The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance

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Marrika was coming in, and quickly Flora swept the jewels and the
sapphire back into the casket, turned the key upon them, and thrust it
back in the far corner of the drawer. She would give every one a great
surprise when the ring was properly set. She glanced nervously over her
shoulder to see if Marrika had noticed her action. The Russian had been
moving to and fro between the wardrobe and the dressing-table with a
droning thread of song. And now she took up the combs and brushes, and
filling her mouth with pins, began on the long river of yellow-brown
hair that flowed down Flora's back. The broad, pale face reflected
beside her own in the mirror was reassuring by its serene indifference.
She had soothing hands, Marrika. It was a luxury to be dressed by her, a
mental soporific. But to-day it wrought no relaxation in Flora's
tightened nerves. All the while she was being combed and laced and
hooked her eyes were alertly on the dressing-table drawer, that remained
a little open; and presently she caught herself vaguely speculating on
how, after she had been fastened up and into her clothes so securely,
she could dispose upon herself the sapphire. How had she arrived at this
consideration? No course of reasoning led up to it. She was annoyed with
herself. If she wasn't going to wear the ring on her finger, and show
it, why did she want to take it with her at all? For fear it might be
lost? Lost, in her jewel box, in the back of the drawer! She blushed for
herself. She looked severely at her guilty reflection in the mirror.
Perhaps she did look tall; yes, and outwardly sophisticated, but
underneath that bold exterior Flora knew she was only the smallest,
youngest, most ridiculous child ever born. There were moments when this
fact appeared to her more vividly than at others. One had been the other
night when Kerr's eyes had looked through and through her; and here she
was again, when she was going to a girls' luncheon, and most wanted to
feel competent, stared out of countenance by the wonderful eye of a
ring.

Through the long afternoon it was more apparent to her than the faces of
the people around her. She was restless to get back to it, but people
talked interminably. At the luncheon they talked of Kerr. Flora knew
these girls felt a little resentment that she had so easily captured
Harry Cressy; for Harry had been more than an eligible man in the little
city. He had been an eligible personage. Not that he had money; not that
his family tree was plainly planted in their midst; but that without
these two things he had achieved what, with these things, the people he
knew were all striving for. He stood before them as the embodiment of
what they most believed in--perfect bodily splendor, and perfect
knowledge of how to get on with the world; and the fact that he wouldn't
quite be one of them, but after five years still stood a little
off--made him shine with greater brilliance, especially in the eyes of
these young girls. It was hard, they seemed to feel, that such an
apparently remote and difficult person should have succumbed so easily;
and now that a new luminary of equal luster was apparent in their sky,
Flora felt their remarks a little triumphantly aimed at her. It was odd
to her that they should envy her anything, especially those one or two
exquisite flowers of old families, whose lovely eyes saw not one inch
farther than her turquoise collar. And the way they talked of Kerr, with
flourishes, made her feel a faint, responsive irritation that he had
talked to so many of them in exactly the same way.

But between the threads of interest the table group wove together, kept
flashing up her furtive desire to be away, to be at home, to see what
had happened to the sapphire. Of course, she knew that nothing could
have happened; but she wanted to look at it, to open the casket and see
the flash of it before her eyes. For was she quite sure that it was not
one of those fairy gifts, which, put into the hand in a blaze of beauty,
may be found in the pocket as withered leaves? Yet her tenacious nets
of duty caught and caught, and again caught her, so that when the
carriage finally fetched her home it was between lighted street-lamps.

They were dining early that night on account of the Bullers' box party,
but it was nearly eight o'clock before Flora reached the house. And it
was, of course, for that reason that she ran up-stairs--ran wildly,
regardlessly, before the eyes of Shima--and along the hall, her high
heels clacking on the hard floors, and through her bedroom to the
dressing-room, snatched open the table drawer, unlocked the casket with
a twitch of the key--and, ah, it was there! It was really real! Why,
what had she expected? She was laughing at herself.

She was gay in her relief at getting back to the sapphire, but at the
same time she was already wondering what she should do about it that
night--take it with her or leave it alone? Dared she wear it on her
finger under her glove? Clara might notice the unfamiliar form of the
jewel through the thin kid. Harry's warning had been phrased
conventionally enough, but the hints his words conveyed had expanded in
her mind--fear not only of Clara's laughter, that such a jewel had come
from a junk shop, but of her wonder, her questions, her ability of
getting out the story of the whole erratic proceeding, even to the
strange pantomime between Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman. Clara was
marvelous!

