THE QUEEN’S COURTESY
THE cart drew up at the station with a bounce. Before it had fairly
stopped, a large man in the clothes of a working citizen, with the
umbrella and bag of a traveler, sprang out and made a rush for the door
of the ticket-office.
A lean, brown fellow in riding-trousers, who was dawdling on the
platform, stared and laughed.
“Holden, what’s the rush?”
“Good Lord, have I missed it?” gasped the other.
“The train?” Thair yawned. “Twenty minutes early.”
“They told me I’d barely make it!” Holden stared resentfully at the
vacant rails.
“H’m. Del Monte,” Thair smiled. “Even the clocks are fast!” He squinted
at the sky, soft sapphire-blue.
“Why go up to-day? Wait over, and I’ll show you a bit of a cross-country
run.”
“Thanks,” grunted Holden; “I’ve had my money’s worth.” The grunt ended
in a grin.
Thair chuckled.
“Well,” Holden demanded impatiently, “how is it over at the house?”
“We-e-ell,”—Thair drawled out the word interminably, while amused
recollection crossed his face,—“the rains fell, and the winds blew! _I_
stayed at the club through the worst of it. I was sorry for the
women—the young madam and Mrs. Essington. They had to stick it out.”
“You mean Mrs. Budd was so annoyed?” Holden was a little puzzled.
“Annoyed! Oh, Lord, that’s not the word! Cis says ‘upset.’ That’s
nearer, only seventeen times more upset than usual! Poor woman, she
feels that Julia owes the man some reparation for ‘breaking his neck,’
but marriage seems to her extreme.”
“But what’s the objection? He seems a decent sort of chap.”
“He is; the decentest of his sort; but it’s not the sort madam had hoped
for Julia. Money, y’ know, and—well, composers seem a bit out of the way
to her. But the girl has too much blood to take—” he smiled
quizzically—“what was the ‘correct thing.’”
“I’ve had an idea that this would come about from the first,” said
Holden, complacently.
“M’m?” Thair mused, interrogative.
“Mrs. Essington’s been immensely interested in those two young people.
Shouldn’t wonder—”
Thair bit off a smile. “Remarkable woman, Mrs. Essington,” he observed.
“That damned train’s spending the night on the switch,” growled Holden.
He didn’t look down the track, but over his shoulder at the “Miramar”
runabout that had just come into sight around the turn of the drive.
The lady who sat so erect beside the groom was Florence Essington.
Holden looked relieved. Thair indulged in what might be called a mental
whistle. He gave one sharp glance at Holden, whose attention was
engrossed by the approaching vehicle; then a frank smile and a wave of
the hand toward the lady—a salute she returned in kind. The approaching
train hurried their greetings and farewells, but in that short time he
got an impression of a more obvious sophistication, a more pronounced
worldliness in her than he had recalled.
Her gown, black with dashes of white, suggested the last and finest
flight of fashion; her manner, the latest, most charming importation;
her very movement, a consciousness of the keen eye of the world.
While he pondered whether these differences did not merely enhance the
beauty of her shadowed eyes, her black and white glimmered through the
door of the car. Holden waved his hand from the step and followed her.
Thair wandered down the platform toward where the groom held his uneasy
mount.
“That’s a match,” he muttered. “She’ll take him. That’s what she means.
She’s wise. Great woman! If a man were fool enough—h’m, h’m!” He nodded
to the groom.
--------------
Holden, having established his bags in a seat near the door, took the
chair next Florence.
She was merry, full of twisted phrases, making him laugh in spite of his
impatience.
“I believe,” he told her, half in earnest, “it’s because you’ve fetched
that engagement you’re in such spirits.”
“Oh, do you think me a match-maker?” she laughed.
“Well, I wish you’d be one for yourself,” he said bluntly.
Florence bit her lip. She was hating to face what she knew she finally
must.
“Don’t you remember,” he went on, “a few days ago you said you would
have something to tell me on our way back to town?”
A few days ago! Could it be possible! She looked out of the window. Past
rushed a stream of black oaks pricked through with flashes of sea.
She knew what she would answer. She had turned it over for twenty-four
hours. She had not dreamed how hard it would be to utter. His kindly
eyes were bent upon her with a steady patience, but his blunt fingers
drummed the arm of her chair.
“I tried then to make you see,” she began, “that I wasn’t merely putting
you off. I didn’t know then just what I could say—how much I was fit for
what you ask of me.” She supported his look. “Now I am sure I am not.”
He waved away her objection with his large, open hand. “Are _you_ the
judge of that?”
“Who else? Do you think I could take without giving? If I loved you it
would be different.”
