“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.
