My part in the conversation was drawn from me, literally, by my hostess’s intermittent silences. I found myself asking small, leading questions, about herself and her interests, that I might have the pleasure of her responses.
Even the third member of the party began to speak up. I think it was partly due to his enjoyment in seeing his wife make, what must have been, yet one more easy conquest. It verified his own judgment and taste, and so restored his self-confidence. By the time the end of the dinner was reached, he was riding with us, in high spirits, full of the galloping bombast I had first heard from him.
He saw me admiring a great bluish diamond, set in a ring which she wore beside her wedding ring. It was a gorgeous stone, fit to surmount a king’s sceptre, and I shouldn’t be surprised if once it had. I was about to compliment her on it, during one of those conversational pauses which it had become my role to terminate, but he broke in blatantly and upset the procedure.
“Show Mickey your engagement ring, honey!” he cried. “He’s got his eye on it.” Turning to me, he added: “Not many like it, outside of collections.”
“Oh, please don’t bother!” I protested, seeing her removing it from her finger.
“No trouble,” she replied, and handed it across the table to me. It almost seemed that she placed no value on it, for she paid no attention to my reactions to it, bur unconcernedly began sipping her coffee and thinking of Heaven knows what.
The diamond was most extra-ordinary. One did not have to be an expert to know it, and I said so, with many adjectives, to Belmore’s evident gratification. My mind, though, was not entirely on what I was examining. I had seen another diamond, in another ring, on her finger.
It was a very small diamond, this other one — a mere chip, a splinter, scarcely worthy to be called a diamond at all, beside the monster I was inspecting. The ring in which it was set, narrow and inconspicuous as its jewel, had nestled close beside the opulent one, and so had been obscured until its majestic companion was removed. I wondered what it was doing there, the little upstart, between those two rich pledges of troth and consummation.
I returned the engagement ring to its owner. As she replaced it on her finger, I caught another glimpse of that second little diamond with the modest setting, before it was again overshadowed.
Very likely, I should have kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t.
“That’s an odd little ring,” I said. “It looks so lost, between those two.” I thought I was saying it amusingly, at least.
Belmore chose to take it that way. “It’s a silly little gewgaw,” he said, “but Mrs. Belmore likes it, and when a woman likes something, that’s that. Have a cigar.”
“I do like it,” she assented. “My husband thinks it’s fun to call it a silly little gewgaw but after all I—” He broke in, contritely, with, “Now honey!”
But she continued: “It is little, but it is wrong to call it silly. I’m very fond of it.”
With the subtlety of a rhinoceros, Belmore abruptly changed the subject. “Why don’t we go into the library?” he suggested. “Mickey wants to see our first editions.”
“Would you and he mind going on ahead? I’ll join you in a moment.”
We did. It was obvious she wanted to cry.
“I’m afraid I put my foot in it somehow,” I said, as he and I reached the library. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“That’s all right; you couldn’t know. Perhaps I should have told you. It may have something to do with — that other business. Psychological, you know. Don’t you think so?”
“I’ll know better if you tell me.”
It clearly did have something to do with “that other business” — in his opinion, at any rate — and he had a wretched time making himself begin. For fully a minute he scowled in silence, and I could see he was considering the pros and cons of confiding in me. At last he turned on me, almost defiantly, with: “Some of our friends know about it, anyway!” Then he poured it out without a pause, as if fearful that, once he stopped, he could not bring himself to begin again.
“The fact is, she was engaged to be married, but broke it off to marry me instead. She was right. She was smart. I admire her for it. What was she giving up? He was just a young kid, with blond hair and a good physique, but that’s all. He was broke. Absolutely broke and always will be. It couldn’t have worked. Six months of starving together, and they’d have hated each other. I pointed that out to her, and made her see it. And suppose they’d have kids? It would be worse, and I made her see that too. It’s to her credit that she faced reality, instead of going on dreaming. Well, she’s not ever going to lose by it. All this—” he indicated the house, with a comprehensive sweep — “everything I have will be hers.”
He stopped, hoping for my approval as well as, I think, his own. But it was only his last three words that stuck with me — “will be hers.” Will be? Only will be? Then hadn’t he given her anything, settled anything on her? Was he afraid, perhaps, that if he did—?
She rejoined us then, pretending she had been giving some instructions to the servants. The butler followed a moment later, with coffee and liqueurs; and a little after that Belmore excused himself, as he had arranged with me that he would, saying he had to put in a phone call to London.
Passing behind her chair on his way out, he did something that I think was despicable. He cast a meaning glance over her head at me, and then at the tray of liqueurs, indicating as clearly as if he had said it that I should try to get her to drink, and thereby perhaps loosen her tongue. Fortunately, she did not see him do it, since he was behind her, though for a moment I was afraid she had noticed the shocked expression that must have been on my face and the involuntary way I looked from the bottles to her. However, she gave no sign, so either she had seen nothing or did not understand, being too guileless herself to believe such perfidy of her husband.
Then I was alone with her, and it made no difference what he had wanted me to do, because I couldn’t have done it. Not that it wouldn’t have been easy enough to follow his suggestion, for she instantly began to speak about one of the cordials and to tell me, with child-like pleasure, what a nice taste it has.
“My husband keeps it in the house because I like it,” she said. “It comes from the Italian part of Switzerland, and it’s called Fior d’Alpi. That means Flower of the Alps. You can see why. There’s a sort of little plant growing in it.” She held the bottle up for my inspection, and there was, as she said, a plant-like formation in the midst of the fluid, with leaves and stems, all of pure white.
“That’s not a plant,” I said, trying to impress her with my knowledge. “It’s a crystalline structure, produced by the sugar in the alcohol.”
“Oh, do you understand chemistry?”
“A little,” I replied, hoping I had not revealed that I was a doctor. “I took it at college.”
She filled my glass and then her own, and we both drank a little. The liqueur had an extremely pleasant taste and induced an equally pleasant glow.
“This could become a vice with me,” she said. “If I drink even a second glass, my head feels giddy, in a most agreeable way, and I feel that I haven’t a care in the world.”
“Then I advise you never to take a second glass,” I said, again sounding more like a doctor than I wished, and tried to cover it up by adding: “I mean, that with someone who isn’t used to drinking, one drink goes as far as two or three with someone who is.”