The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance

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"Why not, if you love me?" he insisted. "Are you afraid of those people?
Are you afraid of Cressy? He shall never come near you."

She shook her head. "No, it isn't that."

He stooped and looked into her face. "Then what keeps you?"

She looked up slowly.

"My honor."

"Your honor!" For a moment her answer seemed to have him by surprise. He
mused, and again it came dreamily back to her that he was looking at
her across a vast difference no will of hers could ever bridge.

"Don't you see what I am?" she murmured. "Can't you imagine where I
stand in this hideous business? It's my trust. I'm on their side; and,
oh, in spite of everything, I can't make myself believe in giving it to
you!"

He pondered this very gravely.

"Yes, I can see how you might feel that way. But is the feeling really
yours? Are you sure they haven't put it on you? Might not my honor do as
well for you, if you were mine?" It struck her she had never connected
him with honor, and he read her thought with a flash of humor.
"Evidently it hasn't occurred to you that I have an honor."

She looked at him sadly. "In spite of everything I'm on the other side.
I belong to them."

"You belong to me." His hand closed on hers. "Mine is the only honor you
have to think of. Can't you trust that I am right? Can't you see it
through my eyes? Can't you make yourself all mine?" His arm was around
her now, holding her fast, but she turned her face away, and his kisses
fell only on her cheek and hair.

"Oh," she cried, "if only I could!"

"Don't you love me?"

"Oh, yes, but that makes me see, all the more, the dreadful difference
between us."

"You silly child, there is no difference, really."

"Ah, yes, you know it as well as I. You were afraid of it, too. All that
long time you were walking around you were wondering whether you dared
to take me."

He denied her steadily, "Never!"

She loved him for that gallant denial, for she knew he had been afraid,
horribly afraid, more afraid than she was now; but that strange quality
of his that gave to a double risk a double zest had set him all the
hotter on this resolution.

He sat for some long moments thoughtfully looking straight before him.
She, glancing at his profile, white and faintly glimmering in the
twilight, thought it looked sharp, absorbed and set. She could see his
great determination growing there in the gloom between them, looming
and overshadowing them both.

"I see," he said at last. "I'll simply have to take you in spite of it."
He turned around to her, and reached his hands down through the dusk.
She was being drawn up into arms which she could not see. Her hands were
clasped around a neck, her cheek was against a face which she had never
hoped to touch. Her reason and her fears were stifled and caught away
from her lips with her breath. She was giving up to her awful weakness.
She was giving up to the power of love. She was letting herself sink
into it as she would sink into deep water. The sense of drowning in this
profound, unfathomable element, of shutting her eyes and opening her
arms to it, was the highest she had ever touched; but all at once the
memory of what she was leaving behind her, like a last glimpse of sky,
swept her with fear. She made a desperate effort to rescue herself
before the waters quite closed over her head.

She pulled herself free. Without his arms around her for the first
moment she could hardly stand. She took an uncertain step forward; then
with a rush she reached the white curtains. They flapped behind her. She
heard Kerr laugh, a note, quiet, caressing, almost content. It came from
the gloom like a disembodied voice of triumph. Her rush had carried her
into the middle of the anteroom. At this last moment was there to be no
miracle to save her? There was no rescue among these dumb walls and
closed-up windows. The purple child gave her a sharp, bird-like glance,
as if the most that this wild woman could want was "change." Flora
looked behind her and saw Kerr, who had put aside the curtains and was
standing looking at her. He was bright and triumphant in that twilight
room. He was not afraid of losing her now. He knew in that one moment he
had imprisoned her for ever! She saw him approaching, but though all her
mind and spirit strained for flight, something had happened to her will.
It tottered like her knees.

He stooped and picked up an artificial rose, which had fallen from her
hat, and put it into her hand. A moment, with his head bent, he stood
looking into her face, but without touching her.

