The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Fatherless, motherless, alone upon the pinnacle of her fortune, she had
known that such an extraordinary entrance, even at this rather wide
social portal, would only be acceptable if toned down, glossed over, and
drawn out by a personality sufficiently neutral, sufficiently potent,
and sufficiently in need of what she had to give. The successive
flickers of the gas-lamps through the carriage window made of Clara's
profile so hard and fine a little medallion that it was impossible to
conceive it in need of anything. And yet it was just their mutual need
that had drawn these two women together, and after three years it was
still the only thing that held them. As much of a fight as she had put
up with the rest--the people who had taken her in--she had put up the
hardest with Clara. Yet of them all Clara was the only one she had
failed to capture. Clara was always there in the middle of her affairs,
but surveying them from a distance, and Flora's struggle with her had
resolved itself into the attempt to keep her from seeing too much, from
seeing more than she herself saw. Clara's seeing, thus far, had always
been to help, but Flora sometimes wondered whether in an emergency this
help could be depended on--whether Clara could give anything without
exacting a price.

Their dubious intimacy had created for Flora a special sort of
loneliness--a loneliness which lacked the security of solitude; and it
was partly as an escape from this that she had accepted Harry Cressy.
By herself she could never have escaped. The initiative was not hers.
But he had presented himself, he had insisted, had overruled her
objections, had captured her before she knew whether she wanted it or
not--and held her now, fascinated by his very success in capturing her,
and by his beautiful ruddy masculinity. She did not ask herself whether
women ever married for greater reasons than these. She only wondered
sometimes if he did not stand out more brilliantly against Clara and the
others than he intrinsically was. But these moments when she was obliged
to defend him to herself were always when he was not with her. Even in
the dusky carriage she had been as aware of the splendor of his
attraction as now when they had stopped between the high lamps of the
club entrance, and she saw clearly the broad lines of his shoulders and
the stoop of his square-set head as he stepped swingingly to the
pavement. After all, she ought to be glad to think that he was going to
stand up as tall and protectingly between her and the world, as now he
did between her and the press of people which, like a tide of water,
swept them forward down the hall, sucked them back in its eddy, and
finally cast them, ruffled like birds that have ridden a storm, on the
more generous space of the wide, upward stair.

From here, looking down on the current sweeping past them, the little
islands of black coats seemed fairly drowned in the feminine sea around
them--the flow of white, of pale blue and rose, and the high chatter,
like a cage of birds, that for the evening held possession.

"Ladies' Night!" Harry Cressy mopped his flushed face. "It's awful!"

Flora laughed in the effervescence of her spirits. She wanted to know,
teasingly, as they mounted, if this were why he had brought two more to
add to the lot. He only looked at her, with his short note of laughter
that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was
proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of
daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the
aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls--proud that
her daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating
enough to make her right.

She could recall a time when she had not even been quite sure of her
clothes. Not Clara's subdued rustle at her side could make her doubt
them now; but her security was still recent enough to be sometimes
conscious of itself. It was so short a time since all these talking
groups, that made a personage of her, had had the power to put her quite
out of countenance. The women who craned over their shoulders to speak
to her--how hard she had had to work to make them see her at all! And
now she did not know which she felt more like laughing at, herself or
them, for having taken it so seriously. For, when one thought of it,
wasn't it absurd that people out of nowhere should suppose themselves
exclusive? And people out of nowhere they were, herself and all the rest
of them. From causes not far dissimilar they had drifted or scrambled to
where they now stood. It was a question of squatter rights. The first on
the ground were dictators, and how long they could hold their claim
against invaders a dubious cast of fate. For there were for ever fresh
invasions, and departures; swift risings from obscurity, sudden fallings
back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and
in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or
traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of
ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable
quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this
very quality of transformation that most stirred and delighted her.

