“You ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we’re both ruined. So—”
Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him—again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation—all right, then—
—but now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing. “Tch! tch!”
Tears streamed down Nicole’s face—in a moment she heard some one approaching; it was Tommy.
“You found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick,” he said, “because that little English poule slanged you.”
“It’d be a good setting to jump overboard,” said Dick mildly.
“Wouldn’t it?” agreed Nicole hastily. “Let’s borrow life- preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”
Tommy sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the night. “We’ll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do—she should know the latest things. And we should memorize her song ‘There was a young lady from l’enfer.’ I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its success at the Casino.”
“Are you rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.
“Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well.”
“Dick’s getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.
On the after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: “Dick seems to be drinking.”
“Only moderately,” she said loyally.
“There are those who can drink and those who can’t. Obviously Dick can’t. You ought to tell him not to.”
“I!” she exclaimed in amazement. “I tell Dick what he should do or shouldn’t do!”
But in a reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at Cannes. Golding buoyed him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality, and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the bone of Tommy’s arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the attendant car.
“I’ll drive you home,” Tommy suggested.
“Don’t bother—we can get a cab.”
“I’d like to, if you can put me up.”
On the back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of Golfe Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at Juan les Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When the car turned up the hill toward Tarmes, he sat up suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle and delivered a peroration:
“A charming representative of the—” he stumbled momentarily, “—a firm of—bring me Brains addled a l’Anglaise.” Then he went into an appeased sleep, belching now and then contentedly into the soft warm darkness.
VI
Next morning Dick came early into Nicole’s room. “I waited till I heard you up. Needless to say I feel badly about the evening—but how about no postmortems?”
“I’m agreed,” she answered coolly, carrying her face to the mirror.
“Tommy drove us home? Or did I dream it?”
“You know he did.”
“Seems probable,” he admitted, “since I just heard him coughing. I think I’ll call on him.”
She was glad when he left her, for almost the first time in her life—his awful faculty of being right seemed to have deserted him at last.
Tommy was stirring in his bed, waking for café au lait.
“Feel all right?” Dick asked.
When Tommy complained of a sore throat he seized at a professional attitude.
“Better have a gargle or something.”
“You have one?”
“Oddly enough I haven’t—probably Nicole has.”
“Don’t disturb her.”
“She’s up.”
“How is she?”
Dick turned around slowly. “Did you expect her to be dead because I was tight?” His tone was pleasant. “Nicole is now made of—of Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vitæ from New Zealand—”
Nicole, going downstairs, heard the end of the conversation. She knew, as she had always known, that Tommy loved her; she knew he had come to dislike Dick, and that Dick had realized it before he did, and would react in some positive way to the man’s lonely passion. This thought was succeeded by a moment of sheerly feminine satisfaction. She leaned over her children’s breakfast table and told off instructions to the governess, while upstairs two men were concerned about her.
Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.
“Nice, Rabbits, isn’t it—Or is it? Hey, Rabbit—hey you! Is it nice?—hey? Or does it sound very peculiar to you?”
The rabbit, after an experience of practically nothing else and cabbage leaves, agreed after a few tentative shiftings of the nose.