carrying forward somewhere out of her sight--such a glimpse as Clara had
given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her
hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs
of danger, as a lone general at a last stand with his troops clustered
at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the
glitter of bayonets in the bushes.
She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming
lights and crowds were all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon
it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually--and there her
eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she
saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background--a
short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a
blue-eyed Chinaman.
He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was
alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already
seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pass his way. It was
uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing
as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless.
It was worse than uncanny.
All at once an idea, wild and illogical enough, jumped up in her mind.
Couldn't this miserable vehicle that was lumbering like a disabled bug
move faster and rattle her on out of reach of the glare, the publicity,
the threat of discovery, and, above all, of her discomforting notion?
She breathed out relief as the carriage dipped into the comparative
quiet again, and she felt herself being driven on and up a gently rising
street between block-apart, lone gas-lamps. She thrust her face as far
out of the window as she dared, looking back at the lights and traffic
which were drifting behind her. At this distance she could single out no
one figure from the crowd, and no figure which could possibly be that of
the blue-eyed Chinaman was moving up the street behind her. There only
remained a disquieting memory of him on the corner with Harry. Together
they made a combination, to her mind, threatening to the man she loved,
for whom she so desperately feared.
If ever she had felt herself helpless, it was in this moment passing
along the half-lit, half-empty city street. By what she knew, by what
she wore around her neck, she was separated from all peace-abiding
citizens--she was outlawed. Every closed door and shaded window (so many
she had opened or looked out of!) now seemed shut and shaded against her
for ever. Night and the reticent gray city, averting their eyes, let
her slip through unregarded.
She was passing that section of large, old-fashioned mansions, cupolaed,
towered, indistinct at the top of their high, broad steps, or back among
the trees of their gardens. Along the front of one stretched a high
hedge of laurestinas black as a ribbon of the night, capacious of
shadows; and it seemed to Flora that all at once a shadow detached
itself. She looked with a start. It flashed along the pavement--if
shadow it were--running head down with a strange, scattering movement of
arms and legs, yet seeming to make such speed that for a moment it kept
abreast of the cab. She could see no features, no lineament of this
strange thing to recognