The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

to say that would show you I’m not a brute—but I can’t. N. L. “

There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had

a semblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from

Susy’s hands, and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered

there, her forehead pressed against the balustrade, the dawn

wind stirring in her thin laces. Through her closed eyelids and

the tightly-clenched fingers pressed against them, she felt the

penetration of the growing light, the relentless advance of

another day—a day without purpose and without meaning—a day

without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, and staring from

dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand

Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the

heavy curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the

darkness to the lounge and fell among its pillows-face

downward—groping, delving for a deeper night ….

She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun

on the floor at her feet. She had slept, then—was it

possible?—it must be eight or nine o’clock already! She had

slept—slept like a drunkard—with that letter on the table at

her elbow! Ah, now she remembered—she had dreamed that the

letter was a dream! But there, inexorably, it lay; and she

picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read it. Then she tore

it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before the empty

hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite, she

burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that

some day!

After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of

feeling younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely

said that he was going away for “a day or two.” And the letter

was not cruel: there were tender things in it, showing through

the curt words. She smiled at herself a little stiffly in the

glass, put a dash of red on her colourless lips, and rang for

the maid.

“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that

I should like to see him presently.”

If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few

days she must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her

mind refused to work, and the only thing she could think of was

to take Strefford into her confidence. She knew that he could

be trusted in a real difficulty; his impish malice transformed

itself into a resourceful ingenuity when his friends required

it.

The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy

somewhat sharply repeated her order. “But don’t wake him on

purpose,” she added, foreseeing the probable effect on

Strefford’s temper.

“But, signora, the gentleman is already out.”

“Already out?” Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his

bed before luncheon-time! “Is it so late?” Susy cried,

incredulous.

“After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o’clock train for

England. Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word

that he would write to the signora.”

The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her

painted image in the glass, as if she had been trying to

outstare an importunate stranger. There was no one left for her

to take counsel of, then—no one but poor Fred Gillow! She made

a grimace at the idea.

But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?

NICK LANSING, in the Milan express, was roused by the same bar

of sunshine lying across his knees. He yawned, looked with

disgust at his stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he

had decided to go to Milan, and what on earth he should do when

he got there. The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that

the next morning they generally left one facing a void ….

When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out,

got some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his

journey to Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward

postponed action and dulled thought; and after twelve hours of

furious mental activity that was exactly what he wanted.

He fell into a doze again, waking now and then to haggard

intervals of more thinking, and then dropping off to the clank

and rattle of the train. Inside his head, in his waking

intervals, the same clanking and grinding of wheels and chains

went on unremittingly. He had done all his lucid thinking

within an hour of leaving the Palazzo Vanderlyn the night

before; since then, his brain had simply continued to revolve

indefatigably about the same old problem. His cup of coffee,

instead of clearing his thoughts, had merely accelerated their

pace.

At Genoa he wandered about in the hot streets, bought a cheap

suitcase and some underclothes, and then went down to the port

in search of a little hotel he remembered there. An hour later

he was sitting in the coffee-room, smoking and glancing vacantly

over the papers while he waited for dinner, when he became aware

of being timidly but intently examined by a small round-faced

gentleman with eyeglasses who sat alone at the adjoining table.

“Hullo—Buttles!” Lansing exclaimed, recognising with surprise

the recalcitrant secretary who had resisted Miss Hicks’s

endeavour to convert him to Tiepolo.

Mr. Buttles, blushing to the roots of his scant hair, half rose

and bowed ceremoniously.

Nick Lansing’s first feeling was of annoyance at being disturbed

in his solitary broodings; his next, of relief at having to

postpone them even to converse with Mr. Buttles.

“No idea you were here: is the yacht in harbour?” he asked,

remembering that the Ibis must be just about to spread her

wings.

Mr. Buttles, at salute behind his chair, signed a mute negation:

for the moment he seemed too embarrassed to speak.

“Ah—you’re here as an advance guard? I remember now—I saw

Miss Hicks in Venice the day before yesterday,” Lansing

continued, dazed at the thought that hardly forty-eight hours

had passed since his encounter with Coral in the Scalzi.