"Sit down over there," he said, and pointed toward a chair against the
wall. She went meekly like a prisoner. He spoke to the child in the
purple apron, who was still sitting behind the desk. He put some money
on the cash-desk in front of her. It was gold. It shone gorgeously in
the dull surrounding, and the child pounced upon it, incredulous of her
luck. Then he turned, crossed the room, soundlessly opened the door, and
went out into the violet dark of the street.

The child furtively tested her coin, biting it as if to taste the
glitter, and Flora waited, lost, given up by herself, passively watching
for the room to be filled again with his presence. He was back after a
long minute, and this time took up his stand at the door, where, pushing
aside the tight-drawn curtain a little, from time to time he looked out
into the street. Sometimes his eyes followed the cracks of the
plastered wall, sometimes he studied the floor at his feet; every moment
she saw he was alert, expectantly watching and waiting; and though he
never looked at her sitting behind him, she felt his protection between
her and the darkening street. She sat in the shadow of it, feeling it
all around her, claiming her as it would claim her henceforth, from, the
world. A ghost of light glimmered along the curtains of the window, and
stopped, quivering, in the middle of the curtained door. Then he turned
about and beckoned her. Sheer weakness kept her sitting. He went to her,
took her face between his hands, and looked into it long and intently.

"You don't want to go!" The words fell from his lips like an accusal.
His sudden realization of what she felt held him there dumb with
disappointment. "You have won me," her look was saying, "and yet I have
immediately become a worthless thing, because I am going; and I don't
believe in going." She felt she had failed him--how cruelly, was written
in his face. But it was only for a moment that she made him hesitate.
The next he shook himself free.

"Well, come," he said.

She felt that all doors would fly open at his bidding. She felt herself
swept powerless at his will with all the yielding in her soul that she
had felt in her body when his arms were around her. He had taken her by
the hand--he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights
flared--the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the
unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of
the carriage waiting before the door. It all glimmered before her--a
picture she might never see again--might not see after she passed
through the carriage door that gaped for her. The will that had swept
her out of the door was moving her beyond her own will, as it had moved
her that morning in the garden, beyond all things that she knew. There
was no feeling left in her but the despair of extreme surrender.

She found herself in the carriage. She saw his face in the carriage door
as pale as anger, yet not angry; it was some bigger thing that looked
at her from his eyes. He looked a long while, as if he bade her never to
forget this moment. Then, "I'll give you twenty-four hours," he said.
"This man will take you home." He shut the carriage door--shut it
between them. Before she had gathered breath he had straightened, fallen
back, raised his hat, and the carriage was turning. Flora thrust her
head, straw hat and ribbons out of the window.

"Oh, I love you!" she called to him. She sank back in the cushions and
covered her face with her hands.

XVIII

GOBLIN TACTICS

For a little she kept her face hidden, shutting out the present,
jealously living with the wonderful thing that had happened to her. It
was as wonderful as anything she had dreamed might come when she had
written him that letter. And if she needed any proof of his love, she
had had it in the moment when he had let her go. There he had
transcended her hope. She felt lifted up, she felt triumphant, though
the triumph had not been hers. It was all his; he had saved her from her
own weakness; his was the miracle. How he shone to her! The dark,
swaying hollow of the carriage seemed still full of his presence, full
of his hurried whispering; and again she seemed to see him standing
outside the window in the deep blue evening holding out his hands to her
cry of "I love you!"

He had been wonderful in a way she had not expected. He had shown her so
beautifully that he could be reached in spite of his obsession. Might
not she hope to touch him just a little further? Was there any height
now that he might not rise to? She seemed to see the possible end of it
all shaping itself out of his magnanimity. She seemed to see him finally
relinquishing his passion for the jewel, and his passion for her for the
sake of something finer than both. She had seen it foreshadowed in what
he had done this day--having them both in his hands, he had put them
away from him. Yet in that action she knew there had been no finality.
She had touched him, but she had not convinced him, and as long as he
was unconvinced he would be at her again in some other way.