“Yes. Well—I hardly hoped that, after what you said the other day,” he
answered sturdily; “but we are no longer children; I would not ask too
much of you. You are a woman of wide interests, and my life takes me so
much among people, manipulations of men as well as things, you might—”
She took it up. “Yes, if I could give your interests all my interest,
all my energy, my thought, as I might have done once, as I would now,
gladly, if I could. But I can’t. I have used up such power as I had.
I’ve done all I can do in other people’s interests. Now my interests
will be scattered. My ways are already fixed. You offer me an active
life in the world, but I am through my activities.”
“Good Heaven!” he broke out; “why, you talk as if you were old—_you_,
with the best of your life before you!”
Her smile was tight. “Perhaps I have lived through things too quickly.
But I know I like you too much to cheat you, which I should do if I
married you. I can’t—can’t do it! Believe me, I would like to give you
what you ask, but I haven’t it.”
“Is this the last word?” he said, half risen.
She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
He saw them, and touched her arm. “Don’t, don’t!” he said gently. “I
suppose you know what is best for _you_!” The accent fell on the last
word sadly. He rose; she saw him, a dim bulk on the light window-square
as he stooped to gather up bags and umbrella; saw him passing her. The
door closed behind him.
Florence, with a shiver, relaxed from her tension, leaning back in her
chair a little weakly. Her eyes closed. All the glitter she had shown
them on the platform had fallen away from her; and thus, with shut eyes,
her unlighted face showed exhaustion so deep that peace seemed the next
thing to it. The noise of the train swam heavily in her head. She had no
thoughts, only—as now and again she opened her eyes—a vague noticing of
small things; and then at sight of green onion-fields wheeling past the
window, a sad stab of memory. She shut her eyes, lest some other sight
remind her too cruelly of what was left behind. She did not sleep. She
was unconscious of time in her deep, complete lethargy of soul and
brain. When she opened her eyes again the lights were swinging down the
middle of the car, and through the windows she looked out over water,
beautiful violet-blue in a softly gathering dark. The train was puffing
slower, and now a glimmering succession of windows shut out the water.
The dark tunnel of the ferry-house encompassed her, but the memory of
the purple flash of sea lingered with a vivid pleasure—more vivid that
the glimpse had been so short—as she followed the rush out of the car
door. The cool, soft wind on her face, the crowd tearing to and fro,
roused her. The “overland” was just pulling out; a string of electric
lights, white jackets jumping to the platforms, faces peering from the
windows, it passed her. She felt a queer throb, a wish to be going with
it somewhere, outward bound. What had she to hold her anywhere? But even
with the thought the sense of poignant personal loss would not rise up
before her. Her lethargy was lost, but her consciousness, no longer
concentrated upon herself, was relaxed to a keener perception of her
surroundings—of the high, dusky-vaulted ferry-house, echoing full of
voices and footsteps; of the fitful play of light on the foam churning
through the tall piles of the ferry-slip; of the crowd she moved among,
streaming down the ferry gangway, a succession of faces glimmering past,
each stamped with its headlong personal object. They were still spurred
and ridden by it, while she.... The salt breath of the sea rushed up to
meet her, with suggestion of the immensities of oceans.
She found an outside seat forward.
It was an evening clear, moonless, with a marvelous purple over water
and sky. Every light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a trailing
glory, in the glassy bay; and the ferry was plowing through them, with
its dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a heart. The white bulk of a
steamer moved directly before its course, white lights, green, red
lights—the _Nippon Maru_ outward bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And
there stirred faintly in her the passion she had always cherished for
the mysterious other side of the world—Japan, and that great continent
beyond it. And as the immensity unrolled before her—the thousands of
miles, the millions of people with passions identical, with ideals
unintelligible to hers, but in the great sum of existence as
necessary—the vast, varied face of the world diminished, dwarfed her own
identity.
She had one of those fortunate moments when, the body being very weary,
the spirit takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the body’s demands.
If she had put it to herself, she would have said she had “got outside
of things.” It floated before her, more like an impression than a
thought, that to have had one’s happiness was what counted, though it
passed like the glimpse of purple sea. And the eye of the soul that
could catch it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim, empty,
echoing time-to-come. The time of activity, of struggle for what was
most desirable, most beautiful, or most necessary to life—the delights,
the sufferings, the defeating, the half successes—this time inevitably
was ended. Sometimes the change life made was death, sometimes only
another face of life, as now it came to her—a time of waiting, of
watching, of trying to perceive and understand, from the passionate,
personal motives acting themselves out around her, the great intention
of the whole.
Before her the lights of the city were all alive, trailing around the
water-front, marching over the hills, ringing them with fire, and
trembling away into the large stars of the low, soft sky. Her hand was
on the rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking longingly,
searchingly into the heart of the glittering tangle, as if it were the
veritable tangle of life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Page 159 “envelop” was changed to “envelope”.
○ Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).