“Beastly familiar,” Walter thought.
Hemming’s good-natured, sensual face was vivid with animal spirits. “Where were you last night?” he said. “You did miss it!”
“What?” drawled Walter.
“Mrs. Jack Castra’s dinner dance. Great!” Hemming’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I got Blanche Remi a bid. You know she wanted one like the devil. Mrs. Jack is a terrible stickler, but we’re great pals, and she let me have it.”
“Miss Remi went?” Walter’s voice was very lazy.
“Did she go?” Hemming laughed. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, “the Wrecker’s a wonder! She’s such a wonder that most of the women say, ‘Hands off.’ But between you and me, she makes every other woman look like a Dutch doll.”
Walter had an impulse to strike Hemming. His own words had been flung back at him, but he failed to recognize them.
“Oh, I had a good time,” Hemming repeated, significantly, but unmalicious. “So long.” He sauntered into the saddler’s.
Walter watched the confectioner’s door opening. So Blanche was under an obligation – such an obligation – to Hemming! He had not thought Hemming such a bad lot, but now – Things Lillian had said crowded back to him. And Blanche’s attitude lately? The color thickened in his sallow cheeks.
Blanche came out of the door with a swing. She was eating a chocolate. As she stood under the rippling awning, pulling on her red gloves, he saw she was glowing with excitement. The weight of her splendid hair under her man’s hat, the play of color in her eyes, the slight backward fling of her figure as she poised – each detail proclaimed eloquently how fully she was a conscious, vital force, stupendous to reckon with.
“Where’s Mrs. Gueste?” was the first question she tossed at him, with a straight, studying look.
“Er – she had a headache – and – er, another engagement,” he added, lamely.
Blanche laughed. “One would have been enough,” she said; but the curve of her lip quivered. She stopped his reply with a second question.
“Who ran away as I came out?” she asked, settling in her saddle.
“Blair Hemming.” He looked at her sharply, but she showed no consciousness; only a smile, as though Hemming were something funny.
“Did you have an amusing time last night?” he asked her.
Some vague reminder of Lillian Gueste’s voice startled her. The color deepened in her cheeks. “Oh, lovely! Hemming” – she never gave a title to a name – “took me to the Castras’.”
“Did he get you the invitation?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“I didn’t ask him for it. He offered it.”
“But you took it?”
“Why not? Everyone does it.”
Walter looked at her uneasily. He knew well enough that everyone didn’t. He said stiffly: “I don’t like the idea of your being under obligations to a man like Hemming.”
She looked at him with a quick flush. It might have been anger or pleasure. But then her lashes lowered over her eyes to cover the secret.
“You don’t!” she said. “And how do you suppose Hemming likes my being under obligations to you?”
He was aghast. “What has he got to say about it?”
“What have you?” She let it fall gently.
“Good heavens!” he burst out. “Do you lump us? I thought that you and I were – were – ”
“Friends?” she filled in without a quaver. “We were. But you’ve changed, Wallie.”
“Since – ”
“Your sister came.”
“What nonsense – ” he began, eagerly.
“No” – her eyes were somber, smoldering – “she hates me!” Blanche emphasized the word with her whip on the mare’s flank. “She thinks I’m awful! Hasn’t she said that to you?”
“She has said nothing of the sort. She has nothing to do with it.”
“She has everything!” Blanche said, suddenly, passionately. She jerked the mare’s head fiercely.
They had turned out of the dazzling street into a softly sprinkled side way, where the pepper trees wept their tassels in the dust. Blanche kept her eyes on the bit of blue sky that seemed to close the end of the street like a jewel in a setting.
“Before she came you took me for just what I was. You believed in me, Walter. But ever since she said things, I feel – oh, I don’t know! As if you were a long way off, watching me, and wondering about everything I say and do.”
He broke in: “Because once or twice I criticised some trifle!”
“Oh,” she cried, “don’t think I wouldn’t take criticism from you! I’d take a lot. I’d even wear the sort of hats your sister does!”
“Oh, confound the sort of hats! You know that’s not it. It’s – I – love you, Blanche.”
He brought out the little isolated sentence breathlessly, with a jerk. His sallow face was flushed.
Blanche was very pale. The horses took five steps while there was silence. Then:
“It’s sweet of you to say that.” The girl’s voice was shaken. “But you know, Walter, as she does, I’m not her kind.”
“But I don’t want you to be!”
