CHAPTER VII

THE HOUSE-PARTY IN THE STORM

THE breeze, which at noon had barely rustled the chrysanthemums, an hour later was tossing the pampas plumes across the lawn, and whipping the great sapphire of the sea into broken green and white. There was something ruffling to temper in the dry, beating breath. Hammocks were empty, the garden deserted. The hardiest of the house-party huddled on the veranda behind the Samoan blinds that snapped in the heavy wind. It was not the “trade” blowing in from sea—salt and dreamy with far going—but a land wind driving down through the mountains, stinging with sharp odors of dust and dry leaves—the very dregs of summer.

The sun went down through a wrack of broken clouds into a thundering ocean. To the party gathered around the hall hearth, and straggling up to the first turn of the stair, the garden appeared a writhing, twisting thing, crowded upon, and threatened by the raw, gray twilight. Bowed trees and lashing vines were the more piteous that there was no storm but the ceaseless wind streaming by, roaring across the roof, shaking the window-casings, beating the flowers flat.

The wild night offered to those about the fire the opportunity of drawing together; but the uneasiness, the inexplicable, mutual distrust of people aware of strong cross-currents under the surface of living, separated them. Their common isolation, even their common shelter, failed to unite them.

The curiosity, careless or eager, with which they had met one another on the first evening—the interest for inexperienced personalities—had been replaced by a sharp, personal thread in the web propinquity weaves. Each was no longer a watcher of, but an actor in, a drama, and each more or less dissatisfied with the part assigned him.

Their undermined sociability was apparent in wandering eyes, shifting groups, flurries of talk running into blind alleys. Who could have helped through the interminable evening, would not. Julia refused to sing. Thair read. Longacre intrenched himself with round-cheeked Bessie Lewis against the fear of being asked to play. He was bored with his predicament, and puzzled as to why Florence had chosen to sit with Cissy and Holden.

Florence, irresolute, wretchedly at odds with herself, hated the sight of this collection of people. She was glad to get away to her room. The great sound of the wind, surging by the windows, helped to lull her struggling motives; and waking in the night to a gush of roaring rain, she felt singularly at peace, consoled by the unhesitating strength of the storm.

But the dull face of the next morning was a depressing outlook. The gray sheet of the storm blotted out dunes and sea. The close damp of the first rains, imperfectly dispersed by too lately kindled fires, filled the rooms with its vague discomfort.

The house-party displayed the hectic amiability of people whose breeding does not permit them to betray their disgust at being, for a number of days, cooped up together between the same four walls.

The youngsters’ ill-humor deplored the postponed hunting. The elders hopelessly cited instances of October rains that had cleared with the first sunset. Mrs. Budd apologized for the weather as she would have for an overdone entrée. Her guests responded in scattering chorus.

It was “jolly”—“a lark”—“just the thing for a quiet day!”—a round of deprecation that failed to leave them otherwise than chilly and damp. It was not an atmosphere that clung to them, but rather one they exhaled—one that existed in the face of the most flourishing of fires, that clouded the most amiable game of billiards, that sharpened the most friendly exchange of opinion. The out-of-doors that had offered such excellent opportunities for escaping themselves, or one another, was denied them. They were forced to face conditions that two days had created—conditions of which all understood too much to be unconcerned; of which no one knew the whole. Even Florence, who perhaps understood most, was bewildered completely on one point. But that was not Longacre’s place in the web. _His_ figure to her was clear in the foreground. His bewilderment in her sudden change; his endeavor to bridge this distance she had so suddenly forced between them, to win back what had been given and then so tacitly, so inexplicably withdrawn, made her suffer. That first day was little less than a battle between their two wills.

At what effort she maintained toward him the kindness of her smile, the quiescence of her feeling, the resolution not to avoid him, she did not realize herself. It impressed her that he sought her out more than usual. Formerly they had avoided marked association in a crowd. Now, was he avoiding some one else? Irritable, moody, he seemed most at ease with her, yet, otherwise than his wont, had little to say; and his eyes were more often away from her, following another’s coming and going.

That tall Julia carried the shadow of the storm in her face. She looked cloudy. She was pale. Then, feeling a certain pair of eyes upon her, out flashed the color like a suddenly blossomed flower. All at once she seemed to mean something more than youth and beauty. She was less intent upon herself, more sensitive to who came and went; and sometimes her glance was backward—across her shoulder, as if aware of one behind her. Whose those fancied footsteps were, Florence had no doubt. But this was the knot she could not unravel: just what did Longacre mean to Julia? How much could she be to him?

A consciousness in her bearing toward him made it never twice the same—now imperious, now timid; now making advances, now repelling; but indifferent never. More often Florence thought she looked bewildered, as though something infallible had failed her. And though at times she filled the room with her rich voice—speaking, laughing, singing—at times she stilled and drew away from the others, and bent her black brows on the storm outside in a passionate brooding, as if, by her very desire for release, she would escape the confining house, and pierce the clouds, and find the sun.

