“We must come to a definite understanding. Until we do, further confidence between us is impossible.”
He strutted away, perking his angry head, and whistling.
But Suzanne had accomplished the amiable débacle for which she had been intriguing. She had, paradoxically, separated the inseparables. It was a little triumph, perhaps; a very easy game to one of her experience—hardly worth the candle, in fact; but it was the best the boat had to offer. It remained only to solace the tedium of what was left of the voyage by playing on the broken strings of that friendship.
It was Nicanor who suffered most under the torture. He had always been rather accustomed to hear himself applauded for his wit—a funny little acrid possession which was touched with a precocious knowledge of the world. Now, to know himself made the butt of a maturer social irony lowered his little cockerel crest most dismally. As for good-natured Miguel, it was his way to join, rather than resent, the laugh against himself; and his persistent moral health under the infliction only added to the other’s mind-corrosion. In a very little the two were at daggers-drawn.
The “affair” made a laughable distraction for many of the listless and mischievous among the passengers. They contributed their little fans to the flame, and exchanged private bets upon the probable consequences. But Suzanne, indifferent to all interests but her own, worked her oracles serenely, and affected a wide-eyed unconsciousness of the amorous imbroglio which her arts had brought about. First one, then the other of the rivals would she beguile with her pensive kindnesses, and, according to her mood or the accident of circumstances, reassure in hope. And the task grew simpler as it advanced, inasmuch as the silence which came to fall between Miguel and Nicanor precluded the wholesome revelations which an interchange of confidences might have inspired.
At last the decisive moment arrived when Suzanne’s more intimate worldlings were to be gratified with her solution of the riddle. It was to end, in fact, in a Palais Royal farce; and they were to be invited to witness the “curtain.”
A few hours before reaching port she drew Miguel to a private interview.
“Ah, my friend!” she said, her slender fingers knotted, her large eyes wistful with tears, “I become distracted in the near necessity for decision. Pity me in so momentous a pass. What am I to do?”
“Mademoiselle,” said poor Miguel, his chest heaving, “it is resolved already. We are to journey together to Paris, where the bliss of my life is to be piously consummated.”
“Yes,” she said; “but the publicity—the scandal! Men are sure to attribute the worst motives to our comradeship, and that I could not endure.”