mind. Day after day he sprawled for hours on the Lido sands, his arms
folded under his head, listening to Streffy’s nonsense and watching Susy
between sleepy lids; but he betrayed no desire to see her alone, or
to draw her into talk apart from the others. More than ever he seemed
content to be the gratified spectator of a costly show got up for his
private entertainment. It was not until he heard her, one morning,
grumble a little at the increasing heat and the menace of mosquitoes,
that he said, quite as if they had talked the matter over long before,
and finally settled it: “The moor will be ready any time after the first
of August.”
Nick fancied that Susy coloured a little, and drew herself up more
defiantly than usual as she sent a pebble skimming across the dying
ripples at their feet.
“You’ll be a lot cooler in Scotland,” Fred added, with what, for him,
was an unusual effort at explicitness.
“Oh, shall we?” she retorted gaily; and added with an air of mystery
and importance, pivoting about on her high heels: “Nick’s got work to do
here. It will probably keep us all summer.”
“Work? Rot! You’ll die of the smells.” Gillow stared perplexedly skyward
from under his tilted hat-brim; and then brought out, as from the depth
of a rankling grievance: “I thought it was all understood.”
“Why,” Nick asked his wife that night, as they re-entered Ellie’s cool
drawing-room after a late dinner at the Lido, “did Gillow think it was
understood that we were going to his moor in August?” He was conscious
of the oddness of speaking of their friend by his surname, and reddened
at his blunder.
Susy had let her lace cloak slide to her feet, and stood before him
in the faintly-lit room, slim and shimmering-white through black
transparencies.
She raised her eyebrows carelessly. “I told you long ago he’d asked us
there for August.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d accepted.”
She smiled as if he had said something as simple as Fred. “I accepted
everything--from everybody!”
What could he answer? It was the very principle on which their bargain
had been struck. And if he were to say: “Ah, but this is different,
because I’m jealous of Gillow,” what light would such an answer shed on
his past? The time for being jealous--if so antiquated an attitude were
on any ground defensible--would have been before his marriage, and before
the acceptance of the bounties which had helped to make it possible. He
wondered a little now that in those days such scruples had not troubled
him. His inconsistency irritated him, and increased his irritation
against Gillow. “I suppose he thinks he owns us!” he grumbled inwardly.
He had thrown himself into an armchair, and Susy, advancing across the
shining arabesques of the floor, slid down at his feet, pressed her
slender length against him, and whispered with lifted face and lips
close to his: “We needn’t ever go anywhere you don’t want to.” For
once her submission was sweet, and folding her close he whispered back
through his kiss: “Not there, then.”
In her response to his embrace he felt the acquiescence of her whole
happy self in whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough
of such moments as this; and as they held each other fast in silence his
doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice.
“Let us stay here as long as ever Ellie will let us,” he said, as if the
shadowy walls and shining floors were a magic boundary drawn about his
happiness.
She murmured her assent and stood up, stretching her sleepy arm above
her shoulders. “How dreadfully late it is.... Will you unhook me?... Oh,
there’s a telegram.”
She picked it up from the table, and tearing it open stared a moment at
the message. “It’s from Ellie. She’s coming to-morrow.”
She turned to the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed
her with enlacing arm. The canal below them lay in moonless shadow,
barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola-music came
from far off, carried upward on a sultry gust.
“Dear old Ellie. All the same... I wish all this belonged to you and
me.” Susy sighed.
VIII.
IT was not Mrs. Vanderlyn’s fault if, after her arrival, her palace
seemed to belong any less to the Lansings.
She arrived in a mood of such general benevolence that it was impossible
for Susy, when they finally found themselves alone, to make her view
even her own recent conduct in any but the most benevolent light.
“I knew you’d be the veriest angel about it all, darling, because I knew
you’d understand me--especially now,” she declared, her slim hands
in Susy’s, her big eyes (so like Clarissa’s) resplendent with past
pleasures and future plans.
The expression of her confidence was unexpectedly distasteful to Susy
Lansing, who had never lent so cold an ear to such warm avowals. She had
always imagined that being happy one’s self made one--as Mrs. Vanderlyn
appeared to assume--more tolerant of the happiness of others, of however
doubtful elements composed; and she was almost ashamed of responding so
languidly to her friend’s outpourings. But she herself had no desire to
confide her bliss to Ellie; and why should not Ellie observe a similar
reticence?
“It was all so perfect--you see, dearest, I was meant to be happy,”
that lady continued, as if the possession of so unusual a characteristic
singled her out for special privileges.
Susy, with a certain sharpness, responded that she had always supposed
we all were.
“Oh, no, dearest: not governesses and mothers-in-law and companions, and
that sort of people. They wouldn’t know how if they tried. But you and
I, darling--”
“Oh, I don’t consider myself in any way exceptional,” Susy intervened.
She longed to add: “Not in your way, at any rate--” but a few minutes
earlier Mrs. Vanderlyn had told her that the palace was at her disposal
for the rest of the summer, and that she herself was only going to perch
there--if they’d let her!--long enough to gather up her things and
start for St. Moritz. The memory of this announcement had the effect of
curbing Susy’s irony, and of making her shift the conversation to the
safer if scarcely less absorbing topic of the number of day and evening
dresses required for a season at St. Moritz.
As she listened to Mrs. Vanderlyn--no less eloquent on this theme
than on the other--Susy began to measure the gulf between her past and
present. “This is the life I used to lead; these are the things I used
to live for,” she thought, as she stood before the outspread glories of
Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe. Not that she did not still care: she could
not look at Ellie’s laces and silks and furs without picturing herself
in them, and wondering by what new miracle of management she could give
herself the air of being dressed by the same consummate artists. But
these had become minor interests: the past few months had given her a
new perspective, and the thing that most puzzled and disconcerted her
about Ellie was the fact that love and finery and bridge and dining-out
were seemingly all on the same plane to her.
The inspection of the dresses lasted a long time, and was marked by
many fluctuations of mood on the part of Mrs. Vanderlyn, who passed
from comparative hopefulness to despair at the total inadequacy of her
wardrobe. It wouldn’t do to go to St. Moritz looking like a frump, and
yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and, whatever she
did, she wasn’t going to show herself in any dowdy re-arrangements done
at home. But suddenly light broke on her, and she clasped her hands
for joy. “Why, Nelson’ll bring them--I’d forgotten all about Nelson!
There’ll be just time if I wire to him at once.”
“Is Nelson going to join you at St. Moritz?” Susy asked, surprised.
“Heavens, no! He’s coming here to pick up Clarissa and take her to some
stuffy cure in Austria with his mother. It’s too lucky: there’s just
time to telegraph him to bring my things. I didn’t mean to wait for him;
but it won’t delay me more than day or two.”
Susy’s heart sank. She was not much afraid of Ellie alone, but Ellie and
Nelson together formed an incalculable menace. No one could tell what
spark of truth might dash from their collision. Susy felt that she could
deal with the two dangers separately and successively, but not together
and simultaneously.
“But, Ellie, why should you wait for Nelson? I’m certain to find someone
here who’s going to St. Moritz and will take your things if he brings
them. It’s a pity to risk losing your rooms.”
This argument appealed for a moment to Mrs. Vanderlyn. “That’s
true; they say all the hotels are jammed. You dear, you’re always
so practical!” She clasped Susy to her scented bosom. “And you know,
darling, I’m sure you’ll be glad to get rid of me--you and Nick! Oh,
don’t be hypocritical and say ‘Nonsense!’ You see, I understand... I
used to think of you so often, you two... during those blessed weeks
when we two were alone....”
The sudden tears, brimming over Ellie’s lovely eyes, and threatening to
make the blue circles below them run into the adjoining carmine, filled
Susy with compunction.
“Poor thing--oh, poor thing!” she thought; and hearing herself called
by Nick, who was waiting to take her out for their usual sunset on the
lagoon, she felt a wave of pity for the deluded creature who would
never taste that highest of imaginable joys. “But all the same,” Susy
reflected, as she hurried down to her husband, “I’m glad I persuaded her
not to wait for Nelson.”
Some days had elapsed since Susy and Nick had had a sunset to
themselves, and in the interval Susy had once again learned the superior
quality of the sympathy that held them together. She now viewed all the
rest of life as no more than a show: a jolly show which it would have
been a thousand pities to miss, but which, if the need arose, they could
get up and leave at any moment--provided that they left it together.