“Don’t you, Walter?” She looked at him earnestly. “And I’m not your kind, either. I mean, I’m not like the women you’ve known. She’s made me feel that – your sister. It’s one reason why I hate her. Oh, I do!” She nodded at him. “You may as well know that. She makes me see what I’ve missed – little things I thought didn’t matter. But now – ”
“But, child,” he interrupted, exasperated, manlike, with her self-depreciations, “those little things don’t count! It isn’t that. But if you loved me – ”
“If I loved you?” She turned large, astonished eyes on him.
“Well, you wouldn’t take things from Blair Hemming. I won’t stand it,” he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”
“What did he say?”
“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”
“In what way?” The girl was breathless.
He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.
“Oh, Walter!” Her arms fell at her sides with a gesture of eloquent despair. She seemed to divine his retrospection. “But I can’t help it! I don’t do it on purpose – though I know people say I do. You don’t – don’t think I’m ‘the Wrecker’?” She aimed the word at him like a blow, and while he sought an answer: “You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me. You’re wondering now whether I let Hemming make love to me. Hemming!” – she leaned toward him with a savage head shake. “I may not know a good hat when I see one, but I know a good man!”
The spur pricked. The mare bounded. She was rods away before Walter realized he was deserted. Then he followed. The girl turned and motioned him back.
“Go away, go away!” she cried. There was something at once so imperious and so entreating in voice and gesture that he involuntarily halted, and she wheeled and spurred on at a gallop.
If she had not ridden so headlong she must have shrieked. The tempest in her was too much for expression. She saw, subconsciously, a gray blur of olive trees streaming past, with here and there the richer note of orange orchards, and always the road before her, an intense white line over and around the smooth-topped hills. She did not slacken pace at the passing phaëtons, though these may have contained people whom she knew. She dared not look behind her, through a stifling hope and doubt that Walter had followed. She breasted the last hill crest, where the road lifts out of the gardens and orchards of Monticito to the high, wind-raked bluff above the sea.
Here she reined in and turned and looked back down the long, straight stretch of road she had come. Empty, far as eye could see. She listened, breathlessly, but the interminable whisper of the eucalyptus leaves above her head was the only sound. And she had thought so surely he would follow!
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed – crying like a man, with deep chest respirations that shook her whole body. The mare, feeling a relaxed rein, moved a few steps. The girl’s hands fell from her face. She looked seaward through the slim, swaying eucalyptus trees. The tears rolled down her cheeks to the corners of her twitching mouth. Mechanically she wiped them away with the wrist of her red glove. It left odd, bloodlike streaks on her tawny skin. They gave a menacing look to her despair. She was not thinking of how she looked, but of whom she had left, of how she loved him! She was feeling, with her blind forsakenness, that if Walter gave her up she was lost. If he only knew how little the other people mattered! How good, how awfully, abjectly good, she could be if she had him – the only man who had never made love to her! She remembered, with a stir of pure pleasure, how at first she had been piqued and puzzled that he did not. Afterward, how she had loved him for it! But since this woman, his sister, had come, Blanche did not know how it had been brought about, but she knew that she and Walter, who had been so close, so understanding, were apart and at odds. He had trusted her, and now he suspected her.
She saw Lillian Gueste’s hand in it. Blanche did not reason; she only felt, and hated the subtle and delicate treason. Did Lillian Gueste suppose, she asked herself, that because a woman wore large hats and loud gloves she had no right to the man she loved?
She rode along the cliff edge at a foot pace, her eyes abstractedly on the dancing shadows of eucalyptus leaves the sun painted in the dust. She wondered was this the close of what had been opening out before her as her life? She thought, with her primitive reasoning, were Lillian only out of the way – her mind did not get further than that. But Blanche had felt from the first that Lillian Gueste had come to Santa Barbara for no other reason than rescuing her brother, and that she did not intend to go until she took Wallie with her. “Could she do that?” Blanche wondered in a panic. Had an opportunity offered, she would have pushed Lillian Gueste out of her way as she would have thrust a pebble from her path.
The sun, falling low in the western sky, made towers of tree shadows, and spread an iridescence over the in creeping fog, as she followed the descending road downward toward the arroya, where a bridle path slipped seaward under willows. She had taken that path often before. It met the beach below what was the usual limit for riders, but she loved the long, exciting gallop, the scramble among the rocks, the spice of danger at the narrow turns about the two points when the tide was coming in.
The salt smell of the sea met her, strong with reek of kelp, as she approached its thunder through the willows. The range of sea and sky, the free wind blowing between, gave her release from thought and scope to act. The tide was running in high and full. Where the first bold bluff jutted out, a distance of some six yards, the sliding foam already lapped the rock. Once around the turn of the bluff, the beach lay before her – a long white, empty sweep under black cliffs.
