The Coast of Chance
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Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance
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18 THE COAST OF CHANCE
_By_
ESTHER AND LUCIA CHAMBERLAIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
[Illustration: FLORA GILSEY.]
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1908
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
APRIL
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE VANISHING MYSTERY 1
II A NAME GOES ROUND A TABLE 24
III ENCOUNTERS ON PARADE 63
IV FLOWERS BY THE WAY 82
V ON GUARD 93
VI BLACK MAGIC 105
VII A SPELL IS CAST 129
VIII A SPARK OF HORROR 142
IX ILLUMINATION 162
X A LADY UNVEILED 175
XI THE MYSTERY TAKES HUMAN FORM 197
XII DISENCHANTMENT 213
XIII THRUST AND PARRY 216
XIV COMEDY CONVEYS A WARNING 231
XV A LADY IN DISTRESS 248
XVI THE HEART OF THE DILEMMA 285
XVII THE DEMIGOD 293
XVIII GOBLIN TACTICS 330
XIX THE FACE IN THE GARDEN 345
XX FLIGHT 361
XXI THE HOUSE OF QUIET 381
XXII CLARA'S MARKET 410
XXIII TOUCHE 422
XXIV THE COMIC MASK 435
XXV THE LAST ENCHANTMENT 451
THE COAST OF CHANCE
I
THE VANISHING MYSTERY
Flora Gilsey stood on the threshold of her dining-room. She had turned
her back on it. She swayed forward. Her bare arms were lifted. Her hands
lightly caught the molding on either side of the door. She was looking
intently into the mirror at the other end of the hall. All the lights in
the dining-room were lit, and she saw herself rather keenly set against
their brilliance. The straight-held head, the lifted arms, the short,
slender waist, the long, long sweep of her skirts made her seem taller
than she actually was; and the strong, bright growth of her hair and the
vivacity of her face made her seem more deeply colored.
She had poised there for the mere survey of a new gown, but after a
moment of dwelling on her own reflection she found herself considering
it only as an object in the foreground of a picture. That picture, seen
through the open door, reflected in the glass, was all of a bright, hard
glitter, all a high, harsh tone of newness. In its paneled oak, in its
glare of cut-glass and silver, in the shining vacant faces of its floors
and walls, there was not a color that filled the eye, not a shadow where
imagination could find play. As a background for herself it struck her
as incongruous. Like a child looking at the landscape upside down, she
felt herself in a foreign country. Yet it was hers. She turned about to
bring it into familiar association. There was nothing wrong with it. But
its great capacity suggested large parties rather than close intimacies.
In the high lift of its ceilings, the ample openings of its doors, the
swept, garnished, polished beauty of its cold surfaces, it proclaimed
itself conceived, created and decorated for large, fine functions. She
thought whimsically that any one who knew her, coming into her house,
would realize that some one other than herself had the ordering of it.
She glanced over the table. It was set for three. It lacked nothing but
the serving of dinner. She looked at the clock. It wanted a few minutes
to the hour. Shima, the Japanese butler, came in softly with the evening
papers. She took them from him. Nothing bored her so much as a paper,
but to-night she knew it contained something she really wanted to see.
She opened one of the damp sheets at the page of sales.
There it was at the head of the column in thick black type:
AT AUCTION, FEBRUARY 18
PERSONAL ESTATE OF
ELIZABETH HUNTER CHATWORTH
CONSISTING OF----
She read the details with interest down to the end, where the name of
the "famous Chatworth ring" finished the announcement with a flourish.
Why "famous"? It was very provoking to advertise with that vague
adjective and not explain it.
She turned indifferently to the first page. She read a sentence, re-read
it, read it again. Then, as if she could not read fast enough, her eyes
galloped down the column. Color came into her cheeks. The grasp of her
hands on the edges of the paper tightened. It was the most extraordinary
thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was blazing at her
from the columns of the paper was at once the wildest thing that could
possibly have happened, and yet the one most to have been expected.
