LONGACRE TRAPS HIMSELF
“TO-MORROW’S” 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 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 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.
“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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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:
“Never seek to tell thy love—
Love that never told can be!
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.”
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:
“I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, pale, in ghastly fears—
Ah, she did depart!”
He broke off in the middle.
“Can’t you keep with the accompaniment?”
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:
“Soon after she was gone from me
A traveler came by
Silently, invisibly.
He took her with a sigh!”
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.
[Illustration: “‘_For God’s sake—don’t cry!_’”]
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.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------