He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.
“Oh, Walter!” Her arms fell at her sides with a gesture of eloquent despair. She seemed to divine his retrospection. “But I can’t help it! I don’t do it on purpose—though I know people say I do. You don’t—don’t think I’m ‘the Wrecker’?” She aimed the word at him like a blow, and while he sought an answer: “You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me. You’re wondering now whether I let Hemming make love to me. Hemming!”—she leaned toward him with a savage head shake. “I may not know a good hat when I see one, but I know a good man!”
The spur pricked. The mare bounded. She was rods away before Walter realized he was deserted. Then he followed. The girl turned and motioned him back.
“Go away, go away!” she cried. There was something at once so imperious and so entreating in voice and gesture that he involuntarily halted, and she wheeled and spurred on at a gallop.
If she had not ridden so headlong she must have shrieked. The tempest in her was too much for expression. She saw, subconsciously, a gray blur of olive trees streaming past, with here and there the richer note of orange orchards, and always the road before her, an intense white line over and around the smooth-topped hills. She did not slacken pace at the passing phaëtons, though these may have contained people whom she knew. She dared not look behind her, through a stifling hope and doubt that Walter had followed. She breasted the last hill crest, where the road lifts out of the gardens and orchards of Monticito to the high, wind-raked bluff above the sea.
Here she reined in and turned and looked back down the long, straight stretch of road she had come. Empty, far as eye could see. She listened, breathlessly, but the interminable whisper of the eucalyptus leaves above her head was the only sound. And she had thought so surely he would follow!
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed—crying like a man, with deep chest respirations that shook her whole body. The mare, feeling a relaxed rein, moved a few steps. The girl’s hands fell from her face. She looked seaward through the slim, swaying eucalyptus trees. The tears rolled down her cheeks to the corners of her twitching mouth. Mechanically she wiped them away with the wrist of her red glove. It left odd, bloodlike streaks on her tawny skin. They gave a menacing look to her despair. She was not thinking of how she looked, but of whom she had left, of how she loved him! She was feeling, with her blind forsakenness, that if Walter gave her up she was lost. If he only knew how little the other people mattered! How good, how awfully, abjectly good, she could be if she had him—the only man who had never made love to her! She remembered, with a stir of pure pleasure, how at first she had been piqued and puzzled that he did not. Afterward, how she had loved him for it! But since this woman, his sister, had come, Blanche did not know how it had been brought about, but she knew that she and Walter, who had been so close, so understanding, were apart and at odds. He had trusted her, and now he suspected her.
She saw Lillian Gueste’s hand in it. Blanche did not reason; she only felt, and hated the subtle and delicate treason. Did Lillian Gueste suppose, she asked herself, that because a woman wore large hats and loud gloves she had no right to the man she loved?
She rode along the cliff edge at a foot pace, her eyes abstractedly on the dancing shadows of eucalyptus leaves the sun painted in the dust. She wondered was this the close of what had been opening out before her as her life? She thought, with her primitive reasoning, were Lillian only out of the way—her mind did not get further than that. But Blanche had felt from the first that Lillian Gueste had come to Santa Barbara for no other reason than rescuing her brother, and that she did not intend to go until she took Wallie with her. “Could she do that?” Blanche wondered in a panic. Had an opportunity offered, she would have pushed Lillian Gueste out of her way as she would have thrust a pebble from her path.
The sun, falling low in the western sky, made towers of tree shadows, and spread an iridescence over the in creeping fog, as she followed the descending road downward toward the arroya, where a bridle path slipped seaward under willows. She had taken that path often before. It met the beach below what was the usual limit for riders, but she loved the long, exciting gallop, the scramble among the rocks, the spice of danger at the narrow turns about the two points when the tide was coming in.