Skyscraper (23 page)

He replied at length slowly, “I don't know enough about it, Lynn. It's probably legitimate enough, that is, in the sense of being within the law. Ethically, that's another matter. I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you.”

“But I do worry,” she said, taken quite off guard by his even, low tone, his unastonished acceptance of the situation, and her increasing sense of his interest, his willingness to help. “You see, he promised me that he wouldn't—” She stopped, and flushed, delicately in the darkness. Dwight could hear her little gasp, and then the sound of the swing being set into motion again; he kept his eyes turned from the pale blur of her face and listened intently, so intently that he could hear the blood beating in his own ears. “I'm being very silly,” Lynn apologized, “and secret; I can't help it. But if you knew that someone you cared for were contemplating such a step? Oh, I
can't
think it's honest,” she cried desperately.

Then it wasn't Lynn. Lynn didn't approve. He said cheerfully, “All's fair in love and business.” He was to remember that statement, later. “You've told me that you have your friend's promise. Perhaps he'll keep it. Look here, Lynn, my advice to you is to forget this and say nothing to anyone. If—well, no matter how things turn out, you won't be helping your friend materially, will you, by talking about it?”

“I haven't talked,” she defended herself quickly, “except, of course, to you.”

That was sweet; he recognized it; treasured it; said gently, “Thank you, my dear. I won't ask for anything further except to say that, naturally, it's Tom, is it not? I know you wouldn't be troubled over anyone else.”

She said that yes, it was Tom.

“Then he'll do what you want him to,” Dwight assured her. “He'd be insane not to.”

“I couldn't bear to have him disloyal, to have his integrity threatened,” she explained, after a moment. “I told him that if—if he did this I'd never speak to him again.”

“Then he won't do it,” Dwight comforted her. “Forget it. I'll forget it, too. There! Look at that moon and see if you can keep your mind on troublesome hypothetical questions.”

She turned and looked. It was sheer beauty. The pale diffused light was on her face. Dwight tossed his cigarette over the rail to the terrace and sunk his hands in his pockets. Predatory hands, he was aware of that. He thought, if I take her in my arms? But he could not, he must not; not yet; it was too soon.

Sunday was a repetition of Saturday, only more so. An hour of swimming, notable for Millie's suit, what there was to it, and tennis, a drive and lunch at a country club, and people for tea and more people for dinner, and then one episode of importance.

During the day Dwight found himself speculating upon what Lynn had, or had not, told him. What on earth? A merger? But that was impossible, there had been no rumor of it in banking circles or along the street which is paved with such very good intentions. Still, if there were to be a big merger—He owned some Seacoast stock; not very much. Nor could he buy more outright, on the off chance. He was very deeply in debt. The case he had counted on, which he had taken upon a contingency basis, had been appealed. If he won it would be a long time before he could get his money. If this vague thing proved concrete, and he were in on the ground floor—?

But he would have to make sure. To whom could he go? Norton was out of the question, Shepard, too, of course. Who
then was Shepard's “friend”?

He might ask Sarah—cleverly.

As it happened she asked him something first.

He had taken them all through the house, through his own suite, its bedroom and bath, its small library adjoining. Shown them too the passage leading from the back stairs. “How convenient!” Millie had said, and giggled. That was following their swim and before dinner. After dinner, that Sunday, he had walked with his guests in the gardens. It was a hot, still night. “I had them plant a lot of white,” he explained. “A garden by moonlight is so blurred, white flowers alone give it character.”

He dropped a little behind the others. The hedge was high, it grew in ordered circles. Lynn walking beside him in very high heels, turned her ankle, and cried out, for a brief moment, at the sharp pain.

He said, “What is it?” anxiously.

“Nothing—my ankle. It's all right now.”

The others had reached the end of the hedge, had turned and were coming back on the other side, toward the water. “Take my arm,” said Dwight. “Can you manage to get back to the house?”

She could manage. She set her foot gingerly upon the path and clung to him for an unpremeditated instant. They were quite alone, in the moonlit world of the garden. Near them a sun dial, wreathed in roses, was no reminder of the flight of time. Separated from them by the hedge, unseen, the other walked and laughed. But Sarah, missing her host, missing Lynn, paused a moment, anxious.

Dwight's arm was around Lynn. For a heartbeat's space he held her, close—much closer than any turned ankle warranted. He said softly and quite clearly. “Oh, my dear—you very sweet person—”

And Sarah heard.

A moment later they had rounded the hedge, and Dwight was calling to them. “Wait a moment, will you! Lynn's turned her ankle.”

“But it's all right now,” she protested.

It was all right. Right enough to dance later with Dwight, with Travis, with Millie's weary husband. It was late when they said good night and went to bed. Sarah and Lynn must make an early start in the morning. Dwight was driving them and Travis up. Millie and Jack would have the house to themselves for a time: they never started anywhere before eleven, they protested.

Early to rise and late to bed. But sometime between retiring and rising, Sarah, after Lynn slept, crept down the hall to the back stairs and put her feet cautiously upon them, listening to the creaking which seemed so loud, as loud as the beating of her heart.

Down the passage and to Dwight's door. She paused there, and drew the severe robe of heavy silk about her. Her heart beat so violently, it was as loud as her knock upon his door; louder.

“Come in,” said Dwight, wondering what Wilkins wanted. Or could it be Millie? No, perish the thought. She wasn't
that
much of a fool.

Dwight's room opened on a terrace of brick, completing this small wing. He was standing at the French windows, in his pajamas, smoking. Sarah came into the room. Her eyes were enormous; her plain and pleasant face was tragic, it was old. And there was in it emotion that he had not seen for many years—from her. A bitter jealousy, with which she strove; a warning; a fear; and a question.