To Florence the house was nothing else than a shelter from herself. In its restrained atmosphere, hemmed in by the monotonous, dripping rain, it was easier to lose emotion, to keep a quiet pulse; easier also to perceive in what direction these people, forced into constant conjunction of contradictory motives, would turn circumstance. However strongly she herself desired to mold it, she felt that now she must leave it alone. Even the fact of Cissy Fitz Hugh’s persistent hovering in Julia’s vicinity, mischievous as it looked, might only serve to shape events the faster.

Undoubtedly Cissy meant mischief, and though in sticking herself so fast to Julia she was more adroit than Florence had thought possible, her lack of imagination limited her. She annoyed the girl like a buzzing insect. Julia tried to shake her off. But Cissy had intrenched herself in a cast-iron sweetness that no impatience could ruffle, no rebuff shatter.

She had a very sharp eye on her cousin Thair. She suspected him. She couldn’t get at him. That illuminating talk of theirs over the breakfast-table had given her a clue. Longacre did have a fancy for Florence Essington! Cissy imagined every man had a fancy for herself until it was proved otherwise. Well, now it was proved otherwise; but as long as a man was within reach she felt him securable. But Thair had suggested Julia. This was troublesome! Julia was a beauty. Julia must be kept off, dragged off, until she could finally be scared away.

It was only while strolling in the conservatory with her arm around Julia’s waist, or playing Julia’s accompaniments—an office Longacre uneasily avoided—that Cissy felt at all safe. She was dropping hints all round the margin of what she wanted to say. But Julia was too absorbed in new, mysterious emotions to regard her manœuvers. She simply didn’t see them. Her abstraction was exasperating to Cissy, who was afraid to go too far. She had once seen Julia angry. She realized that the right hint, properly dropped, would comfortably bridge her difficulty. But having it, how to get neatly across? That was the point. As usual, she fell in with a splash.

Toward the end of the second afternoon of storm, with the rain clattering on the west front of the glass room, she followed in Julia’s wake up and down among the fragile ferns. The girl’s eyes were earnestly on the flowers, but Cissy’s were everywhere—toward the window, as if expecting to see some one in the garden; prying through the curtain chinks; then, with a quick peer of curiosity, following a shadow that through the half-open door she saw crossing the library floor. Then the piano answered to compelling fingers.

It had sounded much through the past two days, but now it spoke. Julia lifted her head as if it had spoken to her. She did not look over her shoulder, but frowned out into the rain, and presently went on trimming her plants. Cissy, peeping between the spikes of a dwarf palm saw through the glass the outline of a man seated, of a woman standing, her hand poised at the music-sheet on the rack. Presently she began singing, but singing with a half-voice, as if she listened, following him like an accompaniment. There was something accustomed, attuned, in their relative positions, as if they had fallen into them naturally through long habit. The significance of this touched even Cissy’s thick sensibility, but only as being the very thing she wanted.

“How absorbed those people are!” she observed, with a casual nod toward the glass doors behind her.

Julia gave a glance that seemed not to have noticed them before.

“Mrs. Essington plays very well herself,” she threw out carelessly.

“Oh, _no_!” Cissy assured her. “Only a _very_ little. But she’s so _awfully_ interested in his work—_such_ an inspiration to him in _every_ way!”

“Yes?” Julia snipped off the head of a cyclamen.

Cissy was angry at what seemed to her obtuseness.

“The only wonder is,” she said a little acidly, “considering what she is to him, that he doesn’t marry her!”

Julia raised her head from the asparagus-fern and gave Cissy a straight look.

“What are you talking about?” she flashed. Her blush was to the roots of her hair.

Cissy gave a little scream of mingled surprise and horror. “What _can_ you think I mean!” She reached her arm around Julia. “Of course it’s a perfectly straight affair. He’s simply waiting for her answer.”

She felt the girl fairly quiver under her touch. She took one step too far.

“Of course she’s years older than he, but he’s just the sort of a man to like that.”

Julia removed Cissy’s arm from her waist much as she might have plucked off a spider, gathered up her little watering-pot and shears, and left the conservatory without a word. She crossed the library without glancing at the two by the piano.

Cissy looked rather stunned. She looked curiously at the arm Julia had discarded.

“Upon my word,” she thought, “one would suppose I was dirty!”

She settled her combs in her sleek hair, and presently took the course Julia had followed. She did not join Florence and Longacre, because the more she saw of Florence the more she was afraid of her. Besides, she felt a childish excitement in her cheap little rôle of intrigante. And there was another person upon whom she could practise it without fear: Mrs. Budd, more unsuspicious than her daughter, and as credulous.

Poor woman! Her outspoken, objective nature had been sorely tried by these days with so little doing on the surface of things, and so much on the under side. Her mind was a blur of conjecture over what Thair was going to do. Longacre was a disturbing element she had not named. It was Cissy who clapped on the appellation. It was Cissy who helped her to a conclusion.

It all came out so casually, on the side, with the things they discussed over their lace-making in the wide-windowed upper living-room.

