Skyscraper (22 page)

His eyes flickered toward Sarah briefly. Sarah, sitting rather stiffly, very tailored, very correct, was unwelcomely conscious of the ghost of delight which never failed to stir her when she knew that David Dwight as, if fleetly, remembering. The Maryland place had had a name long before Dwight bought it for the proverbial song. He couldn't afford more than one verse and a chorus in those days. Latterly his taste in choruses had changed, become more concrete. The Maryland place, eight acres and a dear ramshackle house, had been called, sentimentally, Heartsease—

It was at Heartsease that they had once stayed, very far from all the world, at Heartsease they had parted, as lovers—

“Why don't you call it ‘Nonesuch'? Wasn't there a house once—built for a queen—?” asked Lynn, hazy on history.

“They never found its trace, said David. “‘Nonesuch?' That has,” he said, “a melancholy sound, but sweetly secret.”

Travis yawned. “When do we get tea? And I hope,” he added piously, “I hope to God it
isn't
tea!”

A horn honked dimly.

“That's the Carters,” Dwight said, and got to his feet, “and the host not there. Hurry!”

He slipped a hand under Lynn's arm, urging her forward. “Bet I beat you to the house,” he challenged.

The other followed slowly. Travis shook his head. “You'd think he was twenty,” he said in grudging admiration, conscious of the weight of his own thirty-six years. “I couldn't run like that from a fire!”

But Lynn reached the broad, winding walk first, and slowed down, unwilling to appear before strangers at posthaste, hair ruffled and cheeks red. There was a sports roadster in front of the door, and beside it a tall, languid man and a rather pretty woman. Thirtyish, both of them, very casual, the Collin Carters, of New York, Paris, Palm Beach, Newport—and originally Paw Paw, Virginia.

Now, with the introductions over, the house party was complete. They went indoors and, while the Carters vanished stairward, composed themselves to wait for tea. Tea was—tea, to Travis's disgust; but it was also thin tomato sandwiches and caviar on crisp crackers; and it was likewise cocktails and highballs, and Travis brightened. The chukker was going better than he thought it would.

Millie Carer was very pretty, after all. Reappearing. She wore lounging pajamas of black velvet and lamé, jade at her ears, jade on her wrists, jade as her symbol. She had, she thought, a right to wear them, as gaily as she wore the cool green stones. Or at least, when they had been together, ages ago he had been—interested. Was, it appeared, no longer. Millie drank three cocktails and pouted while her husband talked international matches with Travis.

Lynn was eating sandwiches with the zest induced by tennis, a naturally healthy appetite, and an early, hurried luncheon. David Dwight watched her, balancing a glass. He smiled at her lazily. He said, “I was going to suggest a swim—but I won't—not now.”

“When is dinner?” she demanded.

“Eight-thirty.”

“We've time,” she said, and looked at a wall clock.

Millie was saying, “Bridge? I haven't had a game of bridge since—since Easter. I swore off. But—”

“Let's,” said Travis.

Dwight touched a bell rope. Wilkins, the servant who had been with him in the penthouse, came into the room, with his astonishingly truculent air. He had, however, a special, almost fraternal smile for Lynn, who spoke to him by name. A bridge table was set up in a small glassed veranda. Dwight managed well. Sarah found herself facing Travis, Millie, her own husband. “Oh brother,” said Millie, “why do I always cut you, Jack? You know we fight like cats and dogs and you never remember conventions!”

Neither did she, except at a bridge table.

Dwight asked, turning away from the table, “Swim? Sure you want to, Lynn?”

“I ate only four sandwiches,” said Lynn, “and I didn't drink—oh, just one cup of tea. I never drink other things, this time of day; they make me sleepy.”

“You must be charming—asleep,” said Dwight, low.

But Sarah heard him—and overbid her hand.

 

 

 

A SECRET BETRAYED
LATER, LYNN IN THE ONE-PIECE AFFAIR OF SCARLET, belted in white, and Dwight, a bathrobe dripping from his astonishingly massive shoulders, were walking toward the docks, down the steps, together. “How well do you swim?” he wanted to know. “As well as you play tennis?”

