The Coast of Chance
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Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance
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He had her by both wrists, now, and gently made her face him. "I have
believed in you to the extent of coming alone to a place I know nothing
of, because you wanted me. Now that I am here, what is it you have to
say to me?"
"Oh, nothing more than I have said before," she pleaded; "only that, ten
times more earnestly."
"You extraordinary child!" At first, he was pure amazement. "You've
brought me so far, you've come so far yourself--you've got us both here
in such danger, to tell me only this? How could you be so mad--so
cruel?"
She had locked her hands in front of her until the nails showed white
with the pressure. "It was more dangerous there than here. You don't
know what has happened since I saw you. And I thought if you and I could
only be alone together, without the fear of _them_ always between us, I
could show you, I could persuade you--" Before his look she broke down.
"Well--you see, they followed us--they're here."
"Grant it, they are." He seemed to laugh at them. "You have still your
chance. Give everything to me and I can save you still."
"'Save _me_?' Oh, nothing could happen to me so terrible as having you
break my heart like this! If I should give the sapphire to you I should
lose you--even the thought of you--for ever. Nothing could ever be right
with us again! Won't you--" she pleaded, "won't you go?" and lifting her
hands, taking his face between them, "Won't you, because I love you?"
He stood steady to this assault, and smiled down upon her. "Without you
and without it I will not budge. Come now, this is the end. I never
meant to do another thing."
She covered her face with her hands.
"Come, come." His voice was urging her, now very gentle. "It's more for
your sake than for the jewel now." And his arm around her shoulders was
gently forcing her to walk beside him not toward the drive, but away
into the tree-grown sheltered wing of the garden. By interlacing paths,
from the tremulous gray willows under the somber, clashing eucalyptus
spears, under dark wings of cypress they were moving. She was bracing in
every nerve against the unnerving of his presence.
It had been always so. Even across the distance of a room the mere sight
of him had had for her the power to summon those wild spirits of the
soul and body that turn reason to a vapor. And now so close, with his
arm around her, that same power she had felt when she saw him first, the
power that had made her come out and be herself then, the power that
had overwhelmed her in the little restaurant, was leagued against her
again to make her do this one more thing, which she wouldn't do. Never,
never! Despairing, she wondered that such an evil motive could have such
strength.
"Where have you got it now?" she heard him asking, and she pointed
downward toward where the pouch at her knee was swinging to and fro.
"Take it up, then," and like a hypnotized creature she gathered it into
her hand. But, once she had it, she held it clenched against him.
"You're going to give it to me," he prompted, "aren't you?--aren't you?"
and looking steadily in her face his hand shut softly on her wrist, and
held out her clenched hand in front of her. And still they walked,
slowly. Like a pendulum the long gold chain swung from her clenched
fingers. To the tree-top birds they seemed as quiet as two lovers
speaking of their wedding-day. She felt her tension give way in this
quiet--her hand relax.
"Dearest." The word brought up her eyes to his with a start of
tenderness. "Open it," he said, and her hand, involuntarily, sprung the
pouch wide. They stared together into it. The little hollow golden shell
was empty.
For a moment it held her incredulous. Then, faint and sick, all the
foundations of her faith reeling, she slowly raised her eyes to him in
accusation. She was not ready for the terrible sternness in his.
"Have you lied to me?" he asked in a low voice. "Have you given it to
Cressy?"
"No, no, no!" she cried in horror. "It was there! I put it there myself
this morning!" They looked at each other now equally sincere and aghast.
"But you have seen him; you've been near him?" he demanded.
She gasped out the whole truth. "This morning! He left me. He kissed
me."
"Then, my God, where is he?" He gave a wide glance around him. Then
raising his voice, "Stay where you are!" he commanded, and began to run
from her through the trees.
She stood with her hand to her breast, with the empty pouch spinning in
front of her, hearing him crashing in the shrubbery. Then, in sudden
panic at finding herself alone, she fled back down the willow avenue,
and burst out on the broad drive in full view of the house.
Kerr was not in sight, but there was a tremor of disturbance where all
had been still. Clara's face appeared at one of the upper windows and
looked down into the garden. Then Mrs. Herrick came down the stairs,
and, showing an anxious profile as she passed the door, hurried away
along the lower hall. There was a flutter in the servants' quarter, and
from a side door the coachman appeared hatless, in his shirt sleeves,
and ran toward the stable. All the people of the house seemed to be
running to and fro, but she didn't see Harry. This struck her with
unreasoning terror. She fled up the drive, and Clara's small face at the
window watched her.
