.dt Mrs. Essington, by Esther and Lucia Chamberlain-A Project Gutenberg eBook
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MRS. ESSINGTON
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[Illustration: Frontispiece]
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MRS. ESSINGTON
The Romance of a House-party
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BY
ESTHER AND LUCIA
CHAMBERLAIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY HUTT
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[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
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NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1905
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Copyright, 1905, by
The Century Co.
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Published May, 1905
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THE DE VINNE PRESS
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CONTENTS
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CHAPTER | |Page
I | The House-Party Explains Itself, and Gets into a Fog | #3:ch01#
II | Julia Steps Out of It, and Answers a Question | #24:ch02#
III | Mrs. Essington Runs Away from Herself | #44:ch03#
IV | Longacre Runs After | #54:ch04#
V | The Pursuer is Captured | #77:ch05#
VI | Thair Puts in his Finger; Cissy her Foot | #101:ch06#
VII | The House-Party in the Storm | #118:ch07#
VIII | Longacre Traps Himself | #139:ch08#
IX | Mrs. Essington Says “No” | #162:ch09#
X | The Mad Riding | #171:ch10#
XI | The White Darkness | #190:ch11#
XII | Mrs. Essington Says “Yes” | #205:ch12#
XIII | Thair Congratulates | #229:ch13#
XIV | The Queen’s Courtesy | #236:ch14#
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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Mrs. Essington | #Frontispiece:frontis#
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“‘Oh, it’s been wretched!’” | #92:i107#
“Her skirts held high above her pretty, preposterous shoes” | #116:i135#
“‘For God’s sake—don’t cry!’” | #154:i177#
“‘Are you ready?’” | #174:i201#
“Such a strange Julia!” | #232:i263#
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MRS. ESSINGTON
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CHAPTER I||THE HOUSE-PARTY EXPLAINS ITSELF, AND GETS INTO A FOG
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“STILL
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STILL,
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I don’t reconcile you with
that lot,” the young man broke out,
after a silence that had lasted long
enough to be intimate. He leaned
toward her across the space between the two
chairs, lifting his voice a little to be heard
above the racket of the car-wheels.
The woman did not directly reply, unless
there was an answer in the small profile smile
she gave him. She had sat for the past ten
minutes admirably still, her face turned from
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him, her eyes on the flat blue-green of onion-fields
interminably wheeling past the window.
“I mean,” he presently went on in his
easy fashion, “they’re hardly your sort.
Oh, good people, but—dullish, you know;
the kind you never put up with unless you
have to.”
She gave him again the flitting, profile
smile, with an added twinkle, from which
his face seemed to catch illumination; and,
for a moment, they smiled together with the
hint of some common reminiscence.
“At all events,” he came back again, “I
can’t see why you, of all people, would be
going to the Budds!”
She moved at last, turning a full look
upon him. The supple bend of her long
throat, and the cool gray light of her eyes
in the warm shadow of their lashes, touched
him like a harmony in music. The beauty
and eloquence of her movements had always
appealed to him as her special charm. His
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eyes followed the flowing lines of her attitude
more attentively than his ears followed the
first part of her reply.
“No, they’re not our sort,”—she spoke with
slight emphasis on the pronoun,—“and”—the
subtle modelings around her mouth shadowed
a smile—“we’ll probably bore them
horribly. But I’m going—for the same
reason that you are. You know I have
never met Julia Budd.”
“But I have,” said Fox Longacre, flushing
a little, his blue eyes steadily meeting her
bright gaze.
“Which comes, doesn’t it, to the same
thing? Aren’t we both going to ‘Miramar’
to see Miss Budd?”
“She’s lovely—to look at,” he admitted.
“And not in other ways?”
He seemed to ponder this, his clever
young face puckered with an exaggeration
of gravity. He gave it up with a puzzled
laugh.
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“’Pon my word, I don’t know! That’s
what I’m going for.”
“To find out—?”
“Oh, whether she is perfectly charming,
or—just the other thing.”
It struck her that his manner was more
offhand than the occasion required—that
the alternative he had just so gaily admitted
troubled him more than he wished her to
know.
But Florence Essington knew, in spite of
him, more than she looked, and much more
than she said. She felt that she at least foresaw
so much that to spare herself the train
of thought she answered him in quite another
vein.
“You know, Tony,” she said, with that
little, settling movement women use to begin
a gossip, “what really amuses me is that we
haven’t—at least I haven’t—the slightest
idea, not a glimmer, what people Mrs. Budd
will be asking down. She hardly knows me,
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hasn’t seen me since I left school for Paris—don’t
you dare to mention how long ago!
And yet she fairly threatened me into it, eyes
popping and every hair a-quiver. I quite
got the feeling that she wants something of
me.”
“Of course,” he grinned cheerfully, “they
always do.”
“But something special.”
“Letters of introduction?” he hazarded.
“It’s quite on the cards. They’ll be going
to London next season, if she doesn’t—but,
of course, you know what she’s after.”
“Not, at any rate, you,” she quizzed.
At this he laughed out, “Oh, Lord, no!”
Their common amusement was made up
of their common knowledge of his shabby
income, his opera still on probation, and his
purely potential career.
The speed of the train was notably slackening.
The porter had made the round
with his whisk-broom, and was carrying bags
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and golf-kits to the outer platform. The
greater number of travelers had risen, and
were rushing or rustling into their coats.
Most of these people seemed to know one
another, were all bound for a common goal—the
little city of country houses. In the
next three days they would all meet half a
dozen times. They exhaled the heady atmosphere
of their small, smart community.
The stucco front of the San Mateo station
slid slowly past the window. When the
train finally came to a stop the chair-car was
at the far end of the long platform, its windows
commanding the full curve of the drive
where it swept out of the encroaching trees.
The two, who remained seated in the midst
of the general departure, now realized that
the exodus would leave them solitary.
“Good!” said Longacre, contentedly, settling
more comfortably into his chair.
His companion leaned forward to look
down the long wooden platform where, already,
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the newly alighted travelers were
segregating themselves and their parties, one
from another, and were being driven away in
a light whirl of dust. The travel seemed
all arrival. One or two callow, negligent
college boys swung aboard the smoker. The
porter took up the stool.
“I really believe—” Mrs. Essington began.
The sight of a victoria lurching around
the turn of the drive stopped her sentence.
The vehicle, so indisseverably connected
with state and dignity of progression, bounded
at the heels of galloping horses, its occupant
leaning forward with the air of one who
would accelerate top speed. The rigs, driving
away from the station, parted for its onward
rush. Heads craned toward it. There
was a chorus of laughing recognitions. A
man swung his hat. The train gave a preliminary
pulse and quiver as the victoria came
to a violent halt, and the lady sprang out in a
puff of light silk, and ran fluttering and flapping
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along the platform. The conductor and
porter, all agrin, with an arm under each of
her elbows hoisted her to the step of the now
moving train. The footman threw up the
last of half a dozen bags.
Mrs. Essington leaned back and laughed
silently across to her companion.
“A victoria! Wouldn’t you know she
would!” he observed half quizzically, half
ruefully.
“She’s so, pretty!”
“Oh, pretty,” he conceded generously
enough, as the lady’s full-throated laugh preceded
her into the car.
She fairly burst upon them, laughing,
blooming, glittering.
“Of all people! You dear things!”
She squeezed a hand of each affectionately.
“Don’t tell me there is nothing in premonition!
I had one when I told James the
horses must gallop. ‘James,’ I said, ‘it is
absolutely necessary that I catch that train, if
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I get out and run for it.’ James adores me,
though of course he knew we looked ridiculous.
But it doesn’t matter, now that I have
you—and just as I was expecting to be alone
all the way to Monterey!”
She sighed, and sank into the seat Longacre
had swung round for her; rose again to
be helped out of her coat; removed her hat;
caressed her coiffure; resettled in her chair
and shifted the fluttering folds of her skirts,
with a regret or two for her own helplessness
and a hope that the forbearance of her friends
was not merely forbearance. Her almond
eyes, blue shot with green, implored Longacre’s
to refute the self-accusation. But he
chose to do so in a neat sentence.
Watching her, he had a sense that by her
vivacity she staved off the reproach of superabundant
flesh. It was marvelous, the way
the avoirdupois seemed to lessen under her
animation. The wide cheeks flaring away
from the dwindling chin; the tight, rosy little
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mouth drawn up at the corners in a faint,
perpetual smile; the tortoise-shell combs that
pressed her glossy hair close above her pointed
ears, all reminded Longacre irresistibly of a
tortoise-shell—but he stopped the simile to
answer Cissy Fitz Hugh’s appeal concerning
the fate of his opera.
He answered automatically this question,
that had of late begun to weary him, acceding
good-naturedly to Mrs. Fitz Hugh’s
sweeping declaration of her passion for music
in general; but he was unhappily aware
that Florence Essington had teasingly assumed
the remote but interested air of a spectator
at what threatened to be a tête-à-tête.
Nay, more: her eyes laughed at his attempts
to draw her back. He had the aggrieved
feeling of a child whose game has been spoiled.
Well, if Florence wouldn’t play, neither
would he. But he was pleasant about it. He
slid easily from good-humored flattery to genial
silence, from genial silence to the smoking-car.
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Cissy watched his departure with a pettish
mouth. But when the sharp snapping of the
vestibule door had shut the two women in
together she extended her small, plump feet
with a luxurious stretch, and turned to Mrs.
Essington with a “Well, my dear!” that
implied, “At last!” She created the impression
that she had lived only for this moment.
Florence seemed to see herself exhibited as
Cissy’s sole confidante.
“You know,” Cissy began, “it was so
sweet of Emma Budd to ask me for the
week’s end, though of course I don’t hunt—but
with poor Freddy on his back since the
pony-races, and all the horrid fuss with the
plumbing—and the lawsuit, I’ve been really
too anxious for pleasure.” She passed a
plump hand over an unlined brow.
“But when Emma rang up yesterday to
beg, and happened to let drop your name, I
said, ‘If Mrs. Essington is going I really will
make one effort.’” She beamed with candor.
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Florence’s smile surmised that the name
for which the effort had been made was more
probably Fox Longacre’s. But Cissy’s complacence
was impervious.
“It was a delightful surprise to hear you
were going! You come to us so little!”
she lamented.
“Who could resist the country in September?”
Florence felt unable to add
amenities to the already overcharged atmosphere.
“Oh, of course! I just crave the country!”
Cissy agreed.
“Then the hunting—” Florence continued,
aware that quite different reasons
were expected of her—“Mrs. Budd makes
her parties interesting with their variety.”
“Oh, yes—variety,” Cissy cut in. “Emma
just craves it! Did you know she’s asked
D. O. Holden—and he’s going?”
At Cissy’s round-eyed pause, Florence felt
an inclination to laugh. Variety seemed to her
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the last word reminiscent of Holden. Looking
back over the past six months, he appeared
to her the one strong, unvarying, dominant,
reiterated note in her resumed American experiences.
“Really!” she managed with gravity.
“Really!” Cissy echoed impressively.
“But why such a man, who doesn’t care for
anything but railroads, should be going to
Emma, who doesn’t care for anything but
marrying Julia—Of course”—her shallow
eyes endeavored to plumb Mrs. Essington’s—“he’s
going for something in particular.”
She topped it off with her laugh, that seemed
to fill her thick throat.
“Perhaps,” Florence helped her out, “he’s
going for the same reason that you are?”
Cissy looked both blank and disconcerted.
“Poor man, he’s usually too anxious for
pleasure!” Florence explained.
Cissy took it in seriously. “Really the
fact is, a woman is never free from her cares!
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But a man, when he rests, rests so completely!”
She sighed, with her eyes on the door
through which Fox Longacre had departed.
She added inconsequently, “You know
Emma has asked my cousin Charlie Thair.
Of course it’s perfectly plain why Emma
asked him. The wonder is that he dares to
go!” Florence could only guess at the situation,
but she thought the wonder would have
been if Thair had dodged it. “Though it’s
perfectly indecent of him, I’m sure, with
his money, not to marry,” Cissy ran on; “and
of course Julia is a magnificent creature. But
the idea of expecting to really ‘land’ Charlie!
It’s too funny! So like dear Emma.”
Upon this point Florence was, silently, in
accord with Mrs. Fitz Hugh. She could
see—from Mrs. Budd’s point of view that
every eligible man not only should, but
sooner or later would, marry some suitable
girl—how the proposition was a reasonable
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one. But she felt there was as slight a possibility
of Charlie Thair’s being unseated from
his bachelor state as from his hunting-saddle.
“Was there”—it was the following
thought—“such a scant possibility of Fox
Longacre?”
She turned from her vis-à-vis to the window,
as the train, with a roar and a swing,
rushed into the cañon, and fixed her eyes on
the dizzy fascination of the whirling river
below.
The stream of events of the last five years
was more rapid and intricate to the vision of
her mind. The first light ripple on this
stream was her clear memory of the charming,
inconsequent American boy whom she
had met in Vienna five years before. It had
been on one of her trips, that were always
solitary, since Captain Essington was too
busy spending her neat little fortune in various
very private and proper gambling-clubs
to care how his wife amused herself.
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How this boy, Fox Longacre, with his
facile Gallic Americanism, had stood out
among the miscellaneous lot of students of
the Vienna Conservatory! She remembered
his passionate enthusiasm for the music that
he whimsically called his “trade,” his spasmodic
application.
They had got on famously in their short,
merry acquaintance.
She had felt it the greatest pity in the
world that he should be an orphan, a waif,
with just enough money to let him be comfortably
idle, and such potentialities of power
running riot.
She had regretted the end of that gay little
friendship when she returned to her sad-colored
London.
Between this first encounter and the next
intervened her catastrophe. Something done
in those private and particular gambling-houses—something
that never clearly came
out of them—swallowed the half of the
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money remaining, and directed the shot that
ended Captain Essington’s life. A grim, a
bitter wrench it had been! The mere memory
of it brought back the ghost of the old ache.
She had realized then what depths of suffering
might be, in which love and bereavement
bore no part. Even the relief of freedom
had been overwhelmed in the shock of violent
death, of disorganized existence.
How vividly it had set before her the instability
of present circumstances, the danger
of depending on what had been! She had
been frightened to drawing into herself, away
from the interests of the world around her
that had meant so much to her.
In her vague retrospection it seemed to
her it had been more the kindness of her
friends than any effort on her own part that
had not only kept, but lifted her place among
them in the difficult years that followed;
such a place that, when the brilliant boy of
her Vienna memory turned up in London,
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older, less confident, more moody by three
years, and desperately “out” of everything
he should have been “in,” she had almost bewildered
him by the number of doors she
could open to him. All her social threads so
casually picked up, at once had significance,
were manipulated to a purpose. What a
zest, what a spirit her life had had! How
self-distrustful he had been! How she had,
at moments, pulled him after her! It had
been desperate at times to keep him up to it,
but every minute had been worth living.
And now that her long hope was almost
realized, now that he seemed on the very
verge of his success,—now—
She shifted her eyes to the two bright
glints on the toes of Cissy Fitz Hugh’s patent
leathers. The car was one dusky tone in the
deepening twilight, and these two hypnotic
points of light helped to fix her memory
more clearly on the past.
Well, she had been the one woman to him.
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He had glorified her as a boy will. What a
joy it had been, that adoring loyalty of his,
even while she knew she cheated him! The
memory of his old impetuosity, his insistence,
his unhesitating confidence over the inevitable
question that had risen between them,
came back to her, a warm, pleasurable emotion.
And then the sadder sequence! For
it had come to her then that a woman seasoned,
sophisticated, settled, who would marry
a boy ten years her junior—and such a boy—would
be either a knave or a fool.
And yet to get on without her? She
knew he couldn’t afford it then. Could she,
on the other hand, get on without him? She
had made her peace with herself, through the
next three years, with what she had given—the
balance to his chaotic impulse, the spur to
his ambition. She had so lived into his interests,
so made herself identified with them,
that she had lost sight of her old dread of
changing circumstance.
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Six months ago, when she had left London,
she had been so secure in his allegiance—an
allegiance so settled, so taken for granted,
that its first significance was almost lost sight
of—that the separation had not given her a
passing anxiety. Now she asked herself if
his mad dash with the Gretrys across an ocean
and a continent was to have brought him to
her again merely to shake her faith in that
allegiance.
The slamming of the car door brought her
back shrewdly to her surroundings. She looked
up. In the pictures of her memory Longacre
had figured always as a boy, a Viennese student
as she had seen him first. Now the
sight of him as he was, coming down the aisle
upon her, struck her as freshly as the impression
of a stranger. He was no longer youth,
painted in full curves and raw colors, but
young maturity grayed over, sharp-lined,
strenuous with the vital endeavor he had put
into living.
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He seemed to be catching up the years between
them. She had a quick revulsion.
She asked herself, if, after all—
Cissy Fitz Hugh was yawning prettily,
stretching herself awake.
“We’ll be in in five minutes,” Longacre
said, his hand on the back of Florence Essington’s
chair. “Will you have your cloak?”
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CHAPTER II||JULIA STEPS OUT OF IT, AND ANSWERS A QUESTION
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NIGHT had come down in a
smother of fog made infinitely
dreary by the interminable sound
of the sea. The two light rigs
that had sped on the sand road, through the
thick oak shadows, now spun sharply over
the crisp gravel of the ascending drive toward
the “Miramar” lights, trembling in misty
penumbra. The house loomed immediately
above, huge, undefined, confused in its lesser
masses of trees. It seemed so shut up against
this dreary outside that it made not even a
sign of welcome to the arrivals under the
porte-cochère.
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Florence, as Longacre lifted her from the
cart, felt the damp of his greatcoat chill
through her glove. She saw him, mounting
the wide wooden steps in the band of light
from the veranda windows, haloed with silvery
moisture. The veranda presented the
appearance of a deck cleared for action. All
the graces of hammocks and cushions, removed,
left a sentinel row of reversed cane
chairs against the wall. Somewhere out in
the dark a tree dripped steadily.
She felt her hair cling to her cheek.
Cissy Fitz Hugh in her frills was limp as
a wet doll, and prettily cross.
“They must have heard us, with all that
row on the gravel!” she fretted. “There—at
last!”
The door had opened, presenting them
precipitately with the heart of the house—the
big wainscoted living-hall, rugged, divaned,
firelit, and full of people. They were
not really more than a dozen, the women in
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golf-shirts, the men in shooting-coats and
leggings—the flotsam and jetsam of a day’s
sport made sociable with tea.
Their high, cheery babble just paused and
caught its note again as Mrs. Budd, hard
upon the heels of the maid who had opened
the door, fairly pounced upon her belated
guests, and sucked them in to a pleasant
snapping of talk and wood fires. Her tall,
robust figure in its red golf-waistcoat bristled
with welcomes.
“Now I know you’re drenched! The
fog’s a perfect rain! I’m so glad.”
She kissed Cissy warmly, her eyes snapping
meanwhile from Florence to Longacre.
“Come straight to the fire. Do come to
the fire, Mrs. Essington, and Agnès shall
take your wet things.”
Alert for impending introductions, she half
turned to Florence with the name of a guest
at her lips, but Florence had already been cut
off from the rest of the party by a large man
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with his hands in the sagging pockets of an
old shooting-coat. He had at the same time,
in an incredibly short space, furnished her
with tea, and now stood above her while she
drank it, rocking softly to and fro on his
feet, and talking steadily. Occasionally he
gesticulated with a large, open hand.
Cissy Fitz Hugh had gone her own way
some distance into a number of conversations.
It devolved upon Longacre to be led
about the circle with a name here and a name
there, and a blur of presences that vexed his
continental habit, and left him, at the finish,
still face to face with his hostess.
She promptly cast upon the shore of conversation
the first drift of her own interest.
“And what in the world has become of
Julia!” she exclaimed. She almost challenged
him with it. “You would think two
hours would be enough to ride round ‘Tres
Pinos,’ especially with her friends coming—and
all this fog!”
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Her smile stayed with him while her eyes
roved to the windows. She was notably expectant,
but not, as Longacre seemed to
sense it, so anxious as would be natural to a
mother whose daughter has chosen the coast
road on a thick night. While he said something
amiable about the safeness of sand
roads and the instinct of a horse, he felt that
he was looking hardly less expectant than she.
“And where’s dear Julia?” Cissy Fitz
Hugh’s voice preceded her into the group.
“Oh, Julia—”
The name, tossed back and forth, arrested
Florence Essington’s attention.
“Julia is a very naughty child,” Mrs.
Budd happily proclaimed. “She said she
would be home by five, and then she made
me promise not to wait tea for her.” Her
eloquent hands deprecated those of the clock,
which pointed to half after six. “And now
she’s hardly time to dress for dinner!”
“Julia,” said Holden, turning his large
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head on his shoulder, “may come to dinner
in her riding-boots, so long as she comes.”
“Just what I’ve always said, Mr. Holden,”
Cissy seconded. “Dear Julia—”
“Well, there they are!” cried Mrs. Budd,
her eyes flying to the door. Holden opened
it on the white darkness.
Two voices, basso and falsetto, were calling
through the fog. Two horses were
backing and sidling at the steps. Then a
tall young woman came laughing and stamping
through the open doorway.
The magnetism of her bounding vitality
touched Florence Essington before she
looked; for her first look was to Longacre.
He was suddenly brightened, more interested
in what he was saying to Cissy Fitz Hugh;
and Florence, seeing, had a sensation of loneliness,
of desertion, that amounted to antagonism
as she turned her eyes to the girl. The
feeling ached through her pure pleasure in
the other’s extraordinary beauty.
.bn 042.png
.pn +1
Julia was hatless. Her hair, crystalled with
mist, stood off her forehead in a glistening
bush. That dark, back-brushed nimbus gave
the suggestion of some great, fine lady of another
day. The magnificent sweep of her
black brows seemed to dress her forehead.
The blood of her vigorous body burned in
her crimson cheeks and lips. She moved in
an atmosphere of vital energy. She dominated
the room.
Her mother seemed scarcely able to keep
her hands off her.
“Why, darling, what is the matter? Why
are you so late?”
“Awfully sorry, mama. We couldn’t
help it. Mr. Thair couldn’t see the face of
his watch.—How d’ y’ do, Mrs. Fitz Hugh.—Besides,
the ocean was too splendid!”
“But where is your hat, pet?” Mrs. Budd
still hovered, tender and voluble.
“Blew off,” said Julia, blithely. “Mr.
Thair tried to find it, and nearly lost himself
.bn 043.png
.pn +1
in the fog. Bless you, mother, we couldn’t
see our saddle-pommels!”
“Here’s Mr. Longacre,” murmured her
mother, remindingly.
The girl gave him a full hand-clasp. Her
spirits seemed to take another leap.
“Why didn’t you come down earlier,
Mr. Longacre? We should have given you
a run for your money.”
“Oh, there’ll be another night like this
for me,” said Longacre, with confidence.
Mrs. Budd looked at him with dim dismay,
but the entrance of Charlie Thair diverted
her. Lean, keen, and smiling, his
unusually animated, not to say joyous, bearing
gave her reassurance. Her eyes traveled
to Julia for confirmation, but Julia was disconcertingly
oblivious of Thair’s presence.
