CHAPTER XII

MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “YES”

DARK had shut down in a weeping mist when the carts from the country club drove up the “Miramar” terrace. The doctor’s dry, professional presence met Mrs. Budd’s voluble anxiety on the threshold, and, in a measure, smoothed it.

Oh, it was all right—all right, he assured her; only, the place must be kept quiet. (He had a grudging eye for the people getting out of the carts.) The patient ought to be moved to the cottage hospital, but—He pursed out his lips....

But Mrs. Budd wouldn’t hear of such a thing! Since the poor young man was her guest, had been hurt—she saw it dramatically—in saving her daughter—

The doctor’s hands waved it away.

“My dear madam, that’s not the point. I want this case under my eye.”

“Oh! Is it as bad as _that_?”

His look was everywhere but at her.

“Not at all—the usual thing. These youngsters all do it, but—send these people away!”

It was hushed enough that night, the house, but full of whispers, conjectures, things told and asked.

“Why, what happened?”

Nobody knew exactly.

“But, afterward, you should have seen her face!”

“Oh, just queer—dreadful!”

“But she was that at the start!”

“Then, of all things, her riding after them!”

“Them!”

“Why, Mrs. Essington came for him.”

“Mrs. _Essington_! Well!”

So much was out, and so flat, one didn’t know what might jump out next. Julia’s indifference—a stunned quiescence under her mother’s reproaches and the curious glances of the guests—her white face, her blank eyes, added the last touch. “Queer” was the word for it, and this “queerness” clung to them, held them irresolute, was almost too much for their sense of decency. It needed just a turn to start them off, and this Thair gave, cornering Cissy Fitz Hugh, who, in the midst of the indecision, preserved a settled air.

He wanted to know was she aware that an early train and an eight-o’clock breakfast required bags packed overnight?

Cissy was mildly surprised. “How _can_ I leave Emma at such a time?”

“Has she asked you to stay?” Thair rather brutally threw at her.

“But she doesn’t have to _ask me_!”

“I should think not—since she’s already asked two people whom she seems to want,—Mrs. Essington for one—myself for another.” He smiled diabolically.

Cissy gasped. “As an old friend, there are some things I might do for Emma—”

“My good Cicely, there’s only one thing you haven’t done. Do _go_, like a decent woman!”

“But the others?” She was injured. “Aren’t they going, too?”

“Oh, I guess they are,” he grinned, “if you mention it to ’em.”

She was indignant, but her departure was by the morning train that swept the house of all its guests.

Holden left with the others, but instead of traveling townward went to the hotel. He had seen Florence first.

He would like, he said, to escort her if she could let him know what day she was going up to San Francisco. He was thinking of the promise she had made him, that morning, driving out to the links. Through all the perplexing appearances of the last three days he had held by that as something tangible.

She had forgotten it.

She did not know when she would be going; _could_ not tell him. Her pallor, her heavy eyes, the look she had, while she talked, of listening for something—all were eloquent to plead for her. He didn’t understand it, but he waited.

She was merely grateful to him that he let her alone. At the moment she was living so in another’s life that she seemed to own no separate existence. She seemed to waver between living and dying. When the relapse that followed the fever dropped him lowest, she felt herself reaching out toward death. When the crisis, passing, drifted him back, she felt herself quickened. The most she had ever wished, then seemed granted her.

Not only while she was with him, but when she was away, alone, she felt herself drawn somehow closer to him than ever before. She had forgotten the other people. She had forgotten the separation. While he lay, with the returning tide of living yet so low in him that he could hardly lift his eyelids, she was happy.

From half-consciousness Longacre roused, on the fourth day, to a clearer sense of what was around him. While Florence was in the room his eyes followed her as if fearful, should he turn them away, she would vanish. Twice he tried to ask a question, but the whisper failed him. Her ear to his mouth could not catch it.

She fretted, wondering if she had grown deaf that she could not understand what he so much wanted to know!

He lay with the question shut in his half-closed eyes until the fifth morning, when his voice grew from a breath to a sound; and she heard, his lax fingers in her firm ones, her eyes dropped to meet his, lifted.

“Is she safe?”

