"Any one that you gave me would be different from the others, wouldn't
it?" she asked prettily.
"Oh, that's very nice of you, Flora, but I want to find you something
new. When shall we look for it? To-morrow, in the morning?"
"Yes, I should love it," she answered, but with no particular
enthusiasm, for the idea of shopping with Harry, and shopping at
Shrove's, did not present a wide field of possibility. "But I have a
luncheon to-morrow," she added, "so we must make it as early as ten."
"Oh, you two!"
At Clara's mildly reproving voice so close beside them both started like
conspirators. They had not heard her come in, yet there she was, just
inside the doorway, still wrapped in her cloak. But there was none of
the impetus of arrested motion in her attitude. She stood at repose as
if she might have waited not to interrupt them.
"Don't scold Flora," said Harry, rising. "It's my fault. She sent me
away half an hour ago. But it is so comfortable here!"
Flora couldn't tell whether he was simply natural, or whether he was
giving this domestic color to their interview on purpose. She rather
thought it was the latter.
"To-morrow at ten, then!" he said cheerfully to Flora. The stiff
curtains rustled behind him and the two women were left together.
"What an important appointment," said Clara lightly, "to bring a man at
this hour to make it."
"Oh, it is, awfully!" Flora answered in the same key. "To choose my
engagement ring."
Clara's delicate brows flew upward, and though Clara herself made no
comment, the quick facial movement said, "I don't believe it."
VI
BLACK MAGIC
The memory of Clara's incredulous glance remained with her as something
curious, and she was not unprepared to be challenged when, the next
morning, she hurried down the hall, drawing on her gloves. Clara's door
did open, but the lady herself, yawning lightly on the threshold, had
this time no questions for her. "Remember the luncheon," she advised,
"and by the way, Ella wants us to sit in their box to-night. Don't
forget to tell Harry."
Flora threw back a gay "All right," but she was in danger of forgetting
even the object of their errand, once she and Harry were out in the
bright glare of the street. The wind, keen and resinous from the wet
Presidio woods, blew at their back down the short block of pavement,
and buffeted them, broadside, as they waited on the corner for the
slow-crawling little car. In spite of the blustering air Flora insisted
on the side seat of the "dummy," and, catching her hat with one hand,
pressing down her fluttering skirts with the other, she laughed, now
sidelong at Harry, now out at the dancing face of the bay.
Each succeeding cross-street gave up a flash of blue water. The short
blocks slid by, first stone fronts and fresh lawns, stucco and tiles;
then here and there corner lots, the great gray, towered, wooden
mansions the stock-brokers of the "seventies" built, and below them,
like a contingent of shabby-genteel relations, the narrow gray wooden
faces of what was "smart" in the "sixties". It was a continuous progress
backward toward the old, the original town. There was no stately
nucleus. This town was a succession of widening ripples of progress,
each newer, more polished than the last, but not different in quality
from the old center that still teemed--a region of frail wooden
rookeries full of foreign contending interests, haunted with the
adventures of its feverish past. It had built itself on the hopes of a
moment, and what spread from it still was the spell of the new, the
changing, and the reckless. It drew still from the ends of the earth.
The broad road in over the mountains, the broad road out over the ocean
made it where it stood, touching all trades, a road-house of the world.
Some dim perception of this touched Flora as the houses, gliding past,
grew older, grayer, with steeper gardens, narrower streets, here and
there even trees, lone, sentinel, at the edge of cobbled gutters. From
the crest of the last hill they had looked a mile down the long gray
throat of the street to where the ferry building lay stretched out with
its one tall tower pricked up among the masts of shipping. Half-way
between their momentary perch and the ferry slips the street suddenly
thickened, darkened, swarmed, flying a yellow pennon high above
blackened roofs. And now, as they slipped down the long decline into
the foreign quarter the pungent oriental breath of Chinatown was blown
up to them. She breathed it in readily. It was pleasant because it was
strange, outlandish, suggesting a wide web of life beyond her own
knowledge. She wondered what Harry was thinking of it, as he sat with
his passive profile turned from her to the heathen street ahead. She
guessed, by the curl of his nostril, that it was only present to him as
an unpleasant odor to be got through as quickly as possible; but she was
wrong. He had another thought. This time, oddly enough, a thought for
her.