For, from the first the business had been sinister, from as far back as
the tragedy--the end of poor young Chatworth and his wife--the Bessie,
who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her death,
that had befallen in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their
little city, and the large announcements of auction that had followed
hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid
excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some special
luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They had
been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the
"Maple Room" before the auction. And now the whole spectacular business
was capped by a sensation so dramatic as to strain credulity to its
limit. She could not believe it; yet here it was glaring at her from the
first page. Still--it might be an exaggeration, a mistake. She must go
back to the beginning and read it over slowly.
The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima's announcement of dinner
only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when, with a faint, smooth
rustle, Mrs. Britton came in, she let the paper fall. She always faced
her chaperon with a little nervousness, and with the same sense of
strangeness with which she so frequently regarded her house.
"It's fifteen minutes after eight," Mrs. Britton observed. "We would
better not wait any longer."
She took the place opposite Flora's at the round table. Flora sat down,
still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.
"It's the most extraordinary thing!" she burst forth.
Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the
presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her companion's
face--seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes,
through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached for an
explanation.
"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and smooth,
as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.
"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply
vanished! And--and it was all our own crowd who were there!"
"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of
this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it
definite.
Flora flung out her hands.
"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the
afternoon, when everybody was there--and they haven't the faintest
clue."
"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to be
calm.
Again Flora's eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the
other jewels. Harry saw it"--she glanced at the paper--"as late as four
o'clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was
gone."
Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have
differed more than these two women in their blondness and their
prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery
lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and
calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to ivory
through all the gamut of gold--hair color of a panther's hide, eyes dark
hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit.
The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to
elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of
wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery
itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked
far over the head of Clara Britton's annoyance that there should be no
clue.
"Why, don't you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It
might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I would
much prefer to think it was some one we didn't know so well--some one
strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping out the Golden
Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be embarrassed."
Clara looked back with extraordinary intentness.
"Oh, it's not possible the thing is stolen. There's some mistake! And if
it were"--her eyes seemed to open a little wider to take in this
possibility--"they will have detectives all around the water front by
to-night. Any one would find it difficult to get away," she pointed out.
"You see, the ring is an important piece of property."
"Of course; I know," Flora murmured. A faint twitch of humor pulled her
mouth, but the passionate romantic color was dying out of her face. How
was it that one's romances could be so cruelly pulled down to earth? She
ought to have learned by this time, she thought, never to fly her little
flag of romance except to an empty horizon--never, at least, to fly it
in Clara's face. It was always as promptly surrounded by Clara's common
sense as San Francisco would be surrounded by the police. But still she
couldn't quite come down to Clara. "At least," she sighed, "he has saved
me an awful expense, whoever took it, for I should have had to have it."
Mrs. Britton surveyed this statement consideringly. "Was it the most
valuable thing in the collection?"
Flora hesitated in the face of the alert question. "I--don't know. But
it was the most remarkable. It was a Chatworth heirloom, the papers say,
and was given to Bessie at the time of her marriage." The thought of the
death that had so quickly followed that marriage gave Flora a little
shiver, but no shade of the tragedy touched Clara. There was nothing but
speculation in Clara's eyes--that, and a little disappointment. "Then
they will put off the auction--if it is really so," she mused.
"Oh, yes," Flora mourned, "they can put it off as long as they please.
The only thing I wanted is gone--and I hadn't even seen it."
"Well, I wouldn't be too sure. There may be some mistake about it. The
papers love a sensation."
"But there must be something in it, Clara. Why, they closed the doors
and searched them--_that_ crowd! It's ridiculous!"
Clara Britton glanced at the empty place. "Then that must be what has
kept him."
"Who? Oh, Harry!" It took Flora a moment to remember she had been
expecting Harry. She hoped Clara had not noticed it. Clara always had
too much the assumption that she was taking him only as the
best-looking, best-natured, safest bargain presented. "He will be
here," she reassured, "but I wish he would hurry. His dinner will be
spoiled; and, poor dear, he likes his dinner so much!"
The faint silver sound of the electric bell, a precipitate double peal,
seemed to uphold this statement. The women faced each other in a
moment's suspense, a moment of expectation, such as the advance column
may feel at sight of a scout hotfoot from the field of battle. There
were muffled movements in the hall, then light, even steps crossing the
drawing-room. Those light steps always suggested a slight frame, and, as
always, Flora was re-surprised at his bulk as now it appeared between
the parted curtains, the dull black and sharp white of his evening
clothes topped by his square, fresh-colored face.