Flora watched her curiously across the table that evening, wondering
what was that quality of hers by which she acquired. Hitherto Flora had
accepted it as a fact without question, but now she had a desire to
place it. It was not beauty, for though Clara was pretty, like a
polished Greuze, she was colorless and flavorless, lacking the vivid
heat of magnetism. More probably it consisted in a certain sort of
sweetness Clara could produce on occasions, a way she had of looking and
speaking which Flora could only describe as smooth. But smooth without
texture or softness; smooth as quick-flowing water, smooth as glass--a
surface upon which even caution might lose its equilibrium. For the
danger in Clara was that she was disarming. There was nothing
antagonistic in her. One noticed her slowly. The flat tones of her voice
made background for other people's conversations. The pale tints of her
gown blended with the pale tones of her hair and flesh. Beside Clara's
exquisite gradations Flora felt herself without shades, a creature of
violent contrasts and impulses. If Clara had been going to carry the
ring about with her she would have had a reason for it. But Flora had
nothing but a silly fancy.

She made up her mind to leave the sapphire at home; but in her last
moment in her room the resolution failed her. Harry, of course, would be
angry if he knew, but Harry wouldn't see the thing under her glove.

She came down to where Clara was waiting for her, with the guilty
feeling of a child who has concealed a contraband cake; but the way
Clara looked her over made her conscious that she had not concealed her
excitement. Clara was always cool. What would it be like, she wondered,
to feel the same about everything? How would it seem to be no more
elated by the expectation of listening to the most beautiful of tenors
than over the next meeting of the Decade Club? Was that what she was
coming to in time? Not to-night, she thought; and not, at least, while
that talisman of romance clasped her around the third finger.

VIII

A SPARK OF HORROR

They found Harry waiting for them in the theater lobby. He had come up
too late from Burlingame to do more than meet the party there. The
Bullers were already in the box, he said, and the second act of _I'
Pagliacci_ just beginning.

As they came to the door of the box the lights were down, the curtain up
on a dim stage, and the chorus still floating into the roof, while the
three occupants of the box were indistinguishable figures, risen up and
shuffling chairs to the front for Flora and Clara. It was too dark to
distinguish faces.

But dark as it was, Flora knew who was sitting behind her. She heard him
speaking. Under the notes of the recitative he was speaking to Clara.
The pleasure of finding him here was sharpened by the surprise. She
listened to his voice, the mere intonation of which brought back to her
their walk through the Presidio woods as deliciously as if she were
still there.

Then, as the tenor took up the theme, all talking ceased--Ella's husky
whisper, Clara's smoother syllables, and the flat, slow, variable voice
of Kerr--the whole house seemed to sink into stiller repose; the high
chords floated above the heads of the black pit like colored bubbles,
and Flora forgot the sapphire in the triple spell of the singing, the
darkness, and the face she was yet to see. She felt relaxed and released
from her guard by this darkness around her, that blotted out the sea of
faces beneath, that dissolved the walls and high galleries, that
obscured the very outline of the box where she sat, until she seemed to
be poised, half-way up a void of darkness, looking into a pit in the
hollowness of which a voice was singing.

The stage was a narrow shelf of wood swung in that void, from which the
voice sang, and a bare finger of light followed it about from place to
place. The sweet, searching tenor notes, the semblance of passion and
reality the gesticulating Frenchman threw over all the stage, and the
_crescendo_ of the tragedy carried her into a mood that barred out Ella,
barred out Clara, barred out Harry more than any; but, unaccountably,
Kerr was still with her. He was there by no will of hers, but by some
essence of his own, some quality that linked him, as it linked her, to
the passionate subtleties of life. He seemed to her the eager spirit
that was prompting and putting forward this comedy and tragedy playing
on before her. She heard him reasserted, vigorous, lawless, wandering,
in the voice of the mimic strolling player addressing his mimic
audience. The appeal of the tenor to the voiceless galleries,
"Underneath this little play we show, there is another play," seemed
indeed the very voice of Kerr repeating itself. And with the climax of
the sharp tragedy in the middle of the comic stage she placed him
again, but placed him this time in the mimic audience looking on,
neither applauding nor dissenting; but rather as if he watched the play
and played it, too.