Her vivid gestures and high animation were
all for Longacre. Mrs. Budd’s forehead
showed a cleft of anxiety not to be erased
by her most scrupulous smiles. Among the
.bn 044.png
.pn +1
groups, dispersing to dress for dinner, she
tried to reach her daughter; but the girl had
been swept up-stairs, the center of a knot of
women. The slow-moving Holden detained
Mrs. Budd until she had left hardly that allotted
time in which the most expeditious
woman can be groomed and gowned.
But Mrs. Budd was superior to time in
point of determination. She hurried her
maid to the woman’s distraction, and half
an hour before the first of her guests could be
expected she knocked at her daughter’s door.
Julia was in a white and crimson combing-gown,
with her hair streaming; but she
had not yet removed her wet riding-boots,
and there was, to Mrs. Budd’s eye, something
distressingly indiscreet in such foot-gear
appearing from the folds of a peignoir.
“Oh, Julia dear!” she remonstrated.
Julia laughed, and offered a spurred heel
to the maid. “I can’t bear to take them
off,” she said.
.bn 045.png
.pn +1
“You did have a nice time, didn’t you,
pettie, in spite of the dripping fog and the
dreadful wind! But I should have been
anxious if you had been with any one but
Charlie Thair. You did have a nice time,
didn’t you?”
“Magnificent! Uproarious!”
“Oh, not uproarious!” her mother protested.
“Yes, really. I should think you would
have heard us! We sang, ‘The Hounds of
Maynell,’ from the landing to the lighthouse
as hard as we could shout. We got the
triple echo to saying all sorts of things. And
then—” she paused, fitting her feet into
white satin shoes, while Mrs. Budd agonized
in suspense—“well, then, when we got out
to ‘Tres Pinos’ there was such a surf we
simply had to yell to make each other hear.
And there,” concluded Julia, with a flourish of
animation, quite as though she had reached the
climax of her tale—“there my hat blew off.”
.bn 046.png
.pn +1
Mrs. Budd threw her hands in her lap with
a gesture of resignation not lost upon her
daughter.
“And Charlie was such a dear!” Julia
smiled tenderly at the toe of her shoe, and
Mrs. Budd gathered a faint hope.
“He piled off his horse and fell around in
the fog for half an hour, and nearly drowned
himself, till I said, ‘Oh, let it go,’ and he
said, ‘All right, young madam,’ and off we
went.”
Mrs. Budd’s expression of acute disappointment
arrested her daughter’s attention.
“Why, what did you expect he did, mama?
Surely not something horrid?”
“Indeed, no. I’m quite certain, Julia,
if Charlie Thair ever did anything at all, it
could not be horrid.”
Julia stared a minute at this ambiguous
paradox. Then she chuckled.
“I never liked him so much, mama. I
got him all waked up. He didn’t have any
.bn 047.png
.pn +1
time to be witty or tiresome. And on the
way home what do you think he said?”
Mrs. Budd hung upon the revelation.
“He said,” Julia continued, with a touch
of pride, “that I was awfully good sorts, if I
was a beauty. Now wasn’t that nice of
him, mama?”
Mrs. Budd gasped. There were almost
tears in her reply.
“My dear Julia, you must not encourage
that sort of attitude in a man. You must
not forget that you are no longer a child.
And I don’t at all approve of your stramming
round the country, singing at the top
of your lungs, in your second season! Suppose
you had met those people driving up
from the station!”
“Who is the woman who came with Mr.
Longacre?” Julia inquired irrelevantly.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Essington, Kitty Wykoff’s
daughter. Kitty married her to some
Englishman—a wretch! She’s lived in
.bn 048.png
.pn +1
London for years. She knows Mr. Longacre.
I’m so glad she’s come! I don’t
know what we should have done with him
if she hadn’t! He’s queer as ‘Dick’s hatband’!”
“Queer?” Julia threw the word out like
a missile.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Budd said
vaguely. “He’s written an opera, and when
he does talk one can’t always make sure of
what he means. And look at his neckties!”
Mrs. Budd’s eloquent gesture condemned
them out of hand.
“There’s nothing the matter with his
neckties,” said her daughter, coldly. “I
hear some one going down, mama.”
“Well, I don’t know what it is,” her
mother threw over her shoulder; “but if
they were quite right, one wouldn’t notice
them.”
After the door had closed on Mrs. Budd’s
glittering wake, the girl stood motionless,
.bn 049.png
.pn +1
her eyes on her mirror. But her conscious
sight was turned inward. She was struggling
to recall a clear image of the neckties, which
she was certain she had never noticed. What
was it about them her mother so earnestly
deplored? But her mental vision persisted
in rising above the garment in question to
the eyes that could look so steadily without
staring; and through those eyes she began to
see her own. Shining hazel shot with hot
yellow replaced the blue—two flowering
cheeks, and a crimson line of lips. Presently
these smiled at her.
She drew back a step, turned half away
from the glass, looked again, wriggled her
white shoulders luxuriously in her lace bodice,
held the hand-mirror high, and, brows
drawn to one black line, earnestly contemplated
her own profile.
Then she smiled, threw the glass on the
dressing-table, and turned to the door.
She had a pleasant excitement in the
.bn 050.png
.pn +1
thought of meeting Longacre. Those cool,
blue eyes she had vaguely felt to be a bit
critical through their admiration. They
roused in her the child’s impulse to “show
off,” to surprise them into unreserved praise.
Other men were satisfied to find her beautiful,
but he seemed to require more. Well,
he should see, she thought, with a shake of
her darkly burnished head.
He loomed so large to her mental vision
that when she actually saw him he seemed
small and quiet, less than she had expected—yet
(the eyes again) somehow more. He
was opposite her at dinner. She caught herself
comparing his tie with Thair’s, relieved
to find them identical, to see, as Longacre’s
head turned toward the woman on his right,
that the blond hair, longish over the forehead,
was clipped close behind the ears.
Correct as one could wish; and yet, her
mother had said he was queer. Well, he
was—different, odd. She felt ashamed of
.bn 051.png
.pn +1
her inventory, but—well, a man could not
afford to be odd.
She reproached herself. He would not
condemn her for—wearing lawn over satin.
But again, he would—if she sang a false
note. Well, he should see!
They had not exchanged a word between
the time she had come down and the serving
of dinner; but with coffee in the drawing-room
she asked him casually if he would
play an accompaniment.
Longacre was vaguely dismayed. He had
not known that Julia sang. He abhorred
drawing-room songs, built to show the voice
as a stage gown to show the figure. At the
worst, he felt he could not forgive her. At
the best, it must be less beautiful than she.
And that he should second such a performance!
He felt he had changed color. He
said he would be delighted. So far, he rose
to her conventional ideal. It would not,
he felt, have been so bad had they two been
.bn 052.png
.pn +1
alone together; but all these people coming
in, murmuring, looking expectant, made a
show of it, in which he seemed, to himself,
exhibiting Julia, at her worst, to—well,
Florence Essington at her best. He fancied
the girl’s cheeks were hot, her hands nervous
as they skimmed the music.
The song she chose was some selection
from a modern Italian opera, a passionate,
melancholy thing.
All through the long prelude he found
himself expecting and dreading her voice.
When it came at last it bewildered him.
It was everything he had not expected, liquid,
pliant, full, unerringly true in its leaps
and falls through alarming intervals, astonishingly
trained. But it chilled him, distressed
him, so much more disappointed him
than he had feared. It failed in the one
thing he had made sure of. The voice was
a lovely, hollow shell of sound. Could not
a creature with her strong pulse of life, her
.bn 053.png
.pn +1
gorgeous senses, put more of herself, of her
passion, into her voice? His accompaniment
sang the composer’s meaning with
keener comprehension than she, he thought
savagely as his fingers fell on the last chord.
But the approval, the banalities, the applause,
were all for the singer. They must
have it again, Mrs. Budd’s guests.
But Julia, looking covertly at Longacre,
whose approval alone was withheld, refused
brusquely. No, she told Mrs. Fitz Hugh,
the most voluble of the group around her,
she would not sing again to-night. She
looked laughing and triumphant, standing
separated from him by the people.
He felt irritated, out of tune with everything.
The evening that had promised so
well was spoiled. But as he turned from the
piano Julia was suddenly at his elbow, still
flushed, but now her voice was weak in her
murmur.
“You didn’t like it, did you?”
.bn 054.png
.pn +1
It was hard to meet her eyes, yet he experienced
a swift pleasure, as if one in whom
he had feared to be disappointed had not
failed him, after all.
“It’s not as beautiful as you,” he said
simply.
His sincerity startled her.
“Does it have to be that for you to stand
it?” She tried to laugh it off.
“N-no-o—but,” he hesitated—“it’s because—because
I could forgive you every
fault but the one.”
That odd, intimate way he talked amazed
her. She had never heard anything just like
it. It was unconventional—oh, queer! She
felt her color rising, but she stayed.
“Is it the method?” she ventured.
How young she was, he thought; how
could one put it!
“The method is all right,” he said, “and
the voice is lovely; but how can you sing
that song when you don’t know what it
.bn 055.png
.pn +1
means,—or sing anything, when you don’t
know, yet, what anything means?”
Then he saw he had tried too much.
Generations of convention rose up to cut off
her instinct for what he was saying.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,”
she murmured. Her eyes had fluttered fearfully
from his, caught Thair’s across the
room. In answer to their unconscious distress,
Thair quizzically smiled. He came
dawdling across to where Julia and Longacre
stood, by this time conspicuously isolated.
Longacre turned not too graciously to this
approach, and saw that their situation had
drawn another regard. Mrs. Essington, just
quitted by Thair, was looking, and she too,
he fancied, not without a smile.
.bn 056.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch03
CHAPTER III||MRS. ESSINGTON RUNS AWAY FROM HERSELF
.sp 2
.dc 0.25 0.65
FLORENCE ESSINGTON woke
with a flood of early sun across her
bed, and the sound of the ocean
in her ears. But the fringes of
hardy yellow jessamine around her windows
smothered the salt smell of it. The air of the
room suggested gardens, and the sea sound
was but a background for the clear human
voices a-chatter somewhere among the hydrangeas
and heliotrope. The out-of-doors
invaded the house in a positive summons.
A dozen retrospections had lifted and dissolved
with the fog.
Her veins seemed distended with fresh
blood, her heart quickened with the sharp
.bn 057.png
.pn +1
chorus of wild canaries, the chattering flights
of linnets flashing across her window. She
asked her reflection in the glass if a woman
who appeared fresh at seven in the morning
could well accuse herself of age? Her foot
was like a young girl’s on the wide stair descending
to the reception-hall. That sharp,
exquisite freshness that a wet night leaves
behind it met her on the threshold.
The house stood back in the billow of a
hill. The drive rushed in wide sweeps down
a glittering greensward dashed with dark oaks
that thickened to a belt at the base of the
hill, where the road cut whitely through
them; beyond, the cypresses standing up
against the blue circle of sea, and the fog, a
continent of pearl and shadow, stealing back
across the ocean’s floor. It hid the southern
horizon, but northward she could see the
sunlight on the windows of Santa Cruz. She
looked over the whole semicircle of sea and
shore. The length of the coast, trembling out
.bn 058.png
.pn +1
of sight in a quivering mist of spray; the unending
hill and hollow, lifting and falling
away into the sky; the everlasting, encompassing
ocean, lifted her out of herself with
their power of infinity. The sparkle of the
sea drew into her eyes. The buoyant spirit
of a joy that only breathes under a new-risen
sun was reflected in her face.
But the small sounds of things near and
finite, drumming persistently on her ears, at
last made themselves audible, growing upon
her attention until she found herself listening
to a murmur of talking, broken now and
then by a rich, vibrant note of laughter. She
heard it first as a little part of her pleasure of
sight and sound, but presently some disturbing
reminder in it, some painful memory, distracted
her; finally turned, first her face, then
her feet, in the direction of the flower-planted
western terrace.
With a few steps she had the talkers
in sight,—Thair, his riding-crop slashing at
.bn 059.png
.pn +1
the ragged chrysanthemums; Julia Budd, a
sheaf of heliotrope in one arm; and Longacre,
whose hand, while Thair talked, plucked
and plucked and strewed the path with the
small purple blossoms of one of the hanging
sprays.
Florence paused, her impulse to join them
somehow quenched.
Thair, with his genial talk, seemed to have
no association with the other two. He might
as well have been somewhere else. Though
the girl’s face was turned toward the sea,
and Longacre’s eyes were on the heliotrope,
they seemed, by something akin in expression,
somehow sharply, intimately drawn together.
Florence saw them thus for a moment.
Then Julia turned, Longacre looked up at
her, their eyes met. The spirit of the girl’s
voice had shot Florence with sharp misery;
but it was the full look of Longacre’s eyes
that, had they moved a hair’s breadth from
Julia’s face, would have seen Florence standing,
.bn 060.png
.pn +1
looking through the passion-vines, that
held her for a minute still, and staring. Then
noiselessly, like an eavesdropper, she retreated.
She felt wretchedly that she had
spied on him, had interrupted something not
meant for her to see. She had an overwhelming
impulse to escape the confines of flowers
and voices, a need of something not less large
and bitter than the sea. It was not thought,
but impulse that directed her steps, that
turned them so precipitately down the
drive. Near the end of the grounds she
began to run. Under the shelter of the oaks
she slackened her pace, but her gait still had
a headlong haste, and only when she broke
from the fringe of foliage out upon the slope
of sand, with the green waves bowing and
breaking at her feet, did she stop to get
breath.
Even then she did not look back over the
way she had come, but out across the water
that had grown less blue than gray. The
.bn 061.png
.pn +1
only thing before her was that she had seen
another receive what she had thought her
own. Intolerable! It goaded her to motion.
Blind to seeing, deaf to hearing, incapable
of thought, she hurried down a space
of endless sound and emptiness. Oh, to get
away from herself! She ran to outstrip herself,
that self that could only remember the
look in the garden, that could only endlessly
repeat that she had lost him! It was upon
her, the possibility she would not face yesterday.
It had her unawares. She could
not endure it!
She ran. Before her tripped a sandpiper,
his fine web of footprints following him.
Shadows of gulls, swept across the sand, were
like great blown leaves.
She had put her whole life into a failure!
She had lost him!
She heard the soft sucking of wet sand
under her feet. The point of rocks before
her made three ragged steps down to the sea.
.bn 062.png
.pn +1
Above them that cypress had a shape of
human agony. The breakers rising over the
lower rock were like a succession of slippery,
watery stairs meeting the stones. And oh,
the thunder of the coast!
The strong voice of the ocean, the breakers’
shock, the biting taste, the long sigh of
subsiding waves, the eternal iteration of great
sounds, encompassed her. Wild, unthinkably
vast! Ordered commotion! Inevitable
change! What, in the face of sky and
sea, did it matter if this one man loved one
woman, or another?
“One man, one man!” She said it over.
And his voice, his face, and small forgettable
things—tricks of eye, of manner—came
back upon her and possessed her. The woman
the years had made rose in her. The
man was hers. Because she had willed it,
the boy had been drawn to her; because of
her, again, he had found himself; with her
he had fashioned the beginning of his man’s
.bn 063.png
.pn +1
life; he and she had laid the foundations
of it.
Could she let go all that had been so understandingly
wrought to—what? Had
the girl anything but her glorious flesh—any
latent possibility of power to meet his
need? She asked herself, with increasing
calm, could she be sure her stimulated imagination
had not deceived her. But when
that look of his had first been hers, had she
not known it as a fact, tangible as a hand to
grasp? And was she so feeble as to repudiate
the new fact because it stung?
No! She saw laid on him, ever so lightly,
the touch of a younger, stronger vitality;
and yet how fully aware was he? She knew
so well his oblivious self-absorption, his mind
incurious, slow to recognize the possibility
of change. They had so grown to take each
other for granted. She knew that anything
threatening their mutual dependence could
not come to him and leave him steady.
.bn 064.png
.pn +1
But her own position? It was that she
sought in the labyrinth of her mind; but
where reason had been was only a succession
of violent emotions. She had been generous
while she had been sure of him. Now the
feeling of right that custom gives, the passion
of possession, was fermenting in her. It consumed
everything else.
What her strength could hold was hers.
She wondered how strong she was. The
strength of suffering! The wisdom of failure!
Oh, she would hold him! How long?
She put it away.
She turned back along the ringing beach.
It was better, she thought, to be rooted like
the cypress, even to be fastened in a great
melancholy unrest, than to be as one of the
gulls, flying on every wind, fishing at random.
The fog was lifting toward the north.
The coast showed dark under it. There
was something sterile in the thin black line
of land across the waste of water, but she
.bn 065.png
.pn +1
faced it rather than the deep-bosomed, soft-shadowed
hills. But when, perforce, she
turned her back on it to climb the “Miramar”
terrace by a path through the oaks, she
felt her high tension relax, a less triumphant
confidence. Yet her eyes were calm, her
pulse steady; she held her determination unwavering.
Life thus far had taught her that
of tenacity was the habit of success.
.bn 066.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch04
CHAPTER IV||LONGACRE RUNS AFTER
.sp 2
.dc 0.6 0.65
STEPPING on to the veranda, Florence
found herself in a projected
atmosphere of breakfast—the fine
aroma of coffee, the strident gaiety
of people not too well known to one another
and denied the solace of breakfast in their
rooms.
Mrs. Budd’s country house was thrown together
with the directness, the inconsequence,
and the charming frankness of the lady herself.
There were no corners, no intricacies
of passage, no glooms. One step from the
veranda and you were in the midst of it.
You were entirely surrounded by the open
stairs to the chambers, the double drawing-rooms
.bn 067.png
.pn +1
on the left, the dining-room and library
on the right, with the “glass room”
giving on the garden behind it. You saw
them all at a glance, and saw them in an
even flood of light from the lightly curtained,
large, plain windows.
From the living-hall Florence saw, through
the double doors, a triangular vista of the
breakfast-room. The table, drawn squarely
in front of the open French windows, was
dappled with sun. She got an impression of
colors and motions, and the automatic movement
to and fro of the starched white blouse
of the Chinese butler.
She distinguished but two faces, Julia’s
and Longacre’s. They were fronting the
door, back to the full flood of sun, and again
she saw them together, as though detached
from the people around them. Julia was
talking, but more aware of whom she talked
to than what she said. Longacre seemed
hardly to listen. He kept looking at her.
.bn 068.png
.pn +1
Florence felt again a tightening throat.
She got a long breath. She realized that
Mrs. Budd had suspended her flow of conversation
with Holden, and had fixed on her
a smile of absent welcome. She indicated
the vacant place at Holden’s right, and hurried
an inquiry of how her guest had slept
into a breathless demand as to how she preferred
her coffee.
Florence found herself fronting Longacre,
who was pent between Cissy Fitz Hugh’s
pettish prettiness and Julia’s accented gaiety.
He looked up at Florence as if he had come
out of a dream. His eyes met hers across
the table, whimsically asking: Wasn’t it,
after all, just the jolliest, stupidest possible
lark? But she did not answer the look.
She wouldn’t. The smile that she did give
him was a mere good morning, the same as
she had given Holden when he drew back
her chair for her. Her whole attention
seemed for Thair, who had immediately
.bn 069.png
.pn +1
turned on her the genial impudence of his
odd, light eyes that seemed to see consummately
through half-closed lids.
“You are truly the most extraordinary
person,” he was saying. “One sees you in
the first flush of day half a mile on the road
to the sea. And presently you come in,
straight from the fountain of youth, and remember
immediately how many lumps you
take in your coffee.”
“And you—” She just hesitated. She
saw Longacre still looking at her—“are too
delightfully naïve!” Her eyes returned to
Thair’s mocking face. “It’s not a medicine
one permits one’s self before breakfast.”
He laughed with whetted interest.
“What will you have? I am all at your
commands.”
“Mercy, Charlie,” Cissy cut in, “I should
think you’d know all any one expects of
you is to be amusing!” She glanced maliciously
at Mrs. Budd.
.bn 070.png
.pn +1
“Can you prove your reputation for wit?”
Florence asked him.
Thair leaned back, chin up, eyes down.
He was enjoying himself.
“The reputation for wit,” he proclaimed,
“hangs on the things a man has said, and
the things you hope he’ll presently say.
He’s like the ‘white queen’ in what’s-its-name—jam
yesterday, jam to-morrow, but
never jam to-day.”
“Speaking of jam,” Julia plumped in
nonchalantly, “will you please pass me
the marmalade, Mr. Thair? (Never mind,
Wong!) Mama,” she called across the
table, “has it been decided whether we are
to ride or drive over to the links?”
The question caught an undercurrent of
attention through the talk. Not that the
method of progression so much mattered to
the breakfasters, as the company in which
they traveled. They hung upon Mrs. Budd
as the arbiter of their fate.
.bn 071.png
.pn +1
“Why, both, pet.” The hostess’s glance
flashed upon her guests at large, though her
reply, obviously, was limited to her daughter.
“I have ordered the surrey. That and Mr.
Thair’s machine take half of us, but you young
people will, of course, prefer your saddles.”
“You’ll ride?” Holden murmured to
Florence.
She looked down at his big, blunt hand,
resting on the table.
“Did you say your horses were here?”
“Why, yes, the span are. Drove ’em
down from Palo Alto.” He was eager
“Would you rather—”
The tail of his sentence was lost in Julia’s
clear voice.
“Bess and I are going in the ‘red devil,’”
she announced. Thus a queen might proclaim
her progression.
The blooming, blonde creature included
in this edict threw a nervous glance at Thair.
But he was all amiable irony.
.bn 072.png
.pn +1
“You are the leading conspirator for my
happiness.” He bowed across to Julia.
Florence divined who might be expected
to fill the fourth place in the automobile. It
might have been that possibility which ruffled
Cissy Fitz Hugh’s forehead. But Cissy’s
endeavors never failed from lack of confidence.
“Well, really,” she observed pathetically,
“it’s such a magnificent morning, I think
I shall make one effort to ride over. Don’t
you think it’s an ideal morning for a gallop?”
She appealed to Longacre.
“Well, you make it seem so,” he said,
with one of his gentle, misleading looks. It
misled both Cissy and Julia. It left one complaisant,
the other a little more like a princess
than usual. But Florence knew just what
that look signified. When he was going to
escape he was always like that. Unconcerned
about the little arrangements of life,
he habitually took them as they were offered,
.bn 073.png
.pn +1
but Florence knew he had no idea of riding
over as Cissy’s escort.
She suspected he had lost the chance of a
fourth place in Julia’s arrangement. How
he intended to escape Cissy she guessed from
his look at herself, questioning her.
She gave him a vague, inquiring smile,
and turned to answer Thair. She knew
Longacre would speak to her after breakfast.
He did. In the general exodus to the veranda
she found him at her elbow, a little quizzical,
a little puzzled.
“Are we going to gallop over together?”
he asked, as if he were stating a certainty.
“Why, aren’t you with Mrs. Fitz Hugh?”
she said, with light surprise.
“I?” He was puzzled to know if she
were serious. “Lord, I’m going to dodge
her!”
“With me? But, Tony—I’m so sorry—I’ve
promised Mr. Holden to drive over
with him.”
.bn 074.png
.pn +1
“Holden!” Longacre looked, as he felt,
outraged. “But I thought, of course—”
“Why?” Florence wondered. “Did you
speak of it?”
“No—but I thought, of course, that we
would—oh, well!” he flung out, sulky as a
boy.
“Oh, here he is!” Cissy Fitz Hugh, compressed
into her habit like jelly into a mold,
was upon them. Her hand was lightly on
Longacre’s sleeve.