He gave it to her presently, abrupt, matter-of-fact, material. "That
Chinese goldsmith down there has good stuff now and then. How'd you like
to look in there before we go on to what-you-call-'em's,--the regular
place?"
"You mean for a ring?" She was doubtful only of his being in earnest.
"You have so many of the Shrove kind," he explained. "I thought you
might like it, Flora; you're so romantic!" he laughed.
"Like it!" she cried, too touched at his thought for her to resent the
imputation. "I should love it! But I didn't know they had such things."
"Now and then--though it is a rare chance."
"But that will be just the fun of it," she hastened, half afraid lest
Harry should change his mind, "to see if we can possibly find one that
will be different from all these others."
She kept this little feeling of exploration close about her, as they
left the car, a block above the green trees of the plaza, and entered
one of the narrow streets that was not even a cross-street, but an
alley, running to a bag's end, with balconies, green railings and
narcissi taking the sun.
A slant-eyed baby in a mauve blouse stared after them; and a white face
so poisoned in its badness that it gave Flora a start, peered at them
from across the street. It made her shrink a little behind Harry's broad
shoulder and take hold of his arm. The mere touch of that arm was
security. His big presence, moving agilely beside her, seemed to fill
the street with its strength, as if, by merely flinging out his arms,
Samson-like, he could burst the dark walls asunder.
In the middle of the block, sunk a little back from the fronts of the
others, the goldsmith's shop showed a single, filmed window; and the
pale glow through it proclaimed that the worker in metals preferred
another light to the sun's. The threshold was worn to a hollow that
surprised the foot; and the interior into which it led them gloomed so
suddenly around them after the broad sunlight, that it was a moment
before they made out the little man behind the counter, sitting hunched
up on a high stool.
"Hullo, Joe," said Harry, in the same voice that hailed his friends on
the street-corners; but the goldsmith only nodded like a nodding
mandarin, as if, without looking up, he took them in and sensed their
errand. He wore a round, blue Chinese cap drawn over his crown; a pair
of strange goggles like a mask over his eyes, and his little body seemed
to poise as lightly on his high stool as a wisp, as if there were no
more flesh in it than in his long, dry fingers that so marvelously
manipulated the metal. Save for that glitter of gold on his glass plate,
and the grin of a lighted brazier, all was dark, discolored and
cluttered.
And the way Harry bloomed upon this background of dubious antiquity! He
leaned on the little counter, which creaked under his weight, in his
big, fresh coat, with his clear, fresh face bent above the shallow tray
of trinkets--doubtful jades, dim-eyed rings, dull clasps and coins--his
large, fastidious finger poked among. He was the one vital thing in the
shop.
Over everything else was spread a dimness of age like dust. It enveloped
the little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs
to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time
brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a
carved idol in a curio shop that Flora was a little startled to find
that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank
automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally
took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his
extraordinary glasses that gave point to that expression; and presently
when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true.
His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But
there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing
intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of
him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed to
find it.
"Harry," she murmured to Cressy, who was still stirring the contents of
the box with a disdainful forefinger, "this little man gives me the
shivers."
"Old Joe?" Harry smiled indulgently. "He's a queer customer. Been quite
a figurehead in Chinatown for twenty years. Say, Joe, heap bad!" and
with the back of his hand he flicked the tray away from him.
The little man undoubled his knees and descended the stool. He stood
breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-luster eye to the box.
"Velly nice," he murmured with vague, falling inflection.
"Oh, rotten!" Harry laughed at him.
"You no like?"
"No. No like. You got something else--something nice?"
"No." It was like a door closed in the face of their hope--that falling
inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his
whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their
immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry
still leaned on the counter and grinned ingratiatingly. "Oh, Joe, you
good flen'. You got something pretty--maybe?"
