The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance

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At that dreadful dinner, where she sat a conscious frustrater of these
two silent ones, glancing at Harry's face, she knew that if she didn't
attack she would be attacked by him. It was here in the midst of the
noiseless passings of Shima, watching Harry's suspicious glances
flashing across the table at her strange disorder, that the idea
occurred to her of a way out of it. She was bold enough to try a daring
thrust at the mystery. If ever a hunter was to be led off on a false
scent, Harry was that one. She was amazed at the sudden, fearless
impulse that had sprung up in her. She wasn't even afraid to say to him
under Clara's nose, "Harry, I want you to myself after dinner. Come up
into the garden study."

He was very willing to follow her. She thought she detected in his
alacrity something more than curiosity or concern. It seemed almost as
if Harry was ashamed of that scene in the red room, and anxious to make
it up with her. He even tried before they had reached the head of the
stairs. "Oh, Flora--I say, Flora, I--"

But an explanation between them was the last thing she wanted just then.
She fairly ran, leaving him panting in the wake of her airy skirts.

For the first time since the thing began Clara was left out completely.
Flora knew she was even left out of a possibility of listening at the
keyhole. For the bright, tight, little room into which Harry followed
her was approached by a square entry and a double door. The room itself
overhung the garden as a ship's deck overhangs the sea. Leather books
and long red curtains were the note of it. She and Harry had often been
here together before. Harry had made love to her here, and she had found
it pleasurable enough. But the fact that she could recall it now with
distaste made this familiar surrounding seem strange, and they
themselves strangest of all.

He hadn't got his breath. He had hardly shut the door on them before she
began. "Well, something has happened." She had his attention. His other
purpose was arrested. "Oh, something extraordinary. I would have told
you on the spot, only I thought you would rather Clara didn't know it."

"I?" That left him staring. "What have I to do with it?"

At this she gave him a long look. "It was through you he ever had the
chance of seeing me. I mean the blue-eyed Chinaman. He has followed me
all the evening. He followed me here to the very door." Flora's array of
facts fell so fast, so hard, so pointed, that for a moment they held him
speechless in the middle of the room.

Any fleeting suspicion she might have had of his complicity in the
Chinaman's pursuit vanished. He showed plain bewilderment. For a moment
he was more at sea than herself. The next she saw the shadow of a
thought so disturbing that it sharpened his ruddy face to harshness. He
stepped toward her. "What did he say to you?" He loomed directly above
her, threatening.

"Nothing. He didn't say anything. But I know he followed me quite to
the house, for I saw his shadow all the way down the hill."

Harry still breathed quickly. "Where--how did he come across you?"

She'd been prepared for that question.

"I was driving down Sutter Street and he saw me at the carriage window."

Harry stood tense, poised, catching everything as she tossed it off;
then as if all at once he felt the full weight of the burden, "Lord!" he
said, and let himself down heavily into a chair. It was plain in his
helpless stare that he knew exactly what it all meant. Laying her hands
on the high chair-arms, leaning down so that she could look into his
face, Flora made her thrust.

"What do you think he wants?" she gently asked. It was as if she would
coax it out of him. His answer was correspondingly low and soft.

"It's that damned ring."

She heard her secret fear spoken aloud with such assurance that she
waited, certain at the next moment Harry's voice would people the
silence with all the facts that had so far escaped her. But when, after
a moment of looking before him he did speak, he went back to the
beginning, which they both knew.

"You know he didn't want to part with it in the first place."

"Yes, yes; but he did," Flora insisted.

"Well," he answered quickly, "but that was before--" He caught himself
and went on with a scarcely perceptible break: "He may have had a better
offer for it since."

He couldn't have put it more mildly, and yet that temperate phrase
brought back to her in a flash a windy night full of raucous voices and
the great figures in the paper that had covered half a page--the reward
for the Crew Idol. Could it be that--that sum so overwhelming to human
caution and human decency which Harry had cloaked by his grudging phrase
"some better offer"? What else could he mean? And what else could the
blue-eyed Chinaman mean by his strange pursuit of her?

"Some one must have wanted it awfully," Flora tried again, keeping step
with his mild admission.