“Mr. Colton wants to put me up,” she
complained, “but I said no one shall—but
my cavalier!”
“Now, really, Mr. Longacre,” Mrs. Budd’s
voice burst forth from the other side, “I
don’t know what sort of a mount you prefer.”
She indicated the group of horses crowding
away from the gibbering road-machine
that ground into the porte-cochère with Thair’s
hand on the throttle. Thair’s humorous regard
was for Longacre’s predicament. Too
.bn 075.png
.pn +1
late, it seemed to say, to escape from such a
veteran as Cissy.
When the riders headed the procession
down the steep dip of the drive, Cissy’s
blonde head was nodding and ducking to
Longacre’s passive profile with such calm
assurance of how cleverly she had managed
it, that Florence Essington could not repress
a smile.
Holden, who, at the instant, had pulled
up his horses at the steps, took the expression
to himself with simplicity. The concentration
with which he took in what was
immediately before him, without regard to
things behind or beyond, was a relief to her.
Now his hands were so full of his horses that
he had hardly a glance for her. The impatient
sorrels were making preliminary attempts
to run over the groom at their bits.
“Can you make it?” Holden said, as
he brought the runabout to momentary
quiet.
.bn 076.png
.pn +1
She was in with the dart of a swallow.
The groom sprang aside, and Florence
felt herself precipitated, as in one plunge, toward
the sea.
“Hey, hey!” Holden growled under his
breath. The reins were taut, and his arm,
brushing her shoulder, was as stiff as steel.
The animals, curbed and quivering, danced
down the slope like fine ladies, shaking their
heads with a vague threat of another outburst.
“They’re crazy for a run,” Holden murmured
caressingly. “We’ll have to head
that procession,” and he nodded toward the
group stringing through the gate.
“That is what I should like,” said Florence.
“Then we’ll put them clean out of sight,”
he answered.
They passed the foremost riders as these
were swinging into the coast road, and for a
few moments Florence saw oaks and ocean
.bn 077.png
.pn +1
as a blur of olive-green pierced with flashes
of bright blue.
“Too fast?” Holden inquired, his eyes on
the horses’ ears.
“It couldn’t be!” she answered with excitement.
The rapid motion was what her mood
needed to fire it. It lit a spark in her cold,
lethargic determination. She was possessed
with that feeling of triumph speed creates—a
physical elation, a surety that nothing in
life could stand still again. A faint color
grew in her cheeks. Her eyes had a fire that
seldom burned in their somber pupils; a
color and a fire that Holden marked in his
greater leisure, with the slackened speed of
the horses rising the steep hill.
“You look so lit up,” he told her, half
wonderingly.
“It’s the driving,” she explained, “or
rather flying. We hardly seemed to touch
earth.”
.bn 078.png
.pn +1
“Just driving!” He was amused. “Well,
I like it. It’s my play. It’s famous to
have a strong, lively pair of brutes under
your hand to hurry or pull up as you like.”
Florence looked as though that pleasure
were quite within her comprehension.
“But,” he added, with another look at her
glowing face, “it would take the biggest
deal in the country to make me feel within
twenty miles of the way you look.”
“Oh, do I look all that?” She seemed so
to comprehend! He warmed under the
kindness of her fancy.
“You know I want above all things to
please you,” he began.
“Aren’t we friends enough not to have to
please each other?” she quickly interposed.
She wanted so to keep him off that dangerous
ground.
“You people have such a way with
words!” he protested, with a head-shake as
large and impatient as a bull’s.
.bn 079.png
.pn +1
“We people?” she demanded with gay
asperity.
“Oh, all that crowd!” He jerked his head
backward, in the direction of the party following.
“And you insist on classing me?” she
persisted.
“You know,” he replied obstinately, “as
far as I’m concerned, you’re in a class by
yourself. I’ve told you all about that before.”
As they began the descent his hands
tightened on the reins.
She looked seaward over the low live-oaks.
“You can’t for a moment suppose,” he
went on, “that I class you with them. You
know their sort. You know how to meet
them; but I believe at bottom you’re more
like me.”
“That may be, too,” she said gently;
“but—”
“Do you know, that’s the way you always
.bn 080.png
.pn +1
answer me!” he struck in. “You won’t
put a definite period to a sentence.”
“Because you won’t let me come to the
end of it,” she said quickly. She wanted to
avert the last appeal. She wished to have all
clear between them, but instinctively she
dreaded the finality. “The difficulty is that
I’m not enough like you; and we two are
mature; we won’t change; we can’t adjust
ourselves as younger people can.”
“I ought to know by this time how
much or how little alike we are,” he determined.
“Is it such a long time?” she doubted.
“Six months.”
“Yes, but what did the months in New
York amount to? A porridge of things and
people! Did we have time to breathe? We
simply rushed from place to place, throwing
at each other the last opinion on the latest
thing.”
“I knew what I wanted then,” he retorted.
.bn 081.png
.pn +1
“But you didn’t know me.”
“Don’t you think I know the sort you
are?” he demanded.
“Not quite.” And, as he repudiated her
words with his large head-shake, she added,
“At least, if you will take the consequences
of cornering me, I’m not at all sure I know
what you are like.”
He seemed to consider this more natural.
“I’ll tell you all you want to know in that
quarter, and tell you straight.” He pinned
her with his direct look.
She tried to retrieve his misconception of
her meaning.
“Oh,” she said, “you can’t. You would
have to show me.”
They whirled under the cypresses at the
entrance to the golf-links. The club-house,
so low, and so widely roofed with tiles that
it appeared to crouch under a red umbrella,
gave them just the glimmer of the upper row
of its windows over the hill-crest.
.bn 082.png
.pn +1
“And how long a time will it take to show
you?” said Holden.
It came to her how unescapable he was;
what significance had his direct mind read
into her replies? She was grave, with a certain
distress and indecision in her face.
“I can’t tell. I mean you must not ask me
to—you must not expect—I cannot—”
But he would not have it.
“Oh, well, if time’s what you want!”
“Do you go at your deals as hard as
this?” she smiled.
“Worse than this,” he said earnestly.
“There’s no consideration there—much
worse.”
“Worse!” cried Cissy Fitz Hugh, catching
the word as she and Longacre, foremost
of the riders, came abreast the runabout.
“Golf—worse than railroad deals,” replied
Florence so quickly that Longacre,
who had had time to note Holden’s annoyance,
gave her a long consideration.
.bn 083.png
.pn +1
“But you don’t stay out of a game because
it’s hard, Holden,” he said. “Suppose we
make a foursome.”
Florence felt a quickened heart—a thrill
that was more than excitement, too keen for
joy. Had he looked at Holden as at a rival?
Was he trying, this negligent Longacre, to
arrange to speak with her, to be near her?
Did he miss her so much? He must miss
her more.
He handed her out at the club veranda,
both her hands in his, and she could not help
giving him one of her old looks. It got
away from her. She saw him flush under it.
It went to his head.
She kept close to Holden. She walked
out to the tee with him, as inconsequently
happy, and, she told herself, as silly, as a
girl. She knew that Longacre had builded
on his knowledge that, while he and she
played a fairly fast game, Cissy was a notably
wild shot and Holden a duffer. But Florence
.bn 084.png
.pn +1
chose to assume Holden to be her
partner, again relegating Cissy to Longacre;
and she waived to Cissy the right of the first
drive, which, though wild, covered a long
space in a forward direction. Longacre’s
face, flushed, quivering with irritation, his
drive off—a smashing crack that sent the
ball a spinning streak—were with her memory
over all the course, but she managed her
game to keep just from blocking Holden’s,
seeing Longacre well away at the second
green as the greater party came out to the
tee.
Diligently coaching Holden, she managed
to keep far enough ahead of all but one, the
most hardy, the most headlong player on the
links. Florence felt pursued and hurried on
by that ringing voice, detaching itself in her
ears from all other sounds and voices.
“Fore!” it rang out, vibrant, musical, across
the brown downs.
Looking back from her advance to where
.bn 085.png
.pn +1
the play was more congested, she could see
the tall figure whose vigor and presence
seemed to dominate the links. Florence felt
herself sunk in the background of Julia
Budd’s identity. The girl’s strokes had
rhythm; the movements of her body, harmony.
Her voice, that was more a call than
a shout, had the sound of half-savage music.
Beside her the others seemed triflers. She
was splendid in her intensity for the thing in
hand, the play—the long swing, the flying
ball, the quick pursuit. Florence could feel
her waiting at their backs, impatient of delay,
her warning “Fore!” urging them forward.
With this potent personality pressing her
hard, Florence went slowly, warily. Her
eye measured the distance as she increased
or decreased it between herself and Longacre.
Her nerves were tight, but the exercise
fostered what color the drive had lent her;
and her sense of beginning to handle circumstances,
.bn 086.png
.pn +1
that she had feared were slipping
past her, gave her an appearance of serenity.
It was this manner of delicate calm, considered
with her bright eyes and hot cheeks,
that, when she joined the party at luncheon,
instantly got Longacre’s attention and kept
him distracted. She guessed he was trying
to explain her mood to himself, without success.
She determined to give him no opportunity
for discoveries until the hour of her
choosing.
She quizzed Thair across the luncheon-table
with the early invitation to try his automobile
he had extended her, and had not
made good.
“I’ll take you up on that,” he threatened,
“if you’ll honor the ‘red devil’ as far as
‘Del Monte’ to-night.”
“To the dance? Must we be so precipitate?”
she asked.
He insisted.
Cissy Fitz Hugh looked sharply from
.bn 087.png
.pn +1
Thair to Florence, from Florence to Longacre.
After luncheon, while the horses were
being brought around, she cornered her cousin.
Florence saw Thair amused, protesting,—Cissy
positive, insisting. She must have
extracted a promise. She turned away with
the smile of a kitten over cream.
That look, and the idea it suggested, of
what Cissy had been after, gave Florence a
sudden disgust of the whole thing—Cissy,
her manœuver; herself, her own manœuvers;
every one; all scuffling after what they
wanted, seeing no further than the next minute.
Unprofitable! She would not think.
She drove back to “Miramar,” as she had
come, with Holden. She went immediately
to her room. To sleep was impossible, and
she would not—no, could not—think. She
walked about the room, picked up and moved
about little articles on the writing-desk, the
chiffonnier. She watched from her window
the line of surf that incessantly built and
.bn 088.png
.pn +1
broke itself along the glittering coast. The
fingers that drummed the pane trembled.
She heard voices passing under her window
as the tennis-players and bathers followed
the afternoon home for tea on the veranda,
since the evening was clear. She did not go
down. She stood at the window, watching
the violet shadows drawing fold over fold of
deepening color across the ocean’s floor. She
had lost herself to such finite things as time.
When she came back to it with a start, she
was dismayed to see only half an hour left
for dressing.
But she dressed with consideration, with
anxiety. For full five minutes after the maid
had fastened the last hook and pinned the last
flower, she revolved before the mirror, studying
the coils of dark hair that wrapped her
head, and the lines of the lace gown that sloped
along her shoulders and rippled, with broken
glitters of cut steel, to the floor. When she
turned from the glass she was smiling.
.bn 089.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch05
CHAPTER V||THE PURSUER IS CAPTURED
.sp 2
.dc 0.6 0.65
SHE was late to a late dinner. She
found herself last, but felt herself
more looked at than mere lateness
warranted. Some of the women
looked first at her, and then at each other.
Among the glances given she noted but
two—Longacre’s and Julia Budd’s; though
theirs were the eyes least evidently on her.
The girl was in great spirits, rather readier
with her rich laugh than usual. Florence
was almost betrayed into a straight stare of
admiration, of wonder, at all she meant—the
arrogance of youth in great beauty that repudiated
the need of enhancement, either
from the rosy cloud of chiffon in which she
.bn 090.png
.pn +1
had clothed herself, or the mind, hardly
awake, under the splendid aura of her hair.
How she was sailing on the surface of life!
But it occurred to Florence that when she
should plunge into its depths—!
Longacre leaned across the table with a
question to Florence, and she fancied that
Julia listened to it. Her eyes and ears were
unwontedly keen and sensitive for tones and
expressions. The atmosphere was charged
with diverse elements. The sense of cross-purposes
around the table was as vivid to her
mind as, to her eyes, the general disintegration
upon the rising, and the confused crystallizations
of people.
Cissy Fitz Hugh was already complaisantly
established in the back seat of Thair’s
automobile when Florence came out on the
veranda. Groups of men and women stood
irresolutely about, as if uncertain what disposition
fate was about to make of them. Julia,
thrusting on a half-coat of lace, came rushing
.bn 091.png
.pn +1
through the hall with her air of knowing exactly
where she was going.
“Why, pettie!” Her mother detained
her by one sleeve. “You must put on a
thicker wrap if you are going in an open
vehicle!”
“But I’m not,” said Julia, with a gleam.
“I’m going in the carryall.”
Mrs. Budd’s helpless “Oh!” was clearly
audible.
At this, Cissy, whose mind had evidently
contained one doubt as to who would be the
other occupant of the back seat, looked contentedly
at Longacre handing Julia into her
chosen conveyance. He held open the door
on the last glimmer of her slippers—then
followed her into the carryall. Cissy’s rapid
change of expression amounted to a grimace.
She shot Florence a look of incredulity,
craned hastily around at the carryall windows,
started to speak; then she stared rather blankly
at the blooming Bess who swung into the seat
.bn 092.png
.pn +1
beside her with the confidence of belonging
nowhere else.
Florence looked at Thair, and he gave her
almost a grin.
“Place aux dames!” he lilted as the “red
devil” slid past the carryall.
They headed the procession down the
steep drive, the sea wind in their faces, plunging
through black and white shadows of
moonlight and oaks, catching the flicker of
the Monterey lights, finally rolling through
the Del Monte gates with the electric stars
overhead drawing huge, sprawling silhouettes
of banana and palm on the drive in front,
and a string-orchestra sounding somewhere
beyond the open French windows.
Florence had never felt more alone in her
life than on that swarming hotel veranda.
She saw Cissy Fitz Hugh with a hand out
to a dozen the minute she was out of the automobile—full-necked,
close-cropped men;
liquid-eyed women with cheeks like peaches
.bn 093.png
.pn +1
and voices like ringing glass; how Cissy
seemed to belong among them, to be one of
them with an identity eloquent of a dozen
summers of common pursuits, gossips, and
scandals.
Florence’s steel and lace sheared through
their softer fabrics like a blade through flowers.
The great rooms were filled, jammed. To
the hotel inmates had been added by degrees
the parties from the cottages along the shore.
The assemblage showed its “mixedness” by
the sharp lines of its cliques, made up like a
Chinese toy—ring within ring; the outer,
whoever could manage a night at the hotel
for the sake of a show; the inner, by their
sharper individuality of manner and gown
and their air of belonging exactly where they
happened to be, undoubtedly the show, and
supremely regardless of it.
Of them, a woman in heliotrope, with passementerie
dragons running up her arms,
waved to Florence, and drew her into her
.bn 094.png
.pn +1
shouting group, crying, “You here!” and
“Who next where!”
“And where,” she wanted to know at the
top of her voice, “is the sweet musician—the
American with the short hair, who was
at your elbow in London?”
“In much the same position,” came Longacre’s
soft drawl over Florence’s shoulder.
“The dear impertinence,” the lady-dragoness
appealed, “of taking that description
to yourself!”
“Oh, it was too perfect,” he insisted. “The
American with the short hair!”
“And the sweet musician!” Florence
teased. A note in her voice took him back
to Vienna and their fresher days. He looked
at her. She seemed a reawakened memory—flushed
cheeks, and a stinging light in
her eyes.
“Oh, the sweet musician”—Longacre
was very easy about him—“is pigeonholed
in New York.”
.bn 095.png
.pn +1
“What, that dear thing you were playing
us catches of last spring?” The dragoness
was all vociferous sympathy, but through it
he remained aware of Florence Essington’s
pure profile averted from him, looking across
the room toward a gorgeous, rose-like Julia,
blooming, the center of a circle of black
coats.
But for Longacre, at that moment, the
other side of the room might well have been
the other side of the world. As the orchestra
slid into a waltz of Strauss, and the lady
of dragons was drawn away into the measure,
he laid an eager hand on Florence’s arm, with
an “Oh, I say, dance this with me!” hard to
be denied.
But she nodded across the room toward
Thair approaching with long stride and confident
smile. “It is promised, but—”
“Well,” he frowned, “the next, then.”
“Well—” she acceded.
“And the next.”
.bn 096.png
.pn +1
As she hesitated he muttered, “Do you
know what I want?” He leaned nearer.
“I want the whole evening, as we used—all
of ’em!”
“Oh, only that!” she fairly laughed at
him.
“This isn’t Vienna,” she said as she turned
away with Thair, but her negation sounded
like a promise. She left him—Longacre,
who habitually loafed out a ball,—with a desire
to dance—to dance wildly, madly, with
any one!
Safely and slowly steered around the room
in Thair’s practised arm, Florence saw him
whirling recklessly through the crowd, dancing
double time in fine Viennese fashion,
twice as fast as the rhythmic swing of the
room, with Julia Budd a half-alarmed, half-angry,
wholly excited partner. She seemed
holding back, objecting; he was urging her
on, domineering. He swept her along
against her will.
.bn 097.png
.pn +1
“Oh, no, no; you don’t want to stop!”
Florence heard him laugh as he dashed past.
And, catching glimpses of Julia’s face as she
was whirled along, Florence thought it struggled
with a desire, and an inability, to be
angry; a confused pleasure in a will stronger
than her own.
Mrs. Budd was making covert attempts to
attract her daughter’s attention. Her expression
said that Longacre was proving himself
all and more than “queer” included.
“Conspicuousness” was her abomination,
and there was no doubt that Fox Longacre
was making Julia conspicuous.
To Florence it was equally plain that he
did not know it. The situation opened before
her like a tableau, the climax of the
play. She saw Fox and Julia in their excited
gyration, not as she had seen them that
morning in the garden, but in discord, in
different planets of feeling, the girl supremely
agitated, Longacre elated. What was the
.bn 098.png
.pn +1
origin of that elation? Florence asked herself.
A look of hers—a waft of memory!
If she missed the significance of the girl’s
face, the danger it threatened, it was that she
lost it in the tumult of her own feeling.
A word, and she would have been whirling
in Julia’s place. Still looking at Julia,
she blamed herself for holding him off so
long. The girl’s mere proximity was peril.
That was enough to keep any man beside
her all the evening. She had more than
beauty. She was magnetic. She sunk the
women around her to nonentities.
Florence watched Longacre shouldering
Julia a passage through the press in the direction
of Mrs. Budd’s disapproval. He
stood a moment talking with the mother and
daughter; and as the girl turned her long
throat, and bent her black brows upon him,
the woman thought, “Of course he will stay.
At least he will stay out the interval.” He
seemed to hesitate, but turned presently and
.bn 099.png
.pn +1
walked on to another group, said a word
there, started across the room.
Unconsciously Florence straightened herself.
What irrelevant thing she said to Thair
she didn’t know. She heard him laugh.
She was thinking:
“It is only the beginning. I don’t
know—”
She answered Thair, but all the while was
watching Longacre coming across the floor,
with a word here and there, and bright, absent
eyes. His look found concentration as
he paused in front of her. His eyes were
more eager than she had seen them for longer
than she cared to remember. He was less
at ease, too. His looks at Thair were hints.
When the returning violins urged that gentleman
in the direction of his hostess and his
hostess’s daughter, Longacre, as if at last released,
burst out:
“Now let’s get out of this before any
more come along!”
.bn 100.png
.pn +1
“Any more?” She was composed about
it.
“That two hundred pounds of commercialism
looking in this direction.” He indicated
Holden with a sliding eye.
“Why, Tony, what has happened to
you?”
“Don’t you know?” He was smiling,
but well in earnest. “I haven’t said a word
to you,” he pronounced impressively, “for
twenty-four hours.”
“But why?” She seemed to challenge
him with: “Whose fault is that?”
“Because you dodged,” he replied coolly.
“And unless I look out, you’ll do it again.”
“And your suggestion is that we dodge
together?”
He rose, and stood in front of her while
Holden passed slowly in the crowd, turning
his penetrating eye from side to side, but
missing them completely.
“Florence,” he said, “thaw me out. I’m
.bn 101.png
.pn +1
frozen stiff. Come, I’m stale with self-communications.”
He thrust his arm through hers as he drew
her around the skirts of the crowd. She felt
its urge with a heightened pulse.
“Isn’t this rather conspicuously inconspicuous?”
she wanted to know as he seated
her behind a palm in the crook of a side
stair.
“Quite within the limits,” he assured her.
“Or do you want to be interrupted?”
“Tony, you’re almost formal!”
“You make me feel so. You’re a
stranger.”
Upon this, the curve of her smile was almost
childlike.
“Why,” he laughed, surprised, “you’re
younger than I!”
The glittering butterfly in her hair trembled
with her laughter.
“Delicious!” she cried.
“I suppose that’s the youngest thing
.bn 102.png
.pn +1
that’s been said to-night,” he admitted, rueful
as a boy, but wholly amused. He looked
up at her, and again he seemed to see her
anew, alight with an intensity that flashed in
her large eyes, that seemed reflected in the
glitter of her slow-waving black fan.
“You are the oldest, youngest ever born,”
she said, with a gentle caress of voice that
caused his smile to fade and held his eyes
steady.
“What a way you have with words!” he
said. “You make them really mean things.
You get hold of one—”
“With words,” she helped him.
“Oh, no, no; not only that! But the way
you do it,” he said, with his oldest look on
his young face. “You get nearer with them.
Most only get away.”
He alarmed her and reassured her in a
breath. “Words?” she thought, remembering
Julia’s eyes. Yes, words were her weapons,
and that which was back of them: the
.bn 103.png
.pn +1
power of mentality. But how much did that
count for now?
“You don’t like people, Tony,” she told
him.
He nodded. “I know. They’re such
everlasting discords. They deafen me. I
suppose it’s infernally selfish, but I can’t
think of you as an individual, Florence.
You’re just myself.”
They were too intent now, both of them,
for a change of color.
“You know, ever since we came here,” he
went on, his long fingers running through
and through the steel fringes in her lap,
“I’ve had the oddest sensation of losing myself—of
seeing myself escape. Oh, it’s
been wretched!” He shook his head.
She paled a little. The meaning under
his words—a meaning of which he was unconscious—pierced
her.
“Did you, really?” he asked her.
“Did I?” Her voice trembled.
.bn 104.png
.pn +1
“Try to get away from me?”
Oh, to have been sure she had been the
reason of his wretchedness!
“Are you accusing me of taking back a
gift, Tony?”
The look he gave her swallowed her fears,
and the flippancies they engendered.
“Florence,” he said, “you’ve been always
giving to me. You never think of getting.
You won’t even take what belongs to you—myself,
the opera, and whatever I may do
or be.”
“But, Tony, years ago you gave me all
that.”
“I offered it, and you refused it—on my
account, you said! What a reason!” He repudiated
it with a fierce head-shake. “When
you are giving your brain, your strength,
your life, why won’t you take that much
from me?”
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“‘Oh, it’s been wretched!’”
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[Illustration: “‘Oh, it’s been wretched!’”]
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“Suppose I should?” She looked at him
as if she half feared a recoil of his eagerness;
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but the blood, mounting to his face, only
gave him a more headlong impetuousness.
His answer was as direct as Holden could
have made: “Is that yes?”