It took Florence a moment, groping into what was past, to understand, to realize; and another moment, while she looked across the bed, through the window, into the open sky, to answer—“Yes.”

With that he closed his eyes and turned away his head, as though there were nothing more in the world to ask. She rose and went to the window.

She seemed to see Julia’s blank eyes—how they had leaped to life at sight of her! And then the girl’s cry!

The sick man slept.

Florence wrestled with emotions, primitive, savage.

That he should ask, with his first breath, _that_! That with her assurance he should turn from her to sleep, without a look, a word, a memory!

Yet, she told herself, what wonder that the last, violent instant before unconsciousness should rise before him with his reawakening. Had the question any personal significance? Had not his eyes followed _her_? Didn’t he now turn to her, away from all the rest? Had not the wild girl, with her piece of folly, closed the door on _that_ incident? What could renew it?

It was a question, a cry, half hoping—but she knew it was a forlorn hope.

He reawakened early in the afternoon. His first stir brought her to him, still hot from her conflict with herself. He was stronger this time, more awake to living. He did not ask, but demanded.

“I must get out of here,” he said.

Her amazement questioned him. He dwelt long on her face, seemed to pluck some significance from it.

“You know,” he asked, “how it happened? How I—?”

She nodded yes.

Again he stared at her long and steadily.

“Don’t blame _her_,” he said slowly. “It was not her fault. Mine—mine!”

“Never mind,” she told him; “we can go to-morrow.”

To hear him accuse himself for that other was more than she could bear. Again he seemed to divine her.

“You don’t know, Florence, what happened that morning. I was—I am—” he seemed to contemplate himself—“something no woman could forgive! It left her in such a way—oh, wretched!” His head rolled on the pillow. His eyes drooped away from her.

Florence recalled how he had met her at the stair-foot with the letter in his hand and some greater trouble in his face. Then that angry insistence of his in the glass room had been simply reparation! He had known then that he loved the girl, and somehow known too late. And he had told Julia _that_! She saw with dreadful clearness. Did everything go back to the night when she had wanted and taken so ruthlessly what she desired? It was not Julia, but she, herself, who had led that leap in which he had fallen.

“I must get away,” she heard him mutter.

In her own room she lay a long time, accustoming herself to the new face of the situation, struggling back from extremes of self-hate and self-love to a clearer vision. She must touch again what she had so hoped she had finished with. Something she had called fate had seemed to be thrusting him from that girl; but fate, as she looked, grew to wear too much her own aspect. Had she let conditions alone in the beginning—but she had fought them, curbed them in a measure to her will. She had made a catastrophe, and she must mend it. That was the reason of it. But under reason was a passionate desire that he should be happy. That covered everything.

His self-accusation recurred to her. “Something no woman could forgive.” Could not that girl forgive him that he was loyal? But she was so young, so appallingly young! And oh, the dangerous, difficult task of playing another’s game for him! Yet, could he have played it himself, had he had his strength, he would have made it a different matter. Now, all he could manage in his great bodily weakness was that one absorbing desire to get away. She knew how impossible it was to deflect him where once his obstinate mind was made up. She felt every moment, with his returning strength, her chance was slipping further from her. But she was baffled. Turn and twist as she could, she was shut fast in the middle of a deadlock.

The departure of all the amalgamating presences had left the estrangement of these few so closely concerned a naked fact. They felt its presence palpable among them. It filled the rooms of the house, sat between them at table, walked with them in the gardens. Julia, unreachable behind her hard indifference, through which her voice broke sometimes with sharp suggestions of collapse; Mrs. Budd, nervous, vacillating, strung to the verge of tears; she, herself, out of love with everything but the hope of one man’s life; all were desperately at odds, no one trusting another.

Thair, alone, had given her the sense of an outsider. If he were in the midst of it as much as any one, it didn’t touch him. The very perfection of his manner, meeting those anxious, studying looks Mrs. Budd threw at him, was assurance that he knew his uneasy place in her conjecture. To Florence he had been, with his unconcern, like fresh air in a close room. He perfectly understood; and he took it easily. Their tacit understanding was the only note of confidence in the unquiet house.

