The Coast of Chance Part 32

"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 G.o.d, 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.sing; 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionate 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 gra.s.s 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 bal.u.s.ter 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, G.o.d knew what ravages of stress and strain, until the man had finally broken. That face appeared and reappeared through the flas.h.i.+ng 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 quant.i.ty. 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 ident.i.ty when finally he stood before her restored and perfect? If he were not the thief whom she had struggled so to s.h.i.+eld, 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. Blus.h.i.+ng 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 ident.i.ties.

"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 a.s.surance, 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 gra.s.s. 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 a.s.sured 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.