I’m off for the other side; going back on the Sorceress. She’s just been overhauled at Greenock, and we ought to have a good spin over. Better come along with me, old man.”
The Sorceress was Van Degen’s steam-yacht, most huge and complicated of her kind: it was his habit, after his semi-annual flights to Paris and London, to take a joyous company back on her and let Clare return by steamer. The character of these parties made the invitation almost an offense to Ralph; but reflecting that it was probably a phrase distributed to every acquaintance when Van Degen was in a rosy mood, he merely answered: “Much obliged, my dear fellow; but Undine and I are sailing immediately.”
Peter’s glassy eye grew livelier. “Ah, to be sure—you’re not over the honeymoon yet. How’s the bride? Stunning as ever? My regards to her, please. I suppose she’s too deep in dressmaking to be called on? Don’t you forget to look up Clare!” He hurried on in pursuit of a flitting petticoat and Ralph continued his walk home.
He prolonged it a little in order to put off telling Undine of his plight; for he could devise only one way of meeting the cost of the voyage, and that was to take it at once, and thus curtail their Parisian expenses. But he knew how unwelcome this plan would be, and he shrank the more from seeing Undine’s face harden; since, of late, he had so basked in its brightness.
When at last he entered the little salon she called “stuffy” he found her in conference with a blond-bearded gentleman who wore the red ribbon in his lapel, and who, on Ralph’s appearance—and at a sign, as it appeared, from Mrs. Marvell—swept into his note-case some small objects that had lain on the table, and bowed himself out with a “Madame—Monsieur” worthy of the highest traditions.
Ralph looked after him with amusement. “Who’s your friend—an Ambassador or a tailor?”
Undine was rapidly slipping on her rings, which, as he now saw, had also been scattered over the table.
“Oh, it was only that jeweller I told you about—the one Bertha Shallum goes to.”
“A jeweller? Good heavens, my poor girl! You’re buying jewels?” The extravagance of the idea struck a laugh from him.
Undine’s face did not harden: it took on, instead, almost deprecating look. “Of course not—how silly you are! I only wanted a few old things reset. But I won’t if you’d rather not.”
She came to him and sat down at his side, laying her hand on his arm. He took the hand up and looked at the deep gleam of the sapphires in the old family ring he had given her.
“You won’t have that reset?” he said, smiling and twisting the ring about on her finger; then he went on with his thankless explanation. “It’s not that I don’t want you to do this or that; it’s simply that, for the moment, we’re rather strapped. I’ve just been to see the steamer people, and our passages will cost a good deal more than I thought.”
He mentioned the sum and the fact that he must give an answer the next day. Would she consent to sail that very Saturday? Or should they go a fortnight later, in a slow boat from Plymouth?
Undine frowned on both alternatives. She was an indifferent sailor and shrank from the possible “nastiness” of the cheaper boat. She wanted to get the voyage over as quickly and luxuriously as possible—Bertha Shallum had told her that in a “deck-suite” no one need be sea-sick—but she wanted still more to have another week or two of Paris; and it was always hard to make her see why circumstances could not be bent to her wishes.
“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 Français. 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 hatbrim: “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 Français? Great Scott, Ralph—no wonder your wife’s pining for the Folies Bergère!”
“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
