CHAPTER III

MRS. ESSINGTON RUNS AWAY FROM HERSELF

FLORENCE ESSINGTON woke with a flood of early sun across her bed, and the sound of the ocean in her ears. But the fringes of hardy yellow jessamine around her windows smothered the salt smell of it. The air of the room suggested gardens, and the sea sound was but a background for the clear human voices a-chatter somewhere among the hydrangeas and heliotrope. The out-of-doors invaded the house in a positive summons. A dozen retrospections had lifted and dissolved with the fog.

Her veins seemed distended with fresh blood, her heart quickened with the sharp chorus of wild canaries, the chattering flights of linnets flashing across her window. She asked her reflection in the glass if a woman who appeared fresh at seven in the morning could well accuse herself of age? Her foot was like a young girl’s on the wide stair descending to the reception-hall. That sharp, exquisite freshness that a wet night leaves behind it met her on the threshold.

The house stood back in the billow of a hill. The drive rushed in wide sweeps down a glittering greensward dashed with dark oaks that thickened to a belt at the base of the hill, where the road cut whitely through them; beyond, the cypresses standing up against the blue circle of sea, and the fog, a continent of pearl and shadow, stealing back across the ocean’s floor. It hid the southern horizon, but northward she could see the sunlight on the windows of Santa Cruz. She looked over the whole semicircle of sea and shore. The length of the coast, trembling out of sight in a quivering mist of spray; the unending hill and hollow, lifting and falling away into the sky; the everlasting, encompassing ocean, lifted her out of herself with their power of infinity. The sparkle of the sea drew into her eyes. The buoyant spirit of a joy that only breathes under a new-risen sun was reflected in her face.

But the small sounds of things near and finite, drumming persistently on her ears, at last made themselves audible, growing upon her attention until she found herself listening to a murmur of talking, broken now and then by a rich, vibrant note of laughter. She heard it first as a little part of her pleasure of sight and sound, but presently some disturbing reminder in it, some painful memory, distracted her; finally turned, first her face, then her feet, in the direction of the flower-planted western terrace.

With a few steps she had the talkers in sight,—Thair, his riding-crop slashing at the ragged chrysanthemums; Julia Budd, a sheaf of heliotrope in one arm; and Longacre, whose hand, while Thair talked, plucked and plucked and strewed the path with the small purple blossoms of one of the hanging sprays.

Florence paused, her impulse to join them somehow quenched.

Thair, with his genial talk, seemed to have no association with the other two. He might as well have been somewhere else. Though the girl’s face was turned toward the sea, and Longacre’s eyes were on the heliotrope, they seemed, by something akin in expression, somehow sharply, intimately drawn together.

Florence saw them thus for a moment. Then Julia turned, Longacre looked up at her, their eyes met. The spirit of the girl’s voice had shot Florence with sharp misery; but it was the full look of Longacre’s eyes that, had they moved a hair’s breadth from Julia’s face, would have seen Florence standing, looking through the passion-vines, that held her for a minute still, and staring. Then noiselessly, like an eavesdropper, she retreated. She felt wretchedly that she had spied on him, had interrupted something not meant for her to see. She had an overwhelming impulse to escape the confines of flowers and voices, a need of something not less large and bitter than the sea. It was not thought, but impulse that directed her steps, that turned them so precipitately down the drive. Near the end of the grounds she began to run. Under the shelter of the oaks she slackened her pace, but her gait still had a headlong haste, and only when she broke from the fringe of foliage out upon the slope of sand, with the green waves bowing and breaking at her feet, did she stop to get breath.

Even then she did not look back over the way she had come, but out across the water that had grown less blue than gray. The only thing before her was that she had seen another receive what she had thought her own. Intolerable! It goaded her to motion. Blind to seeing, deaf to hearing, incapable of thought, she hurried down a space of endless sound and emptiness. Oh, to get away from herself! She ran to outstrip herself, that self that could only remember the look in the garden, that could only endlessly repeat that she had lost him! It was upon her, the possibility she would not face yesterday. It had her unawares. She could not endure it!

She ran. Before her tripped a sandpiper, his fine web of footprints following him. Shadows of gulls, swept across the sand, were like great blown leaves.

She had put her whole life into a failure! She had lost him!

She heard the soft sucking of wet sand under her feet. The point of rocks before her made three ragged steps down to the sea. Above them that cypress had a shape of human agony. The breakers rising over the lower rock were like a succession of slippery, watery stairs meeting the stones. And oh, the thunder of the coast!

The strong voice of the ocean, the breakers’ shock, the biting taste, the long sigh of subsiding waves, the eternal iteration of great sounds, encompassed her. Wild, unthinkably vast! Ordered commotion! Inevitable change! What, in the face of sky and sea, did it matter if this one man loved one woman, or another?

“One man, one man!” She said it over. And his voice, his face, and small forgettable things—tricks of eye, of manner—came back upon her and possessed her. The woman the years had made rose in her. The man was hers. Because she had willed it, the boy had been drawn to her; because of her, again, he had found himself; with her he had fashioned the beginning of his man’s life; he and she had laid the foundations of it.

Could she let go all that had been so understandingly wrought to—what? Had the girl anything but her glorious flesh—any latent possibility of power to meet his need? She asked herself, with increasing calm, could she be sure her stimulated imagination had not deceived her. But when that look of his had first been hers, had she not known it as a fact, tangible as a hand to grasp? And was she so feeble as to repudiate the new fact because it stung?

No! She saw laid on him, ever so lightly, the touch of a younger, stronger vitality; and yet how fully aware was he? She knew so well his oblivious self-absorption, his mind incurious, slow to recognize the possibility of change. They had so grown to take each other for granted. She knew that anything threatening their mutual dependence could not come to him and leave him steady.

But her own position? It was that she sought in the labyrinth of her mind; but where reason had been was only a succession of violent emotions. She had been generous while she had been sure of him. Now the feeling of right that custom gives, the passion of possession, was fermenting in her. It consumed everything else.

What her strength could hold was hers. She wondered how strong she was. The strength of suffering! The wisdom of failure! Oh, she would hold him! How long? She put it away.

She turned back along the ringing beach. It was better, she thought, to be rooted like the cypress, even to be fastened in a great melancholy unrest, than to be as one of the gulls, flying on every wind, fishing at random.

The fog was lifting toward the north. The coast showed dark under it. There was something sterile in the thin black line of land across the waste of water, but she faced it rather than the deep-bosomed, soft-shadowed hills. But when, perforce, she turned her back on it to climb the “Miramar” terrace by a path through the oaks, she felt her high tension relax, a less triumphant confidence. Yet her eyes were calm, her pulse steady; she held her determination unwavering. Life thus far had taught her that of tenacity was the habit of success.