“No. I lived inland so long,” she answered, “about ten strokes is my limit.”

He watched her wade in from the steps in shallow water and shiver with delight as the cool blue caress flowed about her. He dropped his bathrobe, appearing in trunks only, and dived cleanly from the end of the dock and swam around her. She was swimming in a little flurry of smitten water.

“Here, take it easy,” he admonished her; and for ten minutes devoted himself to teaching, his hand just touching her, his eyes alert.

“If I had you here—for a long time—I'd teach you,” he said, and added, as if it were necessary—“to swim.”

Returning to the house, he said carelessly, “I should have asked young Shepard, I suppose. But I'm a selfish beast. I must be, to put my happiness above your own!”

She ignored the implication; she had to. She said, “I'm perfectly happy—as things are.”

She tried to believe that she was. She knew she was not. After all, she was not a little angry at Tom. Yet she would have given a year of her life—she could afford to be generous and reckless at her age—to have Tom with her now in this almost too perfect spot. Their courtship, their loving, had been in spite of surroundings; it had never had a setting of charm and ease and relaxation. Her face sobered, her eyes were miles away, Dwight, watching her, was uneasy.

“Yes, I should have asked him,” he repeated.

“No—Oh, do we go through the house—like this?”

“We do. By the back way, through the back passage, up the back stairs. At least you do. I have my rooms,” he told her “in a small wing on the main floor. Here you are, there are the stairs.”

It was a little dark in the passageway. He took her hand to guide her. She was close, she was sweet, in the red bathing-suit; she was fashionably, very nearly naked. She was suddenly conscious of it, conscious too of her companion's lack of conventional attire. She pulled her hand away.

“Is it very late?” Her voice was uneven.

“No, you've time to rest,” he told her, “before dinner.” His voice was exceptionally steady. He had made it so. He stood at the foot of the stairs and watched her mount them, her slim bare ankles and legs very white in the dusk.

He asked himself, turning away, are you going to make a damned fool of yourself—again?

He was, of course; knowing it ahead of time made little difference.

There were other guests at dinner, besides Sarah in her black crepe and Millie in her turquoise tulle, too elaborate perhaps for the occasion but too flattering to china-blue eyes and ash-blond hair to resist, and besides Lynn, in the printed green chiffon. There was a Supreme-Court judge, who was a fine judge of old brandy and good prints as well as of legal tangles; there was his wife, who had money; there were two pretty girls, twins, from the neighboring estate, and two young men who might as well have been twins, perfectly resembling each other in innocuous good looks, manner, and clothes.

The dining-room was a comfortable, cheerful sort of place. Cream and yellow, mahogany and French blue. A plate rail. A chair rail. A good dinner, well served. “Everything off the place.” The broilers, explained Dwight, cost him five dollars a pound, at least.

Cocktails before, and wine, during. Afterward, more bridge, the radio, the twin girls dancing with the duplicate young men. Millie, slipping her hand under Dwight's arm—“There's going to be a moon—do take me out to see the moon, Davie.”

A perfect host, he did so; they returned very shortly; Dwight very unperturbed, the ash on his cigar at least two inches long, Millie, her respiratory action disturbed, a hard little spot of color under the delicate mask of cream rouge.

Lynn had been dancing with the judge, of all people. Large and pleasant, masking an almost mordant wit behind the fat, unlined screen of his face, he liked waltzing. Over the radio, from a New York roof garden, there came a waltz—

Now Lynn was listening to his honor's pleasant flattery. Dwight came up behind her, catlike, as always. “Bridge,” agreed his honor cheerfully. He liked a game of bridge.

Somehow Lynn found herself out in the wide corner of the porch that overlooked the water. There were slatted screens, rolled up, vines, chairs, a lazy swing. She lowered herself into it and watched, with delight, the shimmer of moonlight on the water, the silver path leading to gold. Dwight, sitting beside her in a lounge chair, took out his cigarette case and offered it to her.

