"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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sured 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-gla.s.s 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. b.u.t.tles 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-gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sing 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 grat.i.tude 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.