The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton [e reader manga .txt] 📗

the luggage of the whole party (little Nat’s motor horn

included, as a last concession, and because he had hitherto

forborne to play on it); and in the second, the five Fulmers,

the bonne, who at the eleventh hour had refused to be left, a

cage-full of canaries, and a foundling kitten who had murderous

designs on them; all of which had to be taken because, if the

bonne came, there would be nobody left to look after them.

 

At the corner Susy tore herself from Nick’s arms and held up the

procession while she ran back to the second taxi to make sure

that the bonne had brought the house-key. It was found of

course that she hadn’t but that Junie had; whereupon the caravan

got under way again, and reached the station just as the train

was starting; and there, by some miracle of good nature on the

part of the guard, they were all packed together into an empty

compartment—no doubt, as Susy remarked, because train officials

never failed to spot a newly-married couple, and treat them

kindly.

 

The children, sentinelled by Junie, at first gave promise of

superhuman goodness; but presently their feelings overflowed,

and they were not to be quieted till it had been agreed that Nat

should blow his motor-horn at each halt, while the twins called

out the names of the stations, and Geordie, with the canaries

and kitten, affected to change trains.

 

Luckily the halts were few; but the excitement of travel,

combined with over-indulgence in the chocolates imprudently

provided by Nick, overwhelmed Geordie with a sudden melancholy

that could be appeased only by Susy’s telling him stories till

they arrived at Fontainebleau.

 

The day was soft, with mild gleams of sunlight on decaying

foliage; and after luggage and livestock had been dropped at the

pension Susy confessed that she had promised the children a

scamper in the forest, and buns in a tea-shop afterward. Nick

placidly agreed, and darkness had long fallen, and a great many

buns been consumed, when at length the procession turned down

the street toward the pension, headed by Nick with the sleeping

Geordie on his shoulder, while the others, speechless with

fatigue and food, hung heavily on Susy.

 

It had been decided that, as the bonne was of the party, the

children might be entrusted to her for the night, and Nick and

Susy establish themselves in an adjacent hotel. Nick had

flattered himself that they might remove their possessions there

when they returned from the tea-room; but Susy, manifestly

surprised at the idea, reminded him that her charges must first

be given their supper and put to bed. She suggested that he

should meanwhile take the bags to the hotel, and promised to

join him as soon as Geordie was asleep.

 

She was a long time coming, but waiting for her was sweet, even

in a deserted hotel reading-room insufficiently heated by a

sulky stove; and after he had glanced through his morning’s

mail, hurriedly thrust into his pocket as he left Paris, he sank

into a state of drowsy beatitude. It was all the maddest

business in the world, yet it did not give him the sense of

unreality that had made their first adventure a mere golden

dream; and he sat and waited with the security of one in whom

dear habits have struck deep roots. In this mood of

acquiescence even the presence of the five Fulmers seemed a

natural and necessary consequence of all the rest; and when Susy

at length appeared, a little pale and tired, with the brooding

inward look that busy mothers bring from the nursery, that too

seemed natural and necessary, and part of the new order of

things.

 

They had wandered out to a cheap restaurant for dinner; now, in

the damp December night, they were walking back to the hotel

under a sky full of rain-clouds. They seemed to have said

everything to each other, and yet barely to have begun what they

had to tell; and at each step they took, their heavy feet

dragged a great load of bliss.

 

In the hotel almost all the lights were already out; and they

groped their way to the third floor room which was the only one

that Susy had found cheap enough. A ray from a street-lamp

struck up through the unshuttered windows; and after Nick had

revived the fire they drew their chairs close to it, and sat

quietly for a while in the dark.

 

Their silence was so sweet that Nick could not make up his mind

to break it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a sense

of permanence, of having at last unlimited time before him in

which to taste his joy and let its sweetness stream through him.

But at length he roused himself to say: “It’s queer how things

coincide. I’ve had a little bit of good news in one of the

letters I got this morning.”

 

Susy took the announcement serenely. “Well, you would, you

know,” she commented, as if the day had been too obviously

designed for bliss to escape the notice of its dispensers.