She smoked; the before-dinner cocktail, the Chambertin, the liqueur sang pleasantly in her veins; the exhilaration of strenuous exercise, of the swim, had left her glowing and pleasantly tired, open the insidiousness of a perfectly planned dinner. She was sleepy, yet stimulated; her mental processes were a trifle blurred, not by anything as crude as an actual alcoholic intoxication but by the subtler intoxication of youth and health and bodily comfort. She swayed lazily in the soft embrace of the swing, touching the floor with a pointed toe, her arms clasped behind her head.

“Happy?” asked Dwight, low.

“Yes.” But it was not true, she was not happy—not entirely. She turned the ring on her finger. Something disturbed her vaguely, ate at her consciousness, tunneling, undermining the physical languor, the sense of luxury and drowsy contentment.

“You're very quiet,” he commented; and then, as if the undercurrent had reached him, he asked her, “Is anything troubling you, Lynn?”

“I don't know. A little, perhaps.”

She fell silent, wondering. She couldn't, of course, tell him. Yet she had told him other things; had presented him, for instance, Mara's case. She thought, I wonder if I am being foolish, overscrupulous? Perhaps Tom was perfectly within his rights to contemplate—

She could not, somehow, free herself of a doubt that was almost a conviction. Suppose Tom had not kept his word? Yet, caring for her, he must have done so.

“Can't you tell me?” urged Dwight, wondering in his turn. He smiled wryly in the darkness. Young Shepard again? Of course, young Shepard! Would he have to listen to her confidences, her confession that hope deferred maketh the heart sick? Well, he'd listen then, he'd let himself in for it.

“I shouldn't—” she admitted slowly. Why not tell him, in part? She trusted him, he had told her that she might. A clever man, a brilliant man, perfectly versed in worldly knowledge, in legal knowledge—

Her impulse to seek advice, to find help, her relaxed feeling
of physical well-being, all contrived to blind her to her indiscretion.

“It isn't my secret,” she admitted youthfully, hesitating. “I can't mention names, or anything. You understand?”

He was becoming more and more puzzled. “Quite. We'll consider it—hypothetically,” he agreed with gravity.

How young she was! How incredibly young! How more than incredibly sweet! He fought down the impulse to rise, to sweep her into his arms, to kiss the childish, hesitating question from her desired lips, the impulse to say, “Forget it all, whatever it is, can't you? Let it wait—Love me, tonight. Tonight never comes again.”

He went a little pale with the force of his emotion. He snapped open his cigarette case and lighted a cigarette with hands none too steady. The small spurt of the lighter's blue-yellow flame showed her his face, against the background of darkness, grave, familiar, to be trusted. She drew a deep breath and began her explanation with, for the most part, a series of questions.

If, she wanted to know, an employee of a large and influential organization had access to advance, private information, had this person any right to use this knowledge for his own gain?

Dwight was immeasurably astonished. He had thought to hear a twice-told tale of love and frustration dictated by the heavy impatience of youth, which is, however, hardly youth's prerogative; he had braced himself against this in anticipation, conscious of the crying out of his own blood, the reaction of his own sensitive nerves.

Instead, it seemed he was being interrogated on the subject of business ethics.

He answered cautiously, “Could you explain a little more fully without betraying confidences?”

Well, then, it all had to do with a merger. The friend she mentioned was in a position to know that a merger was being planned. Nothing that this particular person could do, alone, would make any difference, of course. But he had been advised
by an acquaintance to take advantage of the information. “I don't know,” she acknowledged miserably, just what—the plans are. But I think it amounts to selling the information, at just the right time, to influential people.”

Dwight pondered the question, or appeared to, in silence. But he was thinking quickly enough. Shepard, of course, with his easy access to the bank's affairs. Lynn would hardly concern herself with anyone save Tom Shepard. The business was, of course, the bank's. Upon what other business would Shepard have advance information? What more interested Dwight was the “acquaintance.” Who could it be? Lynn herself? He played with this idea a moment. Yes, it might be Lynn—afraid, after she had made her suggestion to Tom, wondering if she should withdraw her persuasion.