In the dusk, while their prow slid over inverted palaces, and through
the scent of hidden gardens, she leaned against him and murmured, her
mind returning to the recent scene with Ellie: “Nick, should you hate me
dreadfully if I had no clothes?”
Her husband was kindling a cigarette, and the match lit up the grin
with which he answered: “But, my dear, have I ever shown the slightest
symptom--?”
“Oh, rubbish! When a woman says: ‘No clothes,’ she means: ‘Not the right
clothes.’”
He took a meditative puff. “Ah, you’ve been going over Ellie’s finery
with her.”
“Yes: all those trunks and trunks full. And she finds she’s got nothing
for St. Moritz!”
“Of course,” he murmured, drowsy with content, and manifesting but a
languid interest in the subject of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe.
“Only fancy--she very nearly decided to stop over for Nelson’s arrival
next week, so that he might bring her two or three more trunkfuls from
Paris. But mercifully I’ve managed to persuade her that it would be
foolish to wait.”
Susy felt a hardly perceptible shifting of her husband’s lounging body,
and was aware, through all her watchful tentacles, of a widening of his
half-closed lids.
“You ‘managed’--?” She fancied he paused on the word ironically. “But
why?”
“Why--what?”
“Why on earth should you try to prevent Ellie’s waiting for Nelson, if
for once in her life she wants to?”
Susy, conscious of reddening suddenly, drew back as though the leap
of her tell-tale heart might have penetrated the blue flannel shoulder
against which she leaned.
“Really, dearest--!” she murmured; but with a sudden doggedness he
renewed his “Why?”
“Because she’s in such a fever to get to St. Moritz--and in such a funk
lest the hotel shouldn’t keep her rooms,” Susy somewhat breathlessly
produced.
“Ah--I see.” Nick paused again. “You’re a devoted friend, aren’t you!”
“What an odd question! There’s hardly anyone I’ve reason to be more
devoted to than Ellie,” his wife answered; and she felt his contrite
clasp on her hand.
“Darling! No; nor I--. Or more grateful to for leaving us alone in this
heaven.”
Dimness had fallen on the waters, and her lifted lips met his bending
ones.
Trailing late into dinner that evening, Ellie announced that, after all,
she had decided it was safest to wait for Nelson.
“I should simply worry myself ill if I weren’t sure of getting my
things,” she said, in the tone of tender solicitude with which she
always discussed her own difficulties. “After all, people who deny
themselves everything do get warped and bitter, don’t they?” she argued
plaintively, her lovely eyes wandering from one to the other of her
assembled friends.
Strefford remarked gravely that it was the complaint which had fatally
undermined his own health; and in the laugh that followed the party
drifted into the great vaulted dining-room.
“Oh, I don’t mind your laughing at me, Streffy darling,” his hostess
retorted, pressing his arm against her own; and Susy, receiving the
shock of their rapidly exchanged glance, said to herself, with a sharp
twinge of apprehension: “Of course Streffy knows everything; he showed
no surprise at finding Ellie away when he arrived. And if he knows,
what’s to prevent Nelson’s finding out?” For Strefford, in a mood of
mischief, was no more to be trusted than a malicious child.
Susy instantly resolved to risk speaking to him, if need be even
betraying to him the secret of the letters. Only by revealing the depth
of her own danger could she hope to secure his silence.
On the balcony, late in the evening, while the others were listening
indoors to the low modulations of a young composer who had embroidered
his fancies on Browning’s “Toccata,” Susy found her chance. Strefford,
unsummoned, had followed her out, and stood silently smoking at her
side.
“You see, Streff--oh, why should you and I make mysteries to each
other?” she suddenly began.
“Why, indeed: but do we?”
Susy glanced back at the group around the piano. “About Ellie, I
mean--and Nelson.”
“Lord! Ellie and Nelson? You call that a mystery? I should as soon apply
the term to one of the million candle-power advertisements that adorn
your native thoroughfares.”
“Well, yes. But--” She stopped again. Had she not tacitly promised Ellie
not to speak?
“My Susan, what’s wrong?” Strefford asked.
“I don’t know....”
“Well, I do, then: you’re afraid that, if Ellie and Nelson meet here,
she’ll blurt out something--injudicious.”
“Oh, she won’t!” Susy cried with conviction.
“Well, then--who will! I trust that superhuman child not to. And you and
I and Nick--”
“Oh,” she gasped, interrupting him, “that’s just it. Nick doesn’t
know... doesn’t even suspect. And if he did....”
Strefford flung away his cigar and turned to scrutinize her. “I don’t
see--hanged if I do. What business is it of any of us, after all?”
That, of course, was the old view that cloaked connivance in an air of
decency. But to Susy it no longer carried conviction, and she hesitated.
“If Nick should find out that I know....”
“Good Lord--doesn’t he know that you know? After all, I suppose it’s not
the first time--”
She remained silent.
“The first time you’ve received confidences--from married friends. Does
Nick suppose you’ve lived even to your tender age without... Hang it,
what’s come over you, child?”
What had, indeed, that she could make clear to him? And yet more than
ever she felt the need of having him securely on her side. Once his word
was pledged, he was safe: otherwise there was no limit to his capacity
for wilful harmfulness.
“Look here, Streff, you and I know that Ellie hasn’t been away for a
cure; and that if poor Clarissa was sworn to secrecy it was not because
it ‘worries father’ to think that mother needs to take care of her
health.” She paused, hating herself for the ironic note she had tried to
sound.
“Well--?” he questioned, from the depths of the chair into which he had
sunk.
“Well, Nick doesn’t... doesn’t dream of it. If he knew that we owed our
summer here to... to my knowing....”
Strefford sat silent: she felt his astonished stare through the
darkness. “Jove!” he said at last, with a low whistle Susy bent over the
balustrade, her heart thumping against the stone rail.
“What was left of soul, I wonder--?” the young composer’s voice shrilled
through the open windows.
Strefford sank into another silence, from which he roused himself only
as Susy turned back toward the lighted threshold.
“Well, my dear, we’ll see it through between us; you and I--and
Clarissa,” he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He
caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the
drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: “I can
never hear that thing sung without wanting to cry like a baby.”
IX.
NELSON VANDERLYN, still in his travelling clothes, paused on the
threshold of his own dining-room and surveyed the scene with pardonable
satisfaction.
He was a short round man, with a grizzled head, small facetious eyes and
a large and credulous smile.
At the luncheon table sat his wife, between Charlie Strefford and Nick
Lansing. Next to Strefford, perched on her high chair, Clarissa throned
in infant beauty, while Susy Lansing cut up a peach for her. Through
wide orange awnings the sun slanted in upon the white-clad group.
“Well--well--well! So I’ve caught you at it!” cried the happy father,
whose inveterate habit it was to address his wife and friends as if he
had surprised them at an inopportune moment. Stealing up from behind, he
lifted his daughter into the air, while a chorus of “Hello, old Nelson,”
hailed his appearance.
It was two or three years since Nick Lansing had seen Mr. Vanderlyn, who
was now the London representative of the big New York bank of Vanderlyn
& Co., and had exchanged his sumptuous house in Fifth Avenue for
another, more sumptuous still, in Mayfair; and the young man looked
curiously and attentively at his host.
Mr. Vanderlyn had grown older and stouter, but his face still kept
its look of somewhat worn optimism. He embraced his wife, greeted Susy
affectionately, and distributed cordial hand-grasps to the two men.
“Hullo,” he exclaimed, suddenly noticing a pearl and coral trinket
hanging from Clarissa’s neck. “Who’s been giving my daughter jewellery,
I’d like to know!”
“Oh, Streffy did--just think, father! Because I said I’d rather have it
than a book, you know,” Clarissa lucidly explained, her arms tight about
her father’s neck, her beaming eyes on Strefford.
Nelson Vanderlyn’s own eyes took on the look of shrewdness which came
into them whenever there was a question of material values.
“What, Streffy? Caught you at it, eh? Upon my soul-spoiling the brat
like that! You’d no business to, my dear chap-a lovely baroque pearl--”
he protested, with the half-apologetic tone of the rich man embarrassed
by too costly a gift from an impecunious friend.
“Oh, hadn’t I? Why? Because it’s too good for Clarissa, or too expensive
for me? Of course you daren’t imply the first; and as for me--I’ve had a
windfall, and am blowing it in on the ladies.”
Strefford, Lansing had noticed, always used American slang when he was
slightly at a loss, and wished to divert attention from the main point.