As she came into the hall she heard Kerr's voice. He was at the
telephone speaking names she had never heard in sentences whose meaning
was too much for her stunned senses to take in; but none the less while
she listened the feeling crept over her that there was some strange
revolution taking place in him. It might be transformation; it might be
only a swift increase of his original power. Whatever it was, he seemed
to her superhuman. The house was full of him--full of his rapid
movement, his ringing orders. If he knew that the sapphire was gone,
what was the meaning of this bold command? Was he, knowing all lost,
plunging gallantly into the clutches of his enemies? Or was this only a
blind, a splendid piece of effrontery to cover his too long delayed
retreat? She sat like a jointless thing on the fauteuil in the large
hall, and all at once saw him in front of her.
She looked at his hat, his overcoat, his slim, glittering stick--all
symbols of departure.
"Wait here," he said, and turned away.
She watched his shadow dance across the flagging, and as it slipped over
the threshold she thought dully that now the sapphire was gone every one
was going from her.
XXIV
THE COMIC MASK
She listened to the sound of wheels, first rattling loud on the gravel,
slowly growing fainter. Then stillness was with her again, and
inanition. She looked around and up, and had no start at seeing Clara's
small face watching her over the gallery of the rotunda. It seemed to
her that appearance was natural to her existence now, like her shadow.
She looked away. When she raised her eyes again Clara was coming down
the stairs, and even at that distance Flora saw she carried something in
her hand--something flat and small and wrapped in a filmy bit of paper.
Out of the chaos of her feeling rose the solitary thought--the picture
which she had bought that morning, the picture of Farrell Wand. She
watched it drawing near her with wonder. She sat up trembling. She had a
great longing and a horror to tear away the filmy paper and see Kerr at
last brutally revealed. She could not have told afterward whether Clara
spoke to her. She was conscious of her pausing; conscious of the faint
rustle of her skirt passing; conscious, finally, that the small swathed
square was in her hand.
She tore the tissue paper through. She held a photograph, a mounted
kodak print. She made out the background to be sky and water and the
rail of a ship with silhouettes of heads and shoulders, a jungle of
black; and in the middle distance caught in full motion the single
figure of a man, back turned and head in profile. He was moving from her
out of the picture, and with the first look she knew it was not Kerr.
Her first thought was that there had been a trick played on her! But
no--across the bottom of the picture, in Judge Buller's full round hand,
was written, "Farrell Wand boarding the _Loch Ettive_." She held it high
to the light. Clara had been faithful to her bargain. It was the
picture that had deceived her. She studied it with passionate
earnestness. She did not know the bearded profile; but in the burly
shoulders, in the set and swing of the body in motion, more than all in
the lowering, peering aspect of the whole figure, she began to see a
familiar something. She held it away from her by both thin edges, and
that aspect swelled and swelled in her startled eyes, until suddenly the
figure in the picture seemed to be moving from her, not up a gang-plank,
but through a glare of sun over grass between broad beds of flowers.
She was faint. She was going to fall. She caught at the chair to save
herself, and still she was dropping down, down, into a gulf of spinning
darkness. "Oh, Harry!" she whispered, and let her head roll back against
the arm of the fauteuil.
With a dim sense of rising through immeasurable distances back to light
she opened her eyes. She saw Mrs. Herrick's face, and as this was
connected in her mind with protection she smiled.
"Do you feel better?" Mrs. Herrick asked her. Then she opened her eyes
wide and saw the walls and the high-arched ceiling of the hall directly
above her, knew herself lying on the floor, saw above her the figure of
Clara standing with a bottle of salts, and then remembered; and, with a
moan, buried her face in Mrs. Herrick's lap. "Oh, no, no, no; don't
bring me back; I don't want to come back!"
Their voices sounding high above her were speaking. Mrs. Herrick said:
"What is that?" Then Clara murmured. Then there was the light rustling
of paper. Flora moved her hand.
"Give it to me; I want it." She felt the stiff little square of
cardboard between her fingers, and closed them around it fast.
After a little she went up-stairs holding tight to the baluster with one
hand and to Mrs. Herrick with the other. After a little of sitting on
the edge of her bed she lay down, still holding to Mrs. Herrick. She
felt as though some cord within her had been drawn tight, too tight to
endure, and every moment she hoped it would snap and set her free.