Her hands dropped from her face, and she confronted the fact drearily.
"No," she thought, "he never gives up what he wants."

She looked out of the window. The flickers of gas-lamps fell
intermittently through it upon her. Her queer vehicle was rattling
crazily--jolting as if every spring were at its last leap. She was out
of the quiet, blue street. Montgomery Avenue, with its lights, its
glittering gilt names and Latin insignia, was traveling by on either
side of her. The voice of the city was growing louder in her ears, the
crowd on the pavement increased. At intervals the carriage dipped
through glares of electric lights that illuminated its interior in a
flash broader than day--the ragged cushions, the raveled tassels, the
limp-swinging shutters, and, glimmering in the midst, wild and
disheveled, herself in all the little wavy mirrors. She sat looking out
at the maze of moving lights and figures without seeing them, intent on
an idea that was growing clearer, larger, moment by moment in her mind.

Kerr's appearance in her garden--his capture of her--had not been the
fantastic freak it had seemed. He had had his purpose. He had taken her
out of her environment; he had carried her beyond succor or menace just
that he might carry them both so much further and faster through their
differences. They had not reached the point of agreement yet, but might
they not on some other ground, where they could be unchallenged? It
seemed to her if she could only meet him on her own ground for
once--instead of for ever on Clara's or Harry's--only meet him alone,
somewhere beyond their reach, it might be accomplished, it might be
brought to the end she so wished. Yet where to go to be rid of Clara and
Harry, the two so closely associated with every fact of her life?

The hack, which had been moving along at a rapid pace, slowed now to a
walk among the thickening traffic, and from a mere moving mass the crowd
appeared as individuals--a stream of dark figures and white faces. Her
eyes slipped from one to another. Here one stood still on the lamp-lit
corner, looking down, with lips moving quickly and silently. It was
strange to see those rapid, eager, moving lips with no sound from them
audible. Then her eyes were startled by something familiar in the
figure, though the direct down-glare of the ball of light above him
distorted the features with shadows. She pressed her face against the
window-glass in palpitating doubt. It was Harry.

She cowered in the corner of the carriage. In a moment the risks of her
situation were before her. Had he seen her? Oh, no, at least not yet. He
had been too intent on whomever he was talking to. She peered to make
sure that he was still safely on the street corner. He was just
opposite, and now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear
space around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very
small, shabby, nondescript man--possibly only a boy, so short he seemed.
His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd
un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could
explain--Italian, Portuguese, Greek--whatever he was, he was a strange
foil to Harry, so bright and burnished.

The hack was turning. She realized with dismay that it was turning sharp
around that very corner where they stood. Suppose Harry should chance to
glance through its window and see Flora Gilsey sitting trembling within.
The hack wheezed and cramped, and all at once she heard it scrape the
curb. Then she was lost! She looked up brave in her desperation, ready
to meet Harry's eyes. She saw the back of his head. For a moment it
loomed directly above her, then it moved. He was separating from his
companion. With one stride he vanished out of the square frame of the
window, and there remained full fronting her, staring in upon her, the
face of his companion.

Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop--dull hues and odors all
at once--and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other
side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white
light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly.

The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless,
powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued
its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney,
where at this hour the town was widest awake, and the crowd was a crowd
she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of
the florists' shops and restaurants, or passing her in carriages. And
what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a
night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a
mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The
only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the
blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner.

She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was
carrying forward somewhere out of her sight--such a glimpse as Clara had
given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her
hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs
of danger, as a lone general at a last stand with his troops clustered
at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the
glitter of bayonets in the bushes.

She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming
lights and crowds were all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon
it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually--and there her
eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she
saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background--a
short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a
blue-eyed Chinaman.

He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was
alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already
seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pass his way. It was
uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing
as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless.
It was worse than uncanny.

