Star-Dust Part 90

"To whom?"

"Fame."

"Nonsense!" she cried. "Don't forget the awakening of spring." And buried her face against her mother because she had been outrageous.

Persiflage rose.

"Skylark, when I become more coherent I'll tell you how wonderful you are."

"Zoe dear, hadn't we better drive home?"

"Lark. Lark. I cannot go home now, Lilly. Let's have a lark!"

Suddenly Bruce caught her by the dancing hands.

"Let's celebrate."

"Let's!"

"We'll dine at Sherry's, dance at the Bilt--"

"Lovely! Lovely! I've never been to either!"

"No, no, Zoe. Please! Your grandparents at home. Besides, it's war time."

"Nonsense! Laugh while we may. Next month this time I'll probably be in the thick of it myself. Let's laugh to-day. Vote her down, Zoe!"

"Pl-ease, Lilly."

"Your grandparents, Zoe, they don't even know the news yet--"

"Lilly, this once. Tippy and Dapples aren't going to be thrilled. They think the whole business rather low, anyway. Besides--there's time--it's my day--Lilly--"

"Not Sherry's, then, Zoe--a quieter--"

"Immense! I have it! Tarrytown. An opportunity to show you the place before you go. We'll drop this taxi and pick up my car at the garage.

How's that, dinner at Tarrytown? Perfect, I'll say."

"What a duck of an idea! Oh, la, la, la, la!"

And so, quite dumbly, Lilly acquiesced and by easy shift to the tan-upholstered car that ironed out all jolts, and a stiff breeze from the Hudson whirring softly against their faces, they were whirling out along quiet stretches, dusk coming down like a veil.

Seated between them, Zoe fell to singing, trilling highly and softly, her head bared to the wind, her tam-o'-shanter on Bruce's lap, and Lilly sitting silently by with lids down against hot eyeb.a.l.l.s, and fighting a sense of cross grain.

Presently lights began to come out along the river, like the gold eyes of cats.

"How cool your fingers are, Zoe. Like the petals of something."

"Lilly, naughty man is holding back one of my hands on me."

"Lovely hands."

"Naughty man."

Silence.

"Oh dear."

"Oh dearest."

"That wasn't for you. That was a sigh."

"But I stole it."

"Cheeky."

Giggles.

Silence again and they turned off a macadamized road that was prematurely dark with trees and into a lariat of driveway that elicited from Zoe a squeal of enthrallment.

Even to Lilly, though she had figured in its purchase, there was something startling in the vast cla.s.sic whiteness and formal Italian chast.i.ty of the house as they flanked it, drawing up under a porte-cochere of Corinthian columns. Through a double row of cypresses turning black, that inclosed a sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the a.n.a.logy which could not conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine advertis.e.m.e.nt of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such Renaissance magnificence.

Three sheer and cunningly landscaped terraces dropped down from what was actually the rear of the house, but which overhung the river, so that, stepping out of the car, an unsuspected, breath-taking panorama of river wound itself, at that moment the Albany boat moving upstream, light-studded.

ZOE (out at a bound): "Oh! Oh! Oh! Isolde's garden. Tristan, where are you?"

"Here."

"I want to kiss a star--that luscious one up there."

"Let me be proxy."

"Lilly, chastise him!"

She smiled at him with her tortured eyes.

"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's Pauline's idea."

They were met by Pauline--known to Zoe and her mother through perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly pet.i.te, rather appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and flatteringly.

There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown; and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.

A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.

"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there, Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for running away!"

Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply.

She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of comment unbroken.