MRS. ESSINGTON

MRS. ESSINGTON

The Romance of a House-party

BY

ESTHER AND LUCIA

CHAMBERLAIN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY HUTT

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1905

Copyright, 1905, by

The Century Co.

Published May, 1905

THE DE VINNE PRESS

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MRS. ESSINGTON

CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE-PARTY EXPLAINS ITSELF, AND GETS INTO A FOG

STILL, 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 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 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.

“’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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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! 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 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.

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 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, 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. 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.

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.

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?”

CHAPTER II
JULIA STEPS OUT OF IT, AND ANSWERS A QUESTION

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.

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 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 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!”

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 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.

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 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 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.

“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.”

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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?”

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 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.

CHAPTER III
MRS. ESSINGTON RUNS AWAY FROM HERSELF

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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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.

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 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.

CHAPTER IV
LONGACRE RUNS AFTER

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 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.

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 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.

“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.

“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.

“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, 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.”

“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 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.

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 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.”

“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.

“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 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.

“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.