All at once an idea, wild and illogical enough, jumped up in her mind.
Couldn't this miserable vehicle that was lumbering like a disabled bug
move faster and rattle her on out of reach of the glare, the publicity,
the threat of discovery, and, above all, of her discomforting notion?
She breathed out relief as the carriage dipped into the comparative
quiet again, and she felt herself being driven on and up a gently rising
street between block-apart, lone gas-lamps. She thrust her face as far
out of the window as she dared, looking back at the lights and traffic
which were drifting behind her. At this distance she could single out no
one figure from the crowd, and no figure which could possibly be that of
the blue-eyed Chinaman was moving up the street behind her. There only
remained a disquieting memory of him on the corner with Harry. Together
they made a combination, to her mind, threatening to the man she loved,
for whom she so desperately feared.

If ever she had felt herself helpless, it was in this moment passing
along the half-lit, half-empty city street. By what she knew, by what
she wore around her neck, she was separated from all peace-abiding
citizens--she was outlawed. Every closed door and shaded window (so many
she had opened or looked out of!) now seemed shut and shaded against her
for ever. Night and the reticent gray city, averting their eyes, let
her slip through unregarded.

She was passing that section of large, old-fashioned mansions, cupolaed,
towered, indistinct at the top of their high, broad steps, or back among
the trees of their gardens. Along the front of one stretched a high
hedge of laurestinas black as a ribbon of the night, capacious of
shadows; and it seemed to Flora that all at once a shadow detached
itself. She looked with a start. It flashed along the pavement--if
shadow it were--running head down with a strange, scattering movement of
arms and legs, yet seeming to make such speed that for a moment it kept
abreast of the cab. She could see no features, no lineament of this
strange thing to recognize, yet instantly she knew what it must be--what
she had feared and thought impossible. She thrust her head far out and
addressed the driver.

"Go as fast as you can, faster! and I'll give you twice what he gave
you." The words rang so wildly to her own ears that she half expected
the driver to peer down like an old bird of prey from his perch and
demand her reason. But he made no sound or sign. It may have been that
in his time he had heard even wilder requests than hers. He only sent
his whip cracking forward to the ears of the lean horse, and the cab
began to rattle like a mad thing.

Flora leaned back with a sigh of relief. The mere sensation of being
borne along at such a rate, the sight of houses, lamp-posts, even people
here and there, flitting away from the eye, unable to interrupt her
course, or even to glimpse her identity, gave her a feeling of safety.
The more she was getting into the residence part of the city, the more
deserted the streets, the closer shut the windows of the houses, the
more it seemed to her as if the night itself covered and abetted her
flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held
together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent
carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a
cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky,
moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little
fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp--the only living thing in sight.
It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in
front of her, waiting for her, who had driven so fast--too fast, it had
seemed, for human foot to follow. By what unimaginable route had he
traveled? She was ready to believe he had flown over the housetops. And
above all other horrors, why was he pursuing her?

The carriage was abreast the Chinaman now, and immediately he took up
his trot, for a little while keeping up, dodging along between light and
shadow, presently falling behind. At intervals she heard the patter,
patter, patter of his footsteps following; at intervals she lost the
sound, and shadows would engulf the figure, and she would wait in a
panic for its reappearance. For she knew it was there somewhere, on one
side of the street or the other. But, oh, not to see it! To expect at
any moment it might start up again--Heaven knew where, perhaps at her
very carriage window. Her unconscious hand was doubled to a fist upon
her breast, fast closed upon the sapphire.

With all her body braced, she leaned and looked far backward, and far
forward, and now for a long time saw nothing. The distance was empty.
The glare of arc-lights showed her the shadows of her own progress--the
shadow of her vehicle shooting huge and misshapen now on the cobbles,
now along a blank wall, wheels, body and driver, all lurching like one;
now heaped on each other, now tenuously drawn out, now twisting
themselves into shapes the mind could not account for. For here,
whirling the corner, the carriage seemed to wave an arm, and now between
the wheels, fast twinkling, she saw a pair of legs. She leaned and
looked, so mesmerized with this grotesque appearance that it scarcely
troubled her that all the way down the last long hill she knew it must
be that a man was running at her wheel.

