“This week? But how on earth can I be ready? Besides, we’re dining at Enghien with the Shallums on Saturday, and motoring to Chantilly with the Jim Driscolls on Sunday. I can’t imagine how you thought we could go this week!”
But she still opposed the cheap steamer, and after they had carried the question on to Voisin’s, and there unprofitably discussed it through a long luncheon, it seemed no nearer a solution.
“Well, think it over—let me know this evening,” Ralph said, proportioning the waiter’s fee to a bill burdened by Undine’s reckless choice of primeurs.
His wife was to join the newly-arrived Mrs. Shallum in a round of the rue de la Paix; and he had seized the opportunity of slipping off to a classical performance at the Francais. On their arrival in Paris he had taken Undine to one of these entertainments, but it left her too weary and puzzled for him to renew the attempt, and he had not found time to go back without her. He was glad now to shed his cares in such an atmosphere. The play was of the greatest, the interpretation that of the vanishing grand manner which lived in his first memories of the Parisian stage, and his surrender such influences as complete as in his early days. Caught up in the fiery chariot of art, he felt once more the tug of its coursers in his muscles, and the rush of their flight still throbbed in him when he walked back late to the hotel.
XIII
He had expected to find Undine still out; but on the stairs he crossed Mrs. Shallum, who threw at him from under an immense hat-brim: “Yes, she’s in, but you’d better come and have tea with me at the Luxe. I don’t think husbands are wanted!”
Ralph laughingly rejoined that that was just the moment for them to appear; and Mrs. Shallum swept on, crying back: “All the same, I’ll wait for you!”
In the sitting-room Ralph found Undine seated behind a tea-table on the other side of which, in an attitude of easy intimacy, Peter Van Degen stretched his lounging length.
He did not move on Ralph’s appearance, no doubt thinking their kinship close enough to make his nod and “Hullo!” a sufficient greeting. Peter in intimacy was given to miscalculations of the sort, and Ralph’s first movement was to glance at Undine and see how it affected her. But her eyes gave out the vivid rays that noise and banter always struck from them; her face, at such moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres blazing. That the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin’s husband was not precisely agreeable to Marvell, who thought Peter a bore in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. But he was becoming blunted to Undine’s lack of discrimination; and his own treatment of Van Degen was always tempered by his sympathy for Clare.
He therefore listened with apparent good-humour to Peter’s suggestion of an evening at a petit theatre with the Harvey Shallums, and joined in the laugh with which Undine declared: “Oh, Ralph won’t go—he only likes the theatres where they walk around in bathtowels and talk poetry.—Isn’t that what you’ve just been seeing?” she added, with a turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him.
“What? One of those five-barrelled shows at the Francais? Great Scott, Ralph—no wonder your wife’s pining for the Folies Bergere!”
“She needn’t, my dear fellow. We never interfere with each other’s vices.”
Peter, unsolicited, was comfortably lighting a cigarette. “Ah, there’s the secret of domestic happiness. Marry somebody who likes all the things you don’t, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you do.”
Undine laughed appreciatively. “Only it dooms poor Ralph to such awful frumps. Can’t you see the sort of woman who’d love his sort of play?”
“Oh, I can see her fast enough—my wife loves ‘em,” said their visitor, rising with a grin; while Ralph threw, out: “So don’t waste your pity on me!” and Undine’s laugh had the slight note of asperity that the mention of Clare always elicited.
“Tomorrow night, then, at Paillard’s,” Van Degen concluded. “And about the other business—that’s a go too? I leave it to you to settle the date.”
The nod and laugh they exchanged seemed to hint at depths of collusion from which Ralph was pointedly excluded; and he wondered how large a programme of pleasure they had already had time to sketch out. He disliked the idea of Undine’s being too frequently seen with Van Degen, whose Parisian reputation was not fortified by the connections that propped it up in New York; but he did not want to interfere with her pleasure, and he was still wondering what to say when, as the door closed, she turned to him gaily.
“I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve got some news for you.” She laid a light touch on his arm.
Touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her engaged, over a Nouveau Luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon’s ravages.
“Oh, I didn’t shop much—I didn’t stay out long.” She raised a kindling face to him. “And what do you think I’ve been doing? While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn’t fib—I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands. I’ve saved you the price of our passage!”
Ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty. When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?
“You wonderful woman—how did you do it? By countermanding a tiara?”
“You know I’m not such a fool as you pretend!” She held him at arm’s length with a nod of joyous mystery. “You’ll simply never guess! I’ve made Peter Van Degen ask us to go home on the Sorceress. What. do you say to that?”
She flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a doubt of the effect the announcement would produce.
Ralph stared at her. “The Sorceress? You MADE him?”
“Well, I managed it, I worked him round to it! He’s crazy about the idea now—but I don’t think he’d thought of it before he came.”
“I should say not!” Ralph ejaculated. “He never would have had the cheek to think of it.”
“Well, I’ve made him, anyhow! Did you ever know such luck?”
“Such luck?” He groaned at her obstinate innocence. “Do you suppose I’ll let you cross the ocean on the Sorceress?”
She shrugged impatiently. “You say that because your cousin doesn’t go on her.”
“If she doesn’t, it’s because it’s no place for decent women.”
“It’s Clare’s fault if it isn’t. Everybody knows she’s crazy about you, and she makes him feel it. That’s why he takes up with other women.”
Her anger reddened her cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes. Even in his recoil from what she said Ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty. But for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her back wrath for wrath.
“Is that the precious stuff he tells you?”
“Do you suppose I had to wait for him to tell me? Everybody knows it—everybody in New York knew she was wild when you married. That’s why she’s always been so nasty to me. If you won’t go on the Sorceress they’ll all say it’s because she was jealous of me and wouldn’t let you.”
Ralph’s indignation had already flickered down to disgust. Undine was no longer beautiful—she seemed to have the face of her thoughts. He stood up with an impatient laugh.
“Is that another of his arguments? I don’t wonder they’re convincing—” But as quickly as it had come the sneer dropped, yielding to a wave of pity, the vague impulse to silence and protect her. How could he have given way to the provocation of her weakness, when his business was to defend her from it and lift her above it? He recalled his old dreams of saving her from Van Degenism—it was not thus that he had imagined the rescue.
“Don’t let’s pay Peter the compliment of squabbling over him,” he said, turning away to pour himself a cup of tea.