"You don't think I'm mad, do you?" she asked. Her friend earnestly
disclaimed it. "Then things are," Flora said, "everything. Oh, oh!" The
memory overwhelmed her. "He took me there as if by chance! He gave the
sapphire to me for my engagement ring. Oh, dreadful! Oh, poor Harry!"
All that afternoon and all night she slept fitfully, starting up at
intervals, trembling at nameless horrors--the glittering goldsmith's
shop, the Chinaman, the great eye of the sapphire, and, worst of all,
Harry's face, always the same calm, ruddy, good-natured,
innocent-looking face that had led her to the goldsmith's shop, that had
smiled at her, falling under the spell of the sapphire, that had
covered, all those days, God knew what ravages of stress and strain,
until the man had finally broken. That face appeared and reappeared
through the flashing terrors of her dreams like the presiding genius of
them all. Finally, drifting into complete repose, she slept far into the
morning.
She wakened languid and weak. She lay looking about the room, and, like
a person recovering after a heavy blow, wondering what had happened.
Then her hand, as with her first waking thought it had done for the last
week, went to the locket chain around her neck. Oh, yes, yes; she had
forgotten. The sapphire was gone. Gone by fraud, gone at a kiss for ever
with Harry--no, with Farrell Wand.
For Harry was not Harry; and Kerr was not Farrell Wand. He was indeed an
unknown quantity. Since she had found Harry she had lost both Kerr's
name and his place in her fairy-tale. She had seen his very demeanor
change before her eyes. Indeed, her hour had come without her knowing
it. The spell had been snapped which had made him wear the semblance of
evil. His sinister form was dissolving; but what was to be his identity
when finally he stood before her restored and perfect? If he were not
the thief whom she had struggled so to shield, why, then he was that
very strength of law and right which, for his sake, she had betrayed.
She sat up quickened with humiliation. The thing was not a tragedy, it
was a grotesque. Blushing more and more crimson, struggling with strange
mingled crying and laughter, she slipped out of the bed, and, still in
her nightgown, ran down the hall, and knocked on Mrs. Herrick's door,
until the dismayed lady opened it.
"I thought it was he," Flora gasped. "I thought it was he who had taken
the ring! Why didn't he tell me? Why did he keep it secret? I would have
done anything to have saved it for him, and I let Harry get it! Oh,
isn't it cruel? Isn't it pitiful? Isn't it ridiculous?"
Mrs. Herrick, who, for the last thirty-six hours, had so departed from
her curriculum of safety, and courageously met many strange appearances,
now was to hear stranger facts. For Flora had let go completely, and
Mrs. Herrick, without hinting at hysterics, let her laugh, let her cry,
let her tell piece by piece, as she could, the story of the two men,
from the night when Kerr had spoken so strangely at the club on the
virtues of thieves to the moment when, in the willow walk, they
discovered that the jewel was gone. Clara's part in the affair, and the
price she had exacted, even in this unnerved moment, Flora's instinct
withheld, to save Mrs. Herrick the last cruelest touch. But for the
rest--she let Mrs. Herrick have it all--and under the shadow of the grim
facts the two women clung together, as if to make sure of their own
identities.
"I don't even know who he is," Flora said faintly.
Mrs. Herrick gave her a quick glance. She had not a moment's hesitation
as to whom the "he" meant. "You will have to ask him when he comes."
"Do you think he will come back?"
Mrs. Herrick had the heart to smile.
"But think of what I have done. I have lost him the sapphire, and he
loves it--loves it as much as he does me."
Again the glance. "Did he tell you that?"
Flora nodded. The other seemed intently to consider. "He will come
back," she declared.
Upheld by her friend's assurance, Flora found the endurance necessary to
spend the day, an empty, stagnant day, in moving about a house and
garden where a few hours ago had passed such a storm of events. She
reviewed them, lived them over again, but without taking account of
them. Her mind, that had worked so sharply, was now in abeyance. She
lived in emotion, but with a tantalizing sense of something unexplained
which her understanding had not the power to reach out to and grasp. For
a day more she existed under the same roof with Clara, for Clara stayed
on.
At first it seemed to Flora extraordinary that she dared, but presently
it began to appear how much more extraordinary it would have been if
Clara had promptly fled. By waiting a discreet length of time, as if
nothing had happened, she put herself indubitably on the right side of
things. Indeed, when one thought, had she ever been legally off it?