She knew he knew to a certain point just how she stood; but that point was the turn where she had let Longacre go. Just how far Thair missed this, she had read in his kind, congratulatory looks at her—his odd, half-protecting air of seeming to ease her off, as much as possible, from the strain, the reiterant conflict of mother and daughter, as from something quite beside her interest.

He had never had so much that air to her as now, this afternoon, when he encountered her stepping through the tall French window upon the veranda, and turned and lifted the passion-vines for her to pass under—such a pretty thing, she thought, for a man to do for a woman as old, as haggard, as self-absorbed as she. They went the length of the fennel walk together. She remembered the morning when Longacre had left Julia so impetuously to follow her as something that had happened a very long time ago—something into which Thair’s voice dropped sharply, shattering the image.

“We are to be abandoned,” he was saying. “The young madam is leaving us for town.”

She stood, looking over the sun-drenched terraces. The thing had come on her so suddenly! She had lost her chance! She put her hand to her forehead. This would be the end! The thing would just fall to pieces by itself!

Then the lasting silence got her, and she looked at Thair. He was looking at her.

“What is the matter?” that look was saying. “Isn’t it all right? Aren’t you glad? Wasn’t it that that you wanted?”

Her reply was just her look of despair.

“What _can_ I do!” She might as well have said it out. It was so clear between them that his answering her with words seemed quite natural.

“Can _I_ do anything?”

She looked away from him to that glittering spot where the sun struck the sea.

Why, there was only _one_ thing any one could do, so elemental that it took this sharp necessity to make it possible. She saw now. It was, all along, the only thing she could have done.

She turned back to Thair, whose last question hung, waiting her answer.

“No, nothing—you’re good—not now—except let me go back alone!”

She ran. From the moment he had confounded her she had dropped all consideration of appearances. On the stair she passed a maid, her arms heaped with newly ironed linen and delicate flowered fabrics—frocks Julia had worn about the house. Then she must be packing. She would be in her room. Half-way down the upper hall, Florence heard the rushing approach of sweeping silk. She stopped, almost opposite her own door, and waited. Julia came down the hall, headlong even when walking. She saw Florence not until she was upon her. She started, drew herself together, made to go on, hesitated.

“Can I do anything?” she said. Her voice gave the commonplace sharp significance, as though her very self depended on the “anything” she could do.

“Yes,” Florence said, holding open her door. “Come in.”

The girl gazed, as if this were the last thing she had expected. Her eyes looked out blackly, defiance through suspicion, as the door closed after her. “See how miserable I am,” they seemed to say, “but don’t dare pity me!” Her face was startling, bewildering. It meant so much more than seemed in nature, even in a woman who had injured the man she loved. It had the furtive suffering of a creature in a trap. It seemed that at any moment her strained voice would break into a cry.

“You’re going to-morrow?” Florence asked her.

Julia stiffened. Her manner was perfunctory. “Yes, I’m going up to town. If there is anything I can do for you there—”

“Aren’t you needed here?” Florence asked her. She felt quieted by the other’s agitation.

The girl stared as if she suspected she was made sport of. “I? Oh!” She smiled sharply.

“Are you sure there is nothing you could do by _staying_?” Florence persisted.

“I see what you mean,” Julia replied, still in that whetted tone that served to defend her weakness. “My fault it happened! It’s done. How can I mend it? Oh, do you think any one regrets it more than I? I would do anything—_anything_,” she repeated with sudden vehemence, “to change it, to—but it is impossible!” Her hands, that she had pressed together, fell apart. She turned nervously toward the window, as if the sight of the wide, warm garden could help her. But Florence moved to intercept the glance.

“If one had injured a person one loved—” she began. She stopped, startled at the application those words had for her own case.

“A person one loved!” Julia repeated. The words seemed dragged out of her throat. She turned on the other woman piercing eyes. “But, if—he did not love you? If he loved another woman?”

Florence pressed her hand to her side.

“And, loving her,” the girl rushed on, “still gave you a—a pretense for truth—if you had hurt him mortally—oh, mortally—what would you do?”