“Why not?” she faltered, her eyes full
upon him.
“Good Lord!”—his voice was thick—“then
there need be no end to anything!”
He stooped with that incalculable impulse
of his. She swayed away from him. Her
black fan seemed to brush him back.
“’Sh!” her warning hand was on his.
Tall, slightly stooping, Charlie Thair stood
between the potted palms, blinking at them
out of his narrow eyes. One could not know
how much they had seen. They seemed to
have seen simply nothing.
“I have,” he murmured, “constituted myself
a relief expedition. You did very well,”
he said to Longacre. “I have spent three
quarters of a waltz hunting.”
“I did the best I could.” Longacre’s
.bn 110.png
.pn +1
cheerful impudence covered the situation.
“You ought to give up sooner, old man.”
Florence felt half shocked, half relieved, to
hear them talking thus, as they would have
talked if there had been no situation. But
she left the responsibility with Longacre.
She nodded casually enough to him as she
went away with Thair. But, for all her lightness,
she could not conceal the evidences of
what had happened to her. She dared not
give her eyes all the light they knew, and
still Thair wondered at their brightness. She
could not keep the caress out of her voice.
Her laugh lay too near her lips. Her breast
heaved too high. She saw that Thair noticed
it, but she felt it no longer mattered.
Whom she danced with, what she said, she
hardly knew. “Is that yes?” she heard
Longacre saying, and then her answer: “Why
not?”
Why not? Had she thought herself old?
Her pulse was a girl’s, her color inconstant,
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her heart quick and irregular. She saw him
across the crowd—a look. It was like a
hand laid in her own. Was she beginning
to live over again? Had he, for what she
had given him, repaid her with youth? She
was splendid in the flower of her mood.
She saw Julia Budd amid the crowd, distinct
from it, yet somehow less vital—a
colorful, restless-eyed ghost. Among the dispersing
dancers—with the carriages at the
door, and the morning faint yellow through
the banana leaves—Julia passed her with
the others, a dimly disturbing spirit. There
was something searching, seeking, baffled
in the look she gave Longacre as he helped
her into the carryall. He was so vital, so
alive, that he seemed to have taken from
Julia some of her gorgeous magnetism.
But Florence knew it was from another
source the vitality had sprung. She was
flushed and warm and sparkling with the
thought of it. It kept her brilliant through
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the long ride back in the cold sea wind toward
the cold saffron east. She was a whirl of
feeling. She rushed along with her sensations
as if she dared not think. The spin of the
automobile helped her.
But when the rapid motion in the sharp
half-light had changed for the long upward
house-stair; when Longacre’s good night was
but the memory of a hand-clasp around her
fingers,—then she hurried to escape what
was crowding on her elation. She shut the
door of her room. She locked it; but the
shadow that threatened had been too quick
for her. The four walls closed it in. She
turned up all the lights in the room. In
their glare the shadow was fainter. She
drew the curtains over the windows. She
shut herself away from the growing light.
She saw an image in her glass, a woman who
loved, and was loved again, bright-eyed,
hectic. The room was too small to hold
her. The walls weighed down upon her.
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Her heart was too small to hold her happiness.
Was it for that reason it ached, that
it lay lead in her breast? And the fullness
in her throat—tears of joy? It was very
near to anguish.
She tried to recall Longacre’s face when
he questioned, “Is that yes?” But she only
saw the confused distraction with which he
had answered Julia’s seeking look. She
knew he belonged to her as never before.
But she felt guilty, uneasy, criminal.
She was suffering. She pressed her hands
on her smarting eyes, with her old impulse
for reason crying, “Why?” What had she
done? Whom had she robbed? She had
only taken what was hers. Rather, it had
been given freely, freely, she told herself insistently.
Surely they belonged to each
other, herself and the man she loved. What
had the other people to do with it? Whom
had she wronged?
She flung herself on her bed. The tumult
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of brain and soul ran out in tears. Triumph,
strength, color, hope, were flowing from her;
but the figures of the dark spelled out words
before her closed, unsleeping eyes—motives
that she had obscured, meanings that had
been dim.
Whom had she wronged? One figure
filled her inturned sight. The man she
loved stood there, accusing her. The wrong
she had done was between the two of them.
To him she must answer.
“What had she done?” the poor ghost
seemed to ask.
She had made him. For what? That
question stared at her horribly. “For himself,”
she tried to answer. It had been true
in past years, but now it was inexplicably
false. For herself, now. She would have
hidden from the truth, but it was too quick
for her. She lay still, seeing it all, flinching,
but looking it in the face.
She had had much to give him; and she
.bn 115.png
.pn +1
had given it. She had helped him over his
hard road—a road which, without her, he
might have found too steep and narrow.
Now she had come to the end.
How did she know—she broke in passionately
upon her reason—that if he wanted
her, he no longer needed her? But something
deeper than reason, deeper than passion,
assured her of the dreary truth. The
very years sundered them, and each succeeding
year would widen the breach. She, in
her prime, in the full power of her faculties
and charm—ten years would find her old,
years that would leave him young. After—what
was there after that?
If she could do no more, if she loved him,
must she let him go? That was the bitterest!
To step out of the way. To make herself
forgotten!
When she rose the east shone palely bright
through her windows. She turned out the
sickly lights, thrust back the curtains, and
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.pn +1
let the sharp, merciless morning fill the
room.
Seeing her reflection in the mirror, she
seemed to face her actual self. Her cheeks
were white, the shadows under her eyes bluish;
from nostril to mouth the lines were
long and hard. But it was easier to look
this self in the face than the other of the
night before. Here there was nothing hidden,
no unknown horror at her back, no
shadow to engulf her. Everything was
clearly defined. Now that she was in the
midst of the shadow, it was less black than
gray; but she wondered whether fire would
not have been a relief from that interminably
dreary hue that infinitely surrounded her.
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.h2 id=ch06
CHAPTER VI||THAIR PUTS IN HIS FINGER; CISSY HER FOOT
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THAIR, lounging down to
breakfast the morning after the
dance, found Cissy Fitz Hugh
alone over a demoralized table.
She gave him a nod that was cousinly in its
curtness, shoved the muffins a little way
toward him, and relapsed into an unwonted
obliviousness. Reminiscently smiling, Thair
watched her a moment before baiting her
gently.
“My good Cicely, you’re not very fit this
morning,” he presently brought out with
family frankness.
She twitched the ruffles of her morning-gown,
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.pn +1
drew a plump hand up the sweep of
her back hair, and launched at him:
“Well, I’d like to know who is after last
night! Emma Budd is simply twittering.
That great girl of hers is more dreadful than
ever! It simply gets on my nerves. They’re
all in such a state!”
“Except—” he blinked at her.
“I’m sure Mrs. Essington looks the worst
of the lot.”
“Who mentioned Mrs. Essington?” His
eyebrows were exclamation-points.
“Well, then who are you talking about?
I do wish, Charlie, you would sometimes say
what you mean!”
“Oh, why, so long as I, at least, mean
what I say.”
“Oh, well, if you’re going to be hateful!
You were horrid enough last night!” Cissy
whined.
“It was with the best intentions,” he assured
her.
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“Of course! I’ve noticed if any one ever
does a thoroughly stupid thing, it’s always
with the best intentions! And your bundling
that girl into the back seat with me, when
I’d asked you, and was so counting on Mr.
Longacre—when you promised—”
“Oh, why not promise?” His tone was
gentle resignation, a wicked consciousness in
his half-shut eyes.
“Well, you are a beast!” Cissy gasped.
It was outrageous, such outspoken depravity!
“Oh, let me have my finger in the pie,” he
pleaded. “I wanted your Longacre somewhere
else. If he must make love to some
one, why not to Julia? It would be so awfully
convenient for me, you know.”
“Well, he didn’t!” said Cissy, triumphantly.
“No, he did not,” Thair admitted gracefully.
“Nor to you. We all go into the
same ditch.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” In their
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conversations this was the chronic state of
Cissy’s intelligence. Thair smiled pleasantly.
But her next move brought him up roundly.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Whom?” He was imperturbably vague
about her personal application.
“Who did he make love to?”
On this, Thair’s air of being delicately
shocked was maddening.
“My good Cicely, how should I know?
If you knew,” he pursued with an air of mammoth
secrecy, “what I was up to—”
But his diplomacy was outstripped by her
sharpness.
“Well, I do know. So far as any one
could see, you spent the evening hunting
for—” her flash of revelation snapped the
situation like a trap—“Mrs. Essington!”
She leaned across the table, flushed, gaping
a little in eagerness. “Well, and you found
her!” She threw it straight at him. “Charlie,
you do know something!”
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“Flattered, Cicely; properly flattered.”
His look was over her shoulder toward the
windows.
“One good turn deserves another,” he said.
“Mrs. Essington is now hunting for us.”
Cissy’s startled turn gave her, through the
expanse of glass, the glimpse of a passing
profile, pale against a parasol of rose.
This fleeting profile had seemed to Thair
rarely luminous, lighted with a delicate life
of its own, an atmosphere excluding the
crowd of them. But when she stood in the
door he was startled. She was the sharpest,
palest, unhappiest substance of the vision.
That false radiance of hers was furled in her
hand—just an arrangement of silk and sun!
Poor dear! Cissy’s shot was, after all, nearer
the mark. She did look “the worst of the
lot.”
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Vibrating through her house with a roving
eye to the agreeable disposition of her guests
.bn 122.png
.pn +1
tucked away among remote book-shelves,
and in angles of the veranda, Mrs. Budd had
more than ever the air of a great, impulsive
girl suddenly smitten with middle age, and
trying to make the best of it. She was
younger far than Florence Essington, younger
than Cissy Fitz Hugh, younger even than
her own daughter, whom she presently came
upon, teasing the dachshunds on the grassplot
beside the “glass room.”
.pi
The girl was on her knees. Each separate
thread of her gorgeous bush of hair glistening
in the dazzle of the late morning sun,
her flushing cheeks, her somber brows, her
hot, bright eyes, were all a part of the ripple
of color and motion she made in the dead,
warm greenness. The two long, wriggling
dogs threw themselves upon her with yelps
and scramblings. She tossed them back,
rolled them off their feet, tousled and worried
them with gurgles of joy and foolish, tender
mutterings.
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Her mother’s shadow, falling across her,
brought up her eyes in a quick flash of recognition.
“Oh, mama, the darlings! Look! The
angels! See him snap! Do look—now,
mama! Oh, you didn’t look quick enough!”
Mrs. Budd’s eyes absently took in the encircling
shrubbery, the walk to their right,
thinly veiled with straggling fennel, and came
back to her daughter’s lovely face with a
sort of puzzled helplessness.
“Yes, pettie, yes; they’re very nice. But
what a way to spend the morning!”
Julia sat back on her heels. Her great
brows, curved to a peak, spelled innocent interrogation.
“For mercy’s sake, why not, mama?”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs.
Budd began with a gush, trailing off dimly—“but
with so many people about—people
to be pleasant to—why shouldn’t you just—be
pleasant?”
.bn 124.png
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“Pleasant? Am I not pleasant, mama?
To whom?”
“Why, everybody, dearie; and—Mr.
Thair!”
“But I am pleasant to Charlie Thair,
mama. I’m very, very pleasant.”
“Yes, yes, pet, you are. Only—how shall
one tell the child?—not quite, dearie, so
pleasant as if you cared—” Mrs. Budd
stopped short, a little flustered with her own
indelicacy, finishing the sentence with eyes
and hands. In all her talks with Julia she
had not before come quite so near to putting
it plainly. Of the two, Julia, looking
gravely into her mother’s face, was the least
embarrassed.
“But I don’t,” she said simply.
“But try, pettie; try to!” Mrs. Budd’s
voice was anxious, pleading. “Mother
wishes it so much.”
Julia bowed her head over the nearest
dachshund, turned his collar with deliberate
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fingers. She was frankly gaining time, casting
about for some likely means to put off
her own realization of the subject that made
the air fairly electric between them.
This she seemed to find in the young
man who stepped out of the glass room
upon the lawn, a little dazed in the noon
glare. Her appeal was a sweet, ringing
cry.
“Oh, Mr. Longacre!”
Seeing them together, he stood a minute,
seemed to hesitate, then came toward them
over the grass; hatless in the sunshine, he
looked fair, and a little dreamy. His finger
kept the place in his book.
Mrs. Budd surveyed him with a solicitude
amounting to annoyance. She turned on her
daughter, her mouth shaped for speech, but
his quick approach gave her no time. It
was Julia who took up the snapped thread
of talk in a fluttering sentence:
“It’s my dogs—Mr. Longacre—I—I
.bn 126.png
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wanted you to see them.” She was flushed,
forehead to chin.
“Oh!” He seemed to just arrive at what
was expected of him. “They’re very nice
ones.”
The flatness of it left all three stranded in
uncomfortable silence. The thought in each
mind of how much might be said, were one
of the others away, kept them from saying
anything through an interminable moment
that merged unexpectedly into a common interest.
It centered in a single figure lounging
across the lawn from the breakfast-room.
Thair came slowly, his chin in the air, a
dead cigarette in his fingers. Julia frowned.
Mrs. Budd rustled. Thair strolled, stopping
to pluck an oleander, then tossing it away.
Mrs. Budd struggled with the situation.
She half turned to Longacre. Her eyes followed
the fennel path. Again she opened her
lips, with the odd effect of making her seemingly
the author of Thair’s dilatory drawl.
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“I am an agitator,” he announced at large,
“a disturber of the existing state of affairs.”
His amused eyes lingered a moment on Julia’s
anticipatory stare, on Longacre’s air of ready-for-anything.
He addressed himself exclusively
to Mrs. Budd. “Mrs. Essington has
been wondering whether this was the
morning you were going to show her—whatever
it was about the Japanese chrysanthemum.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Budd clapped her hand to
her cheek. It was a gesture she had when
suddenly remembering.
“That’s all I know—what she said.”
Thair was deliberate. “She was coming out,
but I appointed myself ambassador.”
“Oh, why, I—” Mrs. Budd began. The
good lady was fairly cornered.
“Oh, then,” she said, with a last hope,
“I’ll leave you three young people here
together.”
“But,” Thair protested, “I am curious myself to
.bn 128.png
.pn +1
know what it is about the what’s-its-name
chrysanthemum.”
She was already in full retreat for the
house—hair, skirts, sleeves all a-flutter. The
look she gave him over her shoulder was
despair; but he, imperturbable, dropped into
her wake, tossing his dead cigarette into the
oleanders.
The quality of the silence these two left
behind them was of a different sort from the
triangular uneasiness of the moment before.
It was one with the life of the hot, green
circle of garden. Something inarticulate,
more simple than thought, seemed to pass
between the two. The girl, still on her knees,
but drawn erect, head lifted, eyes blank,
looked, listening. Even thus, what height
she had, what length of line! What strength
in that flat white wrist, what vital color in
her face, what daring in the back fling of the
head! Longacre thought he had never seen
her more splendid. Yet why was she grown
.bn 129.png
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suddenly little to him, helpless, and protectable?
He looked down at the sun on her
dark head. There rioted in him a reasonless
desire to put his arms around it—to comfort
her, to hold her! To hold her! Why, what
was this? When had he ever—? Florence!
The whole of the evening before came over
him. That was all so sure and right! This?
He was sick with himself. He was torn with
a divided sense of reparation to Florence and,
somehow, in some way, reparation here!
Some of the stress of it, in his face looking
down, met her lifted eyes. She seemed to
absorb, without comprehending, his trouble.
She was only suddenly conscious and uncomfortable.
She got to her feet without the
help of his hand, laughing nervously, biting
her lips.
“Oh, how—how stupid of me, Mr. Longacre—when
I called you over to put my
pups through their paces. We’ll do it now!”
She was eagerly rolling her handkerchief
.bn 130.png
.pn +1
into a ball. She poised it for throwing, and
looked about a trifle blankly.
“Why, where are they? They’re gone!
Stars! Stripes! Here, boys!” She whistled.
She frowned.
“Oh, no, no; never mind,” Longacre began
earnestly; “really, I’d rather—”
She cut him short. “Then come and look
at the oleanders. We’ve all sorts. Mama
loves them. They are lovely, but not sweet,
you know. I don’t love them.” She led
across the open lawn toward the thicket of
blazing color that hedged it on the house
side.
Longacre followed a pace behind, the word
“sweet” repeating itself aimlessly in his head.
He was vexed by the confusion of this ending
to their perfect moment. He stood listlessly
beside her, inattentive to her naming
over the varieties, watching the quick turns,
from side to side, of the long line of her
throat.
.bn 131.png
.pn +1
If such were to be his feelings, better to be
away!
In this position, with their backs to the
garden, without seeing, they were seen by two
turning the crook in the fennel walk, and
thus quite innocently had the effect of checking
the flow of extraordinarily amiable chat
with which these two had, for the last five
minutes, beguiled the time while waiting for
Mrs. Budd and Thair.
Cissy stopped short, peering through the
feathery green.
Florence knew that the other two there in
the sun were the logical result of what she
had sent Thair to accomplish, what through
the night she had made out was due to Longacre—his
chance to be sure of himself, to see
just where he stood. Did he? Had he? If
not, he must have more time. In giving him
that, she would have done what she could.
He must see it through his own eyes.
She couldn’t, with straight words, let him
.bn 132.png
.pn +1
go. But she could help him to seeing; she
could let him alone. She turned to go on,
but Cissy had assured herself, through her
peep-hole, of the identity of the person she
sought.
“There’s dear Julia,” she tinkled. “I
haven’t seen her this morning. I must—I
really must speak to her!”
She made a preliminary movement toward
an opening in the fennel, her skirts held high
above her pretty, preposterous shoes.
“Oh, would you?”
Something in the tone made Cissy feel
ridiculous. She hesitated, hating to meet the
other woman’s look. She raised her voice.
“I’m sure I don’t see why not!”
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[Illustration: “Her skirts held high above her pretty, preposterous shoes”]
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Florence saw Longacre turn as Cissy
flounced through the hedge; then she went
quickly up the path without looking back.
Her eyes took in the sudden flight of a linnet
out of a cypress bough, the flickering shadows
of the fennel blurring the walk, and the
.bn 133.png
.pn +1
.bn 134.png
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.bn 135.png
.pn +1
.bn 136.png
.pn +1
.bn 137.png
.pn +1
white glass-room door at the end. Her ears
heard a hurrying tread behind her. She felt
the urge of pursuit, a keen joy that he still
would, though he should not!
Her whiteness flickered among the shadows
as she fled; and he followed.
He caught her in the sun, at the door of
the glass room.
“Oh, you!” he said, a little breathless, and
laughing up at her from the steps below.
She looked at him silently, still of a mind
for flight, her hand on the door. It opened
suddenly inward, and presented them, face to
face, with Holden, who stood, hands jammed
into the bulging pockets of his old shooting-coat.
“You folks don’t care much for your complexions,
out there in the hot sun,” he said.
But he looked at Florence.
.bn 138.png
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.h2 id=ch07
CHAPTER VII||THE HOUSE-PARTY IN THE STORM
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THE breeze, which at noon had
barely rustled the chrysanthemums,
an hour later was tossing
the pampas plumes across the
lawn, and whipping the great sapphire of the
sea into broken green and white. There was
something ruffling to temper in the dry,
beating breath. Hammocks were empty,
the garden deserted. The hardiest of the
house-party huddled on the veranda behind
the Samoan blinds that snapped in the heavy
wind. It was not the “trade” blowing in
from sea—salt and dreamy with far going—but
a land wind driving down through
the mountains, stinging with sharp odors of
.bn 139.png
.pn +1
dust and dry leaves—the very dregs of
summer.
The sun went down through a wrack of
broken clouds into a thundering ocean. To
the party gathered around the hall hearth,
and straggling up to the first turn of the
stair, the garden appeared a writhing, twisting
thing, crowded upon, and threatened by
the raw, gray twilight. Bowed trees and
lashing vines were the more piteous that there
was no storm but the ceaseless wind streaming
by, roaring across the roof, shaking the
window-casings, beating the flowers flat.
The wild night offered to those about the
fire the opportunity of drawing together;
but the uneasiness, the inexplicable, mutual
distrust of people aware of strong cross-currents
under the surface of living, separated
them. Their common isolation, even their
common shelter, failed to unite them.
The curiosity, careless or eager, with which
they had met one another on the first evening—the
.bn 140.png
.pn +1
interest for inexperienced personalities—had
been replaced by a sharp, personal
thread in the web propinquity weaves.
Each was no longer a watcher of, but an
actor in, a drama, and each more or less dissatisfied
with the part assigned him.
Their undermined sociability was apparent
in wandering eyes, shifting groups, flurries
of talk running into blind alleys. Who
could have helped through the interminable
evening, would not. Julia refused to sing.
Thair read. Longacre intrenched himself
with round-cheeked Bessie Lewis against the
fear of being asked to play. He was bored
with his predicament, and puzzled as to why
Florence had chosen to sit with Cissy and
Holden.
Florence, irresolute, wretchedly at odds
with herself, hated the sight of this collection
of people. She was glad to get away to her
room. The great sound of the wind, surging
by the windows, helped to lull her struggling
.bn 141.png
.pn +1
motives; and waking in the night to a
gush of roaring rain, she felt singularly at
peace, consoled by the unhesitating strength
of the storm.
But the dull face of the next morning was
a depressing outlook. The gray sheet of the
storm blotted out dunes and sea. The close
damp of the first rains, imperfectly dispersed
by too lately kindled fires, filled the rooms
with its vague discomfort.
The house-party displayed the hectic amiability
of people whose breeding does not permit
them to betray their disgust at being, for
a number of days, cooped up together between
the same four walls.
The youngsters’ ill-humor deplored the
postponed hunting. The elders hopelessly
cited instances of October rains that had
cleared with the first sunset. Mrs. Budd
apologized for the weather as she would have
for an overdone entrée. Her guests responded
in scattering chorus.
.bn 142.png
.pn +1
It was “jolly”—“a lark”—“just the
thing for a quiet day!”—a round of deprecation
that failed to leave them otherwise
than chilly and damp. It was not an atmosphere
that clung to them, but rather one
they exhaled—one that existed in the face
of the most flourishing of fires, that clouded
the most amiable game of billiards, that sharpened
the most friendly exchange of opinion.
The out-of-doors that had offered such excellent
opportunities for escaping themselves, or
one another, was denied them. They were
forced to face conditions that two days had
created—conditions of which all understood
too much to be unconcerned; of which no
one knew the whole. Even Florence, who
perhaps understood most, was bewildered
completely on one point. But that was not
Longacre’s place in the web. His figure to
her was clear in the foreground. His bewilderment
in her sudden change; his endeavor
to bridge this distance she had so
.bn 143.png
.pn +1
suddenly forced between them, to win back
what had been given and then so tacitly, so
inexplicably withdrawn, made her suffer.
That first day was little less than a battle between
their two wills.
At what effort she maintained toward him
the kindness of her smile, the quiescence of
her feeling, the resolution not to avoid him,
she did not realize herself. It impressed her
that he sought her out more than usual.
Formerly they had avoided marked association
in a crowd. Now, was he avoiding some
one else? Irritable, moody, he seemed most
at ease with her, yet, otherwise than his wont,
had little to say; and his eyes were more
often away from her, following another’s
coming and going.