“Why, Sarah,” he said, startled out of all poise. “Why,
Sarah!
”

Heaven knew what passed through his mind at that moment, what fleeting explanations, solutions, expectancies. He was sorry for them a moment later, a little ashamed.

She said, harshly, insistently, “Lynn—I had to ask you about Lynn—Are you in love with her, David—and if you are—what are you going to do about it?”

 

 

 

DWIGHT GIVES HIS WORD
THE FRENCH WINDOWS STOOD OPEN. OUTSIDE, a red moon was falling swiftly through starry space
to her close. Soon it would be very dark, and very hushed, before the pale prelude to the dawn.The room was scented with tobacco smoke, with the odor of leather, with the tenuous persistence of roses. And it was so still that Sarah could hear the soft, enchanted murmur of water on the beach, the stifled sighing, in the branches, of a vagrant wind.

Dwight leaned against the window frame. He felt slightly ridiculous, in the long tunicked Russian pajamas of heavy silk. He said a thing, sparring for time, which was small and mean; which he regretted. He asked lightly, “Not jealous, are you, Sarah?”

She flushed, without beauty. She answered, her eyes on his, “No, I'm not jealous, David—I'm afraid.”

But she was jealous; she knew it. She could have scotched the little snake at her heart, set her heel upon its bright, dangerous, lifted head. She must destroy it. While he murmured, “Shut the door, come in, you can't stand there; what will people say?” and laughed a little, remembering, perhaps, as she forlornly remembered, a time when what people said—or thought—had meant so little to her, to both of them. She tried to destroy her enemy. She tried to think: of what am I jealous? Not, any more, of his love, or his desire for another woman. No, never any more. Not jealous, in the common sense, of Lynn, whom she loved. Oh, not that. Jealous, it might be of all Lynn stood for, youth, grace, possible radiant surrender, laughter, life—

Jealous, too, of David's personal integrity, of the delicate balance of that curious unacknowledged relationship which was between them. So, she said, shutting the door, and coming into the room, a few deliberate steps, “David, you've got to be honest with me. You've always been honest with me before. You can't do this to—Lynn. You can't,” she said, “do it to me.”

He had not made a name for himself through being stupid. He had not earned—and flung away—and earned again, large, solid fortunes, by being insensitive and blind. He couldn't turn this off lightly, with a word of reassurance—“Sarah, don't be silly. There's nothing in it. Can't I be attentive to a pretty girl”—plaintively—“I
like
pretty girls, without your getting all
worked up over it? Run along to bed, do, there's a darling.”

No, he couldn't say that. Instead he said, and reached for a bathrobe of brocaded silk, belting it about his slim waist, “Sit down. We'll talk this thing out.”

She sat down, docilely enough. He took the chair near her, at his small, fine desk. He was tired, he discovered suddenly. Yet a moment before he had been so far from tired. Wilkins? He hoped to heaven Wilkins wouldn't come in now with his unservile—”You should be in bed.” Through the door on the little library he could see his bedroom, the bed turned down, waiting, the carafe on the night table, the book he was reading, the soft light on. What had possessed him to wander about the library? To write three letters to Lynn which were now destroyed and in the waste basket? And eventually to lean against the window frame and look toward the dreaming garden and the flowing water and wish impossible things, impossible even if they should come to pass?”

It struck him as enormously comic, as tremendously traffic, that he and Sarah Dennet should be sitting thus, at this time of night alone, shut in, in the quiet of the big friendly house, a lamp burning, and the fragrance of summer in the room. Once, a thousand years ago, it had been heaven to be with her thus, alone, enraptured, alien from the world.

Why not now?

He thought, fleetingly, that the question contained most of the love tragedy in the universe.

He turned his attention to Sarah. She was sitting wearily in the deep chair, in a strangely humble position, somehow, for one usually so almost irritatingly erect, sure, of herself. Her hands were lax at her sides. He thought. There isn't much use lying—to her—she always knew when I lied, there, toward the end. He thought, if one could put her in the wrong, get at this from an angle disadvantageous to her—it was not unkindness nor even self-protection. He was merely not a lawyer for nothing, as his clients very well knew.

“Sarah”—his voice low, restrained, a shape reproachful—“Aren't you taking a rather unfair advantage of me?”

She knew what he meant, shrank back against the chair, cowered, as if the touch of padded upholstery meant safety. They hadn't, for years, spoken of the days gone by. They had agreed to that. No use. No use stirring embers; and when embers have become ashes even more futile to blow upon them and watch the gray wisps drift upon uncaring air.

He had liked that about her so much. The only woman he had ever known who would not say, long after love had perished, “Do you remember—”

She answered, as steadily as she could, “I didn't mean to—you know that. Lynn, Lynn means a great deal to me. Oh, why can't you leave her alone, David?” Her big fine hands writhed, twisted, “Why can't you leave her alone?—She's so young—”

“Am I'm so old?” he murmured wryly.

“No, I didn't mean that.” She didn't. She stared at him, eyelids torn wide open. Old? Dwight? Not by any standards.

“What did you mean?” he pressed her.

Her hands were quiet again.

“She doesn't know much about life—She's pretty innocent, David.”

“Lynn? Lynn?” his voice was tender, he couldn't, for his life, prevent it. “How old is she—twenty-two? Twenty-two-year-old girls, nowadays, dear Sarah!—”

“Oh, why do you twist the things I say?” Her voice rose a little.

He said, “Hush!” compellingly.

She quieted, went on, dully, “Can't you see what I mean by innocence? I don't mean an ignorance of pitfalls. Lynn's modern enough, sane enough, for that matter. But she doesn't know what life can do to—to a girl. David, she's happy, she's in love. Tom Shepard's a decent sort of boy. They'll quarrel and be reconciled a hundred times before they marry. Can't you let her alone, leave her to him? She belongs to him.”