CHAPTER VI

THAIR PUTS IN HIS FINGER; CISSY HER FOOT

THAIR, lounging down to breakfast the morning after the dance, found Cissy Fitz Hugh alone over a demoralized table. She gave him a nod that was cousinly in its curtness, shoved the muffins a little way toward him, and relapsed into an unwonted obliviousness. Reminiscently smiling, Thair watched her a moment before baiting her gently.

“My good Cicely, you’re not very fit this morning,” he presently brought out with family frankness.

She twitched the ruffles of her morning-gown, drew a plump hand up the sweep of her back hair, and launched at him:

“Well, I’d like to know _who_ is after last night! Emma Budd is simply twittering. That great girl of hers is more dreadful than ever! It simply gets on my nerves. They’re all in such a state!”

“Except—” he blinked at her.

“I’m sure Mrs. Essington looks the worst of the lot.”

“Who mentioned Mrs. Essington?” His eyebrows were exclamation-points.

“Well, then who _are_ you talking about? I do wish, Charlie, you would sometimes say what you mean!”

“Oh, why, so long as _I_, at least, mean what I say.”

“Oh, well, if you’re going to be hateful! You were horrid enough last night!” Cissy whined.

“It was with the best intentions,” he assured her.

“Of course! I’ve noticed if any one ever does a thoroughly stupid thing, it’s always with the best intentions! And your bundling that _girl_ into the back seat with me, when I’d asked you, and was so counting on Mr. Longacre—when you promised—”

“Oh, why not promise?” His tone was gentle resignation, a wicked consciousness in his half-shut eyes.

“Well, you are a beast!” Cissy gasped. It was outrageous, such outspoken depravity!

“Oh, let me have my finger in the pie,” he pleaded. “I wanted your Longacre somewhere else. If he must make love to some one, why not to Julia? It would be so awfully convenient for me, you know.”

“Well, he didn’t!” said Cissy, triumphantly.

“No, he did not,” Thair admitted gracefully. “Nor to you. We all go into the same ditch.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” In their conversations this was the chronic state of Cissy’s intelligence. Thair smiled pleasantly. But her next move brought him up roundly.

“_Who_ are you talking about?”

“_Whom?_” He was imperturbably vague about her personal application.

“Who _did_ he make love to?”

On this, Thair’s air of being delicately shocked was maddening.

“My good Cicely, how should I know? If _you_ knew,” he pursued with an air of mammoth secrecy, “what I _was_ up to—”

But his diplomacy was outstripped by her sharpness.

“Well, I _do_ know. So far as any one could see, you spent the evening hunting for—” her flash of revelation snapped the situation like a trap—“Mrs. Essington!”

She leaned across the table, flushed, gaping a little in eagerness. “Well, and you found her!” She threw it straight at him. “Charlie, you _do_ know something!”

“Flattered, Cicely; properly flattered.” His look was over her shoulder toward the windows.

“One good turn deserves another,” he said. “Mrs. Essington is now hunting for us.”

Cissy’s startled turn gave her, through the expanse of glass, the glimpse of a passing profile, pale against a parasol of rose.

This fleeting profile had seemed to Thair rarely luminous, lighted with a delicate life of its own, an atmosphere excluding the crowd of them. But when she stood in the door he was startled. She was the sharpest, palest, unhappiest substance of the vision. That false radiance of hers was furled in her hand—just an arrangement of silk and sun! Poor dear! Cissy’s shot was, after all, nearer the mark. She did look “the worst of the lot.”

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Vibrating through her house with a roving eye to the agreeable disposition of her guests tucked away among remote book-shelves, and in angles of the veranda, Mrs. Budd had more than ever the air of a great, impulsive girl suddenly smitten with middle age, and trying to make the best of it. She was younger far than Florence Essington, younger than Cissy Fitz Hugh, younger even than her own daughter, whom she presently came upon, teasing the dachshunds on the grassplot beside the “glass room.”

The girl was on her knees. Each separate thread of her gorgeous bush of hair glistening in the dazzle of the late morning sun, her flushing cheeks, her somber brows, her hot, bright eyes, were all a part of the ripple of color and motion she made in the dead, warm greenness. The two long, wriggling dogs threw themselves upon her with yelps and scramblings. She tossed them back, rolled them off their feet, tousled and worried them with gurgles of joy and foolish, tender mutterings.