[Illustration: YES, HE WAS MAGNIFICENT, SHE THOUGHT.]
"Well, Flora," he said, "I know I'm late," and took the hand she held to
him from where she sat. Her face danced with pleasure. Yes, he was
magnificent, she thought, as he crossed with his light stride to Mrs.
Britton's chair. He could even stand the harsh lines and lights of
evening clothes. He dominated their ugly convention with his height,
his face so ruddy and fresh under the pale brown of his hair, his alert,
assured, deft movement. His high good nature had the effect of
sweetening for him even Clara Britton's flavorless manner. The "We were
speaking of you," with which she saw him to his seat, had all the warmth
of a smile, but a smile far in the background of Flora's immediate
possession. Indeed, Flora had seldom had so much to say to Harry as at
this moment of her excitement over what he had actually seen. For the
evidence that he had seen something was vivid in his face. She had never
found him so splendidly alive. She had never seen him, it came to her,
quite like this before.
She shook the paper at him. "Tell us everything, instantly!"
He gaily acknowledged her right to make him thus stand and deliver. He
shot his hands into the air with the lightening vivacity that was in him
a sort of wit. "Not guilty," he grinned at her.
"Harry, you know you were in it. The papers have you the most important
personage."
"Oh, not all that," he denied her allegation. "They had the whole lot of
us cooped up together for investigation for as much as two hours. I
thought I shouldn't have time to dress! I'm as hungry as a hawk!" He
rolled it out with the full gusto with which he was by this time engaged
on his first course.
"Poor dear," said Flora with cooing mock-sympathy, "and did they starve
it? But would it mind telling us, now that it has its food, what is
true, and what was the gallant part it played this afternoon?"
"Well," he followed her whimsical lead, "the chief detective and I were
the star performers. I found the ring wasn't there, and he found he
couldn't find it."
"Don't you know any more than the paper?" Flora mourned.
"Considerably less--if I know the papers." He grinned with a fine flash
of even teeth. "What do you want me to say?"
"Why, stupid, the adventures of Harry Cressy, Esquire. How did you
feel?"
"Thirsty."
"Oh, Harry!" She glanced about, as if for a missile to threaten him
with.
"Upon my word! But look here--wait a minute!" he arrived deliberately at
what was required of him. "Never mind how I felt; but if you want to
know the way it happened--here's your Maple Room." He began a diagram
with forks on the cloth before him, and Clara, who had watched their
sparring from her point of vantage in the background, now leaned
forward, as if at last they were getting to the point.
"This is the case, furthest from the door." He planted a salt-cellar in
his silver inclosure. "I come in very early, at half-past two, before
the crowd; fail to meet you there." He made mischievous bows to right
and left. "I go out again. But first I see this ring."
"What was it like?" Flora demanded.
"Like?" Harry turned a speculative eye to the dull glow of the
candelabrum, as if between its points of flame he conjured up the
vision of the vanished jewel. "Like a bit of an old gold heathen god
curled round himself, with his head, which was mostly two yellow
sapphires, between his knees, and a big, blue stone on top. Soft, yellow
gold, so fine you could almost dent it. And carved! Even through a glass
every line of it is right." He paused and ran the tip of his finger
along the silver outline of his diagram, as if the mere memory of the
precious eyes of the little god had power to arrest all other
consideration. "Well, there he was," he pulled himself up, "and I can't
remember when a thing of that sort has stayed by me so. I couldn't seem
to get away from it. I dropped into the club and talked to Buller about
it. He got keen, and I went back with him to have another look at it.
Well, at the door Buller stops to speak to a chap going out--a crazy
Englishman he had picked up at the club. I go on. By this time there's a
crowd inside, but I manage to get up to the case. And first I miss the
spot altogether. And then I see the card with his name; and then,
underneath I see the hole in the velvet where the god has been."
Flora gave out a little sigh of suspense, and even Clara showed a gleam
of excitement. He looked from one to the other. "Then there were
fireworks. Buller came up. The detective came up. Everybody came up.
