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THE COAST OF CHANCE
_By_
ESTHER AND LUCIA CHAMBERLAIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
[Illustration: FLORA GILSEY.]
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1908
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
APRIL
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE VANISHING MYSTERY 1
II A NAME GOES ROUND A TABLE 24
III ENCOUNTERS ON PARADE 63
IV FLOWERS BY THE WAY 82
V ON GUARD 93
VI BLACK MAGIC 105
VII A SPELL IS CAST 129
VIII A SPARK OF HORROR 142
IX ILLUMINATION 162
X A LADY UNVEILED 175
XI THE MYSTERY TAKES HUMAN FORM 197
XII DISENCHANTMENT 213
XIII THRUST AND PARRY 216
XIV COMEDY CONVEYS A WARNING 231
XV A LADY IN DISTRESS 248
XVI THE HEART OF THE DILEMMA 285
XVII THE DEMIGOD 293
XVIII GOBLIN TACTICS 330
XIX THE FACE IN THE GARDEN 345
XX FLIGHT 361
XXI THE HOUSE OF QUIET 381
XXII CLARA'S MARKET 410
XXIII TOUCHE 422
XXIV THE COMIC MASK 435
XXV THE LAST ENCHANTMENT 451
THE COAST OF CHANCE
I
THE VANISHING MYSTERY
Flora Gilsey stood on the threshold of her dining-room. She had turned
her back on it. She swayed forward. Her bare arms were lifted. Her hands
lightly caught the molding on either side of the door. She was looking
intently into the mirror at the other end of the hall. All the lights in
the dining-room were lit, and she saw herself rather keenly set against
their brilliance. The straight-held head, the lifted arms, the short,
slender waist, the long, long sweep of her skirts made her seem taller
than she actually was; and the strong, bright growth of her hair and the
vivacity of her face made her seem more deeply colored.
She had poised there for the mere survey of a new gown, but after a
moment of dwelling on her own reflection she found herself considering
it only as an object in the foreground of a picture. That picture, seen
through the open door, reflected in the glass, was all of a bright, hard
glitter, all a high, harsh tone of newness. In its paneled oak, in its
glare of cut-glass and silver, in the shining vacant faces of its floors
and walls, there was not a color that filled the eye, not a shadow where
imagination could find play. As a background for herself it struck her
as incongruous. Like a child looking at the landscape upside down, she
felt herself in a foreign country. Yet it was hers. She turned about to
bring it into familiar association. There was nothing wrong with it. But
its great capacity suggested large parties rather than close intimacies.
In the high lift of its ceilings, the ample openings of its doors, the
swept, garnished, polished beauty of its cold surfaces, it proclaimed
itself conceived, created and decorated for large, fine functions. She
thought whimsically that any one who knew her, coming into her house,
would realize that some one other than herself had the ordering of it.
She glanced over the table. It was set for three. It lacked nothing but
the serving of dinner. She looked at the clock. It wanted a few minutes
to the hour. Shima, the Japanese butler, came in softly with the evening
papers. She took them from him. Nothing bored her so much as a paper,
but to-night she knew it contained something she really wanted to see.
She opened one of the damp sheets at the page of sales.
There it was at the head of the column in thick black type:
AT AUCTION, FEBRUARY 18
PERSONAL ESTATE OF
ELIZABETH HUNTER CHATWORTH
CONSISTING OF----
She read the details with interest down to the end, where the name of
the "famous Chatworth ring" finished the announcement with a flourish.
Why "famous"? It was very provoking to advertise with that vague
adjective and not explain it.
She turned indifferently to the first page. She read a sentence, re-read
it, read it again. Then, as if she could not read fast enough, her eyes
galloped down the column. Color came into her cheeks. The grasp of her
hands on the edges of the paper tightened. It was the most extraordinary
thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was blazing at her
from the columns of the paper was at once the wildest thing that could
possibly have happened, and yet the one most to have been expected.
