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

was worth it and what wasn’t.

 

This philosophy had at first enchanted Lansing; but now it began

to rouse vague fears. The fine armour of her fastidiousness had

preserved her from the kind of risks she had hitherto been

exposed to; but what if others, more subtle, found a joint in

it? Was there, among her delicate discriminations, any

equivalent to his own rules? Might not her taste for the best

and rarest be the very instrument of her undoing; and if

something that wasn’t “trash” came her way, would she hesitate a

second to go to pieces for it?

 

He was determined to stick to the compact that they should do

nothing to interfere with what each referred to as the other’s

“chance”; but what if, when hers came, he couldn’t agree with

her in recognizing it? He wanted for her, oh, so passionately,

the best; but his conception of that best had so insensibly, so

subtly been transformed in the light of their first month

together!

 

His lazy strokes were carrying him slowly shoreward; but the

hour was so exquisite that a few yards from the landing he laid

hold of the mooring rope of Streffy’s boat and floated there,

following his dream …. It was a bore to be leaving; no doubt

that was what made him turn things inside-out so uselessly.

Venice would be delicious, of course; but nothing would ever

again be as sweet as this. And then they had only a year of

security before them; and of that year a month was gone.

 

Reluctantly he swam ashore, walked up to the house, and pushed

open a window of the cool painted drawing-room. Signs of

departure were already visible. There were trunks in the hall,

tennis rackets on the stairs; on the landing, the cook Giulietta

had both arms around a slippery hold-all that refused to let

itself be strapped. It all gave him a chill sense of unreality,

as if the past month had been an act on the stage, and

its setting were being folded away and rolled into the wings to

make room for another play in which he and Susy had no part.

 

By the time he came down again, dressed and hungry, to the

terrace where coffee awaited him, he had recovered his usual

pleasant sense of security. Susy was there, fresh and gay, a

rose in her breast and the sun in her hair: her head was bowed

over Bradshaw, but she waved a fond hand across the breakfast

things, and presently looked up to say: “Yes, I believe we can

just manage it.”

 

“Manage what?”

 

“To catch the train at Milan—if we start in the motor at ten

sharp.”

 

He stared. “The motor? What motor?”

 

“Why, the new people’s—Streffy’s tenants. He’s never told me

their name, and the chauffeur says he can’t pronounce it. The

chauffeur’s is Ottaviano, anyhow; I’ve been making friends with

him. He arrived last night, and he says they’re not due at Como

till this evening. He simply jumped at the idea of running us

over to Milan.”

 

“Good Lord—” said Lansing, when she stopped.

 

She sprang up from the table with a laugh. “It will be a

scramble; but I’ll manage it, if you’ll go up at once and pitch

the last things into your trunk. “

 

“Yes; but look here—have you any idea what it’s going to cost?”

 

She raised her eyebrows gaily. “Why, a good deal less than our

railway tickets. Ottaviano’s got a sweetheart in Milan, and

hasn’t seen her for six months. When I found that out I knew

he’d be going there anyhow.”

 

It was clever of her, and he laughed. But why was it that he

had grown to shrink from even such harmless evidence of her

always knowing how to “manage”? “Oh, well,” he said to himself,

“she’s right: the fellow would be sure to be going to Milan.”

 

Upstairs, on the way to his dressing room, he found her in a

cloud of finery which her skilful hands were forcibly

compressing into a last portmanteau. He had never seen anyone

pack as cleverly as Susy: the way she coaxed reluctant things

into a trunk was a symbol of the way she fitted discordant facts

into her life. “When I’m rich,” she often said, “the thing I

shall hate most will be to see an idiot maid at my trunks.”

 

As he passed, she glanced over her shoulder, her face pink with

the struggle, and drew a cigar-box from the depths. “Dearest,

do put a couple of cigars into your pocket as a tip for

Ottaviano.”

 

Lansing stared. “Why, what on earth are you doing with

Streffy’s cigars?”

 

“Packing them, of course …. You don’t suppose he meant them

for those other people?” She gave him a look of honest wonder.

 

“I don’t know whom he meant them for—but they’re not

ours ….”

 

She continued to look at him wonderingly. “I don’t see

what there is to be solemn about. The cigars are not Streffy’s

either … you may be sure he got them out of some bounder. And

there’s nothing he’d hate more than to have them passed on to

another.”

 

“Nonsense. If they’re not Streffy’s they’re much less mine.

Hand them over, please, dear.”

 

“Just as you like. But it does seem a waste; and, of course,

the other people will never have one of them …. The gardener

and Giulietta’s lover will see to that!”