The curtain of vacuity parted just a crack--let through a gleam of
intense intelligence. "Maybe." The goldsmith chuckled deeply, as if
Harry had unwittingly perpetrated some joke--some particularly clever
conjurer's trick. He sidled out behind the counter, past the grinning
brazier, and shuffled into the back of the shop where he opened a door.
Flora had expected a cupboard, but the vista it gave upon was a long,
black, incredibly narrow passage, that stretched away into gloom with
all the suggestion of distance of a road going over a horizon. Down this
the goldsmith went, with his straw slippers clapping on his heels, until
his small figure merged in the gloom and presently disappeared
altogether, and only the faint flipper-flap of his slippers came back
growing more and more distant to them, and finally dying into silence.
In the stillness that followed while they waited they could hear each
other breathe. The little shop with the water-stained walls and the
ancient odor--ancient as the empire of China--inclosed them like a spell
cast around them by a vanishing enchanter to hold them there mute until
his returning. They did not look at each other, but rather at the
glowing brazier, at the gold on the glass plates, at the forms of people
passing in the street, moving palely across the dim window pane, as
distant to Flora's eye as though they moved in another world. Then came
the flipper-flap of the goldsmith's slippers returning. The sound
snapped their tension, and Harry laughed.
"Lord knows how far he went to get it!"
"Across the street?" Flora wondered.
"Or under it. And it won't be worth two bits when it gets here." He
peered at the little man coming toward them down the passage, flapping
and shuffling, and carrying, held before him in both hands, a square,
deep little box.
It was a worn, nondescript box that he set down before them, but the
jealous way he had carried it had suggested treasure, and Flora leaned
eagerly forward as he raised the cover, half expecting the blaze of a
jewel-case. She saw at first only dull shanks of metal tumbled one upon
the other. But, after a moment's peering, between them she caught gleams
of veritable light. Her fingers went in to retrieve a hoop of heavy
silver, in the midst of which was sunk a flawed topaz. She admired a
moment the play of light over the imperfection.
"But this isn't Chinese," she objected, turning her surprise on Harry.
"Lots of 'em aren't. These men glean everywhere. That's pretty." He held
up a little circle of discolored but lusterful pearls--let it fall
again, since it was worth only a glance. He leaned on the counter,
indifferent to urge where value seemed so slight. He seemed amused at
Flora's enthusiasm for clouded opals.
"They look well enough among this junk," he said, "but compare them with
your own rings and you'll see the difference."
She heard him dreamily. She was wishing, as she turned over the tumble
of damaged jewels, that things so pretty might have been perfect. To
find a perfect thing in this place would be too extraordinary to hope
for. Yet, taking up the next, and the next, she found herself wishing it
might be this one--this cracked intaglio. No? Then this blue one--say.
The setting spoke nothing for it. It was a plain, thin, round hoop of
palpable brass, and the battered thing seemed almost too feeble to hold
the solitary stone. But the stone! She looked it full in the eye, the
big, blazing, blue eye of it. What was the matter with this one? A flaw?
She held it to the light.
She felt Harry move behind her. She knew he couldn't but be looking at
it. For how, by all that was marvelous, had she for a moment doubted it?
Down to its very heart, which was near to black, it was clear fire, and
outward toward the facets struck flaming hyacinth hues with zigzag white
cross-lights that dazzled and mesmerized. Just the look of it--the
marvelous deep well of its light--declared its truth.
"Harry," she breathed, without taking her gaze from the thing in her
hand, "do look at this!"
She felt him lean closer. Then with an abrupt "Let's see it," he took it
from her--held it to the light, laid it on his palm, looking sharply
across the counter at the shopkeeper, then back at the ring with a long
scrutiny. His face, too, had a flush of excitement.
"Is it--good?" Flora faltered.
"A sapphire," he said, and taking her third finger by the tip, he slid
on the thin circle of metal.
She breathed high, looking down at the stone with eyes absorbed in the
blue fire. There was none of the cupidity of women for jewels in her
look. It was the intrinsic beauty of this drop of dark liquid light that
had captured her. It had mystery, and her imagination woke to it--the
wistful mystery of perfect beauty. And perfect beauty in such a place!