And to-night it was not the picture exhibition, nor the function itself
that elated her, but the fancy she had as she looked over the moving
mass below her that the crowning excitement of the day, the vanishing
mystery, hovered over them all. It was fantastic, but it persisted; for
had not the Chatworth ring itself proved that the most ordinary
appearances might cover unimagined wonders? Which of those bland,
satisfied faces might not change shockingly at the whisper "Chatworth"
in its ear? She wanted to confide the naughty thought to Harry. But no,
he wasn't the one. If Harry were apprehensive of anything at all it was
only of being caught in too hot a crush. He saw no possibilities in the
mob below except boredom. He saw no possibilities in the evening but his
conventional duty; and Flora could read in his eye his intention of
getting through that as comfortably as possible. His suggestion that
they have a look at the pictures brought the two women's eyes together
in a rare gleam of mutual mirth. They knew he suspected that the picture
gallery would be the emptiest place in the club, since to have a look at
the pictures was what they were all supposed to be there for. That was
so infallibly the note of their life, Flora thought, as she followed up
the wide sweep of the middle stair, and along the high-ceiled, gilded
hall whose open arches overlooked the rooms below.

The picture gallery was new, an addition; and the plain, narrow,
unexpected door in this place, where all was high, arched, elaborate
and flourished, was like a loophole through which to slip into a foreign
atmosphere. This atmosphere was resinous of fresh wood; the light was
thick with drifting motes; the carpets harshly new, slipping beneath the
feet on the too polished floor; the bare bones of the place yet scarcely
covered. But its quiet was after all comparative. There were plenty of
people lingering in groups in the center of the gallery which was dusky,
eclipsed by the great reflectors that circled the room, throwing out the
pictures in a bright band of color around the walls. People leaning from
this border of light back into the dusk to murmur together, vanished and
reappeared with such fascinating abruptness that Flora caught herself
guessing what sort of face, where this nearest group stood just on the
edge of shadow, would pop out of the dark next.

She was ready for something extraordinary, but now, when it came, she
was taken aback by it. It gave her a start, that toss of black hair,
that long, irregular, pale face whose scintillant, sardonic smile was
mercilessly upon the poor, inadequate picture-face fronting him. His
stoop above the rail was so abrupt that his long, lean back was almost
horizontal, yet even thus there was something elegant in the swing of
him--in the careless twist of his head, around, to speak to the woman
behind him. The light above struck blind on the glass in one eye, but
the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it
caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the
spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to
Flora's lips--"Who in the world is that?"--she checked; why, she didn't
ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across
the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well,
beginning with the Chatworth ring, had been raised even a note higher.
Her restive fancy was beginning again. All the footlights of her little
secret stage were up.

Clara turned to the right, following a beckoning fan, and Flora,
dallying with her anticipation, reasoned that now they must circle the
room before they should face him--the interesting apparition. It was a
pilgrimage of which he on the other side was performing his half.
Perfunctorily talking from group to group, conscious now and again of
the lagging Clara or Harry, she could nevertheless keep a sly eye on the
stranger's equal progress. The flash of jet, and the voluble,
substantial shoulders of the lady so profusely introducing him, were an
assurance of how that pilgrimage would terminate, since it was Ella
Buller who was parading him. She even wondered before which of the
florid pictures at the far, other end of the room, as before a shrine,
the ceremony would take place.

She kept her eyes fixed on the paintings before her, and as she moved
down from one to another, and the voices of the approaching group drew
nearer, one separated itself from the general murmur, so clear, so
resonantly carried, so clean-clipped off the tongue, that it stood out
in syllables on the blur of sound which was Ella Buller's conversation.
It had color, that voice; it had a quality so sharp, so individual that
it touched her with a mischievous wonder that he dared speak so
differently from all the world about him. Then, six pictures away, she
heard her own name.

"Why, Flora Gilsey!" It was Ella's husky, boyish note. "I've been
looking for you all the evening! How d'y'do, Harry?" She waved her hand
at him. "Why, how d'y'do, Mrs. Britton? I wouldn't let papa go to supper
until I'd found you. 'Papa,' I said, 'wait; Flora and Harry will be
here.' Besides," she had quite reached Flora's side by this time and
communicated it in an impressive whisper, "I want you to meet my
Englishman." She looked over her shoulder, and largely beckoned to where
the blunt and florid Buller and his companion, with their backs to what
they were supposed to be looking at, were exchanging an anecdote of
infinite amusement.