For, from the first the business had been sinister, from as far back as
the tragedy--the end of poor young Chatworth and his wife--the Bessie,
who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her death,
that had befallen in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their
little city, and the large announcements of auction that had followed
hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid
excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some special
luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They had
been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the
"Maple Room" before the auction. And now the whole spectacular business
was capped by a sensation so dramatic as to strain credulity to its
limit. She could not believe it; yet here it was glaring at her from the
first page. Still--it might be an exaggeration, a mistake. She must go
back to the beginning and read it over slowly.
The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima's announcement of dinner
only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when, with a faint, smooth
rustle, Mrs. Britton came in, she let the paper fall. She always faced
her chaperon with a little nervousness, and with the same sense of
strangeness with which she so frequently regarded her house.
"It's fifteen minutes after eight," Mrs. Britton observed. "We would
better not wait any longer."
She took the place opposite Flora's at the round table. Flora sat down,
still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.
"It's the most extraordinary thing!" she burst forth.
Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the
presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her companion's
face--seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes,
through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached for an
explanation.
"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and smooth,
as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.
"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply
vanished! And--and it was all our own crowd who were there!"
"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of
this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it
definite.
Flora flung out her hands.
"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the
afternoon, when everybody was there--and they haven't the faintest
clue."
"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to be
calm.
Again Flora's eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the
other jewels. Harry saw it"--she glanced at the paper--"as late as four
o'clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was
gone."
Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have
differed more than these two women in their blondness and their
prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery
lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and
calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to ivory
through all the gamut of gold--hair color of a panther's hide, eyes dark
hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit.
The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to
elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of
wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery
itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked
far over the head of Clara Britton's annoyance that there should be no
clue.
"Why, don't you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It
might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I would
much prefer to think it was some one we didn't know so well--some one
strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping out the Golden
Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be embarrassed."
Clara looked back with extraordinary intentness.
"Oh, it's not possible the thing is stolen. There's some mistake! And if
it were"--her eyes seemed to open a little wider to take in this
possibility--"they will have detectives all around the water front by
to-night. Any one would find it difficult to get away," she pointed out.
"You see, the ring is an important piece of property."
"Of course; I know," Flora murmured. A faint twitch of humor pulled her
mouth, but the passionate romantic color was dying out of her face. How
was it that one's romances could be so cruelly pulled down to earth? She
ought to have learned by this time, she thought, never to fly her little
flag of romance except to an empty horizon--never, at least, to fly it
in Clara's face. It was always as promptly surrounded by Clara's common
sense as San Francisco would be surrounded by the police. But still she
couldn't quite come down to Clara. "At least," she sighed, "he has saved
me an awful expense, whoever took it, for I should have had to have it."
Mrs. Britton surveyed this statement consideringly. "Was it the most
valuable thing in the collection?"
Flora hesitated in the face of the alert question. "I--don't know. But
it was the most remarkable. It was a Chatworth heirloom, the papers say,
and was given to Bessie at the time of her marriage." The thought of the
death that had so quickly followed that marriage gave Flora a little
shiver, but no shade of the tragedy touched Clara. There was nothing but
speculation in Clara's eyes--that, and a little disappointment. "Then
they will put off the auction--if it is really so," she mused.
"Oh, yes," Flora mourned, "they can put it off as long as they please.
The only thing I wanted is gone--and I hadn't even seen it."
"Well, I wouldn't be too sure. There may be some mistake about it. The
papers love a sensation."
"But there must be something in it, Clara. Why, they closed the doors
and searched them--_that_ crowd! It's ridiculous!"
Clara Britton glanced at the empty place. "Then that must be what has
kept him."
"Who? Oh, Harry!" It took Flora a moment to remember she had been
expecting Harry. She hoped Clara had not noticed it. Clara always had
too much the assumption that she was taking him only as the
best-looking, best-natured, safest bargain presented. "He will be
here," she reassured, "but I wish he would hurry. His dinner will be
spoiled; and, poor dear, he likes his dinner so much!"
The faint silver sound of the electric bell, a precipitate double peal,
seemed to uphold this statement. The women faced each other in a
moment's suspense, a moment of expectation, such as the advance column
may feel at sight of a scout hotfoot from the field of battle. There
were muffled movements in the hall, then light, even steps crossing the
drawing-room. Those light steps always suggested a slight frame, and, as
always, Flora was re-surprised at his bulk as now it appeared between
the parted curtains, the dull black and sharp white of his evening
clothes topped by his square, fresh-colored face.