It was too beautiful. The feeling it brought her was too sharp for pure
pleasure. It was dimly like fear. Yet instinctively she shut her hand
about the ring. She murmured out her wonder.
"How in the world did such a thing come here?"
"Oh, not so strange," Harry answered. He leaned on his elbow upon the
counter, his head bent close to hers above the single, glittering point
that drew the four eyes to one focus. "Sailors now and then pick up a
thing of whose value they have no idea--get hard up, and pawn it--still
without any idea. These chaps"--and his bold hand indicated the
shopkeeper--"take in anything--that is, anything worth their while; and
wait, and wait, and wait until they see just the moment--and turn it to
account."
It might be because Harry's eyes were so taken with the jewel that his
tongue ran recklessly. He had spoken low, but Flora sent an anxious
glance to be sure the shopkeeper hadn't overheard. She had meant only to
glance, but she found herself staring into eyes that stared back from
the other side of the counter. That wide, unwinking scrutiny filled her
whole vision. For an instant she saw nothing but the dance of
scintillant pupils. Then, with a little gasp she clutched at her
companion's arm.
"Oh, Harry!"
His glance came quickly round to her. "Why, what's the matter?"
She murmured, "That Chinaman has blue eyes."
He looked at her with good-natured wonder.
"Why, Flora, haven't you blue on the brain? I believe he has, though,"
he added, as he peered across the counter at the shopkeeper, whose gaze
now fluttered under narrowed lids; "but why in the world should blue
eyes scare you?" His look returned indulgently to Flora's face.
She could not explain her reason of fear to him. She could not explain
it to herself more than that the eyes had seemed to know. What? She
could not tell; but they had had a deadly intelligence. She only
whispered back, "But he is awful!"
"Oh, I guess not," Harry grinned, and turned his back to the counter,
"only part white. Makes him a little sharper at a bargain."
But, in spite of his off-handedness, Flora saw he was alert, touched
with excitement. Once or twice he looked from the shopkeeper to the
sapphire.
"Do you like it, Flora?" he said. "Do you want it?" He spoke eagerly
against her reluctance.
"It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, but--" She could not put it
to him why she shrank from it. That feeling which had touched her at the
first had a little expanded, the sense of the sapphire's sinister charm.
She faltered out as much as she could explain. "It's too much for me."
His shoulders shook with appreciation of this. "Oh, I guess not! If you
keep that up I shall be thinking you mean it is too much for me."
It hadn't been in the least what she meant, but now that he had
suggested it to her--"Well, I shouldn't like it to be," she blushed, but
she braved him.
The ring of his laughter filled the little, dark, old shop, and made the
proprietor blink.
"Oh, I guess not," he said again, and with that he seemed to make an end
of her hesitations. There was not another objection she could bring up.
She let him draw the ring off her hand with a mingled feeling of
reluctance and relief. She saw him turn briskly to the shopkeeper.
"Now, Joe, how much you want?" That much she heard as she turned away
with a fear lest it might, and a hope that it would be, too much for
him!
She lingered away to the door, through whose upper glazed half she saw
the street swarming and sunny, picked out with streamers of red and
squares of green. The murmur of traffic outside was faint to her ears.
The murmur of the two voices talking on inside the shop momently grew
fainter. She looked behind her and saw them now in the back of the shop,
close by the grinning brazier.
The light of it showed what would have been otherwise dark. It showed
her Harry, straddling, hands in pockets, hat thrust back, a silhouette
as hard as if cast in cold metal. The aspect of him, thus, was strange,
not quite unlike himself, but giving her the feeling that she had never
known how much Harry smoothed over.
Perhaps men were always like that with men. Still she looked away again
because she felt she had taken a liberty in catching him when he was
coming out so plain and coming out so positive to the shopkeeper, whom
he seemed really to be bullying. She felt that, considering the
sapphire, nothing that went on about it could be too extraordinary. And
yet the tone their voices were taking on made her nervous. Whatever they
were arguing about, she found it hard to go on standing thus with her
back to it, and for so long, while her expectancy tightened, and her
unreasonable idea that she did not want the ring, more and more took
hold of her. If he did not want to sell it, why not let it go--the
beautiful thing!