Harry covered her with an impressive stare. "There's something queer
about that ring," he nodded to her. He was going to tell her at last!
She gazed at him in expectation, but presently she realized that nothing
more was coming. He had stopped at the beginning. She tried to urge him
on.

"Queer, what do you mean?" She was feigning surprise.

He looked at her cautiously. "Why, you must have noticed it yourself
when we were at the shop. And now, to-night, his having followed you."

She could see him hesitate, choosing his words. She knew well enough her
own fear of saying too much--but, what was Harry afraid of? Did he
suspect her feeling for Kerr? Was that why he was holding back, leaving
out, giving her the small, expurgated version of what he knew. She tried
again, making it plainer.

"You think the ring is something he ought not to have had; something
that belongs somewhere else?"

He looked away from her, around the room, as if to pick up his answer
from some of the corners. "Well, anyway, it's lucky we waited about that
setting," he said with quick irrelevance. "If you're going to be annoyed
in this way you'd better let me have it."

Why hadn't she thought of that! It was what any man might say, after
hearing such a story as hers, yet it was the last thing she had thought
of, and the last thing she wanted.

"Oh, leave it with me," she quavered, "at least till you're sure!"

"Oh, no!" He gave his head a quick, decided shake. "If something should
come out you wouldn't want to be mixed up in it."

"Then why not give it back to the Chinaman?" she tried him.

"Oh, that's ridiculous." He was in a passion. His darkening eyes, his
swelling nostrils, his aspect so out of proportion to her mild and
almost playful suggestion, frightened her. He saw it and instantly his
mood dropped to mere irritation. "Oh, Flora, don't make a scene about
it. This thing has been on my mind for days--the thought that you had
the ring. I was afraid I had no business to let you have it in the first
place, and what you've told me to-night has clean knocked me out. I
don't know what I'm saying. Come, let me have it; and if there's
anything queer about the business, at least we'll get it cleared up."

But, smiling, she retreated before him.

"Why, Flora," he argued, half laughing, but still with that dry end of
irritation in his voice, "what on earth do you want to keep the thing
for?"

By this time she backed against the window, and faced him. "Why, it's my
engagement ring."

He looked at her. She couldn't tell whether he was readiest to laugh or
rage.

"You gave it to me for that," she pleaded. "Why shouldn't I keep it,
until you give me a real reason for giving it up? If you really know
anything, why don't you tell me?" She was sure she had him there; but he
burst out at last:

"Well, for a fact, I know it is stolen!" He leaned toward her; and his
arms, still flung out with the hands open as argument had left them,
seemed to her frightened eyes all ready for her, ready with his last
argument, his strength.

Once before she had feared herself face to face with the same threat in
the eyes and body of another man, but here, her only fear was lest Harry
should get the sapphire away from her. His doing so would dash down no
ideal of him. It was mere physical terror that made her tremble and
raise her hand to her breast. Instantly she saw how she had betrayed the
sapphire again. He had taken hold of her wrist, and, twist as she might,
he held it, horribly gentle.

She pressed back against the glass until she felt it hard behind her.

"Harry," she whispered, "if you care anything, if you ever want me for
yours, you'll take your hands away." She meant it; she was sincere in
that moment, for all she shrank from him. Her body and mind would not
have been too great a price to give him for the sapphire.

But these he seemed to set aside as trivial. These he expected as a
matter of course; he was going to have that other thing, too--the thing
she had clung to as a man clings to life; and that now, parting from,
she would give up not without a struggle as sharp as that with which the
body gives up breath. She wrestled. He seemed all hands. He put aside
her struggles, her pleadings, as if they were thistle-down.

Then all at once she felt his arm around her neck. She couldn't move her
body. She could only turn her head from his hot breath. For a moment he
held her, and yet another moment; and then, terrified at what this
strange immobility might mean, she raised her eyes and saw he was not
looking at her. Though he held her fast he was not conscious of her.
Straight over her head he looked, through the window and down, into the
garden. Her eyes followed. It lay beneath, the wonder of its morning
aspect all blanched and dim. She saw the silhouette of rose branches in
black on the sky. She saw the flowers and bushes all one dull tone. But
in the midst of them the oval of the path shone white; and there, as in
the afternoon, standing, looking upward, was the dark figure of a man.

