The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance

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She leaned and looked through the thin veil of her curtains at the
splendid day. It was one of February's freaks. It was hot. The white
ghost of noon lay over shore and sea. Beneath her the city seemed to
sleep gray and glistening. The tops of hills that rose above the
up-creeping houses were misted green. Across the bay, along the northern
shore, there was a pale green coast of hills dividing blue and blue.
Ships in the bay hung out white canvas drying, and the sky showed whiter
clouds, slow-moving, like sails upon a languid sea. Beneath her,
directly down, through hanging darts of eucalyptus leaves, hemmed with
high hedges, the oval of her garden showed her a pattern like a Persian
carpet. Roofs sloped beyond it, and beyond these the diagram of streets
and houses, and empty unbuilt grassy lots.

She looked down upon all, as lone and lonely as a deserted lady in a
tower, lifted above these happy, peaceful things by her strange
responsibility. Her thoughts could not stay with them; her eyes traveled
seaward. She parted the curtains and, leaning a little out, looked
westward at the white sea gate.

A whistle, as of some child calling his mate, came sweetly in the
silence. It was near, and the questing, expectant note caught her ear.
Again it came, sharper, imperative, directly beneath her. She looked
down; she was speechless. There was a sudden wild current of blood in
her veins. There he stood, the whistler, neither child nor bird, but the
man himself--Kerr, looking up at her from the gay oval of her garden.
She hung over the window-sill. She looked directly down upon him,
foreshortened to a face, and even with the distance and the broad glare
of noon between them she recognized his aspect--his gayest, of diabolic
glee. There lurked about him the impish quality of the whistle that had
summoned her.

"Come down," he called.

All sorts of wonders and terrors were beating around her. He had
transcended her wildest wish; he had come to her more openly, more
daringly, more romantically than she could have dreamed. All the
amazement of why and how he had braved the battery of the windows of
her house was swallowed up in the greater joy of seeing him there,
standing in his "grays," with stiff black hat pushed off his hot
forehead, hands behind him, looking up at her from the middle of
anemones and daffodils.

"Come down," he called again, and waved at her with his slim, glittering
stick. How far he had come since their last encounter, to wave at and
command her, as if she were verily his own! She left the window, left
the room, ran quickly down the stair. The house was hushed; no passing
but her own, no butler in the hall, no kitchen-maid on the back stair.
Only grim faces of pictures--ancestors not her own--glimmered
reproachful upon her as she fled past. Light echoes called her back
along the hall. The furniture, the muffling curtains, her own reflection
flying through the mirrors, held up to her her madness, and by their
mute stability seemed to remind her of the shelter she was
leaving--seemed to forbid.

She ran. This was not shelter; it was prison. He was rescue; he was
light itself. The only chance for her was to get near enough to him.
Near him no shadow lived. The thing was to get near enough. She rushed
direct from shadow into light. She came out into the sun, into the
garden with its blaze of wintry summer, its whispering life and the free
air over it. The man standing in the middle of it, for all his pot hat
and Gothic stick, was none the less its demigod waiting for her,
laughing. He might well laugh that she who had written that unflinching
letter should come thus flying at his call; but there was more than
laughter, there was more than mischief in him. The high tide of his
spirits was only the sparkle of his excitement. It was evident that he
was there with something of mighty importance to say.

Was it that her letter had finally touched him? Had he come at last to
transcend her idea with some even greater purpose? She seemed to see the
power, the will for that and the kindness--she could not call it by
another word--but though she was beseeching him with all her silent
attitude to tell her instantly what the great thing was, he kept it
back a moment, looking at her whimsically, indulgently, even tenderly.

"I have come for you," he said.

"Oh, for me!" she murmured. Surely he couldn't mean that! He was simply
putting her off with that.

"I mean it, I mean it," he assured her. "This doesn't make it any less
real, my getting at you through a garden. Better," he added, "and sweet
of you to make the duller way impossible."

She took a step back. It had not been play to her; but he would have it
nothing else. He, too, stepped back and away from her.

"Come," he said, and behind him she saw the lower garden gate that
opened on the grassy pitch of the hill, swinging idle and open. The
sight of him about to vanish lured her on, and as he continued to walk
backward she advanced, following.

"Oh, where?" she pleaded.

"With me!" Such a guaranty of good faith he made it!