She thought she would call Harry, and suggest it--but no. She hesitated.
She would give them a chance to finish it themselves. She would count
ten pigtails past the window first. She watched the last far into the
distance, and still she was there, blowing hot and cold. She would call
to Harry--call out to him from where she stood, that she wouldn't have
the thing.
She turned, and there they were yet. They had not moved. The shadow of
the gesticulating little Chinaman danced like a bird on the wall, and
before him Harry glowed, immovable, but ruddy, as if the hard metal
whereof he was cast was slowly heating through. The thought came to her
then. Harry was iron! The hard shade of his profile on the wall, the
stiff movement of his lips, the forward thrust of his head on his
shoulders gave her another thought. Was Harry also brutal? The sight of
that brutality awake, feeding, as it were, on the fluttering little
figure before it, distressed her. How long were they going on putting an
edge to their argument? There was continually with her the fear that it
might sharpen into a quarrel; for now the goldsmith had ceased his
gesticulation and became suddenly immobile, and still Harry was
requiring of him the same thing. It was insisted upon, by all the lines
of his stiff braced figure, and she had a fluttered expectancy that if
the little man didn't do something quickly, now--now it would happen.
What she expected of Harry, a violent act or a quick relaxation of his
iron mood, she had not time to consider, for the shopkeeper had moved.
He was jerking his head, his thumb, and finally his arm in the direction
of the long, dim passage--such a pointed direction, such a singular
gesture, as to startle her with its incongruity. What had that to do
with the price of the ring? And if it had nothing to do with the price
of the ring, what had they been talking about? Her small scruple against
knowing what was going on behind her was forgotten. Indeed, now she was
oblivious of everything else. She was taking it in with all her eyes,
when Harry turned and looked at her. And, oddly enough, she thought he
looked as if he wondered how she came there. She saw him return to it
slowly. Then, in a flash, he met her brilliantly. He came toward her
out of the gloom, holding the ring before him, as if with the light of
that, and the flash of his smile, he was anxious immediately to cover
his deficit.
"I had the very devil of a time getting it," he said. "The little beggar
didn't want to let me have it." But there was a subsiding excitement in
his face, and a something in his manner, both triumphant and troubled,
which his explanation did not reasonably account for. Had Harry felt the
touch of the same strange influence that the little shop, and the
blue-eyed Chinaman, and the sapphire, had wrought around her? Or was it
something more salient, the same thing that had suggested itself to her
with the violent gesticulation of the shopkeeper at the passage--that
some question other than the mere transfer of the ring had come up
between them?
"Harry"--she hesitated--"are you quite sure it's all right?"
"All right?" The sudden edge in his voice made her look at him. "Why,
it's genuine, if that's what you mean."
It hadn't been, quite; but her meaning was too vague to put into
words--a mere sensation of uneasiness. She watched Harry turn the ring
over, as if he were reluctant to let it go out of his hands. And then,
looking at her, she thought his glance was a little uncertain. She
thought he hesitated, and when he finally slid the ring over her finger,
"I wouldn't wear it until it is reset," he said. "That setting isn't
gold. It's hardly decent."
"Yes," she assented; "Clara will laugh at us."
"She won't if we don't show it to her until it's fit to appear. In fact,
I would rather you wouldn't. As it is now, the thing doesn't represent
my gift to you."
She felt this was Harry's conventional streak asserting itself. But even
she had to admit that an engagement ring which was palpably not gold was
rather out of the way.
"You'd better keep it a day or two and look it over and make up your
mind how you want it set, and then we'll spring it on them," he
advised.
But now it was finally on her finger, she did not want to think it would
ever have to be taken off again. She drew her glove over it. The great
facets showed sharp angles under the thin kid. She wished the sapphire
were not quite so large, so difficult to reconcile with everything else.
Now that she had the perfect thing with her, clasping her so heavily
around the third finger, she was half afraid it was going to be too much
for her, after all.
VII
A SPELL IS CAST