Her heart gave a great leap. Just so she'd been summoned once before
that day, but what infernal freak had fetched him back to repeat that
dangerous sally, and brought him finally into his enemy's grasp? She
tried to make a gesture to warn him, and just there Harry released her,
dropped her so that she half fell upon the window-seat, and made a dash
across the room for the light. In a moment they were in darkness. In a
moment, to Flora pressed against the window, the garden sprang clear,
and on the formless figure below the face appeared, white in the
starlight looking up. She cried out in wonder. It was not Kerr. It was
the blue-eyed Chinaman.

After her haunted drive, after her escape, after Shima's search, he was
there, still inexorably there; small, diminished by the great facade of
the house, but looking up at it with his calm eye, surveying it,
measuring its height, numbering its doors, trying its windows. Harry was
beside her again. He was tugging frantically at the window. It resisted.
She saw his hands trembling while he wrestled with it. Then it went
shrieking up and he leaned out.

"What do you want?" he called, and, though he used no name, Flora saw he
knew with whom he was speaking. The Chinaman stood immobile, lifting his
round, white face, whose mouth seemed to gape a little. Harry leaned far
out and lowered his voice.

"Go away, Joe! Don't come here; never come here!" There was a quiver in
his voice. Anger or apprehension, or both, whatever his passion was, for
the moment it overwhelmed him, and as the Chinaman stood unmoved,
unmoving, at his commands, Harry turned sharp from the window and dashed
out of the room. Flora heard him running, running down the stairs. She
hung there breathless, waiting to see him meet the motionless figure;
but while she looked and waited that motionless figure suddenly took
life. It moved, it turned, it flitted, it mixed with shadows, became a
shadow; and then there was nothing there.

Nothing was there when Harry burst out of the garden door and stood
staring in the empty oval. How distracted, how violent he looked, balked
of his prey! He was stalking the garden, beating the bushes, walking up
and down. All at once he stopped and raised a white baffled face to her
window. She shrank away. _She_ was in peril of Harry now. He knew her no
longer innocent. She had held the ring against him in the face of the
fact he had told her it was stolen. And he must guess her motive. He
must suspect her now.

In her turn she ran, up and up a twisted side stair, shortest passage to
her own rooms. At least lock and key could keep her safe for the next
few hours. After that she must think of something else.

XX

FLIGHT

By five o'clock in the morning she was already moving softly to and fro,
so softly as not to rouse the sleeping Marrika. By seven her lightest
bag was packed, herself was bathed, brushed, dressed even to hat and
gloves, and standing at her window with all the listening alert look of
one in a waiting-room expecting a train. She was watching for the city
to begin to stir; watching for enough traffic below in the streets to
make her own movement there not too noticeable. Yet every moment she
waited she was in terror lest her fate should take violent form at last
and assail her in the moment of escape. She listened for a foot
ascending to her room with a message from Clara demanding an audience.
She listened for the peal of the electric bell under Harry's hasty
hand--Harry, arrived even at this unwarranted hour with Heaven knew what
representative of law to force the sapphire from her.

But all her household was still unstirring when at last she went, soft
step after step, down the broad and polished stair and across the empty
hall. She went quiet, direct, determined, not at all as she had fled on
her other perilous enterprise only yesterday. She shut the outer door
after her without a sound and with great relief breathed in the fresh
and faintly smoky air of morning.

She walked quickly. The windows of her house still overlooked her, and
her greatest terror was that some voice, some appearance, out of that
house, might command her return. The street was nearly empty. A maid
scrubbing down steps looked after her sharply, and she wondered if she
had been recognized. She had no intention of keeping to this street, or
even taking a car and traveling down its broad, gray and gleaming vista
of formal houses and formal gardens that she knew and that knew her so
well. It was a cross-town car bound for quite another locality that she
climbed aboard. It was filled only with mechanics and workmen with picks
and shovels. She sat crowded elbow to elbow among odors of stale
tobacco, stale garlic, stale perspiration, and looking straight before
her through the car window watched the aspect of the city, still gray,
grow less gleaming and formal and finally quite dirty, and quite, quite
dull.