She tried to summon her reluctance.

"But why?"

"We'll talk about it as we go along." His hand was on the gate. "We
can't stop here, you know. She'll be watching us from the window."

Flora glanced behind her. The windows were all discreetly draped--most
likely ambush--but that he should apprehend Clara's eyes behind them!
Ah, then, he did know what he was about! He saw Clara as she did. She
would almost have been ready to trust him on the strength of that alone.
Still she hung back.

"But my things!" she protested. She held up her garden hat. "And my
gown!" She looked down at her frail silk flounces. Was ever any woman
seen on the street like this!

"Oh, la, la, la," he cut her short. "We can't stop to dress the part.
You'll forget 'em."

She smiled at him suddenly, looked back at the house, put on her
hat--the garden hat. The moment she had dreaded was upon her. In spite
of her warning reason, in spite of everything, she was going with him.

Beyond the looming roofs as they descended the hill she saw white sails
sink out of sight. All the little panorama upon which she had looked
down sprang up around her, large and living. He whistled to the car as
he helped her down the last steep pitch, whistled and waved, and they
ran for it. No time for back-looking, no time now for a faint heart.
Before she knew they were fairly crowded into the narrow front seat, and
the long street was running up to them and streaming by.

This was never the car one went out the front door to take. This creaked
and crawled low, taking the corners comfortably, past houses with all
their windows blinking recognition. Hadn't it passed them so for twenty
years? Old houses in long gardens, and little houses creeping back
behind their yards, not yet encroached upon by fresher ties of living.
Past all these and gliding down under high, ragged banks, green grass
above with wooden stairways straggling up their naked faces; past these
again; past lower levels; past little gray and cluttered houses; past
loaded carts of vegetables; past children playing shrilly, bearing down
always on the green square of the plaza wide, worn and foreign, and the
Greek church "domed" with blue and yellow, bearing down as if it had
fairly determined to make its course straight through this stable
center. Then in the very shadow it swerved aside to clatter off in quite
another direction along a wider street with whiter shops, and more
glittering windows with gilded letters flashing foreign names, with more
marked and brilliant colors moving in the crowd, with a clearer stamp on
all of Latin living.

Then suddenly for them the sliding panorama ceased. The car had stopped
and they had left it, and were standing upon the corner of a still
street that came down from the high hills behind them and crossed the
car-track and climbed again a little way to curve over into the sky.
Dingy houses two blocks above them stood silhouetted against the blue.
They were walking upward toward this horizon, leaving color and motion
behind them. With every step the street grew more empty, lonely and
colorless. Many of the windows that glimmered at them, passing, were
the blank windows of empty houses. Were they taking this way, this
curious roundabout out-of-the-world way, of dropping over into the
shipping which lay under the hill? For all she knew this might really be
his notion, for since they had left the garden gate, though they had
looked together at the light and color of the pictures moving past their
eyes, they had not exchanged a word.

But all at once he stopped at the intersection of two dusty streets, and
his eyes veered down the four perspectives like a voyageur taking his
soundings. Elegant as ever and odd enough, yet he wasn't any odder here
at the jumping off place of nowhere than he had appeared in the box at
the theater, or in the picture gallery. She had the clear impression all
at once that he wasn't too odd for anything.

"Here we are!" he said, and indicated with his glittering stick straight
before them a little house. It was low, as if it crouched against the
wind, faded and beaten by the sun to the drab of the rock itself, and
made so secret with tight-drawn curtains that it seemed to have shut
itself up against the world for ever. She wavered. She wasn't afraid of
herself out here, out-of-doors under the sky, but she was afraid that
those four walls might shut out her new unreasoning joy, might steal
away his new tenderness, and bring her back face to face with the same
ugly fact that had confronted her in her drawing-room.

"Oh, no," she said, and put her hands behind her with a determination
that she wasn't going to move.

"Oh, yes," he said, but he didn't smile. He looked at her quite gravely,
reproachfully, and the touch of his fingers on her arm was fine, was
delicate, as if to say, "I wouldn't harm you for the world."