She rode at an easy canter, breathing in the stinging salt air, looking out upon the water, where the dark “seaward line” swung with the swell a mile out in “the channel.” She had lost the choking tears, the despair of her first rush down the Monticito road. She felt not happy, but wildly at liberty. The wind took her hat, and she laughed, seeing it spin down the beach. The tingling breeze in her hair whipped out the short, springy curls. The high animal spirits that had helped her over situations where a less vital woman would have been overwhelmed had begun to reassert themselves in the exercise and open air. She scanned the empty beach perspective. What a gallop to the far point! She touched the mare, then pulled her up sharply in the first bound. The beach was not empty. Some one was riding – perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of her – imperfectly to be distinguished among the scattered rocks.
Her first thought was “Walter!” Trembling with eagerness, she peered under a sheltering hand. The rider was a woman. In the revulsion of her feeling, Blanche’s disappointment was an inarticulate sound. All her misery was back upon her. Who it was, riding slowly down the beach in a direction similar to her own, did not matter. She only wanted to avoid being seen – hatless, red-eyed, wild – by this woman, who, being a woman, was her natural enemy. She rode slowly, cautiously, hoping the other would quicken her pace, and put the next point between them. The sun had fallen into the fog, from under which the ocean thundered sullen, gray, up the shore.
Blanche wanted to get around the next point before dusk. She saw the horse in front – bright sorrel on the yellowish-white sand – drawing slowly near the black shoulder of rock; finally, fairly at the turn of it. In an instant it would be out of sight. No, it had stopped; stood motionless a full minute; then, to the girl’s intense amazement, wheeled and came back down the beach at a quick lope. There seemed something of vexation in the sharp turn-about.
Had the woman seen, and come back to speak with her? Blanche wondered. There was no avoiding the meeting. Shaking her hair over her eyes, she rode forward. As the rider drew nearer, with a contraction of heart she recognized Lillian Gueste. At the same instant she knew that Lillian had not seen her.
Mrs. Gueste’s face wore a preoccupied, a vexed, a vaguely anxious, look. The sand half quenched the sound of the horse’s coming. They were almost abreast before she saw Blanche Remi, and then it was with a start, a stare of keen surprise, of interrogation, that effaced the first expression.
Blanche knew whom the questioning eyes missed. There was about them a subtle, tantalizing suggestion of Walter, and she felt the blood run in her temples as she bent her head in faint recognition.
Mrs. Gueste stopped.
“Where is my brother?” she said. She fairly challenged the other with it. That she did not name him Mr. Carter was a mark of her extreme surprise, alarm; for Blanche Remi, with discolored eyes, disheveled hair, and the red stains across her face, looked wild enough to have thrust a displeasing lover into the sea.
Blanche looked at and realized how she hated this woman, this unruffled perfection. The strength of her feeling frightened herself. But her voice was as cool as Mrs. Gueste’s.
“I have no idea,” she said, politely insolent, and made to go on.
Lillian Gueste’s sharp scrutiny had taken in all the girl’s misery, and supposed a scene. Her idea of what had been Walter’s part in it made her, with a revulsion of relief, almost amiable.
“You can’t get around that way,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the point. The vexation was back on her face. “The tide is in.”
The girl’s eye ranged back along the beach. The black cliffs seemed suddenly to have marched seaward.
“Well, you can’t get back that way,” she said. “The water was up to the second point when I came through an hour ago – it’s over the quicksand.”
“Quicksand?” Lillian looked at her blankly. “Then what can we do?”
“Get around there,” said Blanche, waving back to the near point.
“We can’t.” Irritation and unbelief were in Mrs. Gueste’s voice.
“I’ve done it before. It’s easy. Come on.” Blanche was nonchalant in the face of the encroaching sea. The gulls were screaming above their heads, the sound of shattering water was in their ears, as they rode forward.
At the shoulder of the point the wind met them, and the inrush of the ocean. Here the beach sloped suddenly. The cliffs came out in a convex sweep of several rods, with a sharp jut of rock thrust out from the midst of it, like a fish’s fin. Over it, up to the cliff face, the water fawned and leaped, and in its sucking recoil left bare for an instant a narrow neck of sand.
Blanche looked at the bulging bluff, the sharp rock. That made it bad. One could not make a straight dash – would have to make an angle – out and then back; and a moment’s hesitation at the turn – well, it wouldn’t do to meet the ebb there. Blanche knew the strength of the undertow.
With her eyes on the rising and receding water, she made a rapid calculation for the best moment to go in. She was excited, eager for the enterprise. She was surprised at the other woman’s pallor.