But why was he embarrassed, whose attention did he wish to divert, It
was plain that Vanderlyn’s protest had been merely formal: like most of
the wealthy, he had only the dimmest notion of what money represented
to the poor. But it was unusual for Strefford to give any one a present,
and especially an expensive one: perhaps that was what had fixed
Vanderlyn’s attention.
“A windfall?” he gaily repeated.
“Oh, a tiny one: I was offered a thumping rent for my little place at
Como, and dashed over here to squander my millions with the rest of
you,” said Strefford imperturbably.
Vanderlyn’s look immediately became interested and sympathetic.
“What--the scene of the honey-moon?” He included Nick and Susy in his
friendly smile.
“Just so: the reward of virtue. I say, give me a cigar, will you, old
man, I left some awfully good ones at Como, worse luck--and I don’t mind
telling you that Ellie’s no judge of tobacco, and that Nick’s too far
gone in bliss to care what he smokes,” Strefford grumbled, stretching a
hand toward his host’s cigar-case.
“I do like jewellery best,” Clarissa murmured, hugging her father.
Nelson Vanderlyn’s first word to his wife had been that he had
brought her all her toggery; and she had welcomed him with appropriate
enthusiasm. In fact, to the lookers-on her joy at seeing him seemed
rather too patently in proportion to her satisfaction at getting her
clothes. But no such suspicion appeared to mar Mr. Vanderlyn’s happiness
in being, for once, and for nearly twenty-four hours, under the same
roof with his wife and child. He did not conceal his regret at having
promised his mother to join her the next day; and added, with a wistful
glance at Ellie: “If only I’d known you meant to wait for me!”
But being a man of duty, in domestic as well as business affairs, he did
not even consider the possibility of disappointing the exacting old lady
to whom he owed his being. “Mother cares for so few people,” he used to
say, not without a touch of filial pride in the parental exclusiveness,
“that I have to be with her rather more than if she were more sociable”;
and with smiling resignation he gave orders that Clarissa should be
ready to start the next evening.
“And meanwhile,” he concluded, “we’ll have all the good time that’s
going.”
The ladies of the party seemed united in the desire to further this
resolve; and it was settled that as soon as Mr. Vanderlyn had despatched
a hasty luncheon, his wife, Clarissa and Susy should carry him off for a
tea-picnic at Torcello. They did not even suggest that Strefford or Nick
should be of the party, or that any of the other young men of the group
should be summoned; as Susy said, Nelson wanted to go off alone with his
harem. And Lansing and Strefford were left to watch the departure of the
happy Pasha ensconced between attentive beauties.
“Well--that’s what you call being married!” Strefford commented, waving
his battered Panama at Clarissa.
“Oh, no, I don’t!” Lansing laughed.
“He does. But do you know--” Strefford paused and swung about on his
companion--“do you know, when the Rude Awakening comes, I don’t care to
be there. I believe there’ll be some crockery broken.”
“Shouldn’t wonder,” Lansing answered indifferently. He wandered away to
his own room, leaving Strefford to philosophize to his pipe.
Lansing had always known about poor old Nelson: who hadn’t, except poor
old Nelson? The case had once seemed amusing because so typical; now, it
rather irritated Nick that Vanderlyn should be so complete an ass. But
he would be off the next day, and so would Ellie, and then, for many
enchanted weeks, the palace would once more be the property of Nick and
Susy. Of all the people who came and went in it, they were the only ones
who appreciated it, or knew how it was meant to be lived in; and that
made it theirs in the only valid sense. In this light it became easy to
regard the Vanderlyns as mere transient intruders.
Having relegated them to this convenient distance, Lansing shut himself
up with his book. He had returned to it with fresh energy after his few
weeks of holiday-making, and was determined to finish it quickly. He did
not expect that it would bring in much money; but if it were moderately
successful it might give him an opening in the reviews and magazines,
and in that case he meant to abandon archaeology for novels, since
it was only as a purveyor of fiction that he could count on earning a
living for himself and Susy.
Late in the afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors.
He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised
peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark
green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening
the languid air. What visions he could build, if he dared, of being
tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above
a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected
garden--and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient
intervals! Why should they not settle in Venice if he pulled it off!
He found himself before the church of the Scalzi, and pushing open the
leathern door wandered up the nave under the whirl of rose-and-lemon
angels in Tiepolo’s great vault. It was not a church in which one was
likely to run across sight-seers; but he presently remarked a young lady
standing alone near the choir, and assiduously applying her field-glass
to the celestial vortex, from which she occasionally glanced down at an
open manual.
As Lansing’s step sounded on the pavement, the young lady, turning,
revealed herself as Miss Hicks.
“Ah--you like this too? It’s several centuries out of your line, though,
isn’t it!” Nick asked as they shook hands.
She gazed at him gravely. “Why shouldn’t one like things that are out
of one’s line?” she answered; and he agreed, with a laugh, that it was
often an incentive.
She continued to fix her grave eyes on him, and after one or two remarks
about the Tiepolos he perceived that she was feeling her way toward a
subject of more personal interest.
“I’m glad to see you alone,” she said at length, with an abruptness that
might have seemed awkward had it not been so completely unconscious.
She turned toward a cluster of straw chairs, and signed to Nick to seat
himself beside her.
“I seldom do,” she added, with the serious smile that made her heavy
face almost handsome; and she went on, giving him no time to protest: “I
wanted to speak to you--to explain about father’s invitation to go with
us to Persia and Turkestan.”
“To explain?”
“Yes. You found the letter when you arrived here just after your
marriage, didn’t you? You must have thought it odd, our asking you just
then; but we hadn’t heard that you were married.”
“Oh, I guessed as much: it happened very quietly, and I was remiss about
announcing it, even to old friends.”
Lansing frowned. His thoughts had wandered away to the evening when he
had found Mrs. Hicks’s letter in the mail awaiting him at Venice.
The day was associated in his mind with the ridiculous and mortifying
episode of the cigars--the expensive cigars that Susy had wanted to
carry away from Strefford’s villa. Their brief exchange of views on the
subject had left the first blur on the perfect surface of his happiness,
and he still felt an uncomfortable heat at the remembrance. For a few
hours the prospect of life with Susy had seemed unendurable; and it was
just at that moment that he had found the letter from Mrs. Hicks, with
its almost irresistible invitation. If only her daughter had known how
nearly he had accepted it!
“It was a dreadful temptation,” he said, smiling.
“To go with us? Then why--?”
“Oh, everything’s different now: I’ve got to stick to my writing.”
Miss Hicks still bent on him the same unblinking scrutiny. “Does that
mean that you’re going to give up your real work?”
“My real work--archaeology?” He smiled again to hide a twitch of regret.
“Why, I’m afraid it hardly produces a living wage; and I’ve got to think
of that.” He coloured suddenly, as if suspecting that Miss Hicks might
consider the avowal an opening for he hardly knew what ponderous
offer of aid. The Hicks munificence was too uncalculating not to be
occasionally oppressive. But looking at her again he saw that her eyes
were full of tears.
“I thought it was your vocation,” she said.
“So did I. But life comes along, and upsets things.”
“Oh, I understand. There may be things--worth giving up all other things
for.”
“There are!” cried Nick with beaming emphasis.
He was conscious that Miss Hicks’s eyes demanded of him even more than
this sweeping affirmation.
“But your novel may fail,” she said with her odd harshness.
“It may--it probably will,” he agreed. “But if one stopped to consider
such possibilities--”
“Don’t you have to, with a wife?”
“Oh, my dear Coral--how old are you? Not twenty?” he questioned, laying
a brotherly hand on hers.
She stared at him a moment, and sprang up clumsily from her chair. “I
was never young... if that’s what you mean. It’s lucky, isn’t it, that
my parents gave me such a grand education? Because, you see, art’s a
wonderful resource.” (She pronounced it RE-source.)
He continued to look at her kindly. “You won’t need it--or any
other--when you grow young, as you will some day,” he assured her.
“Do you mean, when I fall in love? But I am in love--Oh, there’s
Eldorada and Mr. Beck!” She broke off with a jerk, signalling with her
field-glass to the pair who had just appeared at the farther end of the
nave. “I told them that if they’d meet me here to-day I’d try to make
them understand Tiepolo. Because, you see, at home we never really
have understood Tiepolo; and Mr. Beck and Eldorada are the only ones to
realize it. Mr. Buttles simply won’t.” She turned to Lansing and held
out her hand. “I am in love,” she repeated earnestly, “and that’s the
reason why I find art such a RE source.”
She restored her eye-glasses, opened her manual, and strode across the
church to the expectant neophytes.