She blushed a slow, painful crimson. She hadn't meant that. She hadn't
even thought of it; but, since he had, there was nothing for it but to
go in. The door shut behind her sharply, with a click like a little
trap; and she breathed such an atmosphere, flat, faint and stale, the
mere ghost of some fuller, more fragrant flavor. In the little anteroom
where they stood, whose faded ceiling all but brushed their heads, and
in the larger little room beyond the Nottingham lace curtains, prevailed
a mild shabbiness, a respectable decay. Curtains and table-cloths alike
showed a dull and tempered whiteness as if the shadow of time had fallen
dim across the whole. The little restaurant seemed left behind in the
onward march of the city, and its faded, kindly face was but a shadow of
what had been of the vigor and flourish of bourgeois Spain thirty years
before. There was no one eating at the little tables, no one sitting
behind the high cash-desk in the anteroom. Not a stir of human life in
all the place.

"Hello," said Kerr among the tables looking around him, "we've caught
them asleep." He rapped on the wall with his cane. Flora peered at him
between the curtains, all her fascinated apprehension of what was to
follow plain upon her face. "Shall it be a giant or dwarf?" he asked
her. "There's nothing I won't do for you, you know."

The door opened and a little girl with a long black braid and purple
apron came in.

"A dwarf," cried Flora. She laughed with a quick relaxing of her
strained nerves. It might almost have been the truth from that old
little swarthy face and sedate demeanor that hardly noticed them. The
child walked gravely up to the desk and mounting to the high stool
struck a faint-voiced bell.

"There," said Kerr, "ends formality. Now let the real magic begin!"

"Not black magic," Flora took up his fancy.

He had drawn out a chair for her. "That depends on you. I'm not the
magic maker. I have no talisman."

She felt the conscious jewel burn in her possession. She looked up
beseechingly at him, but he only laughed, and, with a swing, lifted the
chair a little off the ground as he set her up to the table, as if to
show how easily he could put forth strength. There was nothing defiant
in him. He was taking her with him--taking her upon the wings of his
high spirits; but mischievously, obstinately, he would not show her
where the flight was leading, nor let her listen to anything but the
rustling of those wings. He was determined to make holiday, whatever was
to follow. For the glimpse of blue through the dim window might be the
Bay of Naples; and, ah! Chianti. Perhaps the sort one gets down Monte
Video way, where France fades into Italy--perhaps, at least if her kind
fancy could get the better of the reality. In Sicily there were just
such table-cloths as these, and just such fat floor-shaking contadini to
wait upon you. And look now at the purple one behind the desk--child or
gnome--feet not touching the floor--centuries of Italy in her face. Oh,
calculation, indifference!

"She wouldn't care if you jumped up and threw me out of the window," he
affirmed. "That's why this hole is so harmless. Oh, isn't that harmless?
What's more harmless than to let one alone? There's only one dangerous
thing here," he grinned and let her take her choice of which.

She came straight at it.

"You know I can't let you alone."

He laughed. "Well, isn't that why we're here at last--that you may
dictate your terms?"

"I have. Didn't you get my letter?"

"Oh, indeed I did. Haven't I obeyed it? Haven't I kept away from your
house? Have I tried to approach you?"

"Haven't you, though?" she threw at him accusingly.

"Ah," he deprecated, "you came to me. I was down in the garden."

She looked at him through his persiflage wistfully, searchingly. "But
there were other things in that letter."

"There were?" He regarded her with grave surprise. Oh, how she
mistrusted his gravity! "Why, to be sure there were things--things that
you didn't mean--one thing above all others you couldn't mean, that you
want me to drop out when the game is half done, to slink away and leave
it all like this--abandon you and my Idol so to each other! My dear, for
what do you take me?"

She burst out. "But can't you see the danger?"

He met it quietly.

"Certainly. I have been seeing nothing else but the danger--to you. Do
you think I've been idle all these days? Every line I have followed has
ended in that. It's brought me finally to this." The gesture of his hand
included their predicament and the dingy little room. "You'll really
have to help me, after all."

"Oh, haven't I tried to? That is why I wrote. Don't you see your own
danger at all?"

"No, but I'd like to." He leaned toward her, brows lifted to a quizzical
peak.

"Oh, I can't tell you," she despaired. "But somehow I shall have to make
you go."

"That will be easy," he said. Leaning back, nursing his chin in his
hand, he watched her with a gloomy sort of brooding. "You know what it
is I'm waiting for. You know I won't go without it." His words came
sadly, but doggedly, with a grim finality, as if he gave himself up to
the course he was following as something he knew was inevitable. The
faintness of despair came over her. Only the narrow table was between
them, yet all at once, with the mention of the ring, he seemed a long
way off. What was this terrible obsession that outweighed every other
consideration with him? How get at it? How get through it? Or was it
between them for ever?