That was the very horror. Clara had simply turned the situation over and
seen its market value, and how enormously she had made it pay! Flora
herself had paid; and she had seen the evidence that Harry had paid,
paid for his poor little hour of escape which a mere murderer might have
granted him in pity. Yet Clara could walk beside them, meet them at
dinner with the same smooth face, chat upon the terrace with the
unsuspecting Mrs. Herrick, and even face Flora in a security which had
the appearance of serenity, since she knew that nothing ever would be
told. At every turn in the day's business Flora kept meeting that placid
presence; and it was not until the end of the day that she met it primed
for departure. Flora was with Mrs. Herrick, and Clara, coming to seek
them out, had an air of casual farewell. The small, sweet smile she
presented behind her misty veil, the delicate white-gloved hand she
offered were symbols of enduring friendship, as if she were leaving them
only for a few hours; as if, when Flora returned to town, she would find
Clara waiting for them in the house. But Flora knew it was only Clara's
wonderful way. This uprising and departure were her last.
Now all her waiting was for Kerr's returning. She did not know how she
should face him, but she wanted him. A telegram came an hour before him,
came to Mrs. Herrick announcing him; and then himself, driven up on the
high seat of the cart, just as daylight was closing. She and Mrs.
Herrick had walked half-way out toward the rose garden; and, seeing them
there, he stopped the cart in the drive, leaped down and ran across the
grass. Both hurried to meet him. The three encountered like friends,
like intimates, with hand-clasps and hurried glances searching each
other's faces.
"Did you save it?" Flora asked.
He looked at Mrs. Herrick, hesitating.
"You can tell, she knows," Flora assured him.
"No, I haven't saved it--not so far," he said. He had taken off his hat
and the strong light showed on his face lines of fatigue and anxiety.
"He gave me the slip--no trace of him. No one saw him come into the
city; nothing turned up in the goldsmith's shop. His friend, the
blue-eyed Chinaman, has dropped out of sight. I haven't made it public,"
he glanced at Flora--"but our men think he's gone out by the water
route--Lord knows in what or where! He must have had this planned for
days." He didn't look at Flora now. He turned his communication
carefully on Mrs. Herrick. "There were seven vessels sailed, that day,
and all were searched; but there are ways of smuggling opium, and why
not men?"
They were walking toward the house. Kerr looked up at the window where,
a short time before, Clara's face had looked down upon the confusion in
the garden.
"Is that paid woman still here?"
"Oh, no; she's gone." Flora looked at him warningly. But Mrs. Herrick
had caught his tone. "Why shouldn't she be?" she demanded with delicate
asperity.
Kerr had dropped his monocle. "Because, in common decency, she
couldn't. She sold Cressy to me for a good round sum."
Flora and Mrs. Herrick exchanged a look of horror.
"I'd suspected him," said Kerr. "I knew where I'd seen him, but I
couldn't be sure of his identity till she showed me the picture."
"What picture?" cried Flora.
"The picture Buller mentioned at the club that night: Farrell Wand,
boarding the _Loch Ettive_. Don't you remember?" He spoke gently, as if
afraid that a hasty phrase in such connection might do her harm. Now,
when he saw how white she looked, he steadied her with his arm. "We
won't talk of this business any more," he said.
"But I must talk of it," Flora insisted tremblingly. "I don't even know
what you are."
For the first time he showed apologetic. He looked from one to the other
with a sort of helpless simplicity.
"Why, I'm Chatworth--I'm Crew; I'm the chap that owns the confounded
thing!"
To see him stand there, announced in that name, gave the tragic farce
its last touch. Flora had an instant of panic when flight seemed the
solution. It took all her courage to keep her there, facing him,
watching, as if from afar off, Mrs. Herrick's acknowledgment of the
informal introduction.
"I came here, quietly," he was saying, "so as to get at it without
making a row. Only Purdie, good man! knew--and he's been wondering all
along why I've held so heavy a hand on him. We'll have to lunch with
them again, eh?" He turned and looked at Flora. "And make all those
explanations necessitated by this lady's wonderful sense of honor!"
It was here, somewhere in the neighborhood of this sentence of doubtful
meaning, that Mrs. Herrick left them. In looking back, Flora could never
recall the exact moment of the departure. But when she raised her eyes
from the grass where they had been fixed for what seemed to her eternity
she found only Kerr--no, Chatworth--standing there, looking at her with
a grave face.
"Eh?" he said, "and what about that honor of yours? What shall we say
about it, now that the sapphire's gone and no longer in our way?"