Lansing, looking after her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck
were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a
queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly
was not. But then--but then--. Well, there was no use in following up
such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers
had already reached Palazzo Vanderlyn.
They got back only in time for a late dinner, full of chaff and
laughter, and apparently still enchanted with each other’s society.
Nelson Vanderlyn beamed on his wife, sent his daughter off to bed with a
kiss, and leaning back in his armchair before the fruit-and-flower-laden
table, declared that he’d never spent a jollier day in his life. Susy
seemed to come in for a full share of his approbation, and Lansing
thought that Ellie was unusually demonstrative to her friend. Strefford,
from his hostess’s side, glanced across now and then at young Mrs.
Lansing, and his glance seemed to Lansing a confidential comment on the
Vanderlyn raptures. But then Strefford was always having private jokes
with people or about them; and Lansing was irritated with himself for
perpetually suspecting his best friends of vague complicities at his
expense. “If I’m going to be jealous of Streffy now--!” he concluded
with a grimace of self-derision.
Certainly Susy looked lovely enough to justify the most irrational
pangs. As a girl she had been, for some people’s taste, a trifle
fine-drawn and sharp-edged; now, to her old lightness of line was added
a shadowy bloom, a sort of star-reflecting depth. Her movements were
slower, less angular; her mouth had a needing droop, her lids seemed
weighed down by their lashes; and then suddenly the old spirit would
reveal itself through the new languor, like the tartness at the core
of a sweet fruit. As her husband looked at her across the flowers and
lights he laughed inwardly at the nothingness of all things else.
Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs.
Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted
her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford,
with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and
Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book.
The quietness of the great echoing place gave him a foretaste of the
solitude to come. By mid-August all their party would be scattered: the
Hickses off on a cruise to Crete and the AEgean, Fred Gillow on the way
to his moor, Strefford to stay with friends in Capri till his annual
visit to Northumberland in September. One by one the others would
follow, and Lansing and Susy be left alone in the great sun-proof
palace, alone under the star-laden skies, alone with the great orange
moons--still theirs!--above the bell-tower of San Giorgio. The novel, in
that blessed quiet, would unfold itself as harmoniously as his dreams.
He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he
heard a step behind him. The next moment two hands were clasped over his
eyes, and the air was full of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s last new scent.
“You dear thing--I’m just off, you know,” she said. “Susy told me you
were working, and I forbade her to call you down. She and Streffy are
waiting to take me to the station, and I’ve run up to say good-bye.”
“Ellie, dear!” Full of compunction, Lansing pushed aside his writing and
started up; but she pressed him back into his seat.
“No, no! I should never forgive myself if I’d interrupted you. I
oughtn’t to have come up; Susy didn’t want me to. But I had to tell you,
you dear.... I had to thank you...”
In her dark travelling dress and hat, so discreetly conspicuous, so
negligent and so studied, with a veil masking her paint, and gloves
hiding her rings, she looked younger, simpler, more natural than he had
ever seen her. Poor Ellie such a good fellow, after all!
“To thank me? For what? For being so happy here?” he laughed, taking her
hands.
She looked at him, laughed back, and flung her arms about his neck.
“For helping me to be so happy elsewhere--you and Susy, you two blessed
darlings!” she cried, with a kiss on his cheek.
Their eyes met for a second; then her arms slipped slowly downward,
dropping to her sides. Lansing sat before her like a stone.
“Oh,” she gasped, “why do you stare so? Didn’t you know...?”
They heard Strefford’s shrill voice on the stairs. “Ellie, where the
deuce are you? Susy’s in the gondola. You’ll miss the train!”
Lansing stood up and caught Mrs. Vanderlyn by the wrist. “What do you
mean? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing... But you were both such bricks about the letters.... And
when Nelson was here, too.... Nick, don’t hurt my wrist so! I must run!”
He dropped her hand and stood motionless, staring after her and
listening to the click of her high heels as she fled across the room and
along the echoing corridor.
When he turned back to the table he noticed that a small morocco case
had fallen among his papers. In falling it had opened, and before him,
on the pale velvet lining, lay a scarf-pin set with a perfect pearl. He
picked the box up, and was about to hasten after Mrs. Vanderlyn--it
was so like her to shed jewels on her path!--when he noticed his own
initials on the cover.
He dropped the box as if it had been a hot coal, and sat for a long
while gazing at the gold N. L., which seemed to have burnt itself into
his flesh.
At last he roused himself and stood up.
X.
WITH a sigh of relief Susy drew the pins from her hat and threw herself
down on the lounge.
The ordeal she had dreaded was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderlyn had
safely gone their several ways. Poor Ellie was not noted for prudence,
and when life smiled on her she was given to betraying her gratitude too
openly; but thanks to Susy’s vigilance (and, no doubt, to Strefford’s
tacit co-operation), the dreaded twenty-four hours were happily over.
Nelson Vanderlyn had departed without a shadow on his brow, and though
Ellie’s, when she came down from bidding Nick good-bye, had seemed to
Susy less serene than usual, she became her normal self as soon as it
was discovered that the red morocco bag with her jewel-box was missing.
Before it had been discovered in the depths of the gondola they had
reached the station, and there was just time to thrust her into her
“sleeper,” from which she was seen to wave an unperturbed farewell to
her friends.
“Well, my dear, we’ve been it through,” Strefford remarked with a deep
breath as the St. Moritz express rolled away.
“Oh,” Susy sighed in mute complicity; then, as if to cover her
self-betrayal: “Poor darling, she does so like what she likes!”
“Yes--even if it’s a rotten bounder,” Strefford agreed.
“A rotten bounder? Why, I thought--”
“That it was still young Davenant? Lord, no--not for the last six
months. Didn’t she tell you--?”
Susy felt herself redden. “I didn’t ask her--”
“Ask her? You mean you didn’t let her!”
“I didn’t let her. And I don’t let you,” Susy added sharply, as he
helped her into the gondola.
“Oh, all right: I daresay you’re right. It simplifies things,” Strefford
placidly acquiesced.
She made no answer, and in silence they glided homeward.
Now, in the quiet of her own room, Susy lay and pondered on the distance
she had travelled during the last year. Strefford had read her mind with
his usual penetration. It was true that there had been a time when
she would have thought it perfectly natural that Ellie should tell
her everything; that the name of young Davenant’s successor should be
confided to her as a matter of course. Apparently even Ellie had been
obscurely aware of the change, for after a first attempt to force her
confidences on Susy she had contented herself with vague expressions of
gratitude, allusive smiles and sighs, and the pretty “surprise” of the
sapphire bangle slipped onto her friend’s wrist in the act of their
farewell embrace.
The bangle was extremely handsome. Susy, who had an auctioneer’s eye
for values, knew to a fraction the worth of those deep convex stones
alternating with small emeralds and brilliants. She was glad to own the
bracelet, and enchanted with the effect it produced on her slim wrist;
yet, even while admiring it, and rejoicing that it was hers, she had
already transmuted it into specie, and reckoned just how far it would go
toward the paying of domestic necessities. For whatever came to her now
interested her only as something more to be offered up to Nick.
The door opened and Nick came in. Dusk had fallen, and she could not
see his face; but something in the jerk of the door-handle roused her
ever-wakeful apprehension. She hurried toward him with outstretched
wrist.
“Look, dearest--wasn’t it too darling of Ellie?”
She pressed the button of the lamp that lit her dressing-table, and her
husband’s face started unfamiliarly out of the twilight. She slipped off
the bracelet and held it up to him.
“Oh, I can go you one better,” he said with a laugh; and pulling a
morocco case from his pocket he flung it down among the scent-bottles.
Susy opened the case automatically, staring at the pearl because she was
afraid to look again at Nick.
“Ellie--gave you this?” she asked at length.
“Yes. She gave me this.” There was a pause. “Would you mind telling
me,” Lansing continued in the same dead-level tone, “exactly for what
services we’ve both been so handsomely paid?”
“The pearl is beautiful,” Susy murmured, to gain time, while her head
spun round with unimaginable terrors.
“So are your sapphires; though, on closer examination, my services would
appear to have been valued rather higher than yours. Would you be kind
enough to tell me just what they were?”
Susy threw her head back and looked at him. “What on earth are you
talking about, Nick! Why shouldn’t Ellie have given us these things? Do
you forget that it’s like our giving her a pen-wiper or a button-hook?
What is it you are trying to suggest?”