Florence, white, breathing short, looked at the floor. It seemed rising up to strike her. She was overwhelmed that Julia had divined her case—had guessed,—a dozen frantic suppositions flew through her mind. Then the fact flashed on her: the girl had only cried her own tragedy! But how was it hers? How could it be Julia’s, when Longacre had told her—? Florence filled her lungs with a deep, slow-drawn breath, as if she were drawing in courage to face what was rising in her mind. It was Longacre’s face as it had peered up into hers that morning, and his voice restlessly repeating, “I am something no woman could forgive!” Her quickening comprehension embraced what that might be. Longacre had told Julia nothing! She put her hand out behind her, touched the table to steady herself. The passionate gratitude that rose in her at his forlorn loyalty stood still when she raised her eyes to Julia’s face. She knew what the girl was suffering. It was what she herself suffered, but worse, for Julia was blind. Julia could see no way out of it, and Florence herself, for a moment, was nerveless before the enormousness of her own task.

Her voice came weakly. “I would be very sure, first, that he did _not_ love me.” The answer seemed her own as well as Julia’s.

The girl’s eyes blazed at her.

“Don’t _you_ know?” she said.

But Florence expected to be stabbed.

“Yes, I do,” she answered steadily; “but you must see him yourself.”

The girl’s bosom lifted sharply. “Oh, _no!_” she breathed. She stood up. She seemed to tower over the other woman. She seemed to force it home to Florence how impossible it was to find a way out.

“Oh, if you knew,” she cried, “you couldn’t ask it! Even _you_ couldn’t wish me such—such humiliation.”

“If I knew?” Florence repeated, dreading, shrinking from any further revelation.

“What happened,” Julia moaned, turning away.

“Would what happened seem any less impossible,” Florence slowly began, “if the man thought himself bound in honor to another woman—”

“_Thought!_” Julia cried.

“A woman whom he did not love,” Florence kept on; “to whom he was tied by old promises, with whom now there was nothing but an old friendship?”

Julia looked at her a little wildly.

“I—don’t know what you mean!”

“I mean this woman did not—was not in love with him any more. When she knew of—of you, she released him.”

“But that was after—”

“What happened? Yes.”

“Then he didn’t keep faith with her—with either!” Julia cried, still fixing Florence with her white, quivering face.

“Because he loved you.”

Julia seemed to stand there irrationally, convinced by the sound of Florence Essington’s voice—by just the weight of its own deep, passionate conviction.

“Then why couldn’t he have told me?” the girl murmured forlornly. “I would have believed him! Why couldn’t he trust me!”

The last words caught a little bitter echo in the woman’s heart. She silenced it. She took Julia by the shoulders, who had slid to the floor, half kneeling, half sitting, the tears slipping down her cheeks.

“Even if you love him,” she cried, “isn’t he human? Can’t you forgive him that much? He will forgive you—men forgive more in women!”

Julia’s hands held the folds of her gown. “But what can I do?” she implored. She hung on the other’s words with a passionate dependence.

Florence, with an impulse, took the face between her hands.

“Be sure you want him more than anything else,” she murmured.

The head inclined faintly. The wide eyes still held hers with their piteous stare and falling tears.

“Go to him,” Florence whispered. She felt the girl trembling.

“When?”

“Now!”

Julia sobbed. “My mother!”

“That will come afterward. Never mind any of the rest of us—what we do and say. It doesn’t matter. Only think of him! Promise me you won’t leave him until you have made it right!”

“Are you sure I can?” the girl whispered, with such a face of hope and fear, such joy struggling with tears, that Florence, remembering in what hard ways even the greatest love may lead, leaned down and kissed her.

“Quite sure,” she said.

Julia drew yet closer. “Are you _sure_ he—he loves me?” The last words were a breath.

Florence drew back coldly. “You must go _now_,” she said. Then seeing Julia shrink at her strange, dry voice, she added, “Do you think he would tell that to _me_?”—at what cost she herself did not measure.

But she did not realize that she was in the midst of her crisis. She was too much in it to look back or forward. She saw only outward actions, the minute present. When she spoke with the nurse at the door of the sick-room her voice was even matter-of-fact.

The white-capped woman came out. Florence waited until she went into another room farther down the hall. Then she almost pushed Julia in. “No one will come,” she murmured as she closed the door after her.