This was all as she had intended, very much in the direction of her
errand, and safe. But in Market Street the car-line ended, and she was
turned out again in this broad artery of commerce where she was in
danger of meeting at any moment people she knew. She made straight
across the thoroughfare to its south side, turned down Eighteenth and in
a moment was hidden in Mission Street.

Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why
a woman with a small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a
school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the
women--women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered
heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags
in their hands--the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass
for--all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they
thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.

She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where
she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that
offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked
there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief.
It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two
hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as long as she
dared, drinking two cups of the hideous coffee; stayed while many came
and went, until she felt the proprietor noticing her. That revived her
consciousness of the possible dangers still between her and the end she
held in view. She had heard of people being arrested for suspicious
conduct. She didn't feel sure in what this might consist, but surely
such an appearance could be avoided by walking fast and seeming to know
exactly where one was going.

It was ten o'clock in the morning, three hours since she had left her
house and a most reasonable time of daylight, when Flora turned out of
the flatness of "south of Market Street" and began to mount a
slow-rising hill. It was a wooden sidewalk she followed flanking a
wood-paved street, and these, with the wooden fences and dusty cypress
hedges and the houses peering over them upon her looked worn, battered
and belonging all to the past. None the less it bore traces of having
been a dignified past, and farther up on the crown of the hill among
deep-bosomed trees, two or three large mansions wore the gravely
triumphant aspect of having been brought successfully from a past empire
into a present with all their traditions and mahogany complete. Upward
toward these Flora was looking. Her breath was short from fast
climbing. Her cheeks under her thin veil were hot and bright.

As she neared the hilltop she glanced at a card from her chatelaine,
consulting the address upon it. Then anxiously she scanned the
house-fronts. It was not this one, nor this; but the square white
mansion she came to now stood so far retired at the end of its lawn that
she could not make out the number. As she peered a young girl came down
the steps between the dark wings of the cypress hedge, a slim, fair,
even-gaited creature dressed for the street and drawing on her gloves.
As she passed Flora made sure she had seen her before. There was
something familiar in the carriage of the girl's head and hands;
something also like a pale reflection of another presence. Pale as it
was, it was enough to reassure her that this was the house she wanted.

She ascended the steps beneath the arch of cypress and immediately found
herself entering an atmosphere quieter even than that of the little
street below. It was quiet with the quiet of protectedness, as if some
one brooding, vigilant care encircled it, defending it against all
inroads of violent action and thought. It had been long since any young
girl had carried such a heart of passionate hopes and fears up this
mossed path between these peaceful flower-beds.

This appearance of the place began to bring before Flora the full
enormity and impertinence of her errand, but though her heart beat on
her side as loud as the brass knocker upon the door, she had no mind for
turning back.

A high, cool, darkly gleaming interior, mellow with that precious tint
of time which her own house so lacked, received her. And here, as well
as out of doors, all the while she sat waiting she felt that protected
peace was still the deity of the place. To Flora's eager heart time was
streaming by, but the tall clock facing her measured it out slowly. Its
longest golden finger had pointed out five minutes before the sweeping
of a skirt coming down the hall brought her to her feet.

Mrs. Herrick came in hatless, a honeysuckle leaf caught in her gray
crown of hair, geraniums in her hand. Flora had never seen her so
informal and so gay.

"I would have asked you to come out into the garden, except that it's so
wet, and there's no place to sit," she said.

Flora apologized. "I knew if I came at this hour I should interrupt you,
but really there was no help for it." She glanced down at her satchel.
"I had to go this morning, and before I went I had to see you about the
house. I'm going down to look at it and--and to stop a while."

Mrs. Herrick hesitated, deprecated. "But you know Mrs. Britton wasn't
satisfied with the price I asked."

"Oh," said Flora promptly, "but I shall be perfectly satisfied with it,
and I want to take possession at once."

The positive manner in which she waved Clara out of her way brought up
in Mrs. Herrick's face a faint flash of surprise; but it was gone in an
instant, supplanted by her questioning puzzled consideration of the
main proposition.