The lights went up with a spring. A wave of motion flickered over the
house, the talking voices burst forth all at once, and she saw him,
really saw him for the first time that evening, as in her fancy, part of
the audience; as in her fancy, neither applauding nor dissenting, yet
with what a difference! He leaned back in his chair, and leaned his head
a little back, as if, for weariness, he wished there were a rest behind
it; and how indifferently, how critically, how levelly he surveyed the
fluttered house, and the figures in the box beside him! How foreign he
appeared to the ardent spirit who had dominated the dark; how emptied of
the heat of imagination, how worn, how dry; and even in his salience,
how singularly pathetic! He was neither the satanic person of the first
night, nor her comrade of the Presidio hills. And if the expression of
his face was not quite so cheap as cynicism, it was just the absence of
belief in anything.

She felt a lump in her throat, an ache of the cruelest disappointment,
as though some masker, masking as the fire of life, had suddenly removed
the covering of his face and showed her the burnt-out bones beneath. The
shift from what she remembered him to what he now appeared was too rapid
and considerable for her. She found herself looking at him through a
mist of tears--there in the heart of publicity, in the middle of the
circle of red velvet curtains!

He turned and saw her. She watched a smile of the frankest pleasure
rising, as it were, to the surface of his weary preoccupation. Something
had delighted him. Why, it was herself--just her being there! And she
could only helplessly blink at him. Was ever anything so stupid as to be
caught in tears over nothing! For the next moment he had caught her. She
knew by the change of his look, interrogative, amused, incredulous. He
straightened and leaned forward.

"Really," he said, "you must remember that little man has only gone out
for a glass of beer."

So he thought it was the tenor who had brought her to the point of
tears.

"Ah, why do you say that?" she protested.

He continued to smile indulgently upon her. "Would you really rather
believe it true?"

"I don't know. But I wish _you_ hadn't thought of the beer."

He brought the glare of his monocle to bear full upon her. "Why not? It
is all we make sure of."

So he had taken that side of it. By his words as well as his looks he
repudiated all the gallant show of romance he had paraded to her before,
and had taken up the cause of the world as flatly as Harry could have
done.

"Oh, if to be sure is all you want," she burst out; "but you don't mean
it! Wouldn't you rather have something beautiful you weren't sure of,
than something certain that didn't matter?"

He nodded to this quite casually, as if it were an old acquaintance.

"Oh, yes; but the time comes round when you want to be sure of
something. The sun never sets twice alike over Mont Pelee; but you can
always get the same brand of lager to-day that you had the week before."
He looked at her with a faint amusement. "And by your expression I take
it you don't know how fine some of those brands are. Life is not half
bad--even when it is only a means to the beer."

Under these garish lights, in the middle of this theater of people,
facing the bland, almost banal, stare of that monocle, it looked
exceedingly probable that, after all, in spite of her dreaming, this was
what life would prove to be. But she hated the thought, as she hated
that Kerr should be the one to show it to her; as she would have hated
her ring if, after all its splendor in the shop, it should have turned
out to be a piece of colored glass.

"No, no! I won't believe you," she stoutly denied him. "There _is_ more
in life than you can touch. You're not like yourself to say there is
not."

He laughed, but rather shortly.

"My dear child, forgive me; I'm sulky to-night. I feel, as I felt at
eighteen, that the world has treated me badly. I've lost my luck."

The way his voice dropped at the last sounded to her the weariest thing
she had ever heard. He settled back in his chair again, and looked
moodily out across the brilliant house.

"I'm sorry." Her tone was sweetly vague. What could be the matter with
him? Then, half timidly, she rallied him. "If you go on like this, I
shall have to show you my talisman."

"Oh, have you indeed a talisman?" he humored her. And it was as if he
said, "Oh, have you a doll?" He did not even turn his head to look at
her.

She was chilled. She felt the disappointment, that his quick smile had
lightened, return upon her. She hardly noticed the rise of the curtain
on the second little play, and the singing voices did not reach her with
any poignancy. She was vaguely aware of movements in the box--of
Harry's coming in, of Clara's little rustle making room for him, of the
shift of Ella's chair away from the business of listening, toward him,
and her husky whisper going on with some prolonged tale of dull
escapade; but to Flora they all made only a banal background for the
brooding silence of her companion. He had thrown his mood over her until
she was ready to doubt even the potency of her talisman to counteract
it.