The warm lights of her house were just before her, offering succor,
stiffening courage. It would be but a dash from the door of the cab to
her own door. There was no second course, once the cab stopped. She felt
that to lurk in its gloom would mean robbery, perhaps death. She thought
without fear, but with an intense calculation. Her hand held the door at
swing as the cab drew up. Before it should stop she must leap. She
gathered her skirts and sprang--sprang clean to the sidewalk. The steps
of her house rushed by her in her upward flight. Her bell pealed. She
covered her eyes.

For the moment before Shima opened the door there was nothing but
darkness and silence. She had never been so glad of anything in her life
as of the kind, astute, yellow face he presented to her distressed
appeal.

"Shima," she panted, "pay the cab; and if there's any one else there say
that I'll call the police--no, no, send him away." There was no question
or hesitation in Shima's obedience. Through the glass of the door she
watched him descend upon his errand, until he disappeared over the edge
of the illumination of the vestibule. She waited, dimly aware of voices
going on beyond the curtains of the drawing-room, but all her listening
power was concentrated on the silence without--a silence that remained
unbroken, and out of which Shima returned with the same imperturable
countenance.

"He wants ten dollars."

"Oh, yes, give him anything," Flora gasped. If that was all the Chinaman
had followed her for! But her relief was momentary, for instantly Shima
was back again.

"I gave him ten dollars, the cabman."

Now she gasped indeed. "Oh, the cabman! But the other one!" For an
instant Shima seemed to hesitate; glancing past her shoulder as if there
was something that he doubted behind her. Then as she still hung on his
answer he brought it out in a lowered voice.

"Madam, there was no one else there."

XIX

THE FACE IN THE GARDEN

With her hand at her distressed forehead she turned, and saw, between
the curtains of the drawing-room, Harry, and behind him Clara, looking
out at her with faces of amazement, and she fancied, horror. Harry came
straight for her.

"Why, you poor child, what's happened to you?"

She gave him a look. She couldn't forget their scene in the red room,
but the mixture of apprehension and real concern in his face went far
toward melting her. She might even have told him something, at least a
part of the truth, but for that other standing watching her from the
drawing-room door. With Clara, there was nothing for it but to ignore
her disordered hair, her hat in her hand, her ruffle torn and trailing
on the floor.

She put on a splendid nonchalance, as if it were none of their business.
"Oh, I am sorry if I kept you waiting."

It was Clara who spoke to her, past Harry's blank astonishment. "Why, we
don't mind waiting a few moments more while you dress."

"I shan't have to dress." Such a statement Flora felt must amaze even
Shima, waiting like an image on the threshold of the dining-room. But if
these people were waiting to be amazed she felt herself equal to amazing
them to the top of their expectations.

"Oh, but at least go up and let Marrika give you some pins," Clara
protested, hurrying forward as if fairly to drive her.

"Thank you, no, this will do," Flora said. On one point she was quite
clear. She wasn't going to leave those two together for a moment to
discuss her plight; not till she could first get at Harry alone. Then
and there she turned to the mirror and with her combs began to catch
back and smooth the disorder of her hair, seeing all the while Clara's
reflection hovering perturbed and vigilant in the background of her own.

While her hands were busy seeming to accommodate Clara, her mind was
marshaled to Clara's outwitting. The only thing to do was to tell
nothing. Let Clara spend her time in guessing. Unless by some wild
chance she had seen Kerr in the garden she couldn't come near the truth
of what had happened. But what was to be done with Harry? Harry was too
close to her to be ignored. Her attitude toward him had undergone a
change. In the moment in the red room, when she had seen him break the
one feeling that had held her to him, the feeling of awe and respect had
evaporated. She felt that it was quite impossible now for them to go on
on the same footing; yet, as long as she kept the sapphire she must
somehow manage to keep up an appearance of it. She must tell him
something.

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