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

Susy to see the pictures some morning when they

were sure to have the place to themselves.

 

But Susy divined that there was another reason for Strefford’s

suggestion. She had never yet shown herself with him publicly,

among their own group of people: now he had determined that she

should do so, and she knew why. She had humbled his pride; he

had understood, and forgiven her. But she still continued to

treat him as she had always treated the Strefford of old,

Charlie Strefford, dear old negligible impecunious Streff; and

he wanted to show her, ever so casually and adroitly, that the

man who had asked her to marry him was no longer Strefford, but

Lord Altringham.

 

At the very threshold, his Ambassador’s greeting marked the

difference: it was followed, wherever they turned, by

ejaculations of welcome from the rulers of the world they moved

in. Everybody rich enough or titled enough, or clever enough or

stupid enough, to have forced a way into the social citadel, was

there, waving and flag-flying from the battlements; and to all

of them Lord Altringham had become a marked figure. During

their slow progress through the dense mass of important people

who made the approach to the pictures so well worth fighting

for, he never left Susy’s side, or failed to make her feel

herself a part of his triumphal advance. She heard her name

mentioned: “Lansing—a Mrs. Lansing—an American … Susy

Lansing? Yes, of course …. You remember her? At Newport, At

St. Moritz? Exactly…. Divorced already? They say so …

Susy darling! I’d no idea you were here … and Lord

Altringham! You’ve forgotten me, I know, Lord Altringham ….

Yes, last year, in Cairo … or at Newport … or in Scotland

… Susy, dearest, when will you bring Lord Altringham to dine?

Any night that you and he are free I’ll arrange to be ….”

 

“You and he”: they were “you and he” already!

 

“Ah, there’s one of them—of my great-grandmothers,” Strefford

explained, giving a last push that drew him and Susy to the

front rank, before a tall isolated portrait which, by sheer

majesty of presentment, sat in its great carved golden frame as

on a throne above the other pictures.

 

Susy read on the scroll beneath it: “The Hon’ble Diana Lefanu,

fifteenth Countess of Altringham”—and heard Strefford say: “Do

you remember? It hangs where you noticed the empty space above

the mantel-piece, in the Vandyke room. They say Reynolds

stipulated that it should be put with the Vandykes.”

 

She had never before heard him speak of his possessions, whether

ancestral or merely material, in just that full and satisfied

tone of voice: the rich man’s voice. She saw that he was

already feeling the influence of his surroundings, that he was

glad the portrait of a Countess of Altringham should occupy the

central place in the principal room of the exhibition, that the

crowd about it should be denser there than before any of the

other pictures, and that he should be standing there with Susy,

letting her feel, and letting all the people about them guess,

that the day she chose she could wear the same name as his

pictured ancestress.

 

On the way back to her hotel, Strefford made no farther allusion

to their future; they chatted like old comrades in their

respective corners of the taxi. But as the carriage stopped at

her door he said: “I must go back to England the day after tomorrow, worse luck! Why not dine with me to-night at the

Nouveau Luxe? I’ve got to have the Ambassador and Lady Ascot,

with their youngest girl and my old Dunes aunt, the Dowager

Duchess, who’s over here hiding from her creditors; but I’ll try

to get two or three amusing men to leaven the lump. We might go

on to a boite afterward, if you’re bored. Unless the dancing

amuses you more ….”

 

She understood that he had decided to hasten his departure

rather than linger on in uncertainty; she also remembered having

heard the Ascots’ youngest daughter, Lady Joan Senechal, spoken

of as one of the prettiest girls of the season; and she recalled

the almost exaggerated warmth of the Ambassador’s greeting at

the private view.

 

“Of course I’ll come, Streff dear!” she cried, with an effort at

gaiety that sounded successful to her own strained ears, and

reflected itself in the sudden lighting up of his face.

 

She waved a good-bye from the step, saying to herself, as she

looked after him: “He’ll drive me home to-night, and I shall

say ‘yes’; and then he’ll kiss me again. But the next time it

won’t be nearly as disagreeable.”

 

She turned into the hotel, glanced automatically at the empty

pigeon-hole for letters under her key-hook, and mounted the

stairs following the same train of images. “Yes, I shall say

‘yes’ to-night,” she repeated firmly, her hand on the door of

her room. “That is, unless, they’ve brought up a letter ….”

She never re-entered the hotel without imagining that the letter

she had not found below had already been brought up.

 

Opening the door, she turned on the light and sprang to the

table on which her correspondence sometimes awaited her.

 

There was no letter; but the morning papers, still unread, lay

at hand, and glancing listlessly down the column which

chronicles the doings of society, she read:

 

“After an extended cruise in the AEgean and the Black Sea on

their steam-yacht Ibis, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks and their

daughter are established at the Nouveau Luxe in Rome. They have

lately had the honour of entertaining at dinner the Reigning

Prince of Teutoburger-Waldhain and his mother the Princess

Dowager, with their suite. Among those invited to meet their

Serene Highnesses were the French and Spanish Ambassadors, the

Duchesse de Vichy, Prince and Princess Bagnidilucca, Lady

Penelope Pantiles—” Susy’s eye flew impatiently on over the

long list of titles—“and Mr. Nicholas Lansing of New York, who

has been cruising with Mr. and Mrs. Hicks on the Ibis for the

last few months.”

