The Coast of Chance Part 16

"Oh!" She turned away from him. Every nerve in her was in revolt. Then he really wasn't going to tell her anything. He was keeping her out of it as if she were a child. She had relied on him to return the ring. She had counted upon his indifference and good nature. And he was neither indifferent nor good-natured. All desire of even mentioning the ring to him left her; and as to giving him her confidence--These hints that he had thrown out about Kerr--they might be mere jealousy--but he might have actual knowledge, knowledge that, with her own fitted to it, would make for him a complete figure. She caught her breath at the thought of how near she had come to actually betraying Kerr. Until that moment she had not realized that through all her waverings her one fixed intention had been not to betray him.

Harry had risen and was b.u.t.toning his overcoat. "You know you're never at home if you don't want to be," he said.

She stood misleadingly drooping before him. But though her appearance was pa.s.sive enough for the most exacting lover her will had never been in more vigorous revolt. She knew Harry was taking her weariness for acquiescence, and she let him take it so. She even followed him into the hall, and with a vague idea of further propitiation, nodded away s.h.i.+ma and opened the door for him herself.

The fog was a chasm of white outside. Harry turned on the brink of it.

"By the way, where's Clara?"

"Why, do you want to see her? She'll be out all day. She's dining with the Willie Herricks."

"No, I don't want to see her, but, by the way, she's not dining with the Willie Herricks; she's dining with the Bullers. I heard her make the engagement yesterday."

"Oh, no, Harry, I'm sure you're mistaken."

"Well, it doesn't matter. All I want to know is, why did you show that ring to Clara before it was set?"

She was genuinely aghast. "I didn't," she flashed. "What made you think I had?"

He shrugged. "Well, she asked me where we got it. I don't see why women always talk those things over." He was looking at her inquiringly.

"Well, I haven't," she said quickly. "Have you?"

He looked out upon the fog. "Told her where we got it, do you mean? No, I just chaffed her. I'd look out, if I were you. She strikes me as d.a.m.ned curious." He stood a moment on the threshold, looking from Flora to the chasm of fog outside, as if he were choosing between two chances.

"I think I'll take that ring this morning," he said slowly.

The deliberate words came to her with a shock. But in the moment, while she looked into Harry's moody face, she realized how impossible to make a scene over what must still be maintained as a trivial matter betwixt them--the mere resetting of a jewel; what should she do to put him off?

She looked up at him, and saw with relief that his face was turned from her to the fog, as if he had forgotten her. Then, still with averted head, as if he addressed the whiteness, or himself,--"No," he determined, "I won't. I'll take it when I come back." He pulled himself together with an effort, with a smile. "That is," he turned to her, "if you're in no great hurry about the setting? Very well, then. In a day or two."

He plunged away into the fog. A few rods from the door he disappeared, but she could still hear his footsteps growing thinner, lighter, pa.s.sing away in the whiteness.

XIV

COMEDY CONVEYS A WARNING

She stood where he had left her in the open doorway, with the damp eddy of the fog blowing on her. She had had a narrow escape; but after the first fullness of her relief there returned upon her again the weight of her responsibility. There was no slipping out of it now, and it was going to be worse than she had imagined. So much had come out in the last half-hour that she felt bewildered by it. What Harry had let slip about Clara alarmed her. What in the world was Clara about? With one well-aimed observation she had stirred up Harry against Kerr and against Flora herself. And meanwhile she was running after the Bullers. Twice in two days, if Harry was not mistaken, and she was even nearing another engagement.

After all her fruitless mousings, Clara had too evidently got on the scent of something at last. How much she knew or guessed as yet, Flora could not be sure, but certainly, now, she couldn't let Clara go. For that would be turning adrift a dangerous person with a stronger motive than ever for pursuing her quest, and the opportunity for pursuing it un.o.bserved, out of Flora's sight. Clara was at it even now, and the only consolation Flora had was that Harry, at least, would not play into her hands.

For Harry had a special secret interest of his own. The last ten minutes of their interview had made that plain. His manner, when he had declared his intention of taking the ring, had been anything but the manner of a care-free lover merely concerned with pleasing his lady. Then they were all of them racing each other for the same thing--the thing she held in her possession; and whether she feared most to be felled by a blow from Harry, or hunted far afield by Kerr, or trapped by Clara, she could not tell. She stood hesitating, looking out into the obscurity of the fog, as if she hoped to read the answer there. Presently she returned to the fact that s.h.i.+ma was waiting to close the door. Half-way across the hall she paused again, looking thoughtfully down the rose-colored vista of the drawing-room, and up at the broad black march of the stair. Vague mysteries peered at her from every side. Which should she flee from?

Which walk boldly up to and dispel?

She went up-stairs slowly. She stood in her dressing-room absently before the mirror. She touched the hard, unyielding stone of the ring under the thin bodice of her gown. She recalled the morning when she had gone to get it, before anything had happened and the lure of life had been so exquisite. Now that it had come near--if this indeed were life that she was laboring in--it was steep and crabbed, like the brown hills in summer, far off, like velvet, to climb, plowed ground and stubble.

And yet she didn't wish herself back, but only forward. Now she had no leisure to imagine, to pretend, to enjoy, only the breathless sense that she must get forward. The chattering clock on her mantel warned her of the pa.s.sing time and set her hurrying into her walking-gown, her hat, her gloves, as if the object of her errand would only wait for her a moment longer. When, for the second time, she opened the house door, she didn't hesitate. She descended into the white fog that covered all the city.

