He went home, and into his studio, and sat down on his hard beech chair; he looked round on his books and his work, and then, for the first time, remembered how long and how patiently he had toiled for every hundred pounds he had made; and he laid the evidences of his wife's profusion and deceit by the side of those signs of painful industry and self-denial, and his soul filled with bitterness. “Deceit! deceit!”
Mrs. Staines heard he was in the house, and came to know about the trial. She came hurriedly in, and caught him with his head on the table, in an attitude of prostration, quite new to him; he raised his head directly he heard her, and revealed a face, pale, stern, and wretched.
“The matter is what it has always been, if I could only have seen it. You have deceived me, and disgraced yourself. Look at those bills.”
“You have had an allowance for housekeeping.”
“It was plenty, if you had kept faith with me, and paid ready money. It was enough for the first five weeks. I am housekeeper now, and I shall allow myself two pounds a week less, and not owe a shilling either.”
“Well, all I know is, I couldn't do it: no woman could.”
“Then, you should have come to me, and said so; and I would have shown you how. Was I in Egypt, or at the North Pole, that you could not find me, to treat me like a friend? You have ruined us: these debts will sweep away the last shilling of our little capital; but it isn't that, oh, no! it is the miserable deceit.”
Rosa's eye caught the sum total of Madame Cie's bill, and she turned pale. “Oh, what a cheat that woman is!”
But she turned paler when Christopher said, “That is the one honest bill; for I gave you leave. It is these that part us: these! these! Look at them, false heart! There, go and pack up your things. We can live here no longer; we are ruined. I must send you back to your father.”
“I thought you would, sooner or later,” said Mrs. Staines, panting, trembling, but showing a little fight. “He told you I wasn't fit to be a poor man's wife.”
“An honest man's wife, you mean: that is what you are not fit for. You will go home to your father, and I shall go into some humble lodging to work for you. I'll contrive to keep you, and find you a hundred a year to spend in dress--the only thing your heart can really love. But I won't have an enemy here in the disguise of a friend; and I won't have a wife about me I must treat like a servant, and watch like a traitor.”