[Illustration: YES, HE WAS MAGNIFICENT, SHE THOUGHT.]
"Well, Flora," he said, "I know I'm late," and took the hand she held to
him from where she sat. Her face danced with pleasure. Yes, he was
magnificent, she thought, as he crossed with his light stride to Mrs.
Britton's chair. He could even stand the harsh lines and lights of
evening clothes. He dominated their ugly convention with his height,
his face so ruddy and fresh under the pale brown of his hair, his alert,
assured, deft movement. His high good nature had the effect of
sweetening for him even Clara Britton's flavorless manner. The "We were
speaking of you," with which she saw him to his seat, had all the warmth
of a smile, but a smile far in the background of Flora's immediate
possession. Indeed, Flora had seldom had so much to say to Harry as at
this moment of her excitement over what he had actually seen. For the
evidence that he had seen something was vivid in his face. She had never
found him so splendidly alive. She had never seen him, it came to her,
quite like this before.
She shook the paper at him. "Tell us everything, instantly!"
He gaily acknowledged her right to make him thus stand and deliver. He
shot his hands into the air with the lightening vivacity that was in him
a sort of wit. "Not guilty," he grinned at her.
"Harry, you know you were in it. The papers have you the most important
personage."
"Oh, not all that," he denied her allegation. "They had the whole lot of
us cooped up together for investigation for as much as two hours. I
thought I shouldn't have time to dress! I'm as hungry as a hawk!" He
rolled it out with the full gusto with which he was by this time engaged
on his first course.
"Poor dear," said Flora with cooing mock-sympathy, "and did they starve
it? But would it mind telling us, now that it has its food, what is
true, and what was the gallant part it played this afternoon?"
"Well," he followed her whimsical lead, "the chief detective and I were
the star performers. I found the ring wasn't there, and he found he
couldn't find it."
"Don't you know any more than the paper?" Flora mourned.
"Considerably less--if I know the papers." He grinned with a fine flash
of even teeth. "What do you want me to say?"
"Why, stupid, the adventures of Harry Cressy, Esquire. How did you
feel?"
"Thirsty."
"Oh, Harry!" She glanced about, as if for a missile to threaten him
with.
"Upon my word! But look here--wait a minute!" he arrived deliberately at
what was required of him. "Never mind how I felt; but if you want to
know the way it happened--here's your Maple Room." He began a diagram
with forks on the cloth before him, and Clara, who had watched their
sparring from her point of vantage in the background, now leaned
forward, as if at last they were getting to the point.
"This is the case, furthest from the door." He planted a salt-cellar in
his silver inclosure. "I come in very early, at half-past two, before
the crowd; fail to meet you there." He made mischievous bows to right
and left. "I go out again. But first I see this ring."
"What was it like?" Flora demanded.
"Like?" Harry turned a speculative eye to the dull glow of the
candelabrum, as if between its points of flame he conjured up the
vision of the vanished jewel. "Like a bit of an old gold heathen god
curled round himself, with his head, which was mostly two yellow
sapphires, between his knees, and a big, blue stone on top. Soft, yellow
gold, so fine you could almost dent it. And carved! Even through a glass
every line of it is right." He paused and ran the tip of his finger
along the silver outline of his diagram, as if the mere memory of the
precious eyes of the little god had power to arrest all other
consideration. "Well, there he was," he pulled himself up, "and I can't
remember when a thing of that sort has stayed by me so. I couldn't seem
to get away from it. I dropped into the club and talked to Buller about
it. He got keen, and I went back with him to have another look at it.
Well, at the door Buller stops to speak to a chap going out--a crazy
Englishman he had picked up at the club. I go on. By this time there's a
crowd inside, but I manage to get up to the case. And first I miss the
spot altogether. And then I see the card with his name; and then,
underneath I see the hole in the velvet where the god has been."
Flora gave out a little sigh of suspense, and even Clara showed a gleam
of excitement. He looked from one to the other. "Then there were
fireworks. Buller came up. The detective came up. Everybody came up.