Above her the stone facade of her house loomed huge and pinkish in the mist. Her spirits rose with the feeling that she was going adventuring again, leaving that house where for the last two days she had awaited events with such vivid apprehensions. She hurried fast down the damp, glistening pavement, seeing long, dim gray faces of houses glimmer by, seeing figures come toward her through the fog, grow vivid, pa.s.s, and hearing at intervals the hoa.r.s.e, lonely voice of the fog-horn at "The Heads" reaching her over many intervening hills. She did not feel sure what she should do at the end of her journey or what awaited her there.

She knew herself a most unpractised hunter, she, who, all her life, had been the most artful of quarries. A quarry she was still, but in this chase she had to come out and stalk the facts in order to see which way to run; if, she told herself in her exhilaration, she decided to run at all.

She turned in at the low gate of imitation grill in front of an enormous wooden mansion, with towers and cupolas painted all a chill slate gray, with fuchsias, purple and red, clambering up the front. She rang, and was admitted into a hall, ornate and very high, with a wide staircase sweeping down into the middle of it.

The maid looked dubiously at Flora and thought Miss Buller was not at home, but would see. Flora turned into the room on her left and sat down among the Louis Quinze sofas and potted palms with a feeling that Miss Buller was at home, and, for one reason or another, preferred not to be seen. She waited apprehensively, wondering whether Ella was not seeing the world-in-general, or had really specified against herself. Could it be that Ella was one of those women whom Harry had alluded to as running after Kerr? In the short twenty-four hours every individual help she had counted upon had seemed to draw away from her--Kerr, whose understanding she had been so sure of; Clara, whose propriety had never failed; Harry, whose comfortable good nature she had so taken for granted! It seemed as if the sapphire, whose presence she was never unconscious of, for all she wore it out of sight, had a power like the evil eye over these people. But if it could turn such as Ella against her, why, the Brussels carpet beneath her might well open and let her down to deeper abysses than Judge Buller's wine-cellar.

She started nervously at the step of the maid returning. The message brought was unexpected. "Miss Buller says will you please walk up-stairs?"

Flora was amazed. That invitation would have been odd enough at any time, for she and Ella were hardly on such intimate footing. But now she was ushered up the majestic stair, and from the majestic upper hall abruptly into a wild little cluttered sewing-room, and thence into a wilder but more s.p.a.cious bedroom, large curtains at the windows, large roses on the carpet, and over all objects in the room a clutter of miscellaneous articles, as if Ella's band-boxes, bureaus, and work-baskets habitually refused to contain themselves.

From the midst of this Ella confronted her, still in her "wrapper" and with the large puff of her hair a little awry. Under it her face was curiously pink, a color deepening to the tip of her nose and puffing out under her eyes.

"Well, Flora," she greeted her guest. "You were just the person I wanted to see. Sit down. No, not there--that's my bird of paradise feather! Oh, no, not there--that's the breakfast. Well, I guess you'll have to sit on the bed."

Flora swept aside the clothes that streamed across it and throned herself on the edge of the high, white plateau of Ella's four-poster.

Ella, for all her eager greeting, looked upon her friend doubtfully, and Flora recognized in herself a similar hesitation, as if each were trying to make out, without asking, what thoughts the other harbored.

"I was afraid I shouldn't see you at all," Flora began at last.

"Well, you wouldn't if it hadn't happened to be you," said Ella paradoxically. "Look at me; did you ever see such a sight?"

"You don't look very well," Flora cautiously admitted. "Why, Ella, you've been crying!"

"Yes, I've been crying," said Ella, mopping her nose, which still showed a tendency to distil a tear at its tip. "And it's perfectly awful to me to think you've been living so long in the same house with her."

Flora murmured breathlessly, "What in the world do you mean?"

"If you don't know, I certainly ought to tell you. I mean Clara," said Ella distinctly.

Flora, sitting up on the edge of the high bed with the tips of her little shoes hardly touching the floor, looked at Ella fascinated, her lips a little apart. Ella had so exactly p.r.o.nounced her own secret thought of Clara. She was breathless to know what had been Clara's performance at the Bullers'.

"Of course I've always known she was like that," said Ella, leaning back in her chair with an air of resignation. "She's always getting something. It's awful. It was the same even when we were at boarding-school. I suppose she never did have enough money, though her people were awfully nice; but she worked us all for invitations and rides in our carriages, and I remember she got lots through Lillie Lewis' elder brother, and he thought she was going to marry him, but she didn't. She married Lulu Britton's father; and I guess she worked him until he went under and they found there really was no money. So she's been living on people ever since." Ella rocked gloomily.

"But she does it so nicely," Flora suggested. She still had the feeling that it was not decent to own up to these most secret facts of people's failings.

"Oh, yes, she's a perfect wonder," Ella admitted grudgingly; "look at what she's done for you!" Ella's gesticulation was eloquent of how much that had been. "But don't you imagine she cares about you any more than she cares about me!" Ella began to cry again. "You were an awfully good thing for her, Flora, and now that you're going to be married she's got to have something else. But I do think she might have taken somebody besides papa."

Flora gasped. "'Taken!' Ella, what do you mean?"

"I mean married," said Ella.

"'Married!'" For the time Flora had become a helpless echo.

"Oh, not yet," Ella defiantly nodded. "Not while there's anything left of me."

Flora stammered. "Oh, Ella, no. Oh, Ella, are you sure?" She felt a hysterical impulse to giggle.

"Sure?" Miss Buller cried. "I should think so! Why, she's simply making a dead set for him."