Nobody'd believe it. Lots of 'em thought they had seen it only a few
minutes before. But there was the hole in the velvet--and nothing more
to be found."
"But does no one know anything? Has no one an idea?" Clara almost panted
in her impatience.
"Not the ghost of a glimmer of a clue. There were upward of two hundred
of us, and they let us out like a chain-gang, one by one. My number was
one hundred and ninety-three, and so far I can vouch there were no
discoveries. It has vanished--sunk out of sight."
Flora sighed. "Oh, poor Bessie Chatworth!" It came out with a quick
inconsequence that made Clara--even in her impatience--ever so faintly
smile. "It seems so cruel to have your things taken like that when
you're dead, and can't help it," Flora rather lamely explained. "I
should hate it."
Harry stared at her. "Oh, come. I guess you wouldn't care." His eyes
rested for a moment on the fine flare of jewels presented by Flora's
clasped hands. "Besides,"--his voice dropped to a graver level--"the
deuce of it is--" he paused, they, both rather breathless, looking at
him. He had the air of a man about to give information, and then the air
of a man who has thought better of it. His voice consciously shook off
its gravity. "Well, there'll be such a row kicked up, the probability is
the thing'll be returned and no questions asked. Purdie's keen--very
keen. He's responsible, the executor of the estate, you see."
But Clara Britton leveled her eyes at him, as if the thing he had
produced was not at all the thing he had led up to. "Still, unless there
was enormous pressure somewhere--and in this case I don't see where--I
can't see what Mr. Purdie's keenness will do toward getting it back."
Harry played a little sulkily with the proposition, but he would not
pick up the thread he had dropped. "I don't know that any one sees. The
question now is--who took it?"
"Why, one of us," said Flora flippantly. "Of course, it is all on the
Western Addition."
"Don't you believe it!" he answered her. "It's a confounded fine
professional job. It takes more than sleight of hand--it takes genius, a
thing like that!"
Flora gave him a quick glance, but he had not spoken flippantly. He was
serious in his admiration. She didn't quite fancy his tone. "Why,
Harry," she protested, "you talk as if you admired him!"
At this he laughed. "Well, how do you know I don't? But I can tell you
one thing"--he dropped back into the same tone again--"there's no local
crook work in this affair. It should be some one big--some one--" He
frowned straight before him. He shook his head and smiled. "There was a
chap in England, Farrell Wand."
The name floated in a little silence.
"He kept them guessing," Harry went on recalling it; "did some great
vanishing acts."
"You mean he could take things before their eyes without people knowing
it?" Flora's eyes were wide beyond their wont.
"Something of that sort. I remember at one of the Embassy balls at St.
James' he talked five minutes to Lady Tilton. Her emeralds were on when
he began. She never saw 'em again."
Flora began to laugh. "He must have been attractive."
"Well," Harry conceded practically, "he knew his business."
"But you can't rely on those stories," Clara objected.
"You must this time," he shook his tawny head at her; "I give you my
word; for I was there."
It seemed to Flora fairly preposterous that Harry could sit there
looking so matter-of-fact with such experiences behind him. Even Clara
looked a little taken aback, but the effect was only to set her more
sharply on.
"Then such a man could easily have taken the ring in the Maple Room this
afternoon? You think it might have been the man himself?"
His broad smile of appreciation enveloped her. "Oh, you have a scent
like a bloodhound. You haven't let go of that once since you started. He
could have done it--oh, easy--but he went out eight, ten years ago."
"Died?" Flora's rising inflection was a lament.
"Went over the horizon--over the range. Believe he died in the
colonies."
"Oh," Flora sighed, "then I shall have to fancy he has come back again,
just for the sake of the Chatworth ring. That wouldn't be too strange.
It's all so strange I keep forgetting it is real. At least," she went on
explaining herself to Harry's smile, "it seems as if this must be going
on a long way off, as if it couldn't be so close to us, as if the ring I
wanted so much couldn't really be the one that has disappeared." All
the while she felt Harry's smile enveloping her with an odd,
half-protecting watchfulness, but at the close of her sentence he
frowned a little.
