hadn’t a genteel tradition stretching back to 1736, or that hadn’t been restored as a community enterprise in the best sense, could possibly have quite the friendly feel of noblesse oblige that this one has.
“See . . . the woman with the tall young man.”
My mother’s friend nudged me again. It was the tall young man I was looking at. I remembered perfectly the tight lean jaw and the dark haunted eyes with shaggy brows making them seem more deeply set than they really were. And I wondered then, as I’ve wondered a good many times since, if murder doesn’t take its own bitter toll when society doesn’t. It had certainly set Colleton Reid apart. Phyllis’s “No one ever asks him to shoot with them” flashed through my mind.
But it wasn’t Colleton Reid, really, that I was interested in. It was the big blond-haired man following Phyllis Lattimer up the crowded aisle, head and shoulders above most of the people around him. Rusty Lattimer’s face had lost the defeated, almost sullen look it had had when I saw him last in Palm Beach in a chromium and white leather chair under a yellow beach umbrella, a fifth or sixth whisky and soda in his hand. His grey eyes were clear and hard, his face lean and brown and determined. He didn’t, God knows, look happy, but he did look like a man who was captain of his soul.
My mother’s friend touched my elbow. “That’s her son, Colleton Reid.—Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Reid? This child is Diane Baker from Philadelphia.—And Mr. Reid.”
Colleton and his mother gave me oblique greetings in the crowded aisle. Phyllis Lattimer, moving out into the courtyard, spotted me and nodded brightly. I had the uneasy feeling that her sharp little mind was busy every moment. And we’d no sooner crossed the foyer into the white moonlight than she was beside me, one hand on my wrist and the other on Mrs. Atwell Reid’s.
“Diane—this is marvellous! How did you happen to turn up in Charleston? My dear, why didn’t you wire me you were coming?”
She was turning on her full radiance, knowing I couldn’t possibly do anything about it.
“This is Diane Baker, Mrs. Reid. We were talking about her yesterday . . . it was her grandmother Miss Caroline stayed with in Philadelphia.”
Mrs. Reid, firmly pinioned by Phyllis’s right hand, held out hers. She was tail, with snowy-white hair and clear fine skin, blue eyes and dark brows. She was over fifty, I suppose, and still gracefully slender in a grey lace dress with long sleeves, high neckline, and pearls around her throat. She was a stunning woman still, but I knew she must have been unbelievably lovely when she was young.
“You’ve been in Charleston before, haven’t you?” she asked. “I’ve heard of you from time to time. I want you to meet my son.”
She glanced around. Colleton Reid had moved away and was over by the fountain in the wall, talking to a blonde girl I recognized as Rusty Lattimer’s sister Anne. She was much thinner and more tired-looking than when I’d met her at Phyllis’s in Newport. Her hands were nervous; she smoked three cigarettes, it seemed to me, to Colleton Reid’s one, and smiled too brightly at people as they moved back and forth.
“You know Rusty, Diane.”
Phyllis released Mrs. Reid’s arm and took hold of her husband’s.
“Hullo! How did you get down here?”
Rusty Lattimer grinned and held out his hand. It was like taking hold of a piece of iron wrapped in coarse sandpaper.
“It’s funny, Phyllis was talking about you last night . . . wondering if you’d given us all the go-by.”
A flicker of anxiety went through his wife’s face. For an instant I think she wasn’t so sure I wasn’t going to let her down with a thud, She had it coming, I thought; but there was something in Rusty Lattimer’s face now that I saw it closer that would have stopped me even if I’d been the gal to do it—which I wasn’t, and which Phyllis, of course, knew very well. I had the instant feeling that Rusty Lattimer needed all the faith he had in his wife . . . even needed it bolstered as much as possible. There was a kind of profound disillusionment in the back of his grey eyes and in the sun lines at the corners of them, and in the almost grim set of his big mouth, that even his welcoming grin didn’t manage to wipe out.
Just then, as I’d said, “Oh, I’m apt to turn up practically anywhere,” the darnedest thing happened. There was one of those instants of silence that sometimes fall on a room full of chattering, laughing people, and a warm soft voice fell across it like sunlight through a glass of rich burgundy.
“Don’t be silly!”
I don’t know why particularly—because people can be silly about a lot of things—but the whole quality of it, the warmth, the laughing banter, a kind of rejection and at the same time invitation, with complete mastery of the situation, indicated as plain as day that a man was making love to a girl. And just as instantly every one in the group I was interested in stiffened like so much frozen meat. Because I was facing the wall I couldn’t see the girl, but I saw the rest of them: Mrs. Reid’s sudden panic of alarm, her son Colleton’s eyes flashing dark fire. I saw the girl beside him give him a quick frightened glance as her eyes moved from him to his mother, and then to her brother.
And it was Rusty Lattimer’s face that really stopped me. If anybody could translate visually, in anybody else’s face, the kind of instant and gone but perfectly tormenting pain that shoots through a tooth you’d thought was perfectly sound, that would be the nearest approach to what I saw there. Rusty Lattimer was in love with this girl . . . and I knew she must be Jennifer Reid. I knew he was—instantly, clearly and definitely. I knew too that it was a destroying kind of love, and utterly hopeless, because Rusty was the kind of man who being married to another woman could do nothing about it.
I was literally stunned. It was the only thing I hadn’t thought of coming down on the plane. It just simply had never occurred to me that a man Phyllis wanted could be in love with anybody else. I glanced at her, and stopped again. She was still smiling . . . untouched and completely confident, looking at her husband with an amused, almost mocking smile, it seemed to me. In fact she looked precisely like a prize cat that had not only won the blue ribbon but had got a saucer of thick yellow cream thrown in.
Then every one started talking again. It hadn’t taken, all of it, more than a split second . . . but it was all there, a situation perched neatly on as large a keg of dynamite as I’ve ever seen in a public place,
I glanced around. A girl and a man were standing beside a tub of blush-pink camellias, beside the stone column under the long tiled stoop over the foyer doors. The girl, apparently unconscious of anything unusual, was laughing up at the man whose back was turned toward us. She was dark, with short cropped curly black hair, blue silvery black in the white moonlight. Her face and bare arms, and throat above her black net dress, were as warm as her voice and as cool as the camellias in the tree beside her, her eyes were blue and dancing. But it wasn’t them, or her face or her skin, as much as some quality over and above all of them that made her electric just then.
Then the man turned, and if it had been a simple enough problem in dynamite before, I realized now that it was anything but. It was Phyllis’s divorced husband, Bradley Porter. I looked at Phyllis. She gave me a quick almost imperceptible wink, and I felt my face flush angrily. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t decent. I was ashamed of Brad even more than of her, to let himself be part of her scheme to defeat anything so young and lovely, with such a proud little head and clear untarnished eyes.
And I looked at Rusty. Did he know, I wondered? Was that part of the disillusionment and racking
