The Glimpses of the Moon - Edith Wharton (short novels in english txt) 📗

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 REsource.)

 

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 eyeglasses, 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 homeward, 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