"Do you care for it so very much?" she asked him, trembling but valiant.

"I care so very much," he repeated slowly, and after a moment of wonder:
"Why, don't you?"

"Oh, not for that," she cried sharply. "Not for the sapphire!"

He stared. She had startled him clean out of his brooding. "In Heaven's
name, for what, then?"

Oh, she could never tell him it was for him! In her distress and
embarrassment she looked all ways.

His quick white finger touched her on the wrist. "For Cressy?"

The abrupt stern note of his question startled her. She held herself
stiff and still for a moment, then: "For every one in this wretched
business. I have to."

"Ah," he sighed out the satisfaction of his long uncertainty, "then
Cressy _is_ in it."

"No, I didn't mean that--you mustn't think it--I can't discuss him with
you!" She was hot to recapture her fugitive admission.

"Don't let that disturb you. You haven't given him away to me. I had all
I'm likely to get from the man himself."

"He--he told you?" she faltered.

"He told me nothing. Don't you know that he misdoubts me? I got it out
of him, by sleight of hand--where we had met before. Has he never told
you anything of that morning when we left your house together?"

"Never." The admission cost her an effort.

He mused at her. "As I said, he told _me_ nothing, but it occurred to me
when he came in that we might be there on the same errand."

She paled. "You mean--?"

"I mean I thought it might be safer all around that you should not see
him that morning; so I got him away. He hasn't asked you for it since?"

"The sapphire?" she faltered. "No!" The more her instinct warned that it
had been the jewel Harry had returned for, the more she repudiated the
idea to Kerr.

"Why should you think he came for that? What has he to do with it?" she
murmured.

"My God! how you do champion him!" He leaned forward sharply across the
table. "What is this man to you?"

He was going too far. He had no right to that question. "The man I have
promised to marry." Her hot look, her cold manner defied him to command
her here. Yet for a moment, leaning forward with his clenched hands on
the table, he looked ready to spring up and force her words back on
her. The next he let it go and dropped back in his chair again.

"Quite so," he said. "But I didn't believe it." He stared at her with a
dull, profound resentment. "Yet it's most possible; since it isn't the
sapphire it would be that." He mused. "But, you extraordinary woman, why
on earth--" he broke off, still looking at her, looking with a
persistent, sharp, studying eye, as if she were the most puzzling and,
it came to her gradually, the most dubious thing on earth. He was verily
a magician, a worker of black magic; for under the spell of his eyes she
felt herself turning into something horrible. However innocent she was
in intention, the ugly appearance was covering her.

"Then what are you doing here with the ring on you?" he demanded
solemnly. "Why are you dealing with me? What do you think you'll get out
of it? Good God! women are hideous! How can you betray the man you
love?"

"Oh," she cried, with a wail of horror. She stood up trembling and pale.
"I don't--I don't--I don't! I've kept it from them. I'm standing
against them all. I shall never give it to them. When have I ever
betrayed you?"

He drew back, away from her, as if to ward off her meaning, but she
leaned toward him, her hands flung out, holding herself up to him for
all she meant. He got up slowly and the creeping tide of red, dusky and
violent, rising over his face, swelling his features, darkening his
eyes, hung before her like a banner of shame.

"I didn't know, I didn't know," he repeated in a low voice. His eyes
were on the ground. Then, with a sharp motion, as if merely standing in
front of her was unendurable, "Oh, Lord!" he said, and, turning, walked
from her toward the window. He went precipitately, as if he meant to go
through it, but he only leaned against it and stood motionless; and from
her side of the table, trembling, breathless, she watched his stricken
silhouette black upon the gray, fading light.

The knowledge of how far she had gone, of how much she had betrayed
herself, swelled and swelled before her mind until it seemed to fill
her life, but she looked at it hardily and unabashed. All the decencies
in the world should sink before he thought her a traitor. She came
softly up beside him.

"Don't be sorry for what I told you."

