第1章 I(1)

IT rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own.

"It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it as ours, to risk the experiment," Susy Lansing opined, as they hung over the inevitable marble balustrade and watched their tutelary orb roll its magic carpet across the waters to their feet.

"Yes--or the loan of Strefford's villa," her husband emended, glancing upward through the branches at a long low patch of paleness to which the moonlight was beginning to give the form of a white house-front.

"Oh, come when we'd five to choose from. At least if you count the Chicago flat."

"So we had--you wonder!" He laid his hand on hers, and his touch renewed the sense of marvelling exultation which the deliberate survey of their adventure always roused in her ....

It was characteristic that she merely added, in her steady laughing tone: "Or, not counting the flat--for I hate to brag- just consider the others: Violet Melrose's place at Versailles, your aunt's villa at Monte Carlo--and a moor!"

She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet with a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he shouldn't accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have no desire to do so. "Poor old Fred!" he merely remarked; and she breathed out carelessly: "Oh, well--"

His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they stood silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore.

Nick Lansing spoke at last. "Versailles in May would have been impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it's exactly the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So-- with all respect to you--it wasn't much of a mental strain to decide on Como."

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity.

"It took a good deal of argument to convince you that we could face the ridicule of Como!"

"Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then it's-as good as any other."

She sighed out a blissful assent. "And I must say that Streffy has done things to a turn. Even the cigars--who do you suppose gave him those cigars?" She added thoughtfully: "You'll miss them when we have to go."

"Oh, I say, don't let's talk to-night about going. Aren't we outside of time and space ...? Smell that guinea-a-bottle stuff over there: what is it? Stephanotis?"

"Y-yes .... I suppose so. Or gardenias .... Oh, the fire- flies! Look ... there, against that splash of moonlight on the water. Apples of silver in a net-work of gold ...." They leaned together, one flesh from shoulder to finger-tips, their eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples.

"I could bear," Lansing remarked, "even a nightingale at this moment ...."

A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long liquid whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above their heads.

"It's a little late in the year for them: they're ending just as we begin."

Susy laughed. "I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye to each other as sweetly."

It was in her husband's mind to answer: "They're not saying good-bye, but only settling down to family cares." But as this did not happen to be in his plan, or in Susy's, he merely echoed her laugh and pressed her closer.

The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the moon was turning from gold to white in a sky powdered with vanishing stars. Across the lake the lights of a little town went out, one after another, and the distant shore became a floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a great white moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The nightingales had paused and the trickle of the fountain behind the house grew suddenly insistent.

When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. "I have been thinking," she said, "that we ought to be able to make it last at least a year longer."

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

"You mean," he enquired after a pause, "without counting your grandmother's pearls?"

"Yes--without the pearls."

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper:

"Tell me again just how."

"Let's sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best." He stretched himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on a heap of boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee.

Just above her, when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of moonflooded sky incrusted like silver in a sharp black patterning of plane-boughs. All about them breathed of peace and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so acute that it was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of bills and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.

"People with a balance can't be as happy as all this," Susy mused, letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch's bugbear; they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's.