That tall Julia carried the shadow of the
storm in her face. She looked cloudy. She
was pale. Then, feeling a certain pair of
eyes upon her, out flashed the color like a
suddenly blossomed flower. All at once she
.bn 144.png
.pn +1
seemed to mean something more than youth
and beauty. She was less intent upon herself,
more sensitive to who came and went; and
sometimes her glance was backward—across
her shoulder, as if aware of one behind her.
Whose those fancied footsteps were, Florence
had no doubt. But this was the knot she
could not unravel: just what did Longacre
mean to Julia? How much could she be to
him?
A consciousness in her bearing toward him
made it never twice the same—now imperious,
now timid; now making advances, now
repelling; but indifferent never. More often
Florence thought she looked bewildered, as
though something infallible had failed her.
And though at times she filled the room with
her rich voice—speaking, laughing, singing—at
times she stilled and drew away from
the others, and bent her black brows on the
storm outside in a passionate brooding, as if,
by her very desire for release, she would escape
.bn 145.png
.pn +1
the confining house, and pierce the
clouds, and find the sun.
To Florence the house was nothing else
than a shelter from herself. In its restrained
atmosphere, hemmed in by the monotonous,
dripping rain, it was easier to lose emotion,
to keep a quiet pulse; easier also to perceive
in what direction these people, forced into
constant conjunction of contradictory motives,
would turn circumstance. However strongly
she herself desired to mold it, she felt that
now she must leave it alone. Even the fact
of Cissy Fitz Hugh’s persistent hovering in
Julia’s vicinity, mischievous as it looked,
might only serve to shape events the faster.
Undoubtedly Cissy meant mischief, and
though in sticking herself so fast to Julia she
was more adroit than Florence had thought
possible, her lack of imagination limited her.
She annoyed the girl like a buzzing insect.
Julia tried to shake her off. But Cissy had
intrenched herself in a cast-iron sweetness
.bn 146.png
.pn +1
that no impatience could ruffle, no rebuff
shatter.
She had a very sharp eye on her cousin
Thair. She suspected him. She couldn’t
get at him. That illuminating talk of theirs
over the breakfast-table had given her a clue.
Longacre did have a fancy for Florence Essington!
Cissy imagined every man had a
fancy for herself until it was proved otherwise.
Well, now it was proved otherwise;
but as long as a man was within reach she
felt him securable. But Thair had suggested
Julia. This was troublesome! Julia was a
beauty. Julia must be kept off, dragged off,
until she could finally be scared away.
It was only while strolling in the conservatory
with her arm around Julia’s waist, or
playing Julia’s accompaniments—an office
Longacre uneasily avoided—that Cissy felt
at all safe. She was dropping hints all round
the margin of what she wanted to say. But
Julia was too absorbed in new, mysterious
.bn 147.png
.pn +1
emotions to regard her manœuvers. She
simply didn’t see them. Her abstraction
was exasperating to Cissy, who was afraid to
go too far. She had once seen Julia angry.
She realized that the right hint, properly
dropped, would comfortably bridge her difficulty.
But having it, how to get neatly
across? That was the point. As usual, she
fell in with a splash.
Toward the end of the second afternoon of
storm, with the rain clattering on the west
front of the glass room, she followed in Julia’s
wake up and down among the fragile ferns.
The girl’s eyes were earnestly on the flowers,
but Cissy’s were everywhere—toward the
window, as if expecting to see some one in
the garden; prying through the curtain
chinks; then, with a quick peer of curiosity,
following a shadow that through the half-open
door she saw crossing the library floor.
Then the piano answered to compelling fingers.
It had sounded much through the past
.bn 148.png
.pn +1
two days, but now it spoke. Julia lifted her
head as if it had spoken to her. She did not
look over her shoulder, but frowned out into
the rain, and presently went on trimming her
plants. Cissy, peeping between the spikes of
a dwarf palm saw through the glass the outline
of a man seated, of a woman standing,
her hand poised at the music-sheet on the
rack. Presently she began singing, but singing
with a half-voice, as if she listened, following
him like an accompaniment. There
was something accustomed, attuned, in their
relative positions, as if they had fallen into
them naturally through long habit. The significance
of this touched even Cissy’s thick
sensibility, but only as being the very thing
she wanted.
“How absorbed those people are!” she
observed, with a casual nod toward the glass
doors behind her.
Julia gave a glance that seemed not to
have noticed them before.
.bn 149.png
.pn +1
“Mrs. Essington plays very well herself,”
she threw out carelessly.
“Oh, no!” Cissy assured her. “Only a
very little. But she’s so awfully interested in
his work—such an inspiration to him in
every way!”
“Yes?” Julia snipped off the head of a
cyclamen.
Cissy was angry at what seemed to her
obtuseness.
“The only wonder is,” she said a little
acidly, “considering what she is to him, that
he doesn’t marry her!”
Julia raised her head from the asparagus-fern
and gave Cissy a straight look.
“What are you talking about?” she flashed.
Her blush was to the roots of her hair.
Cissy gave a little scream of mingled surprise
and horror. “What can you think I
mean!” She reached her arm around Julia.
“Of course it’s a perfectly straight affair.
He’s simply waiting for her answer.”
.bn 150.png
.pn +1
She felt the girl fairly quiver under her
touch. She took one step too far.
“Of course she’s years older than he, but
he’s just the sort of a man to like that.”
Julia removed Cissy’s arm from her waist
much as she might have plucked off a spider,
gathered up her little watering-pot and shears,
and left the conservatory without a word.
She crossed the library without glancing at
the two by the piano.
Cissy looked rather stunned. She looked
curiously at the arm Julia had discarded.
“Upon my word,” she thought, “one
would suppose I was dirty!”
She settled her combs in her sleek hair,
and presently took the course Julia had followed.
She did not join Florence and Longacre,
because the more she saw of Florence
the more she was afraid of her. Besides, she
felt a childish excitement in her cheap little
rôle of intrigante. And there was another
person upon whom she could practise it
.bn 151.png
.pn +1
without fear: Mrs. Budd, more unsuspicious
than her daughter, and as credulous.
Poor woman! Her outspoken, objective
nature had been sorely tried by these days
with so little doing on the surface of things,
and so much on the under side. Her mind
was a blur of conjecture over what Thair was
going to do. Longacre was a disturbing element
she had not named. It was Cissy who
clapped on the appellation. It was Cissy
who helped her to a conclusion.
It all came out so casually, on the side,
with the things they discussed over their lace-making
in the wide-windowed upper living-room.
Then it was Longacre (according to Cissy)
who had kept Thair—extremely sensitive—at
a distance: Longacre, charming, a dear—but,
well—fond of being about married
women. Cissy had had her little experience
with him, and of course (magnanimously)
there must be others.
.bn 152.png
.pn +1
“But if you knew this about him—and let
me take such a man into my house—when I
have a young girl!”
But, oh, Cissy was horrified. No! not such
an attitude to Julia! Never! The point
was, Did Mrs. Budd want Julia to marry
such a man?
“Marry Julia!” This was appalling.
Cissy felt much satisfaction. Her intention
was far from cruel. She merely wanted
something very much, and was trying to get
it. Gauging their feelings by her own, it never
occurred to her that she had more than vexed
and annoyed her hostess and her hostess’s
daughter. And this she preferred to being
vexed and annoyed herself.
But the circumstances, upon which she
had laid such bold hands, burst from her
grasp and rushed past her. Yet Cissy was
not aware of their progress. It was Florence
Essington who first felt their precipitation.
She foreboded a crisis.
.bn 153.png
.pn +1
With the waning afternoon the veil of the
rain lifted and showed the long hook of the
coast edged with leaping breakers, and a
hurly-burly of high clouds tearing across the
sky. The sun went down with streamers of
yellow through the breaking storm. But the
voice of the ocean grew louder with the
wilder wind, until by fall of night its pulse
was in the very timbers of the house. Its
tumult assailed the very doors.
The house-party met over the tea-cups
with such a sense of excitement as they might
have felt aboard ship in a gale, an exhilaration
that, by its feverishness, was the reaction
from the depression of their immurement.
It was the last of the rain, Holden predicted;
and the expectation of release dashed
them all into high spirits.
Julia was gorgeous. If she had not been
so beautiful she might have seemed overdone.
She was alluring; she laughed and
murmured to Thair until he was overwhelmed
.bn 154.png
.pn +1
by the beauty of it. If he looked at her with
all the admiration he gave to Gainsborough’s
lovely, pictured ladies—and coveted her to
frame and hang in his gallery—there was no
reason Mrs. Budd should not imagine he
coveted her to decorate the foot of his table.
The memory of Cissy’s uncomfortable suggestions
were confused with what seemed
the near consummation of her hopes; but
for the first time in forty-eight hours she
beamed.
Longacre was talking pointedly and exclusively
to Florence. Cissy once or twice tried
to throw in a word. She got a glance, an
assent without the obstinate head turning in
her direction. It was stupendous rudeness,
but he was oblivious to everything but his
need of Florence. He wanted her responsiveness,
her sympathy, to help him escape
his tormenting self. He talked rapidly. He
seemed eager. He was angry that her coldness
left him keenly aware of the palpitating
.bn 155.png
.pn +1
presence of the girl who flashed her dark eyes
so hotly around the room.
But Florence read in his eagerness its
double element. Her throat ached with the
fullness of tears.
Weeks, months ago, when she had first
felt the subtle change in him, so slight that
she had resolutely called it fancy, that terrible
possibility of another woman had given
her some sleepless nights; but she had hoped,
as her knowledge grew, that it was a negative
fate—one of the slow changes time
brings about in mind and body—that was
drawing the man she loved away from her.
She had made herself ready to meet such a
fatality, but the calamity that came was unexpected.
It had her by surprise; and at
the outset she had failed of everything she
had determined on.
She was not a jealous woman, but she had
not realized how it would seem to have him
love another woman.
.bn 156.png
.pn +1
And what was this woman? Beautiful
overwhelmingly, unquestionably to be reckoned
with, but ignorant—a child! What
was she going to be? What could she be
to him? A spur or a clog? Florence
knew the man too well to suppose he would
shake off the latter. He would endure, and
grow less. It seemed bitter to her, then,
that he was a man who could be made or
marred by a woman, and she not that
woman.
“What is the matter?” she heard him
saying. The face he turned to her showed
his irritation. Wouldn’t he yet face it—that
he loved the girl? It was proof to
Florence of what power she had with him.
“Do you know,” he went on in a murmur
so inarticulate that only her ears, that knew
his voice as they knew her own, could catch
it, “we’ve been miserable every moment
since we’ve been in this place. Let’s get
out! For heaven’s sake, come up to town
.bn 157.png
.pn +1
to-morrow, and we’ll be married, and get
away to the other side of the earth!”
She had a hysterical desire to laugh.
“Oh, Tony, you’re the only man in the
world who could say a thing like that, in a
situation like this.”
He grumbled, “Why not? I mean it.”
She knew he meant it. She suffered in
the temptation to say yes, to end everything
like that, to take what consequences followed
when he should some day know, and hate
her for it. She looked at Julia. Not alone
the beauty of her, but some suggestion in its
generous richness of a like nature, made the
rest of them seem cheap. Florence felt
faded as she looked. What a woman for a
man to lose!
Longacre’s eyes followed the direction
Florence’s had taken. He made an impatient
movement.
If he stayed a few days longer under the
girl’s spell, he would find out himself how
.bn 158.png
.pn +1
hard matters were with him. But before
that happened he must be free of her. It
came to Florence all at once that this man
would not free himself. What a loyalty to
lose! And to put it away with her own
hands!
“Florence!” he persisted. She meant to
say that she had something to tell him later
that would answer his question, but her
tongue tricked her into a gay evasion. She
put him off. Because she saw the end must
come, soon or late, she put it off. She would
tell him to-morrow.
.bn 159.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch08
CHAPTER VIII||LONGACRE TRAPS HIMSELF
.sp 2
.if t
“TO-MORROW’S”
.if-
.if h
.dc 0.25 0.65
TO-MORROW’S”
.if-
sun rose on a
miraculous world that dripped
and steamed, and breathed a
thousand sweet scents into a
cloudless sky. The coast road, white for five
months with flying dust, was black, with
flashing pools of water among the trees.
Their leaves, so long powdered pale with
summer, were glistening green, shaking in
the wind that was subsiding slowly. The
breakers still bellowed up the little beaches
and battered the rocky promontories; but
they were sapphire-blue till their crests
curled over,—no longer tattered by the
wind, but breaking, far as eye could follow
.bn 160.png
.pn +1
around the coast, in long white semicircles
of foam.
“Miramar” was flung wide to this morning
of “latter spring,” and the multitudinous
sharp odors of the garden poured through
open doors and windows. The house was
unpeopled. All were abroad in the garden,
strolling down the spongy paths, shaking
cataracts of drops from dahlia and chrysanthemum
in their passing; whistling up the
dogs across the terraces; calling to one another—scattering
and rallying.
Theirs was a high, animal pulse—such
relish and excitement of living as a runner
has who pulls himself together for a leap.
Those purposes and emotions that had had
their growth in the thick atmosphere of the
storm were quickened, pressing against circumstance,
ready to burst out. They boded
a crisis.
Julia Budd’s face alone was assurance of
happenings as she came across the lawn with
.bn 161.png
.pn +1
her long, free step, her skirts picked high,
her dachshunds in leash. Eyes lowering,
mouth smiling, she looked neither at Bessie
Lewis on her right, nor Thair on her left, but
talked rapidly, apparently for any ears that
cared to listen. Now she quickened her
pace, took the path border in a leap, and had
a hand on Holden’s arm.
“Mr. Thair says it’s too heavy going for
the hunt!” She threw it out, less a plea
than a flat statement.
“Good heavens, young woman!” Holden’s
eye ran over the dripping terraces. “They
won’t have the dogs out to-day!”
“M’m,” she nodded emphatically. “I
rang up the club before breakfast, and the
M. F. H. says, ‘Yes.’”
Holden grunted. “They’ll mire in a
minute.”
She thrust out her shoe, damp but unmuddied,
with a laugh. She called out his
broadest smile.
.bn 162.png
.pn +1
“It’s another thing down there.” He indicated
the “sea meadows” with a back motion
of the head. “If we fellows break our
necks it doesn’t matter; but you ladies—wait
till next week!”
“I can’t wait!”
“It may dry off enough by afternoon,”
Holden said, admiring her spirit.
“Will you go with me, then?” Her
foot drummed the ground. As he hesitated,
she flashed round at Thair.
“Will you?”
“My dear young madam—” he protested.
“I’ll go!” said Longacre, across the group.
It looked so obviously a gallantry to rescue
a lost cause! For an instant it seemed
she hated him. Then she laughed.
“Why, I’m not afraid to go alone!”
“Nor I,” said Longacre. “That’s not
why I asked you to let me come.”
Julia looked at him in confusion. This
.bn 163.png
.pn +1
sudden sally out of his aloofness touched her,
and left her at a loss.
Florence Essington bowed her face to the
yellow mass of chrysanthemums—held it
there a moment. When she looked up,
Longacre was kneeling to unfasten the dachshunds’
leash, the girl standing straight, with
quick-rising bosom, but a composed face
averted from him, looking down the terraces.
As the unleashed dogs capered up around
her, she began tossing twigs and pebbles
down the slope, the dogs scuttling back and
forth in an ecstasy of barking.
Longacre saw the deepening color of her
cheek. As they stood, hers was not so far
from his own. The look with which she had
answered his proffer of escort—the look so
out of proportion to the moment, so given
in spite of herself—had stirred in him something
equally ill-governed and inconsequent;
had called out in him something at once
more natural, and more spiritual, than he
.bn 164.png
.pn +1
had imagined the existence of; something
more powerful than he had ever expected to
reckon with. This, then, was the intangible
thing he had been dodging. How easily he
was slipping into this dazzling emotion!
The past seemed dropping away from him;
the future was nebulous. He brought himself
up short, angry that a man might so
lightly become a cad. He had never liked
the way this girl affected him. What place
had this overpowering alien thing in his life,
he wondered savagely. Yet he looked at
Julia.
Silent as she was, helpless, and not a little
awkward, her very nearness elated him.
When she turned to go he felt deserted.
He snatched at any excuse to keep beside
her.
“May I walk to the house with you?”
He knew that had been the wrong thing to
say.
“Of course,” she answered. Her lips
.bn 165.png
.pn +1
trembled around the words. She had forgotten
Cissy’s communication. Strange that
a fact could be so unstable in the face of a
personality! But in that moment her world
was a short, green walk between fennel borders
to a glass door.
They drank in the overwhelming sweet of
heliotrope. He walked stiffly beside her,
looking straight before. She looked sidelong
at him, and wondered what he thought of
her. If he didn’t like it, why had he asked
to walk with her? The gap in the hedge,
the oleanders flaming beyond, brought back
to her that morning she had called him across
the grass. She wondered at herself. She
could never have done it if she had known
he was going to be so dreadful. Had she
betrayed herself to this equivocal mystery?
No, he wasn’t like any one else. She had
always known it; and she was shocked at
herself that just the look of him, when he
was so disagreeable, should make her so
.bn 166.png
.pn +1
happy. She wanted to keep him with her,
and the glass door took on the aspect of inexorable
fate. The gap in the hedge was
the only loop-hole. She turned toward it
with the fine assurance that carried her over
her doubts.
He stopped, blank at this unexpected
manœuver. Did she want to get rid of him?
He had believed that he wished himself out
of it, but the thought of going away was unendurable.
Standing among the dancing greens, she
looked back at him. The wind blew her
clear pink skirts fluttering toward him. Her
gentle “Aren’t you coming?” saved him;
but the sort of smile she gave, threatened—seemed
diabolic. But she had seen, in his
moment of unhappy hesitation, that he feared
to lose her; and her spirits leaped, her eyes
lighted, her mouth flowered in that sudden
bewildering smile. Down on the slopes of
the hot, wet lawns they heard the cicadas
.bn 167.png
.pn +1
singing. The full green tops of trees moved
on a melting sky. This riotous out-of-doors
conspired with her against him. He felt, if
she went on smiling like that, she would
have him.
“For a moment I thought you weren’t
coming!” she called.
“I’m not,” he said.
The color fluttered into her face, but “Not
coming?” she bravely mocked at him.
He stood resolute, but his hard, long look
at her made her heart beat strongly.
“I thought you were going in,” he said.
He expected to see her flare away from
him through the oleanders, but, instead, she
came toward him, dragging her steps like an
unhappy child. That he should be the one
to make her look like that! He was fierce
with himself.
“You know I want to come!” he said
angrily. “I’d come anywhere with you!”
He caught himself desperately. He had a
.bn 168.png
.pn +1
feeling that he must save them. “But—but
you said you were going in. I think we’d
better.” He clutched for banalities. “Let’s
have a game of billiards. Let’s ring up the
club about the meet. Let’s—” he seized
upon the next idea with relief—“I’ve never
heard you sing since that first night.”
She looked up in bewilderment, fretted by
the trivialities. “But you said you didn’t
like it—that I had no feeling!”
He winced, knowing this was just his
reason. He had remembered how the emptiness
of her lovely voice had seemed to estrange
them. The sound of it in the dead
boundary of walls might break the live enchantment
of her presence.
“Oh, give me another chance!” He tried
to take it lightly. But their consciousness
read into his words multiple meanings. They
came to the glass door in silence. He followed
her through the glass room, where she
plucked a tuberose whose sweet scent pursued
.bn 169.png
.pn +1
him at once to vex and delight him.
She seemed to gather more beauty by that
perfume. In her ignorance she was reckless
with her power. In her unconscious beguilement
she was perilous to be near. He hoped
she would sing badly—off key—anything
to help him escape her.
She took a sheet of music, a modern arrangement
of an old song. The first notes
startled him. Did her pliant voice take color
from the music, or had it found a tenderness
of its own? It came at first uncertainly.
The deep tones drew out tremulous, the
high notes quivering with too keen intensity:
but it lived; it interpreted; it was significant.
“Beautiful, beautiful!” some chord within
him seemed repeating. The sweetness, the
pure passion of that voice, singing up from
him, away from him, in sublime ignorance of
the birth of its being and the danger of its
flight! He would not look at her; but in this
.bn 170.png
.pn +1
new voice of hers for the first time he seemed
to see the soul, more beautiful than her beauty—as
desirable as life; and he had no right to
think of her!
The chords went to pieces. His hands fell
jangling upon the keys. He saw her, the
half-sung note dying away between her
parted lips—still parted in amazement. It
made him desperate, that look of innocence
that couldn’t help him!
“It’s such rot!” he said grimly at the
music-sheet, and ran his hands in a thunder
of discords down the keys. “You sang it
well enough. If you understood it, I dare
say you’d do it badly.”
Her mouth grieved. Her eyes flashed, resentful;
she was bewildered by his rapid
changes.
“First you say I sing without feeling, and
then you tell me I should feel more and sing
badly! I think you are hard to please.”
“No; art is acting. I am complimenting
.bn 171.png
.pn +1
you on yours.” He denied to her what was
too plain to himself; but the tone of his
voice, that intimate coldness, seemed to draw
them forcibly nearer. “Now we’ll have
something better,” he said.
This thing must stop here, he determined.
It should never happen again. But he must
hear her voice just once again, her voice in
his music. It would make her his for a moment.
He took up a piece of manuscript
music.
“I don’t know it,” she protested sullenly.
“All the better,” he said brusquely, and
began the prelude.
He ran over the melody with phrases his
fingers seemed to linger in and love—unexpected
intervals, elusive rhythms—and gave
her a look that said, “Come.” She had to
stoop to see the words. These, too, were
strange to her:
.bn 172.png
.pn +1
.pm verse-start
“Never seek to tell thy love—
Love that never told can be!
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.”
.pm verse-end
After all, it was too much. He dared not
give himself up to it. He forced himself
to technicalities.
He stopped her. “Listen to the time,” he
said, and played it over.
She sang it after him without the accompaniment,
and faltered at an unaccustomed
interval.
He played it again with the patience
given a child’s stupidity.
She sang, hating him with her every note:
.pm verse-start
“I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, pale, in ghastly fears—
Ah, she did depart!”
.pm verse-end
He broke off in the middle.
“Can’t you keep with the accompaniment?”
.bn 173.png
.pn +1
She raged inwardly—flushing face, brilliant
eyes.
“Isn’t the accompaniment to keep with
the singer?”
“No; with the song. And since you
don’t know that, listen to what I’m doing.
Hurry those eighths, and hold the ‘G.’ That
phrase is ‘pensieroso.’ Don’t sing it like
a drinking-song.”
“There is nothing to say so! How do
you know?”
Her angry red mouth made him savage.
“I say so! It’s mine!”
She gasped, suddenly in a panic.
“I don’t want to sing it! I don’t know
it! I—I don’t like it!”
Her helpless confusion shook him to tenderness.
“Try this last verse with me,” he pleadingly
insisted.
She began, as though she could not help
herself, in an uncertain voice:
.bn 174.png
.pn +1
.pm verse-start
“Soon after she was gone from me
A traveler came by
Silently, invisibly.
He took her with a sigh!”
.pm verse-end
Her voice fluttered on the last word—forsook
the note. He looked up to see her,
large-eyed, pale, staring at him. The significance
in the words had seized her. Had he
told her flatly that she loved him, he could
not have had her more by surprise.
“I—you—” she stammered. The blood
rushed back to her face. The tears were too
many for her eyes.
He sprang up. “For God’s sake—don’t
cry!” He took her in his arms, and kissed
her over-brimmed eyes as if she were a child.
