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.