Her mother’s shadow, falling across her, brought up her eyes in a quick flash of recognition.

“Oh, mama, the darlings! Look! The angels! See him snap! Do look—_now_, mama! Oh, you didn’t look quick enough!”

Mrs. Budd’s eyes absently took in the encircling shrubbery, the walk to their right, thinly veiled with straggling fennel, and came back to her daughter’s lovely face with a sort of puzzled helplessness.

“Yes, pettie, yes; they’re very nice. But _what_ a way to spend the morning!”

Julia sat back on her heels. Her great brows, curved to a peak, spelled innocent interrogation.

“For mercy’s sake, why _not_, mama?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Budd began with a gush, trailing off dimly—“but with so many people about—people to be pleasant to—why shouldn’t you just—be pleasant?”

“Pleasant? Am I _not_ pleasant, mama? To whom?”

“Why, everybody, dearie; and—Mr. Thair!”

“But I am pleasant to Charlie Thair, mama. I’m very, _very_ pleasant.”

“Yes, yes, pet, you are. Only—how _shall_ one tell the child?—not quite, dearie, so pleasant as if you cared—” Mrs. Budd stopped short, a little flustered with her own indelicacy, finishing the sentence with eyes and hands. In all her talks with Julia she had not before come quite so near to putting it plainly. Of the two, Julia, looking gravely into her mother’s face, was the least embarrassed.

“But I don’t,” she said simply.

“But try, pettie; try to!” Mrs. Budd’s voice was anxious, pleading. “Mother wishes it _so_ much.”

Julia bowed her head over the nearest dachshund, turned his collar with deliberate fingers. She was frankly gaining time, casting about for some likely means to put off her own realization of the subject that made the air fairly electric between them.

This she seemed to find in the young man who stepped out of the glass room upon the lawn, a little dazed in the noon glare. Her appeal was a sweet, ringing cry.

“Oh, Mr. Longacre!”

Seeing them together, he stood a minute, seemed to hesitate, then came toward them over the grass; hatless in the sunshine, he looked fair, and a little dreamy. His finger kept the place in his book.

Mrs. Budd surveyed him with a solicitude amounting to annoyance. She turned on her daughter, her mouth shaped for speech, but his quick approach gave her no time. It was Julia who took up the snapped thread of talk in a fluttering sentence:

“It’s my dogs—Mr. Longacre—I—I wanted you to see them.” She was flushed, forehead to chin.

“Oh!” He seemed to just arrive at what was expected of him. “They’re very nice ones.”

The flatness of it left all three stranded in uncomfortable silence. The thought in each mind of how much might be said, were one of the others away, kept them from saying anything through an interminable moment that merged unexpectedly into a common interest. It centered in a single figure lounging across the lawn from the breakfast-room.

Thair came slowly, his chin in the air, a dead cigarette in his fingers. Julia frowned. Mrs. Budd rustled. Thair strolled, stopping to pluck an oleander, then tossing it away.

Mrs. Budd struggled with the situation. She half turned to Longacre. Her eyes followed the fennel path. Again she opened her lips, with the odd effect of making her seemingly the author of Thair’s dilatory drawl.

“I am an agitator,” he announced at large, “a disturber of the existing state of affairs.” His amused eyes lingered a moment on Julia’s anticipatory stare, on Longacre’s air of ready-for-anything. He addressed himself exclusively to Mrs. Budd. “Mrs. Essington has been wondering whether this was the morning you were going to show her—whatever it was about the Japanese chrysanthemum.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Budd clapped her hand to her cheek. It was a gesture she had when suddenly remembering.

“That’s all I know—what she said.” Thair was deliberate. “She was coming out, but I appointed myself ambassador.”

“Oh, why, I—” Mrs. Budd began. The good lady was fairly cornered.

“Oh, then,” she said, with a last hope, “I’ll leave you three young people here together.”

“But,” Thair protested, “I am curious myself to know what it is about the what’s-its-name chrysanthemum.”