"I'm not," he said. His voice sounded muffled. He did not look at her,
only held out his arm in a mute sign to her to come. She felt it around
her, but it was a mere symbol of protection. It lay limp on her
shoulder, and he continued to stare through the window at the street.
"I'm not sorry for what you said," he repeated slowly. "I'm glad; but,
child, I wish it wasn't true."

"Don't, don't!" she besought him, "for I don't."

He gave her a look. "That's beautiful of you, but"--and he turned to the
window again and spoke to himself--"it puts an awful face on my
business. All along you've made me think for you, and of you, more than
you deserve, more than I can afford." The stare she gave this forced out
of him a reluctant smile. "Why, didn't you know it? Do you think I
couldn't have had the sapphire that first night I saw it on your hand,
if it hadn't been--well, for the way I thought of you? I fancied you
knew that then." He made a restless movement. His arm fell from her
shoulder. "There's been only one thing to do from the first," he said,
"and I don't see my way to it."

"Oh, don't take it! Leave it!" she pleaded. "Leave it with me! What does
it matter so much? A jewel! If only you would leave it and go away from
me!"

He whirled on her. "In Heaven's name, a fine piece of logic! Leave the
sapphire to people who can make no better use of it than I? Leave you to
go on with this business and marry this Cressy? Even suppose you gave me
the sapphire, I couldn't let you do that!"

"If I gave you the sapphire," Flora said, "oh, he wouldn't marry me
then!" She couldn't tell how this had come to her, but all at once it
was clear, like a sign of her complete failure; but Kerr only wondered
at her distress.

"Well, if you don't want to marry him, what do you care?"

"Oh, I don't, I don't care for that." She sank back listlessly in her
chair again. She couldn't explain, but in her own mind she knew that if
she lost the sapphire she would so lose in her own esteem; so fail at
every point that counted, that she would never be able to see or be seen
in the world again as the same creature. Even to Kerr--even to him to
whom she would have yielded she would have become a different thing. She
realized now she had staked everything on the premise that she wouldn't
have to yield; and now it began to appear to her that she would. His
weakness was appearing now as a terrible strength, a strength that
seemed on the point of crushing her, but it could never convince her.
That strength of his had brought her here. Was it to happen here, that
strange thing she had foreseen, the end of her? Was it here she was to
lose the sapphire, and him?

She looked vaguely around the room, at the most impassive aspect of the
place, as at a place she never expected to leave; the darkening
windows, the fast-shut door, the child leaning on the desk, watching
them with sharp, incurious eyes--this would be her niche for ever. She
would be left for ever with the crusts and the dregs. And Kerr's figure
in the twilight seemed each time it moved to be on the point of
vanishing into the grayness. He moved continually up and down the narrow
spaces between the tables. He troubled the dry repose of the place.
Sometimes he looked at her, studying, questioning, undecided. Once he
stopped, as if just there an idea had arrested him. He looked at her, as
if, she thought, he were afraid of her. Then for long moments he stood
looking blankly, steadily out of the window. He did not approach her. He
seemed to avoid her, until, as though he had come at last to his
decision, he walked straight up to her and stood above her. She rose to
meet him. He was smiling.

"Don't you know that you could easily get rid of me?" he demanded.
"Cressy would be too glad to do it for you; and there are more ways
than one that I could get the sapphire from you, if I could face the
idea of it--but really, really we care too much for each other. There's
only one way out for you and me and the sapphire. I'll take you both."

Her clenched hands opened and fell at her sides. A great wave of
helplessness flowed over her. Her eyes, her throat filled up with a rush
of blinding tears. She put out her hands, trying to thrust him off, but
he took the wrists and held them apart, and held her a moment helpless
before him.

"Oh, no," she whispered.

"But I love you."

Her head fell back. She looked at him as if he had spoken the
incredible.

"I love you," he repeated, "though God knows how it has happened!"

The blood rushed to her heart.

He was drawing her nearer.

She felt his breath upon her face; she saw the image of herself in his
eyes. She started to herself on the edge of danger, and made a struggle
to release her wrists. He let them go. She sank down into her chair.

"Why not? Why won't you go with me?" she heard him say again, still
close beside her.

"I can't, I can't!" She clung to the words, but for the moment she had
forgotten her reasons. She had forgotten everything but the wonderful
fact that he loved her. He was there within reach, and she had only to
stretch out her hand, only to say one word, and he would cut through the
ranks of her perplexities and terrors, and carry her away.

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