She was breathing quick to keep from crying. "I told you that day at the
restaurant."
"Yes, yes; you told me why you kept the sapphire from me, but"--he hung
fire, then fetched it out with an effort--"why did you take it in the
first place?"
She looked at him in clear astonishment. "I didn't know what it was."
"You didn't!"
It seemed to Flora the whole situation was turning exactly inside out.
The light that was breaking upon her was more than she could bear. "Oh,"
she wailed, "you couldn't have thought I meant to take it!"
"Then if you didn't," he burst out, "why, when I told you what it was,
didn't you give it to me?"
The cruel comic muse, who makes our serious suffering ridiculous, had
drawn aside the last curtain. Flora felt the laughter rising in her
throat, the tears in her eyes.
"You guessed who I was," he insisted, advancing, "at least what I
represented."
She hid her face in her hands, and her voice dropped, tiny, into the
stillness.
"I guessed you were Farrell Wand."
XXV
THE LAST ENCHANTMENT
The tallest eucalyptus top was all of the garden that was touched with
sun when Flora came out of the house in the morning. She stood a space
looking at that little cone of brightness far above all the other trees,
swaying on the delicate sky. It was not higher lifted nor brighter
burnished than her spirit then. Shorn of her locket chain, her golden
pouch, free of her fears, she poised looking over the garden. Then with
a leap she went from the veranda to the grass and, regardless of dew,
skimmed the lawn for the fountain and the rose garden.
There she saw him--the one man--already awaiting her. He stood back to
back with a mossy nymph languishing on her pedestal, and Flora hoped by
running softly to steal up behind him, and make of the helpless marble
lady a buffer between their greetings. But either she underestimated the
nymph's bulk, or forgot how invariably direct was the man's attack; for
turning and seeing her, without any circumvention, with one sweep of his
long arm, he included the statue in his grasp of her. With a laugh of
triumph he drew her out of her concealment.
To her the splendor of skies and trees and morning light melted into
that wonderful moment. For the first time in weary days she had all to
give, nothing to fear or withhold. She was at peace. She was ready to
stop, to stand here in her life for always--here in the glowing garden
with him, and their youth. But he was impatient. He did not want to
loiter in the morning. He was hot to hurry on out of the present which
was so mysterious, so untried to her, as if these ecstasies had no
mystery to him but their complete fulfilment. He filled her with a
trembling premonition of the undreamed-of things that were waiting for
her in the long aisle of life.
"Come, speak," he urged, as they paced around the fountain. "When am I
to take you away?"
She hung back in fear of her very eagerness to go, to plunge head over
ears into life in a strange country with a stranger. "Next month," she
ventured.
"Next month! why not next week? why not to-morrow?" he declared with
confidence. "Who is to say no? I am the head of my house and you have no
one but me. To be sure, there is Mrs. Herrick--excellent woman. But she
has her own daughters to look out for, and," he added slyly, "much as
she thinks of you, I doubt if she thinks you a good example for them. As
for that other, as for the paid woman--"
"Oh, hush, hush!" Flora cried, hurt with a certain hardness in his
voice; "I don't want to see her. I shall never go near her! And
Harry--"
"I wasn't going to speak of him," said Chatworth quickly.
"I know," she answered, "but do you mind my speaking of him?" They had
sat down on the broad lip of the fountain basin. He was looking at her
intently. "It is strange," she said, "but in spite of his doing this
terrible thing I can't feel that he himself is terrible--like Clara."
"And yet," he answered in a grave voice, "I would rather you did."
She turned a troubled face. "Ah, have you forgotten what you said the
first night I met you? You said it doesn't matter what a man is, even if
he's a thief, as long as he's a good one."
At this he laughed a little grudgingly. "Oh, I don't go back on that,
but I was looking through the great impartial eye of the universe.
Whereas a man may be good of his kind, he's only good in his kind. Tip
out a cat among canaries and see what happens. My dear girl, we were the
veriest birds in his paws! And notice that it isn't moral law--it's
instinct. We recognize by scent before we see the shape. You never knew
him. You never could. And you never trusted him."
"But," she interrupted eagerly, "I would have done anything for you when
I thought you were a thief."
"Anything?" he caught her up with laughter. "Oh, yes, anything to haul
me over the dead line on to your side. That was the very point you made.
That was where you would have dropped me--if I had stuck by my kind, as
you thought it, and not come over to yours."
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