Then it was Longacre (according to Cissy) who had kept Thair—extremely sensitive—at a distance: Longacre, charming, a dear—but, well—fond of being about married women. Cissy had had _her_ little experience with him, and of course (magnanimously) there must be others.

“But if you _knew_ this about him—and let me take _such_ a man into my house—when I have a young girl!”

But, oh, Cissy was horrified. No! not such an attitude to Julia! Never! The point was, Did Mrs. Budd want Julia to _marry_ such a man?

“Marry _Julia_!” This was appalling.

Cissy felt much satisfaction. Her intention was far from cruel. She merely wanted something very much, and was trying to get it. Gauging their feelings by her own, it never occurred to her that she had more than vexed and annoyed her hostess and her hostess’s daughter. And this she preferred to being vexed and annoyed herself.

But the circumstances, upon which she had laid such bold hands, burst from her grasp and rushed past her. Yet Cissy was not aware of their progress. It was Florence Essington who first felt their precipitation. She foreboded a crisis.

With the waning afternoon the veil of the rain lifted and showed the long hook of the coast edged with leaping breakers, and a hurly-burly of high clouds tearing across the sky. The sun went down with streamers of yellow through the breaking storm. But the voice of the ocean grew louder with the wilder wind, until by fall of night its pulse was in the very timbers of the house. Its tumult assailed the very doors.

The house-party met over the tea-cups with such a sense of excitement as they might have felt aboard ship in a gale, an exhilaration that, by its feverishness, was the reaction from the depression of their immurement.

It was the last of the rain, Holden predicted; and the expectation of release dashed them all into high spirits.

Julia was gorgeous. If she had not been so beautiful she might have seemed overdone. She was alluring; she laughed and murmured to Thair until he was overwhelmed by the beauty of it. If he looked at her with all the admiration he gave to Gainsborough’s lovely, pictured ladies—and coveted her to frame and hang in his gallery—there was no reason Mrs. Budd should not imagine he coveted her to decorate the foot of his table. The memory of Cissy’s uncomfortable suggestions were confused with what seemed the near consummation of her hopes; but for the first time in forty-eight hours she beamed.

Longacre was talking pointedly and exclusively to Florence. Cissy once or twice tried to throw in a word. She got a glance, an assent without the obstinate head turning in her direction. It was stupendous rudeness, but he was oblivious to everything but his need of Florence. He wanted her responsiveness, her sympathy, to help him escape his tormenting self. He talked rapidly. He seemed eager. He was angry that her coldness left him keenly aware of the palpitating presence of the girl who flashed her dark eyes so hotly around the room.

But Florence read in his eagerness its double element. Her throat ached with the fullness of tears.

Weeks, months ago, when she had first felt the subtle change in him, so slight that she had resolutely called it fancy, that terrible possibility of another woman had given her some sleepless nights; but she had hoped, as her knowledge grew, that it was a negative fate—one of the slow changes time brings about in mind and body—that was drawing the man she loved away from her. She had made herself ready to meet such a fatality, but the calamity that came was unexpected. It had her by surprise; and at the outset she had failed of everything she had determined on.

She was not a jealous woman, but she had not realized how it would seem to have him love another woman.

And what was this woman? Beautiful overwhelmingly, unquestionably to be reckoned with, but ignorant—a child! What was she going to be? What could she be to him? A spur or a clog? Florence knew the man too well to suppose he would shake off the latter. He would endure, and grow less. It seemed bitter to her, then, that he was a man who could be made or marred by a woman, and she not that woman.

“What is the matter?” she heard him saying. The face he turned to her showed his irritation. Wouldn’t he yet face it—that he loved the girl? It was proof to Florence of what power she had with him.

“Do you know,” he went on in a murmur so inarticulate that only her ears, that knew his voice as they knew her own, could catch it, “we’ve been miserable every moment since we’ve been in this place. Let’s get out! For heaven’s sake, come up to town to-morrow, and we’ll be married, and get away to the other side of the earth!”

She had a hysterical desire to laugh.

“Oh, Tony, you’re the only man in the world who could say a thing like that, in a situation like this.”

He grumbled, “Why not? I mean it.”

She knew he meant it. She suffered in the temptation to say yes, to end everything like that, to take what consequences followed when he should some day know, and hate her for it. She looked at Julia. Not alone the beauty of her, but some suggestion in its generous richness of a like nature, made the rest of them seem cheap. Florence felt faded as she looked. What a woman for a man to lose!

Longacre’s eyes followed the direction Florence’s had taken. He made an impatient movement.

If he stayed a few days longer under the girl’s spell, he would find out himself how hard matters were with him. But before that happened he must be free of _her_. It came to Florence all at once that this man would not free himself. What a loyalty to lose! And to put it away with her own hands!

“Florence!” he persisted. She meant to say that she had something to tell him later that would answer his question, but her tongue tricked her into a gay evasion. She put him off. Because she saw the end must come, soon or late, she put it off. She would tell him to-morrow.