Chapter III: Part I: I (3)

“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....”