"Well, perhaps we can find another ring to take the place of it."
She felt that she had been stupid where she should have been most
delicate. "But you don't understand," she protested, leaning far toward
him as if to coerce him with her generous warmth. "The Chatworth ring
was nothing but a fancy I had. I never thought of it for a moment as an
engagement ring!"
By the light stir of silk she was aware that Clara had risen. She looked
up quickly to encounter that odd look. Clara's face was so smooth, so
polished, so unruffled, as to appear almost blank, but none the less
Flora saw it all in Clara's eye--a look that was not new to her. It was
the same with which Clara had met the announcement of her engagement;
the same look with which she had confronted every allusion to the
approaching marriage; the same with which she now surveyed the mention
of the engagement ring--a look neither approving nor dissenting, whose
calm, considerate speculation seemed to repudiate all interest positive
or negative in the approaching event except the one large question,
"What is to become of me?" Many times Clara had held it up before her,
not as a question, certainly not as an accusation; as a flat assertion
of fact; but to-night Flora felt it so directly and imperatively aimed
at her that it seemed this time to demand an audible response. And
Clara's way of getting up, and standing there, with her gloves on,
poised and expectant, as if she were only waiting an opportunity to take
farewell, took on, in the light of her look, the fantastic appearance of
a final departure. "I'm afraid," she mildly reminded them, "that Shima
announced the carriage ten minutes ago."
"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry!" Flora's eyes wavered apologetically in the
direction of the waiting Japanese. Clara's flicker of amusement made her
hate herself the moment it was out. She could always depend on herself
when she knew she was on exhibition. She could be sure of the right
thing if it were only large enough, but she was still caught at odd
moments by the trifles, the web of a certain social habit into which she
had slipped, full grown on the smooth surface of her father's millions.
Clara's fleeting smile lit up these trifles to her now as enormous. It
took advantage of her small deficit to point out to her more plainly
than ever to what large blunders she might be liable when she had cut
loose from Clara's guiding, reminding, prompting genius, and chose to
confront the world without it.
To be sure, she was not to confront it alone; but, looking at Harry, it
came to her with a moment's qualm that she did not know him as well as
she had thought.
II
A NAME GOES ROUND A TABLE
For to-night, from the moment he had appeared, she had recognized an
unfamiliar mood in him, and it had come out more the more they had
discussed the Chatworth ring. It was not in any special word or action
on his part. It was in his whole presence that she felt the difference,
as if the afternoon's scandal had been a stimulant to him--not through
its romantic aspect, as it had affected her, but merely by the daring of
the theft itself.
She wondered, as he heaped her ermine on her shoulders, if Harry might
not have more surprises for her than she had supposed. Perhaps she had
taken him too much for granted. After all, she had known him only for a
year.
She herself was but three years old in San Francisco, and to her new
eyes Harry had seemed an old resident thoroughly established. So firmly
established was he in his bachelor quarters, in his clubs, in the
demands made upon him by the city's society, that it had never occurred
to her he had ever lived anywhere else. Nor had he happened to mention
anything of his previous life until to-night, when he had given her, in
that mention of a London ball, one flashing glimpse of former
experiences.
Impulsively she summed up the possibilities of what these might have
been. She gave him a look, incredulous, delighted, as he handed her into
the carriage. She had actually got a thrill out of easy-going,
matter-of-fact, well-tubbed Harry! It was a comradeship in itself. Not
that she would have told him. This capacity of hers for thrills she had
found need always to keep carefully covered. In the days when she was a
shoeless child--those days of her father's labor in shaft and dump--she
had dimly felt her world to be a creature of a keen, a fairly cruel
humor, for all things that did not pertain to the essence of the life
it struggled for. The wonder of the western flare of day, the magic in
the white eyes of the stars before sunrise, the mystery in the pulse of
the pounding mine heard in the dark--of such it had been as ruthless as
this new world that looked as narrowly forth at as starved a prospect
with even keener ridicule. Instinctively she had turned to both the
hard, bright face they required. It seemed that in the world at large
this faculty of hers was queer. And to be queer, to have anything that
other people had not, except money, was to be open to suspicion. And yet
from the first she had had to be queer.
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