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.
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