspaper, too much disturbed to court conversation. He felt himself living upon the crust of a volcano. This ceaseless jealousy was a matter of trivial moment in itself. He could have laughed it off, as too absurd for serious argument; but this jealousy brought Eve to the brink of that revelation which might wreck two lives. The horror in front of him was a horror that meant doom.
Eve bore with the silence for a few minutes, took off her bonnet, and carefully adjusted the petals of an artificial rose, studied the little fantasy of lace and flowers as if it were the gravest thing in the world, then flung it impatiently on a chair, and began to smooth out her long suède gloves on her soft, silken knee. Her nerves were strung to torture. She had pretended to be satisfied, while the tempest in her heart was still raging. She looked at her husband as if she hated him. Yes; it was hateful to see him sitting there, silent, imperturbable, reading his newspaper, while she was in the depths of despair. The fact that he had refused to show her that letter seemed almost an admission of guilt. If the thing which he had told her was true, the letter would have borne witness to his truth. He would have been eager to show it to her. “Here,” he would have said, “under the woman’s own hand, you will see that she is nothing to me.”
She brooded thus for about ten minutes, and then her irritation could submit to silence no longer.
“What was the City doing?” she asked. “The City which deprived me of your company at Mrs. Montford’s luncheon.”
“It was not the City’s fault. I surrendered my place to Sophy.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense. There is always room enough and a welcome at Mrs. Montford’s luncheons; but no doubt on a warm July morning the City is more attractive than Mayfair.”
“Certainly, for those who are making or losing money,” he answered, throwing down his paper and preparing to be sociable, though there was that in his wife’s tone which told him her heart was not at ease. “What was the City doing?” he repeated. “Buying and selling, getting and losing. It is not half a bad place on a summer morning, though you speak of it with the voice of the scorner. I walked across St. Paul’s Churchyard. They have turned an old burial-ground into a flower-garden; and there were nurses and children, and homeless ragamuffins lying asleep in the sun, and pigeons—tame pigeons—that fed out of the children’s hands. It might have been Venice.”
He started and turned deadly pale. It was the first time he had ever pronounced the name of the fatal city, voluntarily, in his wife’s hearing. His nerves were overstrained—as much as hers, perhaps—and the mere name took his breath away.
Eve saw the startled look, the sudden pallor.
“I understand!” she cried passionately. “It was at Venice you met that woman. Venice, not Verona. The very name of the place agitates you! The very name of the place where you knew her and loved her moves you more than all I have said to you—than all my pain!”
“You are a fool,” he said roughly, “like Fatima, the type of all woman-fools.”
“It was Venice.”
“It may have been Venice. Who cares; or what does it matter?”
“It may have been! What hypocrisy! Do you think I am a child, to be hoodwinked by your feeble prevarications? Every look, every word, tells me that you have loved that woman better than you ever loved me—that you are still in her net.”
“It was at Venice, then, if you will have it,” he answered, beside himself. “At Venice, on a Shrove Tuesday, in Carnival time, five years ago. Are you satisfied now? That is the first half of the riddle.”
His pale cheek grew whiter, his head fell back upon the velvet cushion, his whole frame collapsed. He was as near fainting as a strong man could be.
Eve rushed to a little table, where she was privileged to write her letters now and then—business letters, she called them, chiefly relating to spending money. Here, among silver ornaments and fanciful cutlery, there was a big bottle of eau de cologne, which she half emptied over her husband’s temples.
“Thanks,” he murmured. “You meant it kindly; but you’ve almost blinded