Mr. Buttles, instead of speaking, had tentatively approached his

table. “May I take this seat for a moment, Mr. Lansing? Thank

you. No, I am not here as an advance guard—though I believe

the Ibis is due some time tomorrow.” He cleared his throat,

wiped his eyeglasses on a silk handkerchief, replaced them on

his nose, and went on solemnly: “Perhaps, to clear up any

possible misunderstanding, I ought to say that I am no longer in

the employ of Mr. Hicks.”

Lansing glanced at him sympathetically. It was clear that he

suffered horribly in imparting this information, though his

compact face did not lend itself to any dramatic display of

emotion.

“Really,” Nick smiled, and then ventured: “I hope it’s not

owing to conscientious objections to Tiepolo?”

Mr. Buttles’s blush became a smouldering agony. “Ah, Miss Hicks

mentioned to you … told you …? No, Mr. Lansing. I am

principled against the effete art of Tiepolo, and of all his

contemporaries, I confess; but if Miss Hicks chooses to

surrender herself momentarily to the unwholesome spell of the

Italian decadence it is not for me to protest or to criticize.

Her intellectual and aesthetic range so far exceeds my humble

capacity that it would be ridiculous, unbecoming ….”

He broke off, and once more wiped a faint moisture from his

eyeglasses. It was evident that he was suffering from a

distress which he longed and yet dreaded to communicate. But

Nick made no farther effort to bridge the gulf of his own

preoccupations; and Mr. Buttles, after an expectant pause, went

on: “If you see me here to-day it is only because, after a

somewhat abrupt departure, I find myself unable to take leave of

our friends without a last look at the Ibis—the scene of so

many stimulating hours. But I must beg you,” he added

earnestly, “should you see Miss Hicks—or any other member of

the party—to make no allusion to my presence in Genoa. I

wish,” said Mr. Buttles with simplicity, “to preserve the

strictest incognito.”

Lansing glanced at him kindly. “Oh, but—isn’t that a little

unfriendly?”

“No other course is possible, Mr. Lansing,” said the ex-secretary, “and I commit myself to your discretion. The truth

is, if I am here it is not to look once more at the Ibis, but at

Miss Hicks: once only. You will understand me, and appreciate

what I am suffering.”

He bowed again, and trotted away on his small, tightly-booted

feet; pausing on the threshold to say: “From the first it was

hopeless,” before he disappeared through the glass doors.

A gleam of commiseration flashed through Nick’s mind: there was

something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and

efficient Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited

passion. And what a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus

suddenly deprived of the secretary who possessed “the foreign

languages”! Mr. Beck kept the accounts and settled with the

hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles’s loftier task to

entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who flocked

about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his

departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs.

Hicks would certainly call an Odyssey.

The next moment the vision of Coral’s hopeless suitor had faded,

and Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own

woes. The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from

a little restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often

patronized, he had done so with the firm intention of going away

for a day or two in order to collect his wits and think over the

situation. But after his letter had been entrusted to the

landlord’s little son, who was a particular friend of Susy’s,

Nick had decided to await the lad’s return. The messenger had

not been bidden to ask for an answer; but Nick, knowing the

friendly and inquisitive Italian mind, was almost sure that the

boy, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Susy, would linger

about while the letter was carried up. And he pictured the maid

knocking at his wife’s darkened room, and Susy dashing some

powder on her tear-stained face before she turned on the light—

poor foolish child!

The boy had returned rather sooner than Nick expected, and he

had brought no answer, but merely the statement that the

signora was out: that everybody was out.

“Everybody?”

“The signora and the four gentlemen who were dining at the

palace. They all went out together on foot soon after dinner.

There was no one to whom I could give the note but the gondolier

on the landing, for the signora had said she would be very late,

and had sent the maid to bed; and the maid had, of course, gone

out immediately with her innamorato.”

“Ah—” said Nick, slipping his reward into the boy’s hand, and

walking out of the restaurant.

Susy had gone out—gone out with their usual band, as she did

every night in these sultry summer weeks, gone out after her

talk with Nick, as if nothing had happened, as if his whole

world and hers had not crashed in ruins at their feet. Ah, poor

Susy! After all, she had merely obeyed the instinct of self

preservation, the old hard habit of keeping up, going ahead and

hiding her troubles; unless indeed the habit had already

engendered indifference, and it had become as easy for her as

for most of her friends to pass from drama to dancing,