Mrs. Essington: The Romance of a House-party

“STILL I don’t reconcile you with that lot,” the young man broke out, after a silence that had lasted long enough to be intimate. He leaned toward her across the space between the two chairs, lifting his voice a little to be heard above the racket of the car-wheels.

The woman did not directly reply, unless there was an answer in the small profile smile she gave him. She had sat for the past ten minutes admirably still, her face turned from him, her eyes on the flat blue-green of onion-fields interminably wheeling past the window.

“I mean,” he presently went on in his easy fashion, “they’re hardly your sort. Oh, good people, but—dullish, you know; the kind you never put up with unless you have to.”

She gave him again the flitting, profile smile, with an added twinkle, from which his face seemed to catch illumination; and, for a moment, they smiled together with the hint of some common reminiscence.

“At all events,” he came back again, “I can’t see why you, of all people, would be going to the Budds!”

She moved at last, turning a full look upon him. The supple bend of her long throat, and the cool gray light of her eyes in the warm shadow of their lashes, touched him like a harmony in music. The beauty and eloquence of her movements had always appealed to him as her special charm. His eyes followed the flowing lines of her attitude more attentively than his ears followed the first part of her reply.

“No, they’re not our sort,”—she spoke with slight emphasis on the pronoun,—“and”—the subtle modelings around her mouth shadowed a smile—“we’ll probably bore them horribly. But I’m going—for the same reason that you are. You know I have never met Julia Budd.”

“But I have,” said Fox Longacre, flushing a little, his blue eyes steadily meeting her bright gaze.

“Which comes, doesn’t it, to the same thing? Aren’t we both going to ‘Miramar’ to see Miss Budd?”

“She’s lovely—to look at,” he admitted.

“And not in other ways?”

He seemed to ponder this, his clever young face puckered with an exaggeration of gravity. He gave it up with a puzzled laugh.

“’Pon my word, I don’t know! That’s what I’m going for.”

“To find out—?”

“Oh, whether she is perfectly charming, or—just the other thing.”

It struck her that his manner was more offhand than the occasion required—that the alternative he had just so gaily admitted troubled him more than he wished her to know.

But Florence Essington knew, in spite of him, more than she looked, and much more than she said. She felt that she at least foresaw so much that to spare herself the train of thought she answered him in quite another vein.

“You know, Tony,” she said, with that little, settling movement women use to begin a gossip, “what really amuses me is that we haven’t—at least I haven’t—the slightest idea, not a glimmer, what people Mrs. Budd will be asking down. She hardly knows me, hasn’t seen me since I left school for Paris—don’t you dare to mention how long ago! And yet she fairly threatened me into it, eyes popping and every hair a-quiver. I quite got the feeling that she wants something of me.”

“Of course,” he grinned cheerfully, “they always do.”

“But something special.”

“Letters of introduction?” he hazarded. “It’s quite on the cards. They’ll be going to London next season, if she doesn’t—but, of course, you know what she’s after.”

“Not, at any rate, you,” she quizzed.

At this he laughed out, “Oh, Lord, no!”

Their common amusement was made up of their common knowledge of his shabby income, his opera still on probation, and his purely potential career.

The speed of the train was notably slackening. The porter had made the round with his whisk-broom, and was carrying bags and golf-kits to the outer platform. The greater number of travelers had risen, and were rushing or rustling into their coats. Most of these people seemed to know one another, were all bound for a common goal—the little city of country houses. In the next three days they would all meet half a dozen times. They exhaled the heady atmosphere of their small, smart community.

The stucco front of the San Mateo station slid slowly past the window. When the train finally came to a stop the chair-car was at the far end of the long platform, its windows commanding the full curve of the drive where it swept out of the encroaching trees.

The two, who remained seated in the midst of the general departure, now realized that the exodus would leave them solitary.

“Good!” said Longacre, contentedly, settling more comfortably into his chair.

His companion leaned forward to look down the long wooden platform where, already, the newly alighted travelers were segregating themselves and their parties, one from another, and were being driven away in a light whirl of dust. The travel seemed all arrival. One or two callow, negligent college boys swung aboard the smoker. The porter took up the stool.

“I really believe—” Mrs. Essington began. The sight of a victoria lurching around the turn of the drive stopped her sentence.

The vehicle, so indisseverably connected with state and dignity of progression, bounded at the heels of galloping horses, its occupant leaning forward with the air of one who would accelerate top speed. The rigs, driving away from the station, parted for its onward rush. Heads craned toward it. There was a chorus of laughing recognitions. A man swung his hat. The train gave a preliminary pulse and quiver as the victoria came to a violent halt, and the lady sprang out in a puff of light silk, and ran fluttering and flapping along the platform. The conductor and porter, all agrin, with an arm under each of her elbows hoisted her to the step of the now moving train. The footman threw up the last of half a dozen bags.

Mrs. Essington leaned back and laughed silently across to her companion.

“A victoria! Wouldn’t you know she would!” he observed half quizzically, half ruefully.

“She’s so, pretty!”

“Oh, pretty,” he conceded generously enough, as the lady’s full-throated laugh preceded her into the car.

She fairly burst upon them, laughing, blooming, glittering.

“Of all people! You dear things!” She squeezed a hand of each affectionately. “Don’t tell me there is nothing in premonition! I had one when I told James the horses must gallop. ‘James,’ I said, ‘it is absolutely necessary that I catch that train, if I get out and run for it.’ James adores me, though of course he knew we looked ridiculous. But it doesn’t matter, now that I have _you_—and just as I was expecting to be alone all the way to Monterey!”

She sighed, and sank into the seat Longacre had swung round for her; rose again to be helped out of her coat; removed her hat; caressed her coiffure; resettled in her chair and shifted the fluttering folds of her skirts, with a regret or two for her own helplessness and a hope that the forbearance of her friends was not merely forbearance. Her almond eyes, blue shot with green, implored Longacre’s to refute the self-accusation. But he chose to do so in a neat sentence.

Watching her, he had a sense that by her vivacity she staved off the reproach of superabundant flesh. It was marvelous, the way the avoirdupois seemed to lessen under her animation. The wide cheeks flaring away from the dwindling chin; the tight, rosy little mouth drawn up at the corners in a faint, perpetual smile; the tortoise-shell combs that pressed her glossy hair close above her pointed ears, all reminded Longacre irresistibly of a tortoise-shell—but he stopped the simile to answer Cissy Fitz Hugh’s appeal concerning the fate of his opera.

He answered automatically this question, that had of late begun to weary him, acceding good-naturedly to Mrs. Fitz Hugh’s sweeping declaration of her passion for music in general; but he was unhappily aware that Florence Essington had teasingly assumed the remote but interested air of a spectator at what threatened to be a tête-à-tête. Nay, more: her eyes laughed at his attempts to draw her back. He had the aggrieved feeling of a child whose game has been spoiled. Well, if Florence wouldn’t play, neither would he. But he was pleasant about it. He slid easily from good-humored flattery to genial silence, from genial silence to the smoking-car.