 

“Yes,” he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. “During

the cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete—oh, just travel-impressions, of course; they couldn’t be more. But the editor

of the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. And

here’s his cheque, if you please! So you see you might have let

me take the jolly room downstairs with the pink curtains. And

it makes me awfully hopeful about my book.”

 

He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps some

reassertion of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaited

The Pageant of Alexander; and deep down under the lover’s well-being the author felt a faint twinge of mortified vanity when

Susy, leaping to her feet, cried out, ravenously and without

preamble: “Oh, Nick, Nick—let me see how much they’ve given

you!”

 

He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. “A couple

of hundred, you mercenary wretch!”

 

“Oh, oh—” she gasped, as if the good news had been almost too

much for her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping to

the ground, and burying her face against his knees.

 

“Susy, my Susy,” he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder.

“Why, dear, what is it? You’re not crying?”

 

“Oh, Nick, Nick—two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I’ve

got to tell you—oh now, at once!”

 

A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew back

from her bowed figure.

 

“Now? Oh, why now?” he protested. “What on earth does it

matter now—whatever it is?”

 

“But it does matter—it matters more than you can think!”

 

She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted

her head so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a

ruddy halo. “Oh, Nick, the bracelet—Ellie’s bracelet ….

I’ve never returned it to her,” she faltered out.

 

He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which she

clutched his knees. For an instant he did not remember what she

alluded to; it was the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn’s name

that had fallen between them like an icy shadow. What an

incorrigible fool he had been to think they could ever shake off

such memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a past!

 

“The bracelet?—Oh, yes,” he said, suddenly understanding, and

feeling the chill mount slowly to his lips.

 

“Yes, the bracelet … Oh, Nick, I meant to give it back at

once; I did—I did; but the day you went away I forgot

everything else. And when I found the thing, in the bottom of

my bag, weeks afterward, I thought everything was over between

you and me, and I had begun to see Ellie again, and she was kind

to me and how could I?” To save his life he could have found no

answer, and she pressed on: “And so this morning, when I saw

you were frightened by the expense of bringing all the children

with us, and when I felt I couldn’t leave them, and couldn’t

leave you either, I remembered the bracelet; and I sent you off

to telephone while I rushed round the corner to a little

jeweller’s where I’d been before, and pawned it so that you

shouldn’t have to pay for the children …. But now, darling,

you see, if you’ve got all that money, I can get it out of pawn

at once, can’t I, and send it back to her?”

 

She flung her arms about him, and he held her fast, wondering if

the tears he felt were hers or his. Still he did not speak; but

as he clasped her close she added, with an irrepressible flash

of her old irony: “Not that Ellie will understand why I’ve done

it. She’s never yet been able to make out why you returned her

scarf-pin.”

 

For a long time she continued to lean against him, her head on

his knees, as she had done on the terrace of Como on the last

night of their honeymoon. She had ceased to talk, and he sat

silent also, passing his hand quietly to and fro over her hair.

The first rapture had been succeeded by soberer feelings. Her

confession had broken up the frozen pride about his heart, and

humbled him to the earth; but it had also roused forgotten

things, memories and scruples swept aside in the first rush of

their reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always:

he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them

together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves

almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the

other, would never again wholly let them go. Yet as he sat

there he thought of Strefford, he thought of Coral Hicks. He

had been a coward in regard to Coral, and Susy had been sincere

and courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his mind dwelt on

Coral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and he

was almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly out

of her mind.

 

It was the old contrast between the two ways of loving, the

man’s way and the woman’s; and after a moment it seemed to Nick

natural enough that Susy, from the very moment of finding him

again, should feel neither pity nor regret, and that Strefford

should already be to her as if he had never been. After all,

there was something Providential in such arrangements.

 

He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands,

and whispered: “Wake up; it’s bedtime.”

 

She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caught

her hand and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill in

the darkness, and through the clouds, from which a few drops

were already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into a

space of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was again

hidden.

 

End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The Glimpses of the Moon, by Wharton