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.
