The Coast of Chance Part 26

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 s.h.i.+ma'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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sail 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sure 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 pa.s.sionate 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 bra.s.s 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.