It had cost her a considerable effort to hold his eyes while she put
the questions. Something had happened between him and Ellie, that was
evident--one of those hideous unforeseeable blunders that may cause one’s
cleverest plans to crumble at a stroke; and again Susy shuddered at
the frailty of her bliss. But her old training stood her in good stead.
There had been more than one moment in her past when everything--somebody
else’s everything--had depended on her keeping a cool head and a clear
glance. It would have been a wonder if now, when she felt her own
everything at stake, she had not been able to put up as good a defence.
“What is it?” she repeated impatiently, as Lansing continued to remain
silent.
“That’s what I’m here to ask,” he returned, keeping his eyes as steady
as she kept hers. “There’s no reason on earth, as you say, why Ellie
shouldn’t give us presents--as expensive presents as she likes; and the
pearl is a beauty. All I ask is: for what specific services were they
given? For, allowing for all the absence of scruple that marks the
intercourse of truly civilized people, you’ll probably agree that there
are limits; at least up to now there have been limits....”
“I really don’t know what you mean. I suppose Ellie wanted to show that
she was grateful to us for looking after Clarissa.”
“But she gave us all this in exchange for that, didn’t she?” he
suggested, with a sweep of the hand around the beautiful shadowy room.
“A whole summer of it if we choose.”
Susy smiled. “Apparently she didn’t think that enough.”
“What a doting mother! It shows the store she sets upon her child.”
“Well, don’t you set store upon Clarissa?”
“Clarissa is exquisite; but her mother didn’t mention her in offering me
this recompense.”
Susy lifted her head again. “Whom did she mention?”
“Vanderlyn,” said Lansing.
“Vanderlyn? Nelson?”
“Yes--and some letters... something about letters.... What is it, my
dear, that you and I have been hired to hide from Vanderlyn? Because I
should like to know,” Nick broke out savagely, “if we’ve been adequately
paid.”
Susy was silent: she needed time to reckon up her forces, and study her
next move; and her brain was in such a whirl of fear that she could at
last only retort: “What is it that Ellie said to you?”
Lansing laughed again. “That’s just what you’d like to find out--isn’t
it?--in order to know the line to take in making your explanation.”
The sneer had an effect that he could not have foreseen, and that Susy
herself had not expected.
“Oh, don’t--don’t let us speak to each other like that!” she cried; and
sinking down by the dressing-table she hid her face in her hands.
It seemed to her, now, that nothing mattered except that their love
for each other, their faith in each other, should be saved from some
unhealable hurt. She was willing to tell Nick everything--she wanted to
tell him everything--if only she could be sure of reaching a responsive
chord in him. But the scene of the cigars came back to her, and benumbed
her. If only she could make him see that nothing was of any account as
long as they continued to love each other!
His touch fell compassionately on her shoulder. “Poor child--don’t,” he
said.
Their eyes met, but his expression checked the smile breaking through
her tears. “Don’t you see,” he continued, “that we’ve got to have this
thing out?”
She continued to stare at him through a prism of tears. “I can’t--while
you stand up like that,” she stammered, childishly.
She had cowered down again into a corner of the lounge; but Lansing did
not seat himself at her side. He took a chair facing her, like a caller
on the farther side of a stately tea-tray. “Will that do?” he asked with
a stiff smile, as if to humour her.
“Nothing will do--as long as you’re not you!”
“Not me?”
She shook her head wearily. “What’s the use? You accept things
theoretically--and then when they happen....”
“What things? What has happened!”
A sudden impatience mastered her. What did he suppose, after all--? “But
you know all about Ellie. We used to talk about her often enough in old
times,” she said.
“Ellie and young Davenant?”
“Young Davenant; or the others....”
“Or the others. But what business was it of ours?”
“Ah, that’s just what I think!” she cried, springing up with an
explosion of relief. Lansing stood up also, but there was no answering
light in his face.
“We’re outside of all that; we’ve nothing to do with it, have we?” he
pursued.
“Nothing whatever.”
“Then what on earth is the meaning of Ellie’s gratitude? Gratitude for
what we’ve done about some letters--and about Vanderlyn?”
“Oh, not you,” Susy cried, involuntarily.
“Not I? Then you?” He came close and took her by the wrist. “Answer me.
Have you been mixed up in some dirty business of Ellie’s?”
There was a pause. She found it impossible to speak, with that burning
grasp on the wrist where the bangle had been. At length he let her go
and moved away. “Answer,” he repeated.
“I’ve told you it was my business and not yours.”
He received this in silence; then he questioned: “You’ve been sending
letters for her, I suppose? To whom?”
“Oh, why do you torment me? Nelson was not supposed to know that she’d
been away. She left me the letters to post to him once a week. I found
them here the night we arrived.... It was the price--for this. Oh,
Nick, say it’s been worth it--say at least that it’s been worth it!” she
implored him.
He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her
dressing-table, making the jewelled bangle dance.
“How many letters?”
“I don’t know... four... five... What does it matter?”
“And once a week, for six weeks--?”
“Yes.”
“And you took it all as a matter of course?”
“No: I hated it. But what could I do?”
“What could you do?”
“When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think
I’d give you up?”
“Give me up?” he echoed.
“Well--doesn’t our being together depend on--on what we can get out of
people? And hasn’t there always got to be some give-and-take? Did you
ever in your life get anything for nothing?” she cried with sudden
exasperation. “You’ve lived among these people as long as I have; I
suppose it’s not the first time--”
“By God, but it is,” he exclaimed, flushing. “And that’s the
difference--the fundamental difference.”
“The difference!”
“Between you and me. I’ve never in my life done people’s dirty work for
them--least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or
you wouldn’t have hidden this beastly business from me.”
The blood rose to Susy’s temples also. Yes, she had guessed it;
instinctively, from the day she had first visited him in his bare
lodgings, she had been aware of his stricter standard. But how could she
tell him that under his influence her standard had become stricter
too, and that it was as much to hide her humiliation from herself as to
escape his anger that she had held her tongue?
“You knew I wouldn’t have stayed here another day if I’d known,” he
continued.
“Yes: and then where in the world should we have gone?”
“You mean that--in one way or another--what you call give-and-take is
the price of our remaining together?”
“Well--isn’t it,” she faltered.
“Then we’d better part, hadn’t we?”
He spoke in a low tone, thoughtfully and deliberately, as if this had
been the inevitable conclusion to which their passionate argument had
led.
Susy made no answer. For a moment she ceased to be conscious of the
causes of what had happened; the thing itself seemed to have smothered
her under its ruins.
Nick wandered away from the dressing-table and stood gazing out of the
window at the darkening canal flecked with lights. She looked at his
back, and wondered what would happen if she were to go up to him and
fling her arms about him. But even if her touch could have broken the
spell, she was not sure she would have chosen that way of breaking it.
Beneath her speechless anguish there burned the half-conscious sense
of having been unfairly treated. When they had entered into their
queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and
concessions the life they were to live together must be based. That he
should have forgotten it seemed so unbelievable that she wondered, with
a new leap of fear, if he were using the wretched Ellie’s indiscretion
as a means of escape from a tie already wearied of. Suddenly she raised
her head with a laugh.
“After all--you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress.”
He turned on her with an astonished stare. “You--my mistress?”
Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that
such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she
insisted. “That day at the Fulmers’--have you forgotten? When you said
it would be sheer madness for us to marry.”
Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on
the mosaic volutes of the floor.
“I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us to
marry,” he rejoined at length.
She sprang up trembling. “Well, that’s easily settled. Our compact--”
“Oh, that compact--” he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.
“Aren’t you asking me to carry it out now?”
“Because I said we’d better part?” He paused. “But the compact--I’d
almost forgotten it--was to the effect, wasn’t it, that we were to give
each other a helping hand if either of us had a better chance? The thing
was absurd, of course; a mere joke; from my point of view, at least. I
shall never want any better chance... any other chance....”
“Oh, Nick, oh, Nick... but then....” She was close to him, his face
looming down through her tears; but he put her back.
“It would have been easy enough, wouldn’t it,” he rejoined, “if we’d
been as detachable as all that? As it is, it’s going to hurt horribly.
But talking it over won’t help. You were right just now when you asked
how else we were going to live. We’re born parasites, both, I suppose,
or we’d have found out some way long ago. But I find there are things I
might put up with for myself, at a pinch--and should, probably, in time
that I can’t let you put up with for me... ever.... Those cigars at
Como: do you suppose I didn’t know it was for me? And this too? Well, it
won’t do... it won’t do....”