She felt of the stone. She drew off her glove and tried to look at it in
the dim light, but couldn't get a gleam out of it. She was as impatient
for the lights to go up that she might secretly be cheered by its
wonder, as she had been that afternoon to get back from the luncheon,
and make sure it was still in the drawer. She must see it in spite of
Clara at her right hand, whose little chiseled profile might turn upon
her at any moment a full face of inquiry.

She held her left hand low in the shadow of her chair; and if, as the
lights went up again, there was any change in the sapphire, it was
merely a sharper brilliance, as if, like an eye, it had moods, and this
was one of its moments of excitement. In its extraordinary luster it
seemed to possess a beauty that could not be valued; and she wanted to
hold it up to Kerr, to see if she couldn't startle him out of his
mood--to see if he wouldn't respond to it, "Yes, there is more in it
than you can touch."

She turned to him with the daring flash of timid spirits. It was so
sharp a motion that he started instantly from his reverie to meet it,
but his alacrity was mechanical. She felt the smile he summoned was
slow, as if he returned, from a long distance, a little painfully to his
present surroundings.

The _Intermezzo_ was playing, and to speak under the music he leaned so
close his shoulder touched her chair. Through that narrow space between
them, almost beneath his eyes, she moved her hand--a gesture so slightly
emphasized as to seem accident. He had started to speak, but her motion
seemed to stop his tongue. He looked hard at her hand, and something
violent in his intentness made her clutch the side of the chair.
Instantly she met his look, so fiercely, cruelly challenging, that it
took her like a blow. For a moment they looked at each other, her eyes
wide with fright, his narrowed to a glare under the terrible intentness
of his brows. What had she done? What threatened her? What could save
her in this sea of people? Then, while she gazed, his challenge burned
out to a pale hard scrutiny, that faded to no expression at all--or was
it that any expression would have seemed dim after the terrible one that
had flashed across his face?

She was as shaken as if he had seized hold of her. If he had snatched
the ring off her finger she wouldn't have been more shocked. The whole
box must be transfixed by him, and the whole house be looking at nothing
but their little circle of horror! She was ready for it. She was braced
for anything but the fact which actually confronted her--that no one had
noticed them at all. It was monstrous that such a thing could have been
without their knowing! But there was no face in all the orchestra, the
crowded galleries, or the tiers of boxes to affirm that anything had
happened; no face in their own box had even stirred, but Clara's, and
that had merely turned from profile to the full, faintly inquiring,
mild, and palely pink in the warm reflections of the red velvet
curtains.

And what could Clara have seen, if she had seen at all, but Flora a
little paler than usual with a hand that trembled; and what worse could
Clara conjecture than that she was being silly about Kerr? She turned
slowly toward him, and looked at him with a courage that was part of her
fear. But wasn't she, in a way, being silly about Kerr? What had become
of his expression that had threatened her? There was nothing left of it
but her own violent impression--and the longer Kerr sat there, talking
from her to Clara, from Clara to Judge Buller, his eyes keeping pace
with his light conversational flights, the less Flora felt sure he had
ever fixed her with that intensity.

And yet the thing had actually happened. Its evidence was before her. He
had been silent. Now he was talking. He had been absent. Now she thought
she had never seen him more vividly concerned with the moment. Yet for
all his cool looks and diffuse talk around the box, she felt uneasily
that his concern was pointed at her, and that he would never let her go.
He only waited for the cover of the last act to come back to her
single-handed.

She would have deflected his attack, but it was too quick, too
unexpected for her to do more than sit helpless, and let him lift up her
left hand, delicately between thumb and finger, as if in itself it was
some rare, fine curio, and, bending close, contemplate the sapphire
unwinkingly. She had an instant when she thought she must cry out, but
how impossible in the awful publicity of her place--a pinnacle in the
face of thousands! And after the first fluttered impulse came a certain
reassurance in such a frank and trivial action. For all its intensity,
how could it be construed otherwise than a lively if unconventional
interest? It must have been her own fancy which had discerned anything
more than that in his first look at her. And yet, when he had laid her
hand lightly back, and readjusted his monocle, and looked out, away from
her, across the black house, she didn't know whether she was more
reassured or troubled because he had not spoken a word. Yet the next
moment he looked around at her.