Buller's expression came around slowly to his daughter's beckoning hand,
but the Englishman's face seemed to flash at the instant from what he
was enjoying to what was expected of him. In the flourish of
introductions, across and across, Flora found herself thinking the
reality less extraordinary than she had at first supposed. Now that Mr.
Kerr was fairly before her, presented to her, and taking her in with the
same lively, impersonal interest with which he took in the whole room,
"as if," she put it vexedly to herself, "I were a specimen poked at him
on the end of a pin," it stirred in her a vague resentment; and
involuntarily she held him up to Harry. The comparison showed him a
little worn, a little battered, a little too perfunctory in manner; but
his genial eyes, deep under threatening brows, made Harry's eyes seem to
stare rather coldly; and the fine form of his long, plain face, and the
sensitive line of his long thin lips made Harry's beauty look,--well,
how did it look? Hardly callous.

This mixed impression the two men gave her was disconcerting. She was
all the more ready to be wary of the stranger. She had begun with him in
the way she did with every one--instinctively throwing out a breastwork
of conversation from behind which she could observe the enemy. But
though he had blinked at it, he had not taken her up, nor helped her
out; but had merely stood with his head a little canted forward, as if
he watched her through her defenses.

"But San Francisco must seem so limited after London," she had wound up;
and the way he had considered it, a little humorously, down his long
nose, made her doubt the interest of cities to be reckoned in round
numbers.

"It's all extraordinary," he said. "You're quite as extraordinary in
your way as we in ours."

"Oh," she wondered, still vexed with his inventory, "I had always
supposed us awfully commonplace. What _is_ our way, please?"

"Ah," he said, measuring his long step to hers as they sauntered a
little, "for one thing, you're so awfully good to a fellow. In
London"--and he nodded back, as if London were merely across the
room--"they're awfully good to the somebodies. It's the way you take in
the nobodies over here that is so astonishing--the stray leaves that
blow in with your 'trade,' and can't show any credentials but a letter
or two, and their faces; and those"--his _diablerie_ danced out
again--"sometimes such deucedly damaged ones."

It was almost indecent, this parade of his nonentity! She wanted to say,
"Oh, hush! Those are the things one only enjoys--never talks about." But
instead, somewhere up at the top of her voice, she said: "Oh, we always
lock up our silver!"

"But even then," he quizzed her, "I wonder how you dare to do it?"

"Perhaps we have to, because we ourselves are all--" ("without any
credentials but those you mention,") she had been about to say--but
there she caught herself on the very edge of giving herself and all the
rest of them away to him; "--all so awfully bored," she mischievously
ended with the daintiest, faintest possible yawn behind her spread fan.

He looked as if she had taken him by surprise; then laughed out. "Oh,
that is the way they don't do here," he provoked her. "You mustn't,
when I'm not expecting it."

"Then what are you expecting?" she inquired a little coolly.

"Well," he deliberated, "not expecting you to get me ready for a sweet,
and then pop in a pickle; and presently expecting, hoping, anxiously
anticipating, what you really care to say."

He was expecting, she looked maliciously, more than he was likely to
get; but the fact that he did see through her to that extent was at once
delightful and alarming. She swayed back into the shadow beyond the
dazzling line of light. She wanted to escape his scrutiny, to be able to
look him over from a safe vantage-ground. But he wouldn't have it. An
instant he stood under the torrent of white radiance, challenging her to
see what she could--then followed her into her retreat. "Shall we sit
here?" he said, and she found herself hopelessly cut off and isolated
with the enemy.

She couldn't withhold a little grudging pleasure in the sharpness with
which he had turned her maneuver, and the way it had detached them from
the surrounding crowd. For there, in the dusky center of the room, it
was as if they watched from safe covert the rest of their party exposed
in the glare of light; though not, as Flora presently noted, quite
escaping observation themselves. For an instant Harry turned and peered
toward them with a look in his intentness that struck Flora as something
new in him, and made her wonder if he could be jealous. She turned
tentatively to see if Kerr had noticed it, and surprised his glance in a
quick transition back to hers.