She might well have been, so pliant she was
to his touch, so comforted with his lips on
her eyes and forehead.
An instant before, antagonists; now their
pulses had the throb of one. It was a miracle—wonderful!
He kissed her on the mouth.
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“‘For God’s sake—don’t cry!’”
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[Illustration: “‘For God’s sake—don’t cry!’”]
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Consciousness was in that kiss. For a
moment it knit them closer together. Then
she stiffened in his arms, thrust at him with
a fury of strength. He let her go.
She drew back; she looked at him with a
breathless expectation—then beseeching bewilderment.
He looked at her, and remembered
Florence. What had he done! Ever
so slightly he hesitated. Ever so little his
face changed. But she saw. Her look froze.
All that she had heard—and forgotten—came
back to her. Blind misunderstanding!
Terrible humiliation! She covered her face
with her hands. She couldn’t understand
what he was saying; she was deaf—blind.
He tried to uncover her face.
“Let me go, let me go!” she implored.
She escaped him. Her skirts swept his feet
in going. The curtains whispered where her
passage stirred them. A fragment of lace was
in his fingers. The hollow wood of the piano
seemed to hold the echo of the last note sung.
.bn 180.png
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He stared at the floor, seeing her last look.
How it had despised him! Worse—it had
despised herself. The past hour had been
but a succession of violent emotions and inconsequent
actions. He had rushed along
with them, without the ability to think; and
here was the climax—the result! He had
wounded the one whom, above all others, he
wanted to protect. Why had his tongue
hesitated with a scruple? It was too late
then! Better have lied to Florence than let
a false honor hold back the truth from the
woman he loved.
Loved! He stared at this fact—recognized
it, astounding, impossible as it seemed.
This fiery girl had disenchanted him of every
other thing but her own passionate presence.
He knew he had asked Florence to marry
him; and yet he revolved desperately some
way of making Julia believe that he loved
her. He would pay any price for that.
Could he pay the price of playing false,
.bn 181.png
.pn +1
of telling Florence that since he had asked
her to marry him he had fallen in love with
another woman? It was better than that
Julia should remember him all her life with
loathing. That was insupportable. But
could his freedom, now, bring her back?
That he could ever explain his hesitation
was preposterous. He could not hope she
would understand it. And not understanding,
how could she forgive? Hopeless!
How she must hate him! She could not
hate him more than he hated himself.
He walked to the window. The wind
puffed the thin curtains against his face.
The whispering silk was like the soft rush
of her from the room.
She was a child. She would not remember
too long. A hard thought. Perhaps
this whole inexplicable business was a
madness of this latter spring, a thing of
blood.
But now, here, it was a torment. The
.bn 182.png
.pn +1
thing was to get away—anywhere, instantly!
But there was Florence.
He came back sullenly enough to that
thought. He knew he must see her before
he went. She had always stood to him for
what was honorable and reasonable against
what was impulse. Duty was the word above
all others he hated, but he was bound to it
now. He had never pictured Florence so
palely as at this moment. She had been
a fascination, an inspiration, a companion.
She had been everything to him. There
had been a moment, a transfiguration; and
she was an obligation, a debt unpaid. She
deserved a hundredfold more than he could
give, and he almost hated her for it.
Yet—he reasoned resolutely, as he crossed
the library—she, who had given so much,
who had centered her life in his interests, had
the greatest right to his honor and faith.
And she should have them, he thought. But
he must see her at once.
.bn 183.png
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Through the open doors of the reception-hall
he heard voices from somewhere out of
sight over the dip of the terrace. The hall
was empty of all but a slim, Spanish-eyed
maid wiping down the wainscoting. She
thought that Mrs. Essington was in her room.
She carried up-stairs the card Longacre wrote
upon. He waited, tossing over the accumulations
of the morning’s mail.
A dog came and sat in the open door, his
tail beating the mat with expectation of attention.
It was one of Julia’s dachshunds.
There flashed back to Longacre, with all the
colors and odors keen as if actual, the picture
of the girl standing tall and flushed on the
dripping grass, tossing pebbles down the
terrace.
He felt a sharp contraction of heart. That
memory made what he was about to do unendurable.
Pinioned between his alternatives, his eye
caught his own name on an envelope that
.bn 184.png
.pn +1
carried a New York postmark. He took it
up slowly. He read the letter-head. This
was what he had been waiting for for months.
This was to have made the turn in his life.
Now a quite different thing had made it.
The turn was a wrench. Everything, beside
it, was insignificant.
He ripped open the letter with indifference.
He read it with his brain still tortured
with his quandary, and got no meaning from
it, only an impression that it was not what
he had expected. He re-read the cautious
sentences, this time with attention.
There had been some lack of authority for
the final decision in the last communication
from the Metropolitan Opera Syndicate. On
account of—he got through the list of reasons
to the closing sentence—the Syndicate
could not, after all, arrange to produce the
“Harold.”
He stood looking at the hand that held
the envelop while the blood gathered in his
.bn 185.png
.pn +1
face. A year of unsparing labor, a year of
wire-pulling and waiting, thrown over because
of a stronger pull!
He had nothing to offer but failure. Nothing
to offer Florence.
That was the name he thought. But under
the thought was the death of a wild,
rebel hope.
He lifted his eyes to see Florence on the
step above him.
.bn 186.png
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.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch09
CHAPTER IX||MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “NO”
.sp 2
.dc 0.6 0.65
SHE wore a gown of sheer white,
with a mantle of Spanish lace drawn
close over her sloping shoulders
and the flowing lines of her arms.
Above it her large gray eyes looked out
luminously.
“What is it?” she asked. Her face was
full of queries. She divined her crisis already
upon her.
Without a word he handed her the letter.
She read it through, dwelt on it a frowning
space—looked at him while the frown
smoothed itself.
His full under lip twitched with a suggestion
half cruel, half sensitive. She saw he
.bn 187.png
.pn +1
was suffering, but there was a confusion of
feeling, something with which the letter had
nothing to do.
“Let us go somewhere else,” she said.
Her glance had traveled toward the open
door.
He followed her through the library, dreading
lest she pause there; but she went on
into the conservatory.
He closed the door, shutting them into
the room of glass. In the midst of the transparent
walls, searched by the sun, they were
alone. The north end where the outer door
opened, the south end looking on the lift of
the hill lawn, were screened thick with heliotrope
and passion-vine. The west fronted
the skirts of the terrace, the somber, lonely
oak-plantation, the distant sea. They saw
through glass the out-of-doors, spacious,
fresh, moved by the wind. Within, the air
was motionless, too hot, too sweet, with
scents of newly watered flowers.
.bn 188.png
.pn +1
She handed the letter back to him as
though it were a mere nothing, saying simply,
“Hawtry was against us from the first.
He had more influence than we.” She put
it plural from habit.
“Hawtry was on the spot, not dawdling
on the other side of the continent,” he answered
sullenly. The way he put it was
brutal to her.
“I know the thing’s all right,” he said
half to himself; “but the rest of ’em have to
know it, too! I’ve got to make ’em!
That’s my failure. Florence—as a force
I’m nothing. Lord! How I hate the public—and
I’m just one of the least of ’em!
That’s it,” he said. His chin was sunk on
his breast.
“The public is slow to see and quick to
change. What they think doesn’t matter
with good work.”
Her mind was busy beyond mere saying.
She had never heard him talk in this strain
.bn 189.png
.pn +1
before. She could remember when he had
not known that his work was good; and he
said “I,” not “we.” She saw that marked
an end. More—he not only separated himself
from her, but he divided that self: the
musician—the man, and called the man a failure.
The letter was not responsible for that.
“I’d like to give you a better proof than
this of what you’ve done. For, Florence,
you have done everything!” That was
what he was saying.
She put up her hand, warning the words
away. “I don’t need proof of what you
can do.”
“Don’t you?” he questioned, looking at
her. “Haven’t you begun lately to suspect
I wasn’t worth what you’ve given?”
“Tony!” her reproach was a cry. “You
know—I couldn’t! But I have taken more
than I have given!” An insane passion for
confession was on her. But he was following
his one idea.
.bn 190.png
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“Then why have you avoided me so
lately?” She had been expecting it.
“Have we ever been much together
among people?”
He looked at her, baffled, but with something
dogged and determined in his face.
She had never seen such a look on it before.
And she was going to refuse what he was
about to ask. How broad his shoulders
bulked on the glare of glass!
“Do you regret what you said at the
dance, then?” he persisted.
“No!” She said it with such vehement
impulse that he straightened, took a step
toward her.
“But now you know what a failure I
am—?”
“Oh, Tony—one failure isn’t failure!”
“But,” he gloomed at her, “it is if there’s
never anything else!”
“There will be,” she said steadily; “but
.bn 191.png
.pn +1
if there never were, who was ever loved for
his successes!”
“Florence,” he said, “you are—you—oh,
I don’t deserve it!” He took her gently
by the shoulders. “Will you marry me?”
The question was between them, but left
each cold. She was a long time looking
out through the begonia leaves before she
answered—“No.”
His hands dropped from her shoulders.
She saw with a sort of shock how sure he
had been of her! He could hardly take in
what she meant.
“Do you remember what you said?”
His voice, coming after a minute, sounded
at a distance to her.
She couldn’t speak. She nodded.
“Then why—now—this?”
“Because—” her voice broke. She waited
a minute, fighting for self-control; then went
on more quietly—“because you don’t love
me, Tony.”
.bn 192.png
.pn +1
She startled him. “Florence,” he said
earnestly, “you wrong us both. You know
you’ve always been the only one!”
“I only know,” she said, “that you do not
love me now—because you once did. Think!
Am I what I was to you six months ago?
Then think of marriage! A lifetime! You
will be still a young man when I am an old
woman. It was inevitable this should end.”
“But why do you talk like this?” He
had her by the shoulders again. “What has
age to do with it? You knew that three
nights ago as well as now. It’s an excuse!
Don’t you love me?”
Her voice was almost listless. “I love
you so much that I’m not afraid even of
ending it.”
“Florence, if you knew how I need you!”
How he touched her vulnerable point! “If
you knew how I have lost the only faith I
had in myself!”
“You have not!” she made passionate denial.
.bn 193.png
.pn +1
She freed herself, and stepped back
from him; but he came on until he was close
in front of her as she pressed back among
the ferns. He looked bewildered—furious.
“You don’t need me!” she denied him.
“We have given all we can. It is different.
I have nothing more for you.” She put her
hands behind her.
“Florence, Florence!” He spoke her
name threateningly. “That is just talk!
Why didn’t you say at once you were tired
of me!”
“I have told you the truth.”
“Oh, the truth! Words! Good God,
what woman ever talked reason to the man
she loved!”
She gave a little, bitter shrug, as if his
words had frozen her in the midst of the sun
and flowers.
“You have nothing to regret!” he said,
savage with self-pity. “There’s no blame—Lord,
I don’t blame you! But why didn’t
.bn 194.png
.pn +1
you tell me—” he stared at her, white with
his dreadful realization—“why didn’t you
tell me before?”
Scarcely less pale, she looked back at him.
What was it that had already happened?
Had everything been done too late?
.bn 195.png
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.h2 id=ch10
CHAPTER X||THE MAD RIDING
.sp 2
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TO Florence everything—leaf,
and wind, and the movement
of her own blood—seemed to
stop and harken to his steps
going from her. To him the power and
procession of incident were suddenly precipitated
in a rending confusion, in which established
custom was uprooted, faith cast down,
self-confidence shaken to bits.
What went on around him had lost significance.
He was among people, talking to
people, looking at Florence across the table;
but in this blind rage of suffering he was as
indifferent to all external things as if he had
been alone.
.bn 196.png
.pn +1
Neither Julia nor Bessie Lewis had appeared
at luncheon. Julia had sent word
that she would be late, to her mother’s absent-minded
distraction. Mrs. Budd’s desire
to rush away and fetch her fluttered before
the faces of her guests like a flag of distress.
In the end she was deflected by an imperative
telephone that caught her just as her guests
were rising. While they loitered between
the dining-room and living-hall, chatting in
groups, Julia, with Bessie Lewis at her heels,
came down the stairs, habited, hatted, booted,
drawing on her gloves, her riding-whip under
her arm.
She was pale, but singularly vivid. Her
dark eyes gleamed under her thick brows.
Her red lips were tight and thin.
Florence, looking quickly at Longacre,
hated the presence descending the stairs.
“Oh, I say, young madam,” Thair protested,
amused; “it won’t do, you know.
You’re going to break your neck.”
.bn 197.png
.pn +1
“You aren’t coming!” she laughed at
him, though he was in his pinks. “But
Mr. Holden is!”
“Here, here!” Holden protested, shaking
his head, half serious. “Don’t misquote me!”
“But we’re all going!” she cried, with a
look straight at Longacre. “There are the
horses!” She was buoyant. “Are two
women going to ride cross-country alone?”
she mocked them.
“By gad!” murmured Holden in stark
admiration for such daring.
Julia turned on Longacre. “Are you
ready?” she said.
He stared. Then—“Not for this,” he
answered briefly.
“Oh!” Her look again was diabolical.
“Are you the man who wasn’t afraid this
morning?”
“Did you accept the offer?”
“If I didn’t—” her red lips curled over
her teeth—“I do now!”
.bn 198.png
.pn +1
“You’ll break your neck!”
“My neck!” She began laughing, as if
that were something superlatively ridiculous.
There was a contagion of recklessness in the
sound of it. She leaned a little nearer and
shook her head at him.
“My neck is worth at least two fences!
And yours?”
“Oh, not that much!” It was an answering
spirit.
“Then come!” she cried. “We’ll lead
them!”
A quick step hurrying from the dining-room,
and Mrs. Budd’s emphatic voice was
lifted.
“Where did those horses come from?”
The tone expressed mere general wonder to
the aggregation in the hall, that quickened
to personal apprehension at sight of her
daughter equipped for the saddle.
“Why, Julia!” she began. Then seeing
Bessie Lewis, she hesitated, dismayed.
.bn 199.png
.pn +1
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.pn +1
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“‘Are you ready?’”
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[Illustration: “‘Are you ready?’”]
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.pn +1
“We’re just off, mama!” cried Julia. “I
told James to have the cart ready to drive
you over to the ‘finish.’”
“Off? Over?” Mrs. Budd helplessly
questioned.
“Why, the drag—the drag-hunt!” her
daughter exclaimed. “You haven’t forgotten
our great event!”
“The drag-hunt! My dear child! Why,
you’re crazy!” Mrs. Budd’s hands were
eloquent of horror. “Mr. Thair—Mr.
Holden! Surely—why, it’s impossible!”
Thair repudiating all part in the proceeding,
Holden struggling for neutral ground,
Mrs. Budd adjuring them to a firm stand
with her against this harebrained escapade, a
confusion of voices began. Bessie Lewis
wavered in the face of her hostess’s vehemence.
In the midst of the indecision Julia,
who had been standing, her teeth on her
under lip, her crop slashing at her boots, suddenly
recommanded the situation.
.bn 204.png
.pn +1
“Well, I’m off!” she cried. “See you
again at the ‘kill!’”
She caught up her riding-skirt, and ran
across the hall and down the step. Longacre
was after her. He felt a horrid responsibility
for this mad bravado.
Her foot hardly pressed his hand as she
sprang into the saddle.
Mrs. Budd clasped Thair’s arm.
“Bring her back! Oh, bring her back!”
she entreated.
“Safe and sound—no danger,” he reassured
her.
“Pretty rapid for the start,” he smiled to
Holden, as he tucked up Bessie Lewis on an
excited mare. “Can you hit the pace?”
“I’m with you,” Holden muttered, straddling
a dancing bay. “Can’t let ’em go
alone!”
They galloped in the wake of the mad
riders. Julia’s habit fluttered at the front.
The reckless spirit of her rose with the swinging
.bn 205.png
.pn +1
pace. Just through the gate she wheeled
left into a wagon-track over fields, a shortcut
to the meet; Longacre followed, a neck
behind. The rest, going at a more discreet
pace, stuck to the sea road, so that the
two reached the meet some few moments
ahead, and waited, without a word to each
other, with the few pink coats, among a yelping
pack in a meadow ruffled over by the
wind, ringed by live-oaks and somber cypresses.
The others came pounding in,
breaking through the trees in a rush of
voices and color.
“Too far ahead of the procession!” cried
Holden.
“You can follow as fast as you please,”
called Julia.
“Oh, we follow, princess, we follow!”
drawled Thair; “but don’t make the way
too steep.”
The pink coats gave curious glances at
Longacre’s bare head and golf attire.
.bn 206.png
.pn +1
The uncoupled hounds scattered over the
field, nuzzling through the wet, brown grass,
till, with a short yelp from one throat and a
long howl from thirty, they had the scent
and were off. The field was bunched at the
start, Longacre well up with Julia, who was
riding hard for the lead.
The going was heavy, and for this the bars
were down, but the girl rode straight at the
fence. Her black mare sank over fetlock on
the other side, but was away with a bare instant
lost, a nose behind Longacre, who, with
the rest, had taken the open gate.
“If you do that again,” he shouted, “I’ll
lead you!”
She laughed and spurred away from him.
The M. F. H., with a dismayed look at
her, was protesting to Thair, who shrugged.
There was no help for it, he seemed to say.
The girl’s hat, crammed over her eyes,
pressed the hair to a close sweep low above
her brows. Her nostrils dilated, her color
.bn 207.png
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burned. The riders strung out, Holden drawing
abreast Julia, Longacre dropping back a
length to Thair’s pace.
“Easier going presently, I trust,” the latter
said, as his horse sank an off leg. “Look at
the dogs,” he added, as the pack darted away
in a course almost at right angles to their
first. “We’ll have a run for our money!”
“Stiff going?” said Longacre, watching
the black mare drawing up on the M. F. H.
“Ground gets better; fences, ditches,
worse; the neck-breaking course of the
country.” Thair, craning forward, laughed
at Julia. “The filly’s got the bit in her
teeth. Cruel going—got to see it through
somehow!”
He took the other side of a mire and edged
away to the left, seeking the narrowest place
in the nearing ditch. It looked easy, a tiny
gully swollen full by the rains. But Longacre
knew how the banks, under-eaten by
water, would not give firm footing to a dog.
.bn 208.png
.pn +1
Julia rode at it as if it were a crack in a rock.
Holden, who was having his first experience
cross-country, slacked a little; but Longacre
crowded forward, reckless of the boggy
ground.
“Take it long—long!” he entreated.
Her eyes flashed at him.
“Are you afraid?” she cried.
The horses rose together. His went over
like a swallow. The black mare jumped
short. One hind foot went down, but hands
and voice and Kentucky blood lifted her out
with hardly a struggle.
Holden’s bay had refused the leap. Another
had floundered badly. Thair’s pink
coat was sailing along the lower field toward
a break in the brush fence.
“Shall we lead him?” said Julia, pointing
on with her whip.
“For God’s sake, go carefully!” he entreated.
It seemed to delight her to torment him.
.bn 209.png
.pn +1
She pressed forward, looking back with a
challenge. Her lips, parted in the ardor of
excitement, showed a cruel white of teeth.
The ground was precarious, but she rode
headlong. It was courting destruction.
He kept her pace, not in response to her
reckless spirit, but for fear of what might
happen, with the desperate hope of averting
disaster. They flew down the field toward
the thunder of the sea, with the sun and the
salt wind strong in their eyes; crashed through
the hedge; scrambled down into a road, up
the sandy bank on the other side, through
the scrub-oaks with a rush, and at once the
salt-meadows were before them, their skirts
of cypress black on a purple sea. Over the
ocean a white arm of fog extended stealthily.
Its thin forefinger pointed landward. Already
the first films were caught on ragged pine and
crooked cypress, like flying shreds of veil.
“That’ll cut us short,” said Thair, frowning
seaward.
.bn 210.png
.pn +1
“It won’t be in till night,” said Julia,
pricking her mare till the creature bounded.
“In an hour,” Thair decided. “We won’t
make the cypress plantation.”
She spurred forward. “We’ll finish by
five,” she called back. “We can ride through
a hedge—we can ride through a mist.”
“A ditch in a fog,” muttered Thair. “Not
me!”
“We can ride like the devil and get
through!” decided the M. F. H. “The
damned dogs are off the scent again!”
Below, among the tussocks of the first
meadow, the pack were whimpering, mingling,
starting off on a false scent—returning,
fawning, leaping up on Julia riding to
and fro among them. The exasperated whipper-in
beat at them. The four other riders
came stringing over the rise among the
sand-hummocks.
“What’s up?”
“Oh, dear, have they lost the scent?”
.bn 211.png
.pn +1
They scattered down the dip among the
dispersed and nosing pack.
“They have it!”
“No. Fake scent!”
“Why on earth is there such a long
break?”—Bessie Lewis’s treble.
“I didn’t carry the drag!” cried Julia,
furiously, fretted with the delay. “Loo, loo,
loo!” She urged the dogs. “Good heavens!
I could find it quicker myself!”
She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—rein the
black in to the group gathered in the lee of
the dunes, but darted away with swoops and
stops beyond the farthest-straying dog.
“Can’t we call it off?” urged Holden,
looking anxiously at the encroaching fog.
It was spreading out, a thick sheet raveling
at the edges.
“Not until we have to!” said Thair, well
into his cross-country humor. “But don’t
let the young madam get too far ahead.”
Then Longacre—who had never taken
.bn 212.png
.pn +1
his eyes from where Julia glimmered down
the somber sward—“They have it! They’re
off!” and was away after them.
He heard the rest hot-pace behind, but he
had a moment’s advantage, and, having saved
his horse between ditch and fence, now drew
away fresh as at the start. He had an open
course—two miles of sandy turf—to catch
her in. She had ridden down near the sea,
and, following the pack, now zigzagged up
hill. He, hugging the line of the dunes, cut
off a corner, and so caught up with her.
Hearing him coming, she spurred harder;
but he drew up inch by inch, until, his roan
abreast her black, they rushed into the face
of the wind together.
Hounds in front and hunters behind were
forgotten; between the cypresses crowding
down from the hills, and the oblivion of fog
beating in from sea, they sped, wild with the
elation of flight, unmindful of beginning,
oblivious of end.
.bn 213.png
.pn +1
Fog was already streaming among the fantastic
trees of the Point of Pines, cutting
them off in front; but Julia held an unswerving
course until the damp breath blew on
her hot cheeks, and moisture stood in pearls
in her hair.
The point went back from the sea in a
low ridge, running up into a straggling grove
of cypress. Its backbone of round, tumbling
stones was cruel footing for horses. The
pack made nothing of it, slipping over like
snakes. Julia was for following, but Longacre
turned a sharp flank movement that had
the black headed off, flying up the point for
the trees, the pack yelping a parallel course
on the left of the ridge.
Julia brought her whip down savagely on
the black’s flank as she passed him. Longacre
took an in-breath as they swept under
the trees. The sun through the fine, blowing
mist made a dazzle for the eyes.
Over a ground broken and spotted with
.bn 214.png
.pn +1
black stumps the girl guided her horse with
admirable skill, Longacre saving his neck by
luck. Their pace perforce was slower, dodging
the trees that sprang on them out of the
mist like specters.
Then, with a hallo, a crashing rush, Thair
broke through the scrub on their left. Old
rider that he was, he knew the short cuts of
every course. He shouted, and they swerved
toward him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
he panted.