XX

THE Mortimer Hickses were in Rome; not, as they would in former

times have been, in one of the antiquated hostelries of the

Piazza di Spagna or the Porta del Popolo, where of old they had

so gaily defied fever and nourished themselves on local colour;

but spread out, with all the ostentation of philistine

millionaires, under the piano nobile ceilings of one of the

high-perched “Palaces,” where, as Mrs. Hicks shamelessly

declared, they could “rely on the plumbing,” and “have the

privilege of over-looking the Queen Mother’s Gardens.”

 

It was that speech, uttered with beaming aplomb at a dinner-table surrounded by the cosmopolitan nobility of the Eternal

City, that had suddenly revealed to Lansing the profound change

in the Hicks point of view.

 

As he looked back over the four months since he had so

unexpectedly joined the Ibis at Genoa, he saw that the change,

at first insidious and unperceived, dated from the ill-fated day

when the Hickses had run across a Reigning Prince on his

travels.

 

Hitherto they had been proof against such perils: both Mr. and

Mrs. Hicks had often declared that the aristocracy of the

intellect was the only one which attracted them. But in this

case the Prince possessed an intellect, in addition to his few

square miles of territory, and to one of the most beautiful

Field Marshal’s uniforms that had ever encased a royal warrior.

The Prince was not a warrior, however; he was stooping, pacific

and spectacled, and his possession of the uniform had been

revealed to Mrs. Hicks only by the gift of a full-length

photograph in a Bond Street frame, with Anastasius written

slantingly across its legs. The Prince—and herein lay the

Hickses’ undoing—the Prince was an archaeologist: an earnest

anxious enquiring and scrupulous archaeologist. Delicate health

(so his suite hinted) banished him for a part of each year from

his cold and foggy principality; and in the company of his

mother, the active and enthusiastic Dowager Princess, he

wandered from one Mediterranean shore to another, now assisting

at the exhumation of Ptolemaic mummies, now at the excavation of

Delphic temples or of North African basilicas. The beginning of

winter usually brought the Prince and his mother to Rome or

Nice, unless indeed they were summoned by family duties to

Berlin, Vienna or Madrid; for an extended connection with the

principal royal houses of Europe compelled them, as the Princess

Mother said, to be always burying or marrying a cousin. At

other moments they were seldom seen in the glacial atmosphere of

courts, preferring to royal palaces those of the other, and more

modern type, in one of which the Hickses were now lodged.

 

Yes: the Prince and his mother (they gaily avowed it) revelled

in Palace Hotels; and, being unable to afford the luxury of

inhabiting them, they liked, as often as possible, to be invited

to dine there by their friends—“or even to tea, my dear,” the

Princess laughingly avowed, “for I’m so awfully fond of buttered

scones; and Anastasius gives me so little to eat in the desert.”

 

The encounter with these ambulant Highnesses had been fatal—

Lansing now perceived it—to Mrs. Hicks’s principles. She had

known a great many archaeologists, but never one as agreeable as

the Prince, and above all never one who had left a throne to

camp in the desert and delve in Libyan tombs. And it seemed to

her infinitely pathetic that these two gifted beings, who

grumbled when they had to go to “marry a cousin” at the Palace

of St. James or of Madrid, and hastened back breathlessly to the

far-off point where, metaphorically speaking, pick-axe and spade

had dropped from their royal hands—that these heirs of the ages

should be unable to offer themselves the comforts of up-to-date

hotel life, and should enjoy themselves “like babies” when they

were invited to the other kind of “Palace,” to feast on buttered

scones and watch the tango.

 

She simply could not bear the thought of their privations; and

neither, after a time, could Mr. Hicks, who found the Prince

more democratic than anyone he had ever known at Apex City, and

was immensely interested by the fact that their spectacles came

from the same optician.

 

But it was, above all, the artistic tendencies of the Prince and

his mother which had conquered the Hickses. There was

fascination in the thought that, among the rabble of vulgar

uneducated royalties who overran Europe from Biarritz to the

Engadine, gambling, tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar

plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses,

should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who

joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk,

and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable

and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto

represented the higher life to the Hickses.

 

Now at last Mrs. Hicks saw the possibility of being at once

artistic and luxurious, of surrendering herself to the joys of

modern plumbing and yet keeping the talk on the highest level.

“If the poor dear Princess wants to dine at the Nouveau Luxe why

shouldn’t we give her that pleasure?” Mrs. Hicks smilingly

enquired; “and as for enjoying her buttered scones like a baby,

as she says, I think it’s the sweetest thing about her.”

 

Coral Hicks did not join in this chorus; but she accepted, with

her curious air of impartiality, the change in her parents’

manner of life, and for the first time (as Nick observed)

occupied herself with her mother’s toilet, with the result that

Mrs. Hicks’s outline became firmer, her garments soberer in hue

and finer in material; so that, should anyone chance to detect

the daughter’s likeness to her mother, the result was less

likely to be