"By your leave," he said, and took away her fan, which in his hand
presently assumed such rhythmic motion that it ceased to be any more
present to her than a delicate current of air upon her face. Her face,
which in the first place he had so well looked over, he now looked into
with something more personal in his quest, as if under the low brows and
crowding lashes there was a puzzle to solve in the timid, unassured
glances of such splendid eyes.

He was not, she felt sure, in spite of his light manipulation of her
fan, a person who cared to please women, but one of that devastating
sort who care above everything to please themselves, and who are skilful
without practice; too skilful, she feared, for her defenses to hold out
against if he intended to find out what she really thought. "Aren't we
supposed to be looking at the pictures?" she wanted to know.

He turned his back on the wall and its attendant glare. "Why pictures,"
he inquired, "when there are live people to look at? Pictures for places
where they're all half dead. But here, where even the damnable dust in
the street is alive, why should they paint, or write, or sculpt, or do
anything but live?" His irascible brows shot the query at her.

Again the proposition of life--whatever that was--was held up before
her, and as ever she faltered in the face of it. "I suppose they do it
here," she murmured, with a vague glance at the paintings around her,
"because people do it everywhere else."

His disparagement was almost a snarl. "That's the rotten part of
it--because they do it everywhere else! As if there wasn't enough
monotony in the world already without every chap trying to be like the
next instead of being himself!"

"Ah!" Her small, uncertain smile in the midst of her outward splendor
was pathetic. "But it is different to you. You're a man. You're not one
of us."

"One of what? I'm a man. I'm myself. Which, pardon me, dear lady, is
just what you won't be--yourself."

"But if you have to be what people expect?" She clung to her first
principle of safety in the midst of this onslaught.

"People don't want what they expect--if you care for that." He waved it
away with his quick, white hand.

"But you have to care, unless you want to be queer." Her poor little
secret was out before she knew, and he looked at it, laughing
immoderately, yet somehow delightfully.

"Ah, if you think the social game is the game that counts! I had
expected braver things of you. The game that counts, my girl," he
preached it at her with his long white hand, "the game that is going on
out here is the big, red game of life. That's the only one that's worth
a guinea; and there's no winning or losing, there's no right or wrong to
it, and it doesn't matter what a man is in it as long as he's a good
one."

"Even if he is a thief?" The question was out of Flora's lips before she
could catch it. It was a challenge. She had meant to confound him; but
he caught it as if it delighted him.

"Well, what would you think?"

He threw it back at her.

What hadn't she thought! How persistently her fancy had played with the
question of what sort of man that one might be who had so wonderfully
put his hand under a glass case and drawn out the Chatworth ring. Why,
outwardly, he must have been like all the crowd around him, to have
escaped unnoticed; but, inwardly, how much superior in power and skill
to have so completely overreached them!

"Oh," she laughed dubiously, "I suppose he is a good one as long as he
isn't caught."

"What!" His face disowned her. "You think he's a renegade, do you? A
chap in perpetual flight, taking things because he has to, more or less
pursued by the law? Bah! It's a guild as old, and a deal more honorable,
than the beggar's. Your good thief is born to it. It's his caste. It's
in his blood. It isn't money that he wants. If he had a million he'd be
the same. And it isn't a mania either. It's a profession." The
Englishman leaned back and smiled at her over the elegance of his long,
joined finger-tips.

She looked at him with a delighted alarm, with an increasing elation;
but whether these arose from his lawless declarations and the singular
way they kept setting before her more vividly moment by moment the
possible character of the present keeper of the Chatworth ring, or
whether it was just the sight of Kerr himself as he sat there that
stirred her, she didn't try to distinguish.

"But suppose he was your own thief," she urged; "took your own things, I
mean," she hastily amended, "and suppose he turned out to be--some one
you knew and liked--" She hesitated. She had come at last to what she
really wanted to say. She had brought out a question that had been
teasing her fancy at intervals all the while he had been talking, and he
hadn't even heard it. He wasn't even looking at her. She had caught him
off his guard. He was looking across her shoulder straight down the dim
vista of the room to the little blaze of bordering light. He was looking
at Harry. No, Harry was looking at him. Harry was looking with a steady,
an intent gaze, and Kerr meeting it--it might have been merely the blank
glare of his monocle--seemed, to Flora, to meet it a little insolently.
She fancied in the instant something to pass between the two men,
something which, this time, she did not mistake for jealousy--a shade
too dim for defiance or suspicion, a deep scrutiny that struggled to
place something, some one.