Nobody'd believe it. Lots of 'em thought they had seen it only a few
minutes before. But there was the hole in the velvet--and nothing more
to be found."
"But does no one know anything? Has no one an idea?" Clara almost panted
in her impatience.
"Not the ghost of a glimmer of a clue. There were upward of two hundred
of us, and they let us out like a chain-gang, one by one. My number was
one hundred and ninety-three, and so far I can vouch there were no
discoveries. It has vanished--sunk out of sight."
Flora sighed. "Oh, poor Bessie Chatworth!" It came out with a quick
inconsequence that made Clara--even in her impatience--ever so faintly
smile. "It seems so cruel to have your things taken like that when
you're dead, and can't help it," Flora rather lamely explained. "I
should hate it."
Harry stared at her. "Oh, come. I guess you wouldn't care." His eyes
rested for a moment on the fine flare of jewels presented by Flora's
clasped hands. "Besides,"--his voice dropped to a graver level--"the
deuce of it is--" he paused, they, both rather breathless, looking at
him. He had the air of a man about to give information, and then the air
of a man who has thought better of it. His voice consciously shook off
its gravity. "Well, there'll be such a row kicked up, the probability is
the thing'll be returned and no questions asked. Purdie's keen--very
keen. He's responsible, the executor of the estate, you see."
But Clara Britton leveled her eyes at him, as if the thing he had
produced was not at all the thing he had led up to. "Still, unless there
was enormous pressure somewhere--and in this case I don't see where--I
can't see what Mr. Purdie's keenness will do toward getting it back."
Harry played a little sulkily with the proposition, but he would not
pick up the thread he had dropped. "I don't know that any one sees. The
question now is--who took it?"
"Why, one of us," said Flora flippantly. "Of course, it is all on the
Western Addition."
"Don't you believe it!" he answered her. "It's a confounded fine
professional job. It takes more than sleight of hand--it takes genius, a
thing like that!"
Flora gave him a quick glance, but he had not spoken flippantly. He was
serious in his admiration. She didn't quite fancy his tone. "Why,
Harry," she protested, "you talk as if you admired him!"
At this he laughed. "Well, how do you know I don't? But I can tell you
one thing"--he dropped back into the same tone again--"there's no local
crook work in this affair. It should be some one big--some one--" He
frowned straight before him. He shook his head and smiled. "There was a
chap in England, Farrell Wand."
The name floated in a little silence.
"He kept them guessing," Harry went on recalling it; "did some great
vanishing acts."
"You mean he could take things before their eyes without people knowing
it?" Flora's eyes were wide beyond their wont.
"Something of that sort. I remember at one of the Embassy balls at St.
James' he talked five minutes to Lady Tilton. Her emeralds were on when
he began. She never saw 'em again."
Flora began to laugh. "He must have been attractive."
"Well," Harry conceded practically, "he knew his business."
"But you can't rely on those stories," Clara objected.
"You must this time," he shook his tawny head at her; "I give you my
word; for I was there."
It seemed to Flora fairly preposterous that Harry could sit there
looking so matter-of-fact with such experiences behind him. Even Clara
looked a little taken aback, but the effect was only to set her more
sharply on.
"Then such a man could easily have taken the ring in the Maple Room this
afternoon? You think it might have been the man himself?"
His broad smile of appreciation enveloped her. "Oh, you have a scent
like a bloodhound. You haven't let go of that once since you started. He
could have done it--oh, easy--but he went out eight, ten years ago."
"Died?" Flora's rising inflection was a lament.
"Went over the horizon--over the range. Believe he died in the
colonies."
"Oh," Flora sighed, "then I shall have to fancy he has come back again,
just for the sake of the Chatworth ring. That wouldn't be too strange.
It's all so strange I keep forgetting it is real. At least," she went on
explaining herself to Harry's smile, "it seems as if this must be going
on a long way off, as if it couldn't be so close to us, as if the ring I
wanted so much couldn't really be the one that has disappeared." All
the while she felt Harry's smile enveloping her with an odd,
half-protecting watchfulness, but at the close of her sentence he
frowned a little.
"Well, perhaps we can find another ring to take the place of it."
