The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at last in the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina’s stead. As this purpose rose to the surface of Ann Eliza’s thoughts she shrank back shyly from its contemplation. A plan so steeped in duplicity had never before taken shape in her crystalline soul. How was it possible for her to consider such a step? And, besides, (she did not possess sufficient logic to mark the downward trend of this “besides”), what excuse could she make that would not excite her sister’s curiosity? From this second query it was an easy descent to the third: how soon could she manage to go?
It was Evelina herself, who furnished the necessary pretext by awaking with a sore throat on the day when she usually went to market. It was a Saturday, and as they always had their bit of steak on Sunday the expedition could not be postponed, and it seemed natural that Ann Eliza, as she tied an old stocking around Evelina’s throat, should announce her intention of stepping round to the butcher’s.
“Oh, Ann Eliza, they’ll cheat you so,” her sister wailed.
Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.
The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an occasional snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest and most neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any untidiness for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a singularly friendly aspect.
A few minutes’ walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr. Ramy must also deal.
Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato- barrels and flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory- aproned butcher who stood in the background cutting chops.
As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked: “Sister sick?”
“Oh, not very–jest a cold,” she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina’s illness had been feigned. “We want a steak as usual, please–and my sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it was her,” she added with child-like candour.
“Oh, that’s all right.” The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin. “Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us,” he remarked.
In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.
“Wait on her first, please,” Ann Eliza whispered. “I ain’t in any hurry.”
The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating in the back of the shop, saw that the old lady’s hesitations between liver and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew, with an anxious appeal to the butcher’s arbitration, the relative advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no avail, for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and at last Ann Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed her steak, and walked home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain, and in the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions she wondered how she could have been foolish enough to suppose that, even if Mr. Ramy DID go to that particular market, he would hit on the same day and hour as herself.