"We shan't meet every evening in such a way as this," he said, and left
the statement dangling unanswerable between them. It sounded
portentous--final. She wondered that in the middle of her fear it could
strike such a sharp note of regret in her. She knew she would regret not
meeting him again; and yet she shrank from the thought she could still
want to meet him. By one look her whole feeling of sympathy, of
reliance, of admiration, that had flowed out to him so naturally she had
scarcely been aware of it, had been troubled and mixed with fear. She
couldn't answer. She could only look at him with a reflection of her
trouble in her face.

"Are you surprised that I thought of that?" he inquired. "It's not so
odd as you seem to think that I should want to see you again. I don't
want to leave it to chance; do you?" He shot the question at her so
suddenly, with such a casual eye, and such dry gravity of mouth, that he
had her admission out of her before she realized the extent of its
meaning. And the way he took that admission for granted, and overlooked
her confusion, made her feel that for the sake of whatever he was after
he was intentionally ignoring what it did not suit his convenience to
see. She knew he must have seen; that every moment while she had changed
and fluttered his eye had never left her.

"Then when are you at home?" he asked her; and by his tone, he conveyed
the impression that he was only making courteous response to some
invitation she had offered him; though, when she thought, she had not
offered it, he had got it out of her. He had got it by sheer
impertinence. But none the less he had it. She couldn't escape him
there.

She answered somewhat stiffly: "Fridays, second and fourth."

He looked at her with a humorous twist of mouth. "What? So seldom?"

She was impotent if he wouldn't be snubbed; but at the worst she
wouldn't be cornered. "Oh, dear, no--but people who come at other times
take a chance."

"Does that mean that I may take mine to-morrow?"

He was pressing her too hard. Why was he so anxious to see her, as he
had not been the first night or yesterday, or even ten minutes ago? She,
who, ten minutes ago, would have been glad, now was doing her best to
put him off. She was silent a moment, considering the conventions, and
then, like him, she abandoned them. Without a word she turned away from
him. Whatever she said, he had her. But, if she said nothing and still
he came to-morrow, whatever she did then, he would have to take the
consequences of his insistence. Her only desire now was to evade him,
lest he should force her out of her non-committal attitude. She wanted
to shield herself from further pursuit.

She couldn't escape yet, for the figures on the stage were still
gesticulating and trilling, and the people around her, in the small
inclosure where she sat, hemmed her in so that she could no more move
away from Kerr than if she had been that impaled specimen he had made
her feel at their first meeting. The most she could do was to turn away,
but even thus, with her eyes averted and her ears full of Ella's voice,
she was still acutely aware of him, sitting looking straight before him
across the black house with a face worn, wary, weathered to any
catastrophe, and such an air of being alertly fixed on something a long
way off, that her silence made no more difference to him than her
flutterings and her rudeness. And yet she knew he was only waiting;
waiting his chance to get at her again and make her commit herself; and
that, she was determined, should not happen.

What had already happened, through its very violence, had left an
impression like a dream. It seemed unreal, and yet it had made her
forget everything else--the stage, the people around her, and even the
very sapphire that had generated her inexplicable situation. She drew
her glove over the ring. The lights were imminent. It would be hard to
hide the great flash of the jewel. And besides, she didn't trust it. She
couldn't tell in what direction it might not strike out a spark of
horror next.

The rustle of final departure was all over the house. The people in the
box were stirring and beginning to stand up; and Flora saw Kerr turn and
look at her. She wanted some one to stand between herself and Kerr, and
it was to Harry that she turned; not alone that he was so large and
adequate, but because she thought she saw in him an inclination to step
into that very place where she wanted him. She saw he was a little
sullen, and though she didn't suspect him quite of jealousy, she
wondered if he had not a right to blame her for the appearance of
flirtation that she and Kerr must have presented. Then how much more
might he blame her for what she had actually done--for deliberately
showing the sapphire to Kerr! The very thought of it frightened her. She
knew she was rattling to Harry all the while he fetched her cloak and
put it on her, and she was glad now of that ability she had cultivated
in herself of making a smooth crust of talk over her seething feelings.
She talked the harder, she even took hold of Harry's arm to be sure of
keeping him there between her and what she was afraid of, as they came
out on the sidewalk and stood waiting in the windy night for the
approach of their carriage lights.

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