“After the hounds!” cried Julia.
“The wild juggernaut couldn’t finish this
run!” he protested.
“Nonsense!” The girl wheeled her horse.
“We’ll be out of the mist when we get away
from the point.”
“That you won’t. It’s coming in from
the land, too. It’ll be thick in five minutes,
and we’ll snag, or break our precious necks
on these dwarf-cypresses!”
.bn 215.png
.pn +1
“We’ll be out in half a minute!” Julia
said, shook her reins, and was off.
“Keep Miss Lewis back!” Longacre
shouted it over his shoulder.
He heard Thair take up the words and
call them again to some dim horseman looming
large in the mist.
Already the hounds were a faint cry far in
front, the girl a gray wraith flitting among
the trees. Now the cypresses had her! Now
she flashed into a clearing! Longacre heard
hoofs and faint voices behind him, but in
that fog, that covered the earth and swallowed
the sun, the rider a length ahead of
him was the only living creature. Before
them the slope slid away into white oblivion.
It was madness—this blind flight. He felt
himself gaining upon her. His hand was
ready for the black’s bit. The thicket opened
out; the trees fell away right and left. A
dark line swam up in front.
“What’s ahead?” he shouted.
.bn 216.png
.pn +1
“Fence!” She flung it back at him with
a note of fear. The sound of that brought
him abreast her. Stark and black, the rails
sprang out at him. He saw a glittering mist
where the other side should have been—heard
voices shouting through the fog—shouting
them to stop. He snatched for the
mare’s bit. She swerved—she sprang to
the spur. He saw Julia’s profile, white on
white, flash past him. His ears were full of
his own name—her voice calling his name—as
the roan leaped upward.
.hr 20%
.ni
To Thair and Holden, blundering down
the field, seeing six feet in front of them,
came a sound—the dull, unresonant drop
of a body falling from a height—a cry, suddenly
cut off. Involuntarily they halted.
Thair peered into the obscurity. Holden
halloed. The silence was dreadful. They
edged cautiously forward, expecting a hail
for direction. Then suddenly out of the fog
.bn 217.png
.pn +1
the black mare plunged on them, empty
saddle, flying rein.
.pi
“God!” said Holden.
“E-e-easy!” muttered Thair, leading forward
cautiously.
Now the stark line of the fence rose up;
now, almost abreast of it, they saw the roan
on the far side, standing, head tossed; and
near him, vague as ghosts, two figures, one
kneeling by one prone in the long, wet grass.
.bn 218.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch11
CHAPTER XI||THE WHITE DARKNESS
.sp 2
.dc 0.3 0.65
FLORENCE watched the riders
down the terrace with a curious
sense of participation in the race.
The whole thing had gone with
such reckless abandon! What had happened
to set Julia, with her hot glitter, headlong on
such an escapade, to drag Longacre so doggedly
after her? Her presentiment recurred
to Florence with a hopeless drop of courage—that,
after all, it had been too late! In
freeing him, then, had she simply thrust him
from her over a precipice?
She saw from the veranda the pink coats
crowding through the drive gate. She heard
around her voices exclaiming, reassuring,
.bn 219.png
.pn +1
complaining. The riders had left behind
them confusion of a petty, biting quality.
She felt her endurance at snapping-point.
She wanted to get out to “Tres Pinos,”
to stand on the rocky point, above the tumult
of the sea, and shout against the shouting
breakers.
Instead she walked among oleanders and
pampas plumes with a rigorous composure.
The placid face of the garden, with its
blended sweets and colors, was cloying; the
passionless blue sky, defiant.
She had let him go! After that she had
hoped at least for quiet—even the quiet of
hopelessness. But here was only irritating
unrest, a striving to understand what, after
all, she had done. She had meant that release
to be so much to him! She kept seeing
Longacre as he had left her. She kept
hearing him reproach her: “Why didn’t
you tell me before?” The whole thing was
in that!
.bn 220.png
.pn +1
She paced the garden over, threaded its
thickets, measured its lawns with her steps,
distanced its farthest hedges—moving, moving,
while shadows lengthened over the lawns,
the light grew yellow, the sun struck aslant
through the oaks. Her thoughts kept her
eyes oblivious to the waning of the afternoon,
to the increasing chill in the breeze, to
the queer, damp breath that seemed to come
from no quarter, but to exhale from the
earth, the sky, the sea. She came back to
keen consciousness of her surroundings with
a high voice questing her among the trees.
“What are you doing, poked off here at
the end of creation?” cried Cissy. “We’re
going to drive over to the club to see the
finish and have supper. It’s the most we
can do after the way they rushed off and left
us!” There was a pettish twitch to her tiny
chin. “Emma is having a fit for fear something
has happened to ‘dear Julia,’ though I
should say she’s perfectly capable of taking
.bn 221.png
.pn +1
care of herself. There’s not the least bit of
danger.”
“Danger?” Florence repeated uneasily.
“Why, the fog! Look!” Cissy indicated
airily.
Florence saw a gray sea drifting up the
bay, ocean above ocean, covering the far
turn of the coast, and flowing, white as wool,
among the low hills to the south.
“Of course there’s no danger they’ll run
into it,” Cissy was saying. “They’ll finish
in less than an hour—so hurry.”
Florence’s first impulse was to refuse.
Next she wondered why. She was too nervous
to be still. She felt, all at once, it would
be a great relief to see the riders come in
safely. Could she wait till after midnight to
be sure of—of what would quiet this senseless
uneasiness? She was so sure that it was
best to go, she could hardly credit her own
refusal. It made Cissy stare. Her look
was a mixture of incredulity and relief. It
.bn 222.png
.pn +1
gave Florence a faint amusement in the
midst of her abstraction.
With Cissy had returned the rasping confusion
that had been with the rush of the
riders, but it did not depart with her.
Standing solitary, among the laurustinus
bushes, Florence felt the impetus of it about
her. She watched the fog gathering in, inclosing
land and sea in an ever-narrowing
ring. She caught herself wondering if by
chance one of the long fingers had caught
the hunt in its hook. Suddenly her restlessness,
her unease, was crystallized into a sharp
anxiety. Was it also an expectation?
She heard the party for the club-house
drive away with relief. Why hadn’t she
gone with them? What was she waiting
for?
A veil was drawn over the burning disk
of the sun as he dipped near the ocean. She
was chilled with the fine approach of the fog.
She walked slowly back toward the house,
.bn 223.png
.pn +1
turning once, and once again, to look behind
her at the vanishing line of coast. She shivered,
covering her head with her black Spanish
lace and drawing it close over the bosom
of the white gown that she had forgotten to
change.
She had forgotten time that day. As much
had crowded into a few hours as might fill a
life. Henceforth time would be too much
with her.
Her foot was on the veranda step when
she saw a pink coat turn in at the drive gate.
She strained her eyes. Charlie Thair—and
without a hat. She had never before seen
him, out-of-doors, without a hat. As he drew
up the drive at a quick canter, she thought
he had reined in a yet quicker pace. She
stood, arrested in mid-motion, turning to him
a face that was a question. He was the first
to speak, hailing her while barely within distance,
as if to make sure of the first word.
“Where is Mrs. Budd, Mrs. Essington?”
.bn 224.png
.pn +1
“She drove over to the country club with
the others to see the finish. What—”
“Thank God! Are you the only one here?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“Did they take the victoria?”
“No; who is hurt?”
He only looked at her.
“Is it—is it—” she put her hand to her
throat—“Julia?” she brought out desperately.
“No, not Julia.” He looked at her very
keenly, very kindly. He need not have
spoken the name that followed. She knew
before she heard.
She got her breath with a sobbing sound,
pressing her hand to her side.
“Oh, not a bad fall,—not bad, Mrs. Essington!”
Thair was beside her. She thought
he steadied her. “Some of the youngsters
lost their heads, got into the fog. He went
after ’em—took a nasty fence. Stunned,
possibly a broken bone—nothing for the
.bn 225.png
.pn +1
hunting-field,” he smiled to her. He kept
her from going to pieces. But she looked
through him. He saw he had not reassured
her, and was glad she knew, in spite of him,
how bad it might be.
“It was too far from the club-house to get
him there,” he said. “Must have a carriage
and a doctor.”
“Doctor!” she repeated, catching at the
word as something to help pull herself together.
“Who is there?”
He gave a name and number. She went
in to the telephone, dazed, dreamy, not half
taking in what had happened. All objects
were confused, all thought stunned in her.
She seemed to be floating. But the curt
professional voice that answered her over the
telephone woke her, spurring her faculties
to activity. She was kept minutes when
seconds were so precious. She could hardly
hear him out.
She snatched a flask from the butler’s pantry,
.bn 226.png
.pn +1
a man’s coat from the rack in the living-hall,
dragged rugs and cushions from the
divans. She was heaping them into the victoria
when Thair came around from the stables.
The overcoat covered her gown, but
the lace was still over her head from which
her face looked a sharp, silvery oval.
“The doctor can be here in half an hour,”
she said. “Can we take a short cut?”
“I’ll show the man; I’m going to ride,”
Thair said, putting her in. He took her going
as the thing most to be expected. She
leaned from the carriage. The sharp motion
arrested him like a detaining hand.
“Who was it he went after?”
Thair looked at her. For a moment he
hesitated. Then, “Yes, it was she,” he said.
“Now then”—to the man—“lively!”
The carriage spun over the coast road.
Its wheels flew, halos now of mud, now of
water. The span were at their sharpest trot,
but to Florence they seemed to crawl.
.bn 227.png
.pn +1
The fog was all around, over, eddying like
smoke among the trees. Somewhere under
its oblivion breakers were rolling in with
sullen voices and heavy, crashing fall upon
the sand.
She leaned forward, peering into the gray
blur before. She was conscious only of interminable
mist and one person it held away
from her. She watched Thair’s pink coat
moving like a will-o’-the-wisp. Now it
stopped. Thair shouted to the driver. The
victoria turned, dipped under the trees, passed
between two gate-posts. She saw long grass
under the wheels. The carriage rocked over
broken ground. The horses were at a canter.
Through a second gate, with a lurch, one
wheel thumping over the bars half drawn
aside. They were in the fields, with the
ocean’s hoarse voice dwindled to a whisper
that was “Hush!” while her heart, audible
to her in the deep silence, drummed “Hurry,
hurry, hurry!” Then above the melancholy
.bn 228.png
.pn +1
sea she heard the sharp chopping of the pack.
Cruel sound! It made her shiver. Then a
hallo. Gray shapes moved in the fog like
shadows on a sheet. One was close to the
carriage, a woman crying. Then Holden’s
voice saying to Thair, “Quicker than we
hoped”; then, beside the carriage, exclaiming,
“Florence!”
Her name was on his lips for the first time.
She did not hear it.
“Where is he?” she said.
“Wait here,” Holden answered, and rode
ahead.
The carriage stopped. She sprang out and
ran forward a few steps—paused. She saw
two men coming toward her, carrying something
between them. Nearer, she saw it was
a man. He hung dead weight, head fallen
back, arms hanging, hands trailing in the
long, wet grass. Behind, like a following
dog, came a tall bare-headed girl. It seemed
unreal, a play scene, till she saw the injured
.bn 229.png
.pn +1
man’s face, dead white, with a dark streak
across the mouth that lengthened it out into
a horrible smile.
“Over here,” Florence said to the coachman.
Her voice was lost in her throat, but
he obeyed the beckoning hand. She was
back in the carriage. The men were lifting
up the burden her hands reached for.
“Easy with the shoulders!” Thair muttered.
They laid it on the heaped-up cushions.
Trembling as she was, she seemed to
lift and move the inert body as easily as the
men. She stooped and wiped away the stain
that disfigured the poor face. And then it
seemed the vacancy of it was the saddest
look it could have worn.
“Can’t we get back by a road? The
cut’s so rough?” she appealed to Holden.
The somber eyes of the men consulted
each other.
“Yes,” Thair decided; “strike the country-club
road over here. Longer, but—better.”
.bn 230.png
.pn +1
Holden nodded to the whipper-in.
“We’ll go ahead and knock out some
rails.”
“You’d better go back to the house with
’em,” Thair called after him. “We’ll ride
over and let ’em know at the club.” He
turned to Julia, who, through it all, had
stood back, not moving or taking her eyes
from the shape in the carriage.
“You ought to go in the victoria.”
She turned her eyes quickly to Florence.
She put her hands to her face. “No! No!”
she cried with vehemence—it might have
been horror.
Florence looked at her. Julia’s habit was
torn away at the waist, her hair falling on
her shoulders. She looked stunned, stupid.
Florence turned to Thair. “Can she
ride?”
“I can ride,” Julia repeated dully. Thair
was holding the black, but she made no
motion to mount. She only stood watching
.bn 231.png
.pn +1
the black bulk of the carriage laboring away
across the broken field.
Four riders waited uncertain, whispering,
looking after the carriage, looking at Thair,
looking at Julia.
Bessie Lewis was mopping her cheeks with
the wet ball of her handkerchief. She gave
a hysterical gasp. “Oh, Julia, your habit!”
She dabbed nervously at the skirt.
Julia roused, shrinking away from the
touch, turning to Thair. He almost lifted
her to the saddle. But once up, she seemed
to wake, to stiffen. She let him take the
rein and lead the black through the ragged
opening left by the torn-away rails. The
carriage had turned down the road under the
overarching trees.
Thair watched her anxiously. He kept
her rein. He turned, touching his horse
lightly with the spur.
“If you can ride as far as the club—” he
began.
.bn 232.png
.pn +1
She pulled herself together, alert, staring
at him, at the whispering four.
The rein jerked out of Thair’s hand. He
half turned in his saddle, blank, dismayed,
as she wheeled and rode furiously after the
victoria.
.bn 233.png
.pn +1
.pb
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.h2 id=ch12
CHAPTER XII||MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “YES”
.sp 2
.dc 0.4 0.65
DARK had shut down in a weeping
mist when the carts from
the country club drove up the
“Miramar” terrace. The doctor’s
dry, professional presence met Mrs.
Budd’s voluble anxiety on the threshold,
and, in a measure, smoothed it.
Oh, it was all right—all right, he assured
her; only, the place must be kept quiet.
(He had a grudging eye for the people getting
out of the carts.) The patient ought
to be moved to the cottage hospital, but—He
pursed out his lips....
But Mrs. Budd wouldn’t hear of such a
thing! Since the poor young man was her
.bn 234.png
.pn +1
guest, had been hurt—she saw it dramatically—in
saving her daughter—
The doctor’s hands waved it away.
“My dear madam, that’s not the point.
I want this case under my eye.”
“Oh! Is it as bad as that?”
His look was everywhere but at her.
“Not at all—the usual thing. These
youngsters all do it, but—send these people
away!”
It was hushed enough that night, the house,
but full of whispers, conjectures, things told
and asked.
“Why, what happened?”
Nobody knew exactly.
“But, afterward, you should have seen her
face!”
“Oh, just queer—dreadful!”
“But she was that at the start!”
“Then, of all things, her riding after them!”
“Them!”
“Why, Mrs. Essington came for him.”
.bn 235.png
.pn +1
“Mrs. Essington! Well!”
So much was out, and so flat, one didn’t
know what might jump out next. Julia’s indifference—a
stunned quiescence under her
mother’s reproaches and the curious glances
of the guests—her white face, her blank eyes,
added the last touch. “Queer” was the
word for it, and this “queerness” clung to
them, held them irresolute, was almost too
much for their sense of decency. It needed
just a turn to start them off, and this Thair
gave, cornering Cissy Fitz Hugh, who, in the
midst of the indecision, preserved a settled
air.
He wanted to know was she aware that an
early train and an eight-o’clock breakfast required
bags packed overnight?
Cissy was mildly surprised. “How can I
leave Emma at such a time?”
“Has she asked you to stay?” Thair
rather brutally threw at her.
“But she doesn’t have to ask me!”
.bn 236.png
.pn +1
“I should think not—since she’s already
asked two people whom she seems to want,—Mrs.
Essington for one—myself for another.”
He smiled diabolically.
Cissy gasped. “As an old friend, there
are some things I might do for Emma—”
“My good Cicely, there’s only one thing
you haven’t done. Do go, like a decent
woman!”
“But the others?” She was injured.
“Aren’t they going, too?”
“Oh, I guess they are,” he grinned, “if you
mention it to ’em.”
She was indignant, but her departure was
by the morning train that swept the house of
all its guests.
Holden left with the others, but instead of
traveling townward went to the hotel. He
had seen Florence first.
He would like, he said, to escort her if
she could let him know what day she was
going up to San Francisco. He was thinking
.bn 237.png
.pn +1
of the promise she had made him, that
morning, driving out to the links. Through
all the perplexing appearances of the last
three days he had held by that as something
tangible.
She had forgotten it.
She did not know when she would be
going; could not tell him. Her pallor, her
heavy eyes, the look she had, while she
talked, of listening for something—all were
eloquent to plead for her. He didn’t understand
it, but he waited.
She was merely grateful to him that he let
her alone. At the moment she was living so
in another’s life that she seemed to own no
separate existence. She seemed to waver between
living and dying. When the relapse
that followed the fever dropped him lowest,
she felt herself reaching out toward death.
When the crisis, passing, drifted him back,
she felt herself quickened. The most she
had ever wished, then seemed granted her.
.bn 238.png
.pn +1
Not only while she was with him, but when
she was away, alone, she felt herself drawn
somehow closer to him than ever before. She
had forgotten the other people. She had forgotten
the separation. While he lay, with
the returning tide of living yet so low in him
that he could hardly lift his eyelids, she was
happy.
From half-consciousness Longacre roused,
on the fourth day, to a clearer sense of what
was around him. While Florence was in
the room his eyes followed her as if fearful,
should he turn them away, she would vanish.
Twice he tried to ask a question, but the
whisper failed him. Her ear to his mouth
could not catch it.
She fretted, wondering if she had grown
deaf that she could not understand what he
so much wanted to know!
He lay with the question shut in his half-closed
eyes until the fifth morning, when his
voice grew from a breath to a sound; and
.bn 239.png
.pn +1
she heard, his lax fingers in her firm ones,
her eyes dropped to meet his, lifted.
“Is she safe?”
It took Florence a moment, groping into
what was past, to understand, to realize;
and another moment, while she looked across
the bed, through the window, into the open
sky, to answer—“Yes.”
With that he closed his eyes and turned
away his head, as though there were nothing
more in the world to ask. She rose and
went to the window.
She seemed to see Julia’s blank eyes—how
they had leaped to life at sight of her!
And then the girl’s cry!
The sick man slept.
Florence wrestled with emotions, primitive,
savage.
That he should ask, with his first breath,
that! That with her assurance he should
turn from her to sleep, without a look, a word,
a memory!
.bn 240.png
.pn +1
Yet, she told herself, what wonder that
the last, violent instant before unconsciousness
should rise before him with his reawakening.
Had the question any personal significance?
Had not his eyes followed her?
Didn’t he now turn to her, away from all
the rest? Had not the wild girl, with her
piece of folly, closed the door on that incident?
What could renew it?
It was a question, a cry, half hoping—but
she knew it was a forlorn hope.
He reawakened early in the afternoon.
His first stir brought her to him, still hot
from her conflict with herself. He was
stronger this time, more awake to living.
He did not ask, but demanded.
“I must get out of here,” he said.
Her amazement questioned him. He
dwelt long on her face, seemed to pluck
some significance from it.
“You know,” he asked, “how it happened?
How I—?”
.bn 241.png
.pn +1
She nodded yes.
Again he stared at her long and steadily.
“Don’t blame her,” he said slowly. “It
was not her fault. Mine—mine!”
“Never mind,” she told him; “we can go
to-morrow.”
To hear him accuse himself for that other
was more than she could bear. Again he
seemed to divine her.
“You don’t know, Florence, what happened
that morning. I was—I am—” he
seemed to contemplate himself—“something
no woman could forgive! It left her in such
a way—oh, wretched!” His head rolled on
the pillow. His eyes drooped away from her.
Florence recalled how he had met her at
the stair-foot with the letter in his hand and
some greater trouble in his face. Then that
angry insistence of his in the glass room had
been simply reparation! He had known then
that he loved the girl, and somehow known
too late. And he had told Julia that! She
.bn 242.png
.pn +1
saw with dreadful clearness. Did everything
go back to the night when she had wanted
and taken so ruthlessly what she desired?
It was not Julia, but she, herself, who had
led that leap in which he had fallen.
“I must get away,” she heard him mutter.
In her own room she lay a long time, accustoming
herself to the new face of the situation,
struggling back from extremes of
self-hate and self-love to a clearer vision.
She must touch again what she had so hoped
she had finished with. Something she had
called fate had seemed to be thrusting him
from that girl; but fate, as she looked, grew
to wear too much her own aspect. Had she
let conditions alone in the beginning—but
she had fought them, curbed them in a measure
to her will. She had made a catastrophe,
and she must mend it. That was the
reason of it. But under reason was a passionate
desire that he should be happy. That
covered everything.
.bn 243.png
.pn +1
His self-accusation recurred to her.
“Something no woman could forgive.”
Could not that girl forgive him that he was
loyal? But she was so young, so appallingly
young! And oh, the dangerous, difficult
task of playing another’s game for him!
Yet, could he have played it himself, had he
had his strength, he would have made it a
different matter. Now, all he could manage
in his great bodily weakness was that one
absorbing desire to get away. She knew
how impossible it was to deflect him where
once his obstinate mind was made up. She
felt every moment, with his returning
strength, her chance was slipping further
from her. But she was baffled. Turn and
twist as she could, she was shut fast in the
middle of a deadlock.
The departure of all the amalgamating
presences had left the estrangement of these
few so closely concerned a naked fact. They
felt its presence palpable among them. It
.bn 244.png
.pn +1
filled the rooms of the house, sat between
them at table, walked with them in the gardens.
Julia, unreachable behind her hard
indifference, through which her voice broke
sometimes with sharp suggestions of collapse;
Mrs. Budd, nervous, vacillating, strung to the
verge of tears; she, herself, out of love with
everything but the hope of one man’s life;
all were desperately at odds, no one trusting
another.
Thair, alone, had given her the sense of
an outsider. If he were in the midst of it
as much as any one, it didn’t touch him.
The very perfection of his manner, meeting
those anxious, studying looks Mrs. Budd
threw at him, was assurance that he knew
his uneasy place in her conjecture. To Florence
he had been, with his unconcern, like
fresh air in a close room. He perfectly understood;
and he took it easily. Their tacit
understanding was the only note of confidence
in the unquiet house.
.bn 245.png
.pn +1
She knew he knew to a certain point just
how she stood; but that point was the turn
where she had let Longacre go. Just how
far Thair missed this, she had read in his
kind, congratulatory looks at her—his odd,
half-protecting air of seeming to ease her
off, as much as possible, from the strain,
the reiterant conflict of mother and
daughter, as from something quite beside
her interest.
He had never had so much that air to her
as now, this afternoon, when he encountered
her stepping through the tall French window
upon the veranda, and turned and lifted the
passion-vines for her to pass under—such a
pretty thing, she thought, for a man to do
for a woman as old, as haggard, as self-absorbed
as she. They went the length of the
fennel walk together. She remembered the
morning when Longacre had left Julia so
impetuously to follow her as something that
had happened a very long time ago—something
.bn 246.png
.pn +1
into which Thair’s voice dropped
sharply, shattering the image.