He stopped, as if his courage failed him; and she moaned out: “But your
writing--if your book’s a success....”
“My poor Susy--that’s all part of the humbug. We both know that my sort
of writing will never pay. And what’s the alternative except more of
the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it? At
least, till now, I’ve minded certain things; I don’t want to go on till
I find myself taking them for granted.”
She reached out a timid hand. “But you needn’t ever, dear... if you’d
only leave it to me....”
He drew back sharply. “That seems simple to you, I suppose? Well, men
are different.” He walked toward the dressing-table and glanced at the
little enamelled clock which had been one of her wedding-presents.
“Time to dress, isn’t it? Shall you mind if I leave you to dine with
Streffy, and whoever else is coming? I’d rather like a long tramp, and
no more talking just at present except with myself.”
He passed her by and walked rapidly out of the room. Susy stood
motionless, unable to lift a detaining hand or to find a final word
of appeal. On her disordered dressing-table Mrs. Vanderlyn’s gifts
glittered in the rosy lamp-light.
Yes: men were different, as he said.
XI.
BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in
old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the
Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since
you couldn’t be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking
into heaps of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had suddenly become
perpendicular....
Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the breaks
between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar faces of the
people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling fool
of a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived that
day, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince, who, in Ursula’s
absence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred
to join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other of
them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be like
with no faces but such as theirs to furnish it....
Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!... After all, most people went
through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned
in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be
perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!
“But what on earth, Susy,” Gillow’s puzzled voice suddenly came to her
as from immeasurable distances, “Are you going to do in this beastly
stifling hole for the rest of the summer?”
“Ask Nick, my dear fellow,” Strefford answered for her; and: “By the
way, where is Nick--if one may ask?” young Breckenridge interposed,
glancing up to take belated note of his host’s absence.
“Dining out,” said Susy glibly. “People turned up: blighting bores that
I wouldn’t have dared to inflict on you.” How easily the old familiar
fibbing came to her!
“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now mind you look me up’; and then spend the
rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,” Strefford amplified.
The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through
Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a
hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: “I’ll call him up there
after dinner--and then he will feel silly”--but only to remember that
the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied
themselves a telephone.
The fact of Nick’s temporary inaccessibility--since she was now
convinced that he was really at the Hickses’--turned her distress to a
mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his
standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly
begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed
it at once.
“Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He’s going to marry Coral
next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her
practiced flippancy.
“Lord!” grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the
unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morning
with his Mueller exercises.
Suddenly Susy felt Strefford’s eyes upon her.
“What’s the matter with me? Too much rouge?” she asked, passing her arm
in his as they left the table.
“No: too little. Look at yourself,” he answered in a low tone.
“Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks fished up
from the canal!”
She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, hands
on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge
caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow--it was
believed to be his sole accomplishment--snapped his fingers in simulation
of bones, and shuffled after the couple on stamping feet.
Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with a
floating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for the
gondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.
“Well, what next--this ain’t all, is it?” Gillow presently queried, from
the divan where he lolled half-asleep with dripping brow. Fred Gillow,
like Nature, abhorred a void, and it was inconceivable to him that every
hour of man’s rational existence should not furnish a motive for getting
up and going somewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view,
and the Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company that
somebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.
Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he’d just come back from
there, and proposed that they should go out on foot for a change.
“Why not? What fun!” Susy was up in an instant. “Let’s pay somebody a
surprise visit--I don’t know who! Streffy, Prince, can’t you think of
somebody who’d be particularly annoyed by our arrival?”
“Oh, the list’s too long. Let’s start, and choose our victim on the
way,” Strefford suggested.
Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing her
high-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. There was no
moon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hung over them as
close as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped on them from garden-walls.
Susy’s heart tightened with memories of Como.
They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to the drifting
whims of aimless people. Presently someone proposed taking a nearer look
at the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and they hailed a gondola and
were rowed out through the bobbing lanterns and twanging guitar-strings.
When they landed again, Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, and
particularly resentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested a night club
near at hand, which was said to be jolly. The Prince warmly supported
this proposal; but on Susy’s curt refusal they started their rambling
again, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes and making for the
Piazza and Florian’s ices. Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar and
yet somehow known to her, Susy paused to stare about her with a laugh.
“But the Hickses--surely that’s their palace? And the windows all lit
up! They must be giving a party! Oh, do let’s go up and surprise them!”
The idea struck her as one of the drollest that she had ever originated,
and she wondered that her companions should respond so languidly.
“I can’t see anything very thrilling in surprising the Hickses,” Gillow
protested, defrauded of possible excitements; and Strefford added: “It
would surprise me more than them if I went.”
But Susy insisted feverishly: “You don’t know. It may be awfully
exciting! I have an idea that Coral’s announcing her engagement--her
engagement to Nick! Come, give me a hand, Streff--and you the other,
Fred-” she began to hum the first bars of Donna Anna’s entrance in Don
Giovanni. “Pity I haven’t got a black cloak and a mask....”
“Oh, your face will do,” said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm.
She drew back, flushing crimson. Breckenridge and the Prince had sprung
on ahead, and Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up the
stairs.
“My face? My face? What’s the matter with my face? Do you know any
reason why I shouldn’t go to the Hickses to-night?” Susy broke out in
sudden wrath.
“None whatever; except that if you do it will bore me to death,”
Strefford returned, with serenity.
“Oh, in that case--!”
“No; come on. I hear those fools banging on the door already.” He caught
her by the hand, and they started up the stairway. But on the first
landing she paused, twisted her hand out of his, and without a word,
without a conscious thought, dashed down the long flight, across the
great resounding vestibule and out into the darkness of the calle.
Strefford caught up with her, and they stood a moment silent in the
night.
“Susy--what the devil’s the matter?”
“The matter? Can’t you see? That I’m tired, that I’ve got a splitting
headache--that you bore me to death, one and all of you!” She turned and
laid a deprecating hand on his arm. “Streffy, old dear, don’t mind me:
but for God’s sake find a gondola and send me home.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
It was never any concern of Streff’s if people wanted to do things he
did not understand, and she knew that she could count on his obedience.
They walked on in silence to the next canal, and he picked up a passing
gondola and put her in it.
“Now go and amuse yourself,” she called after him, as the boat shot
under the nearest bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away from the
folly and futility that would be all she had left if Nick were to drop
out of her life....
“But perhaps he has dropped already--dropped for good,” she thought as
she set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.
The short summer night was already growing transparent: a new born
breeze stirred the soiled surface of the water and sent it lapping
freshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly two o’clock! Nick had no
doubt come back long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured by the
mere thought of his nearness. She knew that when their eyes and their
lips met it would be impossible for anything to keep them apart.
The gondolier dozing on the landing roused himself to receive her, and
to proffer two envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:
she threw it down again and paused under the lantern hanging from the
painted vault, the other envelope in her hand. The address it bore was
in Nick’s writing. “When did the signore leave this for me? Has he gone
out again?”
Gone out again? But the signore had not come in since dinner: of that
the gondolier was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.
A boy had brought the letter--an unknown boy: he had left it without
waiting. It must have been about half an hour after the signora had
herself gone out with her guests.
Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on to her own room, and there, beside the
very lamp which, two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn’s
fatal letter, she opened Nick’s.
“Don’t think me hard on you, dear; but I’ve got to work this thing out
by myself. The sooner the better--don’t you agree? So I’m taking the
express to Milan presently. You’ll get a proper letter in a day or two.
I wish I could think, now, of something to say that would show you I’m
not a brute--but I can’t. N. L.”
There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had a
semblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from Susy’s hands,
and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered there, her forehead
pressed against the balustrade, the dawn wind stirring in her thin
laces. Through her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingers
pressed against them, she felt the penetration of the growing light,
the relentless advance of another day--a day without purpose and without
meaning--a day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, and
staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand
Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy
curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to the
lounge and fell among its pillows-face downward--groping, delving for a
deeper night....
She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on the
floor at her feet. She had slept, then--was it possible?--it must
be eight or nine o’clock already! She had slept--slept like a
drunkard--with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now she
remembered--she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there,
inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read
it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before
the empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite,
she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that some
day!
After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feeling
younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he was
going away for “a day or two.” And the letter was not cruel: there
were tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiled
at herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on her
colourless lips, and rang for the maid.
“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that I should
like to see him presently.”
If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few days she
must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to
work, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford into
her confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty;
his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity when
his friends required it.
The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhat
sharply repeated her order. “But don’t wake him on purpose,” she added,
foreseeing the probable effect on Strefford’s temper.