She felt that she had been stupid where she should have been most
delicate. "But you don't understand," she protested, leaning far toward
him as if to coerce him with her generous warmth. "The Chatworth ring
was nothing but a fancy I had. I never thought of it for a moment as an
engagement ring!"
By the light stir of silk she was aware that Clara had risen. She looked
up quickly to encounter that odd look. Clara's face was so smooth, so
polished, so unruffled, as to appear almost blank, but none the less
Flora saw it all in Clara's eye--a look that was not new to her. It was
the same with which Clara had met the announcement of her engagement;
the same look with which she had confronted every allusion to the
approaching marriage; the same with which she now surveyed the mention
of the engagement ring--a look neither approving nor dissenting, whose
calm, considerate speculation seemed to repudiate all interest positive
or negative in the approaching event except the one large question,
"What is to become of me?" Many times Clara had held it up before her,
not as a question, certainly not as an accusation; as a flat assertion
of fact; but to-night Flora felt it so directly and imperatively aimed
at her that it seemed this time to demand an audible response. And
Clara's way of getting up, and standing there, with her gloves on,
poised and expectant, as if she were only waiting an opportunity to take
farewell, took on, in the light of her look, the fantastic appearance of
a final departure. "I'm afraid," she mildly reminded them, "that Shima
announced the carriage ten minutes ago."
"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry!" Flora's eyes wavered apologetically in the
direction of the waiting Japanese. Clara's flicker of amusement made her
hate herself the moment it was out. She could always depend on herself
when she knew she was on exhibition. She could be sure of the right
thing if it were only large enough, but she was still caught at odd
moments by the trifles, the web of a certain social habit into which she
had slipped, full grown on the smooth surface of her father's millions.
Clara's fleeting smile lit up these trifles to her now as enormous. It
took advantage of her small deficit to point out to her more plainly
than ever to what large blunders she might be liable when she had cut
loose from Clara's guiding, reminding, prompting genius, and chose to
confront the world without it.
To be sure, she was not to confront it alone; but, looking at Harry, it
came to her with a moment's qualm that she did not know him as well as
she had thought.
II
A NAME GOES ROUND A TABLE
For to-night, from the moment he had appeared, she had recognized an
unfamiliar mood in him, and it had come out more the more they had
discussed the Chatworth ring. It was not in any special word or action
on his part. It was in his whole presence that she felt the difference,
as if the afternoon's scandal had been a stimulant to him--not through
its romantic aspect, as it had affected her, but merely by the daring of
the theft itself.
She wondered, as he heaped her ermine on her shoulders, if Harry might
not have more surprises for her than she had supposed. Perhaps she had
taken him too much for granted. After all, she had known him only for a
year.
She herself was but three years old in San Francisco, and to her new
eyes Harry had seemed an old resident thoroughly established. So firmly
established was he in his bachelor quarters, in his clubs, in the
demands made upon him by the city's society, that it had never occurred
to her he had ever lived anywhere else. Nor had he happened to mention
anything of his previous life until to-night, when he had given her, in
that mention of a London ball, one flashing glimpse of former
experiences.
Impulsively she summed up the possibilities of what these might have
been. She gave him a look, incredulous, delighted, as he handed her into
the carriage. She had actually got a thrill out of easy-going,
matter-of-fact, well-tubbed Harry! It was a comradeship in itself. Not
that she would have told him. This capacity of hers for thrills she had
found need always to keep carefully covered. In the days when she was a
shoeless child--those days of her father's labor in shaft and dump--she
had dimly felt her world to be a creature of a keen, a fairly cruel
humor, for all things that did not pertain to the essence of the life
it struggled for. The wonder of the western flare of day, the magic in
the white eyes of the stars before sunrise, the mystery in the pulse of
the pounding mine heard in the dark--of such it had been as ruthless as
this new world that looked as narrowly forth at as starved a prospect
with even keener ridicule. Instinctively she had turned to both the
hard, bright face they required. It seemed that in the world at large
this faculty of hers was queer. And to be queer, to have anything that
other people had not, except money, was to be open to suspicion. And yet
from the first she had had to be queer.
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.