 

Lansing looked away from her at the waves of lace and muslin

from which she emerged like a rosy Nereid. “How many boxes of

them are left?”

 

“Only four.”

 

“Unpack them, please.”

 

Before she moved there was a pause so full of challenge that

Lansing had time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion

between his anger and its cause. And this made him still

angrier.

 

She held out a box. “The others are in your suitcase

downstairs. It’s locked and strapped.”

 

“Give me the key, then.”

 

“We might send them back from Venice, mightn’t we? That lock is

so nasty: it will take you half an hour.”

 

“Give me the key, please.” She gave it.

 

He went downstairs and battled with the lock, for the allotted

half-hour, under the puzzled eyes of Giulietta and the sardonic

grin of the chauffeur, who now and then, from the threshold,

politely reminded him how long it would take to get to Milan.

Finally the key turned, and Lansing, broken-nailed and

perspiring, extracted the cigars and stalked with them into the

deserted drawing room. The great bunches of golden roses that

he and Susy had gathered the day before were dropping their

petals on the marble embroidery of the floor, pale camellias

floated in the alabaster tazzas between the windows, haunting

scents of the garden blew in on him with the breeze from the

lake. Never had Streffy’s little house seemed so like a nest of

pleasures. Lansing laid the cigar boxes on a console and ran

upstairs to collect his last possessions. When he came down

again, his wife, her eyes brilliant with achievement, was seated

in their borrowed chariot, the luggage cleverly stowed away, and

Giulietta and the gardener kissing her hand and weeping out

inconsolable farewells.

 

“I wonder what she’s given them?” he thought, as he jumped in

beside her and the motor whirled them through the nightingale-thickets to the gate.

 

IV.

 

CHARLIE STREFFORD’S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the

Nelson Vanderlyns’ palace called for loftier analogies.

 

Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to

Susy. Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great

shadowy staircase, their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a

ceiling weighed down with Olympians, their chilly evening in a

corner of a drawing room where minuets should have been danced

before a throne, contrasted with the happy intimacies of Como as

their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted with the mutual

confidence of the day before.

 

The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing

had had too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things

over not to make a special effort to hide from each other the

ravages of their first disagreement. But, deep down and

invisible, the disagreement remained; and compunction for having

been its cause gnawed at Susy’s bosom as she sat in her

tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a

tarnished mirror.

 

“I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of

scale,” she mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move

back and forward in the dim recesses of the mirror. “And yet,”

she continued, “Ellie Vanderlyn’s hardly half an inch taller

than I am; and she certainly isn’t a bit more dignified …. I

wonder if it’s because I feel so horribly small to-night that

the place seems so horribly big.”

 

She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome

and high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever

before been oppressed by the evidences of wealth.

 

She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped

hands …. Even now she could not understand what had made her

take the cigars. She had always been alive to the value of her

inherited scruples: her reasoned opinions were unusually free,

but with regard to the things one couldn’t reason about she was

oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken Streffy’s cigars! She

had taken them—yes, that was the point—she had taken them for

Nick, because the desire to please him, to make the smallest

details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious, had become

her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him,

precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have

scorned to commit for herself; and, since he hadn’t instantly

felt the difference, she would never be able to explain it to

him.

 

She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and

glanced around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had

said something about the Signora’s having left a letter for her;

and there it lay on the writing-table, with her mail and Nick’s;

a thick envelope addressed in Ellie’s childish scrawl, with a

glaring “Private” dashed across the corner.

 

“What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so,”

Susy mused.

 

She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed

letters fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie’s hand, to

Nelson Vanderlyn Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly

pencilled a number and a date: one, two, three, four—with a

week’s interval between the dates.

 

“Goodness—” gasped Susy, understanding.

 

She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long

time she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper

covered with Ellie’s writing had fluttered out among them, but

she let it lie; she knew so well what it would say! She knew

all about her friend, of course; except poor old Nelson, who

didn’t, But she had never imagined that Ellie would dare to use

her in this way. It was unbelievable … she had never pictured

anything so vile …. The blood rushed to her face, and she

sprang up angrily, half minded to tear the letters in bits and

throw them all into the fire.

 

She heard her husband’s knock on the door between their rooms,

and swept the dangerous packet under the blotting-book.

 

“Oh, go away, please, there’s a dear,” she called out; “I

haven’t finished unpacking, and everything’s in such a mess.”

Gathering up Nick’s papers and letters, she ran across the room

and thrust them through the door. “Here’s something to keep you

quiet,” she laughed,