She was already in full retreat for the house—hair, skirts, sleeves all a-flutter. The look she gave him over her shoulder was despair; but he, imperturbable, dropped into her wake, tossing his dead cigarette into the oleanders.

The quality of the silence these two left behind them was of a different sort from the triangular uneasiness of the moment before. It was one with the life of the hot, green circle of garden. Something inarticulate, more simple than thought, seemed to pass between the two. The girl, still on her knees, but drawn erect, head lifted, eyes blank, looked, listening. Even thus, what height she had, what length of line! What strength in that flat white wrist, what vital color in her face, what daring in the back fling of the head! Longacre thought he had never seen her more splendid. Yet why was she grown suddenly little to him, helpless, and protectable? He looked down at the sun on her dark head. There rioted in him a reasonless desire to put his arms around it—to comfort her, to hold her! To hold her! Why, what was this? When had he ever—? Florence! The whole of the evening before came over him. That was all so sure and right! This? He was sick with himself. He was torn with a divided sense of reparation to Florence and, somehow, in some way, reparation here!

Some of the stress of it, in his face looking down, met her lifted eyes. She seemed to absorb, without comprehending, his trouble. She was only suddenly conscious and uncomfortable. She got to her feet without the help of his hand, laughing nervously, biting her lips.

“Oh, how—how stupid of me, Mr. Longacre—when I called you over to put my pups through their paces. We’ll do it now!”

She was eagerly rolling her handkerchief into a ball. She poised it for throwing, and looked about a trifle blankly.

“Why, where are they? They’re gone! Stars! Stripes! Here, boys!” She whistled. She frowned.

“Oh, no, no; never mind,” Longacre began earnestly; “really, I’d rather—”

She cut him short. “Then come and look at the oleanders. We’ve all sorts. Mama loves them. They _are_ lovely, but not sweet, you know. _I_ don’t love them.” She led across the open lawn toward the thicket of blazing color that hedged it on the house side.

Longacre followed a pace behind, the word “sweet” repeating itself aimlessly in his head. He was vexed by the confusion of this ending to their perfect moment. He stood listlessly beside her, inattentive to her naming over the varieties, watching the quick turns, from side to side, of the long line of her throat.

If such were to be his feelings, better to be away!

In this position, with their backs to the garden, without seeing, they were seen by two turning the crook in the fennel walk, and thus quite innocently had the effect of checking the flow of extraordinarily amiable chat with which these two had, for the last five minutes, beguiled the time while waiting for Mrs. Budd and Thair.

Cissy stopped short, peering through the feathery green.

Florence knew that the other two there in the sun were the logical result of what she had sent Thair to accomplish, what through the night she had made out was due to Longacre—his chance to be sure of himself, to see just where he stood. _Did_ he? _Had_ he? If not, he must have more time. In giving him that, she would have done what she could. He must see it through his own eyes.

She couldn’t, with straight words, let him go. But she could help him to seeing; she could let him alone. She turned to go on, but Cissy had assured herself, through her peep-hole, of the identity of the person she sought.

“There’s dear Julia,” she tinkled. “I haven’t seen her this morning. I must—I really must speak to her!”

She made a preliminary movement toward an opening in the fennel, her skirts held high above her pretty, preposterous shoes.

“Oh, _would_ you?”

Something in the tone made Cissy feel ridiculous. She hesitated, hating to meet the other woman’s look. She raised her voice. “I’m sure I don’t see why not!”

Florence saw Longacre turn as Cissy flounced through the hedge; then she went quickly up the path without looking back. Her eyes took in the sudden flight of a linnet out of a cypress bough, the flickering shadows of the fennel blurring the walk, and the white glass-room door at the end. Her ears heard a hurrying tread behind her. She felt the urge of pursuit, a keen joy that he still would, though he should not!

Her whiteness flickered among the shadows as she fled; and he followed.

He caught her in the sun, at the door of the glass room.

“Oh, you!” he said, a little breathless, and laughing up at her from the steps below.

She looked at him silently, still of a mind for flight, her hand on the door. It opened suddenly inward, and presented them, face to face, with Holden, who stood, hands jammed into the bulging pockets of his old shooting-coat.

“You folks don’t care much for your complexions, out there in the hot sun,” he said. But he looked at Florence.