"Oh, I hope you haven't come to tell me you want it changed," she
protested. "You know it's quite absurd in places--quite terrible indeed.
It's 1870 straight through, and French at that; but even such whims
acquire a dignity if they've been long cherished. You couldn't put in or
take out one thing without spoiling the whole character."

"But I don't want to change it, I want it just as it is," Flora
explained. "It isn't about the house itself I've come, it's about going
down there. You see there are--some people, some friends of mine. I
haven't promised them to show the house, but I have quite promised
myself to show it to them, and they are only here for a few days more.
They are going immediately." She was looking at Mrs. Herrick all the
while she was telling her wretched lie, and now she even managed to
smile at her. "I thought how lovely it would be if you could go there
with me. I should like so very much to be in it first with you, to have
you go over it with me and tell me how to take care of it, as it's
always been done. I should hate to do it any disrespect."

Her hostess smiled with ready answer. "Of course I will go down. I
should be glad, but it must be in a day or two. Indeed, perhaps it would
be better for you to have your people first, and I can come down, say
Monday afternoon or Tuesday."

Flora faced this unexpected turn of the matter a little blankly. "Ah,
but the trouble is I can't go down alone."

It was Mrs. Herrick's turn to look blank. "But Mrs. Britton?"

"Mrs. Britton isn't going with me; she can't."

"I see." Mrs. Herrick with a long, soft scrutiny seemed to be taking in
more than Flora's mere words represented. "And you wouldn't put it off
until she can?"

"I couldn't put it off a moment," Flora ended with a little breathless
laugh. "I do so wish you would come down with me this morning, for I
must go, and you see I can't go alone."

Mrs. Herrick, sitting there, composed, in her cool, flowing, white and
violet gown with the red flowers in her lap, still looked at Flora
inquiringly. "But aren't there some women in your party old enough to
make it possible and young enough to take pleasure in it?"

Flora shook her head. "Oh, no," she said. Her house of cards was
tottering. She could not keep up her brave smiling. She knew her
distress must be plain. Indeed, as she looked at Mrs. Herrick she saw
the effect of it. Gaiety still looked at her out of that face, but the
warmth, the spontaneity were gone; and the steady eyes, if anything so
aloof could be suspicious, surely suspected her.

Her heart sank. If only she had told the truth--even so much of it as to
say there was something she could not tell. What she had said was
unworthy not only of herself but of the end she was so desperately
holding out for. Now in the lucid gaze confronting her she knew all her
intentions were taking on a dubious color, stained false, like her
words, under the dark cloud of her own misrepresentation. Yet they were
not false, she knew. Her motives, the end she was struggling for, were
as austere as truth itself. She could not give up without one bold
stroke to clear them of this accusation.

"Do you think there's anything queer about it?" she faltered.

"Queer?" To Flora's ears that sounded the coldest word she had ever
heard. "I hardly think I understand what you mean."

"I mean is it that you think there's more in what I'm asking of you than
I have said?" The two looked at each other and before that flat question
Mrs. Herrick drew back a little in her chair.

"I have no right to think about it at all," she said.

"Well, there is," Flora insisted. "There's a great deal more. I am
sorry. I should have told you, but I was afraid. I don't know why I was
afraid of you, except that in this matter I've grown afraid of every
one. It's true that there may be people going down--at least, a person.
But it isn't, as I let you think it, a house party at all. It's for
something, something that I can't do any other way--something," she had
a sudden flash of insight, "that, if I could tell you, you would believe
in, too."

Mrs. Herrick's look had faded to a mere concentrated attention. "You
mean that there is something you wish to do for whoever is going down?"

"Oh, something I must do," Flora insisted.

Mrs. Herrick considered a moment. "Why can't he do it for himself?" she
threw out suddenly.

It made Flora start, but she met it gallantly. "Because he won't. I
shall have to make him."

"You!" For a moment Flora knew that she was preposterous in Mrs.
Herrick's eyes--and then that she was pathetic. Her companion was
looking at her with a sad sort of humor. "My dear, are you sure that
that is your responsibility?"

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