“We can’t get through there,” Lillian Gueste said, half angrily. She looked small, pale, impotent, among the severities of waves and sky.
“Then where?” Blanche slid lightly from her saddle.
“If we should shout – ” Lillian began.
Blanche almost laughed at her. Did this woman expect to be rescued? Blanche’s experience had been that people in bad places had to get themselves out.
“Up on the cliff you couldn’t hear a cannon fired down here,” she said. “We can get through, only you must not be afraid.” She began loosening the lower hooks of her habit bodice.
“What are you going to do?” Lillian asked, nervously. She felt fearful of what might happen next in these strange, perilous conditions.
“Take off my skirt. Better do the same. Then if a wave gets you you can use your legs.”
Lillian looked at her in horror. “Oh, no!” she said, feeling somehow insulted.
“It’s dangerous,” said Blanche, swinging into her saddle man-fashion. In her boots and spurs, with her wide shoulders and narrow hips, she looked a beautiful boy. “You’d better be astride, anyway,” she said.
“I can keep my saddle.” Lillian’s mouth twitched nervously. “Shall I go first?” she said. Blanche saw her hand on the rein tremble. In her excitement at the trick of the sea she had merged her personal attitude toward Lillian.
“No, follow me, and do as I do. Wait until the wave breaks, and go out with it. Then when you turn at the rock you won’t have the ebb against you. You’ll go up with the flow. It’s perfectly safe. But you must not hesitate a minute. When I shout, dash!”
The breakers were coming in high and quick. The neck of sand next the cliff was seen only momently. The nose of rock was perpetually in a boil of water.
Blanche waited, let the great seventh wave go by, and in the midst of the surge of its recoil dashed in. She felt the mare stagger as the tow took her. A swift, terrible force seized and snatched her seaward. She was swept along like a drift. Then, almost touching the point of rock, she was relinquished. With the roar of the next breaker sounding fairly upon her, she spurred savagely. The mare plunged with a boil of water to her knees, with a wake of white behind her. She went up the beach with the spray of the driving ocean in her hair. She wheeled and waved to the woman on the other side.
Through flying foam she could see Lillian Gueste’s face, a little white, a little strained in its composure. Blanche had felt no fear for herself, but now she had a thrill through her body, a withering sensation in her throat, to see Lillian Gueste waiting there, hanging on her word to make the rush. And the haunting semblance of Walter in the fixed eyes —
“Don’t look at the water!” Blanche shouted. “Look at me! Now!” she screamed, to make herself heard above the breaking wave. But the horse and rider hesitated before the recoil of it; came on, seemed to hover on the brink of it.
“Go back!” Blanche shouted, with frantic gesticulation. The ebb was racing out. Lillian wavered, now fairly in; then the sorrel floundered out, belly deep in the surge. Now the girl saw him close upon the point of rock – now suddenly dragged out from it. A yard of fretted water heaved between. Blanche sat as if hypnotized, with the sight of a struggling horse and rider black etched on the green water. It rushed over her all at once who it was the ebb was taking out, and she was motionless. She saw the rider’s face turned landward with the stark stare of the drowning appealing to her with Walter’s eyes. The next moment she was in deep water. She breasted the current with a rush. She saw a horse, with empty saddle, struggling, swimming, drifting out; saw a swash of black tumble in the twisting tides that sucked it seaward. She made a plunge and seized a skirt. Her fingers held a flow of hair. Threshing hands caught at her stirrup. A body sprang tense to her lift. Then the sea had them again.
Eyes, ears, lungs, full of it. Blanche felt the mare gallantly struggling to keep footing; the steep sand seemed slipping away from under them. Then, with a roar, the dark parted. She gasped in the air. She saw Lillian’s face wax white at her knee. She had not strength to lift more than the head and shoulders as she trailed the limp figure up the beach.
Her knees tottered as she slid from the saddle. Her ears were ringing. Or was some one, somewhere, really calling to her? A cart was plunging and bouncing down the grassy tussocks that dip from the coast road to the beach.
“Oh, Blair!” She cried the driver’s name in a burst of relief.
“That you, Blanche?” He had jumped out of the cart and was running toward her. He saw the drenched figure on the sand.
“My Lord! Mrs. Gueste!”
Blanche’s clutch on his arm hurt him. “Oh, is she dead?” she entreated him.
“Not by a good deal.” He gave his flask to Blanche, and rolled his carriage robe around Lillian. Then he stripped off his mackintosh. “Here, girl,” he said, and Blanche thrust her arms into the sleeves.
“Saw you down there,” he said, lifting the unconscious woman’s dead weight into the cart. His voice was matter-of-course, but his look said she was magnificent.