“But, signora, the gentleman is already out.”
“Already out?” Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his bed before
luncheon-time! “Is it so late?” Susy cried, incredulous.
“After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o’clock train for England.
Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word that he would
write to the signora.”
The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her painted
image in the glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunate
stranger. There was no one left for her to take counsel of, then--no one
but poor Fred Gillow! She made a grimace at the idea.
But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?
XII.
NICK LANSING, in the Milan express, was roused by the same bar of
sunshine lying across his knees. He yawned, looked with disgust at his
stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he had decided to go to
Milan, and what on earth he should do when he got there. The difficulty
about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left
one facing a void....
When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out, got
some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his journey to
Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward postponed action and
dulled thought; and after twelve hours of furious mental activity that
was exactly what he wanted.
He fell into a doze again, waking now and then to haggard intervals
of more thinking, and then dropping off to the clank and rattle of the
train. Inside his head, in his waking intervals, the same clanking and
grinding of wheels and chains went on unremittingly. He had done all his
lucid thinking within an hour of leaving the Palazzo Vanderlyn the
night before; since then, his brain had simply continued to revolve
indefatigably about the same old problem. His cup of coffee, instead of
clearing his thoughts, had merely accelerated their pace.
At Genoa he wandered about in the hot streets, bought a cheap suit-case
and some underclothes, and then went down to the port in search of a
little hotel he remembered there. An hour later he was sitting in the
coffee-room, smoking and glancing vacantly over the papers while he
waited for dinner, when he became aware of being timidly but intently
examined by a small round-faced gentleman with eyeglasses who sat alone
at the adjoining table.
“Hullo--Buttles!” Lansing exclaimed, recognising with surprise the
recalcitrant secretary who had resisted Miss Hicks’s endeavour to
convert him to Tiepolo.
Mr. Buttles, blushing to the roots of his scant hair, half rose and
bowed ceremoniously.
Nick Lansing’s first feeling was of annoyance at being disturbed in his
solitary broodings; his next, of relief at having to postpone them even
to converse with Mr. Buttles.
“No idea you were here: is the yacht in harbour?” he asked, remembering
that the Ibis must be just about to spread her wings.
Mr. Buttles, at salute behind his chair, signed a mute negation: for the
moment he seemed too embarrassed to speak.
“Ah--you’re here as an advance guard? I remember now--I saw Miss Hicks
in Venice the day before yesterday,” Lansing continued, dazed at the
thought that hardly forty-eight hours had passed since his encounter
with Coral in the Scalzi.
Mr. Buttles, instead of speaking, had tentatively approached his table.
“May I take this seat for a moment, Mr. Lansing? Thank you. No, I am
not here as an advance guard--though I believe the Ibis is due some
time to-morrow.” He cleared his throat, wiped his eyeglasses on a silk
handkerchief, replaced them on his nose, and went on solemnly: “Perhaps,
to clear up any possible misunderstanding, I ought to say that I am no
longer in the employ of Mr. Hicks.”
Lansing glanced at him sympathetically. It was clear that he suffered
horribly in imparting this information, though his compact face did not
lend itself to any dramatic display of emotion.
“Really,” Nick smiled, and then ventured: “I hope it’s not owing to
conscientious objections to Tiepolo?”
Mr. Buttles’s blush became a smouldering agony. “Ah, Miss Hicks
mentioned to you... told you...? No, Mr. Lansing. I am principled
against the effete art of Tiepolo, and of all his contemporaries, I
confess; but if Miss Hicks chooses to surrender herself momentarily
to the unwholesome spell of the Italian decadence it is not for me to
protest or to criticize. Her intellectual and aesthetic range so far
exceeds my humble capacity that it would be ridiculous, unbecoming....”
He broke off, and once more wiped a faint moisture from his eyeglasses.
It was evident that he was suffering from a distress which he longed and
yet dreaded to communicate. But Nick made no farther effort to bridge
the gulf of his own preoccupations; and Mr. Buttles, after an expectant
pause, went on: “If you see me here to-day it is only because, after
a somewhat abrupt departure, I find myself unable to take leave of
our friends without a last look at the Ibis--the scene of so many
stimulating hours. But I must beg you,” he added earnestly, “should you
see Miss Hicks--or any other member of the party--to make no allusion
to my presence in Genoa. I wish,” said Mr. Buttles with simplicity, “to
preserve the strictest incognito.”
Lansing glanced at him kindly. “Oh, but--isn’t that a little
unfriendly?”
“No other course is possible, Mr. Lansing,” said the ex-secretary, “and
I commit myself to your discretion. The truth is, if I am here it is not
to look once more at the Ibis, but at Miss Hicks: once only. You will
understand me, and appreciate what I am suffering.”
He bowed again, and trotted away on his small, tightly-booted feet;
pausing on the threshold to say: “From the first it was hopeless,”
before he disappeared through the glass doors.
A gleam of commiseration flashed through Nick’s mind: there was
something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and efficient
Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited passion. And what
a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus suddenly deprived of the
secretary who possessed “the foreign languages”! Mr. Beck kept the
accounts and settled with the hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles’s
loftier task to entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who
flocked about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his
departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs. Hicks
would certainly call an Odyssey.
The next moment the vision of Coral’s hopeless suitor had faded, and
Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own woes.
The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from a little
restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often patronized, he had
done so with the firm intention of going away for a day or two in order
to collect his wits and think over the situation. But after his letter
had been entrusted to the landlord’s little son, who was a particular
friend of Susy’s, Nick had decided to await the lad’s return. The
messenger had not been bidden to ask for an answer; but Nick, knowing
the friendly and inquisitive Italian mind, was almost sure that the boy,
in the hope of catching a glimpse of Susy, would linger about while the
letter was carried up. And he pictured the maid knocking at his wife’s
darkened room, and Susy dashing some powder on her tear-stained face
before she turned on the light--poor foolish child!
The boy had returned rather sooner than Nick expected, and he had
brought no answer, but merely the statement that the signora was out:
that everybody was out.
“Everybody?”
“The signora and the four gentlemen who were dining at the palace. They
all went out together on foot soon after dinner. There was no one to
whom I could give the note but the gondolier on the landing, for the
signora had said she would be very late, and had sent the maid to bed;
and the maid had, of course, gone out immediately with her innamorato.”
“Ah--” said Nick, slipping his reward into the boy’s hand, and walking
out of the restaurant.
Susy had gone out--gone out with their usual band, as she did every
night in these sultry summer weeks, gone out after her talk with Nick,
as if nothing had happened, as if his whole world and hers had not
crashed in ruins at their feet. Ah, poor Susy! After all, she had merely
obeyed the instinct of self preservation, the old hard habit of keeping
up, going ahead and hiding her troubles; unless indeed the habit had
already engendered indifference, and it had become as easy for her as
for most of her friends to pass from drama to dancing, from sorrow to
the cinema. What of soul was left, he wondered--?
His train did not start till midnight, and after leaving the restaurant
Nick tramped the sultry by-ways till his tired legs brought him to a
standstill under the vine-covered pergola of a gondolier’s wine-shop at
a landing close to the Piazzetta. There he could absorb cooling drinks
until it was time to go to the station.
It was after eleven, and he was beginning to look about for a boat, when
a black prow pushed up to the steps, and with much chaff and laughter a
party of young people in evening dress jumped out. Nick, from under the
darkness of the vine, saw that there was only one lady among them, and
it did not need the lamp above the landing to reveal her identity. Susy,
bareheaded and laughing, a light scarf slipping from her bare shoulders,
a cigarette between her fingers, took Strefford’s arm and turned in the
direction of Florian’s, with Gillow, the Prince and young Breckenridge
in her wake....
Nick had relived this rapid scene hundreds of times during his hours
in the train and his aimless trampings through the streets of Genoa. In
that squirrel-wheel of a world of his and Susy’s you had to keep going
or drop out--and Susy, it was evident, had chosen to keep going. Under
the lamp-flare on the landing he had had a good look at her face, and
had seen that the mask of paint and powder was carefully enough adjusted
to hide any ravages the scene between them might have left. He even
fancied that she had dropped a little atropine into her eyes....
There was no time to spare if he meant to catch the midnight train, and
no gondola in sight but that which his wife had just left. He sprang
into it, and bade the gondolier carry him to the station. The cushions,
as he leaned back, gave out a breath of her scent; and in the glare of
electric light at the station he saw at his feet a rose which had fallen
from her dress. He ground his heel into it as he got out.