“We are to be abandoned,” he was saying.
“The young madam is leaving us for
town.”
She stood, looking over the sun-drenched
terraces. The thing had come on her so
suddenly! She had lost her chance! She
put her hand to her forehead. This would
be the end! The thing would just fall to
pieces by itself!
Then the lasting silence got her, and she
looked at Thair. He was looking at her.
“What is the matter?” that look was saying.
“Isn’t it all right? Aren’t you glad?
Wasn’t it that that you wanted?”
Her reply was just her look of despair.
“What can I do!” She might as well
have said it out. It was so clear between
them that his answering her with words
seemed quite natural.
“Can I do anything?”
.bn 247.png
.pn +1
She looked away from him to that glittering
spot where the sun struck the sea.
Why, there was only one thing any one
could do, so elemental that it took this sharp
necessity to make it possible. She saw now.
It was, all along, the only thing she could
have done.
She turned back to Thair, whose last
question hung, waiting her answer.
“No, nothing—you’re good—not now—except
let me go back alone!”
She ran. From the moment he had confounded
her she had dropped all consideration
of appearances. On the stair she passed
a maid, her arms heaped with newly ironed
linen and delicate flowered fabrics—frocks
Julia had worn about the house. Then she
must be packing. She would be in her
room. Half-way down the upper hall, Florence
heard the rushing approach of sweeping
silk. She stopped, almost opposite her own
door, and waited. Julia came down the hall,
.bn 248.png
.pn +1
headlong even when walking. She saw
Florence not until she was upon her. She
started, drew herself together, made to go
on, hesitated.
“Can I do anything?” she said. Her
voice gave the commonplace sharp significance,
as though her very self depended on
the “anything” she could do.
“Yes,” Florence said, holding open her
door. “Come in.”
The girl gazed, as if this were the last
thing she had expected. Her eyes looked
out blackly, defiance through suspicion, as
the door closed after her. “See how miserable
I am,” they seemed to say, “but don’t
dare pity me!” Her face was startling, bewildering.
It meant so much more than
seemed in nature, even in a woman who had
injured the man she loved. It had the furtive
suffering of a creature in a trap. It
seemed that at any moment her strained
voice would break into a cry.
.bn 249.png
.pn +1
“You’re going to-morrow?” Florence
asked her.
Julia stiffened. Her manner was perfunctory.
“Yes, I’m going up to town. If
there is anything I can do for you there—”
“Aren’t you needed here?” Florence
asked her. She felt quieted by the other’s
agitation.
The girl stared as if she suspected she was
made sport of. “I? Oh!” She smiled
sharply.
“Are you sure there is nothing you could
do by staying?” Florence persisted.
“I see what you mean,” Julia replied, still
in that whetted tone that served to defend
her weakness. “My fault it happened! It’s
done. How can I mend it? Oh, do you
think any one regrets it more than I? I
would do anything—anything,” she repeated
with sudden vehemence, “to change it, to—but
it is impossible!” Her hands, that she
had pressed together, fell apart. She turned
.bn 250.png
.pn +1
nervously toward the window, as if the sight
of the wide, warm garden could help her.
But Florence moved to intercept the glance.
“If one had injured a person one loved—”
she began. She stopped, startled at the
application those words had for her own
case.
“A person one loved!” Julia repeated.
The words seemed dragged out of her throat.
She turned on the other woman piercing
eyes. “But, if—he did not love you? If
he loved another woman?”
Florence pressed her hand to her side.
“And, loving her,” the girl rushed on,
“still gave you a—a pretense for truth—if
you had hurt him mortally—oh, mortally—what
would you do?”
Florence, white, breathing short, looked at
the floor. It seemed rising up to strike her.
She was overwhelmed that Julia had divined
her case—had guessed,—a dozen frantic
suppositions flew through her mind. Then
.bn 251.png
.pn +1
the fact flashed on her: the girl had only
cried her own tragedy! But how was it hers?
How could it be Julia’s, when Longacre had
told her—? Florence filled her lungs with a
deep, slow-drawn breath, as if she were drawing
in courage to face what was rising in her
mind. It was Longacre’s face as it had
peered up into hers that morning, and his
voice restlessly repeating, “I am something
no woman could forgive!” Her quickening
comprehension embraced what that might
be. Longacre had told Julia nothing! She
put her hand out behind her, touched the
table to steady herself. The passionate gratitude
that rose in her at his forlorn loyalty
stood still when she raised her eyes to Julia’s
face. She knew what the girl was suffering.
It was what she herself suffered, but worse,
for Julia was blind. Julia could see no way
out of it, and Florence herself, for a moment,
was nerveless before the enormousness of her
own task.
.bn 252.png
.pn +1
Her voice came weakly. “I would be
very sure, first, that he did not love me.” The
answer seemed her own as well as Julia’s.
The girl’s eyes blazed at her.
“Don’t you know?” she said.
But Florence expected to be stabbed.
“Yes, I do,” she answered steadily; “but
you must see him yourself.”
The girl’s bosom lifted sharply. “Oh, no!”
she breathed. She stood up. She seemed
to tower over the other woman. She seemed
to force it home to Florence how impossible
it was to find a way out.
“Oh, if you knew,” she cried, “you couldn’t
ask it! Even you couldn’t wish me such—such
humiliation.”
“If I knew?” Florence repeated, dreading,
shrinking from any further revelation.
“What happened,” Julia moaned, turning
away.
“Would what happened seem any less impossible,”
Florence slowly began, “if the
.bn 253.png
.pn +1
man thought himself bound in honor to another
woman—”
“Thought!” Julia cried.
“A woman whom he did not love,” Florence
kept on; “to whom he was tied by old
promises, with whom now there was nothing
but an old friendship?”
Julia looked at her a little wildly.
“I—don’t know what you mean!”
“I mean this woman did not—was not
in love with him any more. When she
knew of—of you, she released him.”
“But that was after—”
“What happened? Yes.”
“Then he didn’t keep faith with her—with
either!” Julia cried, still fixing Florence
with her white, quivering face.
“Because he loved you.”
Julia seemed to stand there irrationally,
convinced by the sound of Florence Essington’s
voice—by just the weight of its own
deep, passionate conviction.
.bn 254.png
.pn +1
“Then why couldn’t he have told me?”
the girl murmured forlornly. “I would have
believed him! Why couldn’t he trust
me!”
The last words caught a little bitter echo
in the woman’s heart. She silenced it. She
took Julia by the shoulders, who had slid to
the floor, half kneeling, half sitting, the tears
slipping down her cheeks.
“Even if you love him,” she cried, “isn’t
he human? Can’t you forgive him that
much? He will forgive you—men forgive
more in women!”
Julia’s hands held the folds of her gown.
“But what can I do?” she implored. She
hung on the other’s words with a passionate
dependence.
Florence, with an impulse, took the face
between her hands.
“Be sure you want him more than anything
else,” she murmured.
The head inclined faintly. The wide eyes
.bn 255.png
.pn +1
still held hers with their piteous stare and
falling tears.
“Go to him,” Florence whispered. She
felt the girl trembling.
“When?”
“Now!”
Julia sobbed. “My mother!”
“That will come afterward. Never mind
any of the rest of us—what we do and say.
It doesn’t matter. Only think of him!
Promise me you won’t leave him until you
have made it right!”
“Are you sure I can?” the girl whispered,
with such a face of hope and fear, such joy
struggling with tears, that Florence, remembering
in what hard ways even the greatest
love may lead, leaned down and kissed her.
“Quite sure,” she said.
Julia drew yet closer. “Are you sure he—he
loves me?” The last words were a
breath.
Florence drew back coldly. “You must
.bn 256.png
.pn +1
go now,” she said. Then seeing Julia shrink
at her strange, dry voice, she added, “Do
you think he would tell that to me?”—at
what cost she herself did not measure.
But she did not realize that she was in the
midst of her crisis. She was too much in it
to look back or forward. She saw only outward
actions, the minute present. When
she spoke with the nurse at the door of the
sick-room her voice was even matter-of-fact.
The white-capped woman came out.
Florence waited until she went into another
room farther down the hall. Then she almost
pushed Julia in. “No one will come,”
she murmured as she closed the door after
her.
.bn 257.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch13
CHAPTER XIII||THAIR CONGRATULATES
.sp 2
.dc 0.25 0.65
FLORENCE sat down in the window-seat
in the dusky hall. The
diamond panes of milky glass let
in a misty light. She drew the
drapery of the dark curtains around her, the
better to insure against interruption. The
house was silent at that long hour of the
afternoon when all the day’s processes seem
to stand still, and heart and brain alike grow
torpid. She waited, as still as her still surroundings,
a piece with the dull curtain, until
an opening door should reanimate her to
living.
At the sound of an approaching step—was
it an hour or a day she had kept her
.bn 258.png
.pn +1
post?—she started nervously. Through
the slightly parted curtains she watched the
stair-turn anxiously. That long, dangling,
masculine figure was at least not Mrs. Budd.
She sighed relief. It was Thair. He came
on with his elegant slouch, turning down the
hall toward the window embrasure, stopped
a moment on the threshold of the morning-room,
looking in with a questing turn of his
long neck, strolled on, craning at the alcove
curtains.
Florence thrust them back. Evidently it
was not she he was looking for. He was
surprised, and something more, hardly curious,
but a look that harked back to what had
been revealed him on the terrace.
“I am,” he explained to her, “in search
of the young madam.” He added with a
considerative smile, “Our last ride together—if
she has anything to say about it.”
Her face showed an odd mingling of distress
and relief.
.bn 259.png
.pn +1
“But you will have to wait. She can’t be
disturbed now.”
“Well”—he dawdled over it a minute—“but
she will be disturbed. I’ll wait, of
course; but will—Mrs. Budd?” He brought
it out with the faintest embarrassment.
Florence looked at him, considering.
“It’s just what she never will do,” he said.
“She’ll expect to see us off.”
Her answer was the dismayed sound that
escaped her lips. She put her hand out with
a gesture that warned him back. They were
like a small secret conclave, shut in their
alcove behind the curtains, stilled in the
middle of their plots.
A door down the hall had softly closed.
They saw Julia stand for a moment outside
the door of Longacre’s room. Then she
turned and came slowly along the hall. She
was coming down upon them, and with every
step she overwhelmed them more. Such a
strange Julia, so pale, so unimperious, with
.bn 260.png
.pn +1
all her sparkle stilled! Yet she shone! Her
great dilated eyes, her face, dawning on
them, glimmering by, looked aghast with
happiness.
Florence was trembling. Her eyes were
on the narrow slit between the curtains where
that vision of Julia had passed. She could
not speak immediately when she finally
turned to Thair. He was looking at her
with the oddest possible expression.
“Well, it doesn’t matter about Mrs. Budd
now,” he said. His usually smooth voice
sounded uneven. “She’s done for!”
At this the lines in her forehead grew deep.
“If one could only make it easier for her!
It is dreadful! But—didn’t you see, just
now?—it was the only thing to do!”
“Dear girl,” he earnestly assured her, “that
you think so is enough for me! But you
can’t show it to her, poor lady!”
She looked at him with a sudden flash.
“You could make it easier.”
.bn 261.png
.pn +1
.bn 262.png
.pn +1
.if h
.il fn=i263.jpg w=414px id=i263
.ca
“Such a strange Julia!”
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: “Such a strange Julia!”]
.sp 2
.if-
.bn 263.png
.pn +1
.bn 264.png
.pn +1
.bn 265.png
.pn +1
“I?” He was blank.
“If she thought—if she knew that some
other hope she may have had for Julia—was—couldn’t
you make her know?”
At this he fixed her with his old diabolical
glint.
“You mean I could congratulate her—heartily?”
Her answering smile was wan. She left
it to him.
He looked back at her once as he went
down the stair.
She held herself still until he was out of
hearing. Then, on tiptoe, she stole down
the hall to the door, and hesitated with beating
heart. There was nothing in the world
she so dreaded, nothing she so much wanted,
as to see Longacre, to hear his voice. She
slipped into the room, expecting to find it
somehow extraordinarily changed, revolutionized.
There was a change. It was in
the man who lay upon the bed.
.bn 266.png
.pn +1
He lay, eyes closed, face quiet. But, ah,
asleep! The strong structure of the face
came out startling in its emaciation. She
looked at that face, dwelt upon it, saw in
the salient lines something she had been
seeking since she had known it. Dared she
think this had come through her—the last
thing she had given him! She waited to
see those obstinate lids unclose.
She had come so lightly he had not heard
her. She would not for the world have
spoken, but if she looked at him—he must
know she was looking at him!
Then, as he lay so still, not a muscle of
the sensitive mouth moving, breathing lightly,
regularly, it came upon her that he wished
her to suppose him asleep.
A faint, cold breath ran in the nerves of
her body. She turned her head quickly
away, as though, through their closed lids,
his waking eyes could spy on her.
She had thought, child-blind, not of friendship,
.bn 267.png
.pn +1
not of recognition for what she had
spent, but of just that last bitter-sweet confidence
when he would tell her, show her without
words, perhaps, how much this new happiness
would be to him. And he hid it from
her!
Well, he was right. How impossible anything
else was! There were barriers of gratitude—yes,
and higher yet than those—barriers
she herself had reared between them!
She stood, hands limply dropped, head
bent. She saw shadows of jessamine leaves
moving like fine, gray fingers on the sunny
floor.
She had no more right in that room than
the veriest stranger.
.bn 268.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch14
CHAPTER XIV||THE QUEEN’S COURTESY
.sp 2
.dc 0.25 0.65
THE cart drew up at the station
with a bounce. Before it had
fairly stopped, a large man in
the clothes of a working citizen,
with the umbrella and bag of a traveler,
sprang out and made a rush for the door of
the ticket-office.
A lean, brown fellow in riding-trousers,
who was dawdling on the platform, stared
and laughed.
“Holden, what’s the rush?”
“Good Lord, have I missed it?” gasped
the other.
“The train?” Thair yawned. “Twenty
minutes early.”
.bn 269.png
.pn +1
“They told me I’d barely make it!”
Holden stared resentfully at the vacant rails.
“H’m. Del Monte,” Thair smiled.
“Even the clocks are fast!” He squinted
at the sky, soft sapphire-blue.
“Why go up to-day? Wait over, and
I’ll show you a bit of a cross-country run.”
“Thanks,” grunted Holden; “I’ve had
my money’s worth.” The grunt ended in a
grin.
Thair chuckled.
“Well,” Holden demanded impatiently,
“how is it over at the house?”
“We-e-ell,”—Thair drawled out the word
interminably, while amused recollection
crossed his face,—“the rains fell, and the
winds blew! I stayed at the club through
the worst of it. I was sorry for the women—the
young madam and Mrs. Essington.
They had to stick it out.”
“You mean Mrs. Budd was so annoyed?”
Holden was a little puzzled.
.bn 270.png
.pn +1
“Annoyed! Oh, Lord, that’s not the
word! Cis says ‘upset.’ That’s nearer,
only seventeen times more upset than usual!
Poor woman, she feels that Julia owes the
man some reparation for ‘breaking his neck,’
but marriage seems to her extreme.”
“But what’s the objection? He seems a
decent sort of chap.”
“He is; the decentest of his sort; but
it’s not the sort madam had hoped for Julia.
Money, y’ know, and—well, composers
seem a bit out of the way to her. But the
girl has too much blood to take—” he
smiled quizzically—“what was the ‘correct
thing.’”
“I’ve had an idea that this would come
about from the first,” said Holden, complacently.
“M’m?” Thair mused, interrogative.
“Mrs. Essington’s been immensely interested
in those two young people. Shouldn’t
wonder—”
.bn 271.png
.pn +1
Thair bit off a smile. “Remarkable
woman, Mrs. Essington,” he observed.
“That damned train’s spending the night
on the switch,” growled Holden. He didn’t
look down the track, but over his shoulder at
the “Miramar” runabout that had just come
into sight around the turn of the drive.
The lady who sat so erect beside the
groom was Florence Essington.
Holden looked relieved. Thair indulged
in what might be called a mental whistle.
He gave one sharp glance at Holden, whose
attention was engrossed by the approaching
vehicle; then a frank smile and a wave of
the hand toward the lady—a salute she returned
in kind. The approaching train hurried
their greetings and farewells, but in that
short time he got an impression of a more
obvious sophistication, a more pronounced
worldliness in her than he had recalled.
Her gown, black with dashes of white,
suggested the last and finest flight of fashion;
.bn 272.png
.pn +1
her manner, the latest, most charming importation;
her very movement, a consciousness
of the keen eye of the world.
While he pondered whether these differences
did not merely enhance the beauty of
her shadowed eyes, her black and white
glimmered through the door of the car.
Holden waved his hand from the step and
followed her.
Thair wandered down the platform toward
where the groom held his uneasy mount.
“That’s a match,” he muttered. “She’ll
take him. That’s what she means. She’s
wise. Great woman! If a man were fool
enough—h’m, h’m!” He nodded to the
groom.
.hr 20%
.ni
Holden, having established his bags in a seat
near the door, took the chair next Florence.
.pi
She was merry, full of twisted phrases,
making him laugh in spite of his impatience.
“I believe,” he told her, half in earnest,
.bn 273.png
.pn +1
“it’s because you’ve fetched that engagement
you’re in such spirits.”
“Oh, do you think me a match-maker?”
she laughed.
“Well, I wish you’d be one for yourself,”
he said bluntly.
Florence bit her lip. She was hating to
face what she knew she finally must.
“Don’t you remember,” he went on, “a few
days ago you said you would have something
to tell me on our way back to town?”
A few days ago! Could it be possible!
She looked out of the window. Past rushed
a stream of black oaks pricked through with
flashes of sea.
She knew what she would answer. She
had turned it over for twenty-four hours. She
had not dreamed how hard it would be to
utter. His kindly eyes were bent upon her
with a steady patience, but his blunt fingers
drummed the arm of her chair.
“I tried then to make you see,” she began,
.bn 274.png
.pn +1
“that I wasn’t merely putting you off. I
didn’t know then just what I could say—how
much I was fit for what you ask of me.”
She supported his look. “Now I am sure I
am not.”
He waved away her objection with his
large, open hand. “Are you the judge of
that?”
“Who else? Do you think I could take
without giving? If I loved you it would be
different.”
“Yes. Well—I hardly hoped that, after
what you said the other day,” he answered
sturdily; “but we are no longer children; I
would not ask too much of you. You are
a woman of wide interests, and my life takes
me so much among people, manipulations of
men as well as things, you might—”
She took it up. “Yes, if I could give
your interests all my interest, all my energy,
my thought, as I might have done once, as I
would now, gladly, if I could. But I can’t.
.bn 275.png
.pn +1
I have used up such power as I had. I’ve
done all I can do in other people’s interests.
Now my interests will be scattered. My
ways are already fixed. You offer me an
active life in the world, but I am through my
activities.”
“Good Heaven!” he broke out; “why,
you talk as if you were old—you, with the
best of your life before you!”
Her smile was tight. “Perhaps I have
lived through things too quickly. But I
know I like you too much to cheat you,
which I should do if I married you. I can’t—can’t
do it! Believe me, I would like to
give you what you ask, but I haven’t it.”
“Is this the last word?” he said, half risen.
She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
He saw them, and touched her arm. “Don’t,
don’t!” he said gently. “I suppose you
know what is best for you!” The accent
fell on the last word sadly. He rose; she
saw him, a dim bulk on the light window-square
.bn 276.png
.pn +1
as he stooped to gather up bags and
umbrella; saw him passing her. The door
closed behind him.
Florence, with a shiver, relaxed from her
tension, leaning back in her chair a little
weakly. Her eyes closed. All the glitter
she had shown them on the platform had
fallen away from her; and thus, with shut
eyes, her unlighted face showed exhaustion
so deep that peace seemed the next thing to
it. The noise of the train swam heavily in
her head. She had no thoughts, only—as
now and again she opened her eyes—a vague
noticing of small things; and then at sight of
green onion-fields wheeling past the window,
a sad stab of memory. She shut her eyes,
lest some other sight remind her too cruelly
of what was left behind. She did not sleep.
She was unconscious of time in her deep,
complete lethargy of soul and brain. When
she opened her eyes again the lights were
swinging down the middle of the car, and
.bn 277.png
.pn +1
through the windows she looked out over
water, beautiful violet-blue in a softly gathering
dark. The train was puffing slower,
and now a glimmering succession of windows
shut out the water.
The dark tunnel of the ferry-house encompassed
her, but the memory of the purple
flash of sea lingered with a vivid pleasure—more
vivid that the glimpse had been so
short—as she followed the rush out of the
car door. The cool, soft wind on her face,
the crowd tearing to and fro, roused her.
The “overland” was just pulling out; a
string of electric lights, white jackets jumping
to the platforms, faces peering from the
windows, it passed her. She felt a queer
throb, a wish to be going with it somewhere,
outward bound. What had she to hold her
anywhere? But even with the thought the
sense of poignant personal loss would not
rise up before her. Her lethargy was lost,
but her consciousness, no longer concentrated
.bn 278.png
.pn +1
upon herself, was relaxed to a keener
perception of her surroundings—of the high,
dusky-vaulted ferry-house, echoing full of
voices and footsteps; of the fitful play of
light on the foam churning through the tall
piles of the ferry-slip; of the crowd she
moved among, streaming down the ferry
gangway, a succession of faces glimmering
past, each stamped with its headlong personal
object. They were still spurred and
ridden by it, while she.... The salt breath
of the sea rushed up to meet her, with suggestion
of the immensities of oceans.
She found an outside seat forward.
It was an evening clear, moonless, with a
marvelous purple over water and sky. Every
light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a
trailing glory, in the glassy bay; and the
ferry was plowing through them, with its
dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a
heart. The white bulk of a steamer moved
directly before its course, white lights, green,
.bn 279.png
.pn +1
red lights—the Nippon Maru outward
bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And
there stirred faintly in her the passion she
had always cherished for the mysterious other
side of the world—Japan, and that great
continent beyond it. And as the immensity
unrolled before her—the thousands of miles,
the millions of people with passions identical,
with ideals unintelligible to hers, but in
the great sum of existence as necessary—the
vast, varied face of the world diminished,
dwarfed her own identity.
She had one of those fortunate moments
when, the body being very weary, the spirit
takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the
body’s demands. If she had put it to herself,
she would have said she had “got outside
of things.” It floated before her, more
like an impression than a thought, that to
have had one’s happiness was what counted,
though it passed like the glimpse of purple
sea. And the eye of the soul that could catch
.bn 280.png
.pn +1
it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim,
empty, echoing time-to-come. The time
of activity, of struggle for what was most desirable,
most beautiful, or most necessary to
life—the delights, the sufferings, the defeating,
the half successes—this time inevitably
was ended. Sometimes the change life made
was death, sometimes only another face of
life, as now it came to her—a time of
waiting, of watching, of trying to perceive
and understand, from the passionate, personal
motives acting themselves out around her,
the great intention of the whole.
Before her the lights of the city were all
alive, trailing around the water-front, marching
over the hills, ringing them with fire,
and trembling away into the large stars of
the low, soft sky. Her hand was on the
rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking
longingly, searchingly into the heart of
the glittering tangle, as if it were the veritable
tangle of life.
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.it Transcriber’s Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
.it Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.
.it Typographical errors were silently corrected.
.it Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a\
predominant form was found in this book.
.it Page 159 “envelop” was changed to “envelope”.
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.it Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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