“Hurry, hurry!” Blanche implored. “Take her over to the Crosbys’, Blair! Oh, quick!”
“Well, come on, then. I’ll whirl you over in a jiffy.”
“Oh, I’m going home – I’ll ride. I’m all right,” she said, through chattering teeth. “But she might – and Mr. Carter – ”
“But, girl – ”
“Oh, go, go!” She lifted herself into the saddle. Weak as she was, her nervous excitement carried her up.
“And mind, Blair, don’t say anything – if you love me!” She almost laughed the last words at him. Then she was off.
She chose not to take the boulevard, but cut through the town by lanes and side streets, where in the dusk of gathering night and inclosing fog her dripping horse, her drenched habit, would escape observation. She shook with nervous excitement, but the fast riding kept the blood pounding in her veins. She had no power to think coherently of what had happened. She had seen Blair Hemming lift Lillian Gueste into his cart, but the idea possessed her that Lillian had gone out in the tide, and drowned with that terrible face looking back to land, with Walter’s eyes.
She urged the exhausted horse cruelly because the face seemed to stare at her out of the dark street ends. She seemed to look from the surface of things into an abyss of possibility. She felt afraid of herself as something horrible.
But as she turned into the drive between the ghostly acacias returned the little, concrete fear lest she be seen by anyone, most of all her mother. There were lights in the drawing-room windows that looked out on the drive oval, and Blanche cautiously took the far side, to be screened by the feathery palms.
Leaving the mare at the stable, and money in the stableman’s hand, she stole tiptoe up the side stair. Once in her room, she stripped, bathed, rubbed her damp hair dry, tossed it up gleaming on the crown of her head, and, still in her glow and shiver of excitement, hooked herself into a black lace dinner gown glittering with jet, fastened a diamond crescent over her bosom, and swept in upon her mother and maiden aunt, who were patiently, resignedly, dining without the belated equestrienne.
“Why, darling!” her mother murmured, in gratified amazement. Blanche seldom bothered to dress for dinner, and to-night she seemed almost too dazzling to be real. She was surprised herself at the extent to which her bravado covered what had happened. Inwardly she was quaking. Her ears were alert for every sound.
“Did you have a nice time?” her mother asked her.
“Oh, lovely!” said Blanche, with a shiver.
“Where did you go?”
“Down the beach.” Blanche started. Her hand poised halfway to an olive. She heard what her ears had been pricking for – horses’ feet on the gravel drive.
With an effort she held herself quiet.
The Spanish maid opened the dining-room door. “Some one to see you, señora.”
Blanche, who had half risen, sank back in her chair.
“Why, who can it be?” Mrs. Remi was murmuring as she went into the hall.
Blanche sat listening, lips apart. She heard her mother exclaim; then a man’s voice exclaimed; she knew the voice; she rose. Her heart seemed beating in her throat. She heard her mother’s voice, perplexed, emphatic: “But she’s all right; she’s very well. There’s some mistake!”
Then Walter Carter’s, insisting: “But they were both in the water. Hemming saw her bring Lillian out. He drove my sister home. How could Blanche – ” When she burst upon them.
“Walter!” The sight of him, wild-haired, pale, his mackintosh over his evening clothes, his general look of catastrophe, struck her with only one significance.
“Mrs. Gueste?” she gasped. “How is she?”
For a moment Walter could only stare at her, dazed. He had seen his sister – drenched, disheveled, white, unconscious – carried into the house. And here stood Blanche, vital, vigorous, self-possessed, groomed for a function.
“My God, no – it was you!” he stammered. “But – but is there any mistake?”
The soft sound of the dining-room door closing left them alone face to face. He came toward her. She stepped back.
“There’s no mistake. At least, we were in the water, and she was afraid.”
“But Hemming said she was washed out of the saddle – and the tow took her out, and you went after her and got her!” He still came toward her. It was hard to look him in the face, for the bewildered eyes reminded her of Lillian Gueste’s look when the tide took her out from the rocks. Blanche felt her bravado running out at her finger ends.
“But I didn’t – I – I – oh, Walter, you don’t know what I did!” She faltered and sobbed. She leaned against the hatrack and buried her face in the folds of a coat.
“Why, child, you simply saved her!” His arms were around her, and he tried to pull the cloak from her face. “She wants to see you to-morrow. She wants to tell you – ”
“Oh, no; I can’t. She wouldn’t if she knew – ” Blanche’s voice was muffled on his shoulder.
“Well, what?” he muttered, his lips against her cheek.
The answer reached him, a half smothered, almost contented whisper:
“How I hated her!”