Flora felt a sudden wish to break that curious scrutiny. It had broken
her little moment. It had shattered the personal, almost intimate note
that had been sounded between them. The look Kerr turned back to her was
vague, and stirred in her a dim resentment that he could drop it all so
easily.

"Shall we join the others?" It was the voice with which she had begun
with him, but her eyes were hot through their light mist of lashes, and
he threw her a comprehending glance of amusement.

"Oh, no," he assured her, "we can't help ourselves. They are going to
join us."

Ella Buller, in the van of her procession, was already descending upon
them. Her approach dissipated the last remnant of their personal moment.
Her presence always insisted that there was nothing worth while but
instant participation in her geniality, and whatever subject it might at
the moment be taken up with. This conviction of Ella's had been wont to
overawe Flora, and it still overwhelmed her; so that now, as she
followed in the tail of Ella's marshaled force, she had a guilty feeling
that there should be nothing in her mind but a normal desire for supper.

Yet all the way down the great stair, "the Corridors of Time," where the
white owl glared his glassy wisdom on the passings and counter-passings,
she was haunted with the thought that Harry had seen the extraordinary
Kerr before; not shaken hands with him, perhaps--perhaps not even heard
his name; but somewhere, across some distance, once glimpsed him, and
had never quite shaken the memory from his mind. For there was something
marked, notable, unforgettable in that lean distinctiveness. Against the
sleek form of the men they met and shook hands with, he flashed
out--seemed in contrast fairly electric. She saw him, just ahead of her
where the crowd was thickening in the door of the supper-room, making
way for Clara through the press with that exasperating solicitude of
his that was half ironic. And the large broadside offered by her
elegant Harry, matter-of-factly towing Ella by the elbow, herself
conscious of a curl or two awry, and Judge Buller tramping heavily at
her side, all took on to her the aspect of a well-chosen peep-show with
the satanic Kerr officiating as showman. Even the smooth and pallid
Clara, who usually coerced by her sheer correctness, failed to dominate
this fantastic image; rather, she took on, as she was handed into the
supper-room, the aspect of his chief exhibit.

The room, hot, polished, flaring reflections of electric lights from its
glistening floor, announced itself the heart of high festivity, through
the midst of which their entrance made an added ripple. The flushed
faces of the women under their flowers, under their pale-tinted hats,
with their smiling recognitions to Clara, to Flora, to Ella, smiled with
a sharpened interest. It proclaimed that Kerr was a stranger, and, in a
circle which found itself a little stale for lack of innovations, a
desirable one. Exclamatory greetings, running into skirmishes of talk,
here and there halted their progress, and even after they had settled
about their table in the center of the room the attention of one and
another was drawn over the shoulder to some special, trans-table
recognition.

Apparently the dominant note of their party was Ella's clamorous
selection for the supper; but to Flora the more real thing was the
atmosphere of excitement and mystery she had been moving in all the
evening. She was pursued by the obsession of something more about to
happen--something imminent--though, of course, nothing would; at least,
how could anything happen here, to them? And by "them," she meant
herself and these people around her so stupidly talking--the eternal
repetition of the story she had read out that evening to Clara, and not
one glimmer of light! She wondered if her obsession was all her own--or
did it reach to one of them? Certainly not Ella; not Judge Buller,
settled into his collar, choosing champagnes. Clara? She had to skip
Clara. One never knew whether Clara had not more behind her smooth
prettiness than ever she brought to light. Kerr? Perhaps. With him she
felt potentialities enormous. Harry? Never. Harry was being appealed to
by all the women who could get at him as to his part in the affair--what
had been his sensations and emotions? But Flora knew perfectly well he
had had none. He was only oppressed by the attention his fame in the
matter, and the central position of their table, brought upon him.
Protesting, he made his part as small as possible.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18