There it was, then; that was the last picture he was to have of her. For
he knew now that he was not going back; at least not to take up their
life together. He supposed he should have to see her once, to talk
things over, settle something for their future. He had been sincere in
saying that he bore her no ill-will; only he could never go back into
that slough again. If he did, he knew he would inevitably be drawn
under, slipping downward from concession to concession....
The noises of a hot summer night in the port of Genoa would have kept
the most care-free from slumber; but though Nick lay awake he did
not notice them, for the tumult in his brain was more deafening. Dawn
brought a negative relief, and out of sheer weariness he dropped into a
heavy sleep. When he woke it was nearly noon, and from his window he saw
the well-known outline of the Ibis standing up dark against the glitter
of the harbour. He had no fear of meeting her owners, who had doubtless
long since landed and betaken themselves to cooler and more fashionable
regions: oddly enough, the fact seemed to accentuate his loneliness, his
sense of having no one on earth to turn to. He dressed, and wandered out
disconsolately to pick up a cup of coffee in some shady corner.
As he drank his coffee his thoughts gradually cleared. It became
obvious to him that he had behaved like a madman or a petulant child--he
preferred to think it was like a madman. If he and Susy were to separate
there was no reason why it should not be done decently and quietly, as
such transactions were habitually managed among people of their kind.
It seemed grotesque to introduce melodrama into their little world
of unruffled Sybarites, and he felt inclined, now, to smile at the
incongruity of his gesture.... But suddenly his eyes filled with tears.
The future without Susy was unbearable, inconceivable. Why, after all,
should they separate? At the question, her soft face seemed close
to his, and that slight lift of the upper lip that made her smile so
exquisite. Well--he would go back. But not with any presence of going to
talk things over, come to an agreement, wind up their joint life like
a business association. No--if he went back he would go without
conditions, for good, forever....
Only, what about the future? What about the not far-distant day when
the wedding cheques would have been spent, and Granny’s pearls sold,
and nothing left except unconcealed and unconditional dependence on rich
friends, the role of the acknowledged hangers-on? Was there no other
possible solution, no new way of ordering their lives? No--there
was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and
leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat
Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in
New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous
children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he
did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had
been based on a moment’s midsummer madness; now the score must be
paid....
He decided to write. If they were to part he could not trust himself to
see her. He called a waiter, asked for pen and paper, and pushed aside
a pile of unread newspapers on the corner of the table where his coffee
had been served. As he did so, his eye lit on a Daily Mail of two days
before. As a pretext for postponing his letter, he took up the paper and
glanced down the first page. He read:
“Tragic Yachting Accident in the Solent. The Earl of Altringham and
his son Viscount d’Amblay drowned in midnight collision. Both bodies
recovered.”
He read on. He grasped the fact that the disaster had happened the
night before he had left Venice and that, as the result of a fog in
the Solent, their old friend Strefford was now Earl of Altringham, and
possessor of one of the largest private fortunes in England. It was
vertiginous to think of their old impecunious Streff as the hero of such
an adventure. And what irony in that double turn of the wheel which, in
one day, had plunged him, Nick Lansing, into nethermost misery, while it
tossed the other to the stars!
With an intenser precision he saw again Susy’s descent from the gondola
at the calle steps, the sound of her laughter and of Strefford’s chaff,
the way she had caught his arm and clung to it, sweeping the other men
on in her train. Strefford--Susy and Strefford!... More than once, Nick
had noticed the softer inflections of his friend’s voice when he spoke
to Susy, the brooding look in his lazy eyes when they rested on her. In
the security of his wedded bliss Nick had made light of those signs. The
only real jealousy he had felt had been of Fred Gillow, because of his
unlimited power to satisfy a woman’s whims. Yet Nick knew that such
material advantages would never again suffice for Susy. With Strefford
it was different. She had delighted in his society while he was
notoriously ineligible; might not she find him irresistible now?
The forgotten terms of their bridal compact came back to Nick: the
absurd agreement on which he and Susy had solemnly pledged their faith.
But was it so absurd, after all? It had been Susy’s suggestion (not his,
thank God!); and perhaps in making it she had been more serious than he
imagined. Perhaps, even if their rupture had not occurred, Strefford’s
sudden honours might have caused her to ask for her freedom....
Money, luxury, fashion, pleasure: those were the four cornerstones
of her existence. He had always known it--she herself had always
acknowledged it, even in their last dreadful talk together; and once he
had gloried in her frankness. How could he ever have imagined that, to
have her fill of these things, she would not in time stoop lower than
she had yet stooped? Perhaps in giving her up to Strefford he might be
saving her. At any rate, the taste of the past was now so bitter to him
that he was moved to thank whatever gods there were for pushing that
mortuary paragraph under his eye....
“Susy, dear [he wrote], the fates seem to have taken our future in hand,
and spared us the trouble of unravelling it. If I have sometimes been
selfish enough to forget the conditions on which you agreed to marry
me, they have come back to me during these two days of solitude. You’ve
given me the best a man can have, and nothing else will ever be worth
much to me. But since I haven’t the ability to provide you with what you
want, I recognize that I’ve no right to stand in your way. We must owe
no more Venetian palaces to underhand services. I see by the newspapers
that Streff can now give you as many palaces as you want. Let him have
the chance--I fancy he’ll jump at it, and he’s the best man in sight. I
wish I were in his shoes.
“I’ll write again in a day or two, when I’ve collected my wits, and can
give you an address. NICK.”
He added a line on the subject of their modest funds, put the letter
into an envelope, and addressed it to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing. As he did
so, he reflected that it was the first time he had ever written his
wife’s married name.
“Well--by God, no other woman shall have it after her,” he vowed, as he
groped in his pocketbook for a stamp.
He stood up with a stretch of weariness--the heat was stifling!--and put
the letter in his pocket.
“I’ll post it myself, it’s safer,” he thought; “and then what in the
name of goodness shall I do next, I wonder?” He jammed his hat down on
his head and walked out into the sun-blaze.
As he was turning away from the square by the general Post Office, a
white parasol waved from a passing cab, and Coral Hicks leaned forward
with outstretched hand. “I knew I’d find you,” she triumphed. “I’ve
been driving up and down in this broiling sun for hours, shopping and
watching for you at the same time.”
He stared at her blankly, too bewildered even to wonder how she knew he
was in Genoa; and she continued, with the kind of shy imperiousness that
always made him feel, in her presence, like a member of an orchestra
under a masterful baton; “Now please get right into this carriage, and
don’t keep me roasting here another minute.” To the cabdriver she called
out: “Al porto.”
Nick Lansing sank down beside her. As he did so he noticed a heap of
bundles at her feet, and felt that he had simply added one more to the
number. He supposed that she was taking her spoils to the Ibis, and
that he would be carried up to the deck-house to be displayed with the
others. Well, it would all help to pass the day--and by night he would
have reached some kind of a decision about his future.
On the third day after Nick’s departure the post brought to the Palazzo
Vanderlyn three letters for Mrs. Lansing.
The first to arrive was a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train
and posted at Turin. In it he briefly said that he had been called home
by the dreadful accident of which Susy had probably read in the daily
papers. He added that he would write again from England, and then--in
a blotted postscript--: “I wanted uncommonly badly to see you for
good-bye, but the hour was impossible. Regards to Nick. Do write me just
a word to Altringham.”
The other two letters, which came together in the afternoon, were both
from Genoa. Susy scanned the addresses and fell upon the one in her
husband’s writing. Her hand trembled so much that for a moment she could
not open the envelope. When she had done so, she devoured the letter in
a flash, and then sat and brooded over the outspread page as it lay on
her knee. It might mean so many things--she could read into it so
many harrowing alternatives of indifference and despair, of irony and
tenderness! Was he suffering tortures when he wrote it, or seeking
only to inflict them upon her? Or did the words represent his actual
feelings, no more and no less, and did he really intend her to
understand that he considered it his duty to abide by the letter of
their preposterous compact? He had left her in wrath and indignation,
yet, as a closer scrutiny revealed, there was not a word of reproach in
his brief lines. Perhaps that was why, in the last issue, they seemed so
cold to her.... She shivered and turned to the other envelope.
The large stilted characters, though half-familiar, called up no
definite image. She opened the envelope and discovered a post-card of
the Ibis, canvas spread, bounding over a rippled sea. On the back was
written:
“So awfully dear of you to lend us Mr. Lansing for a little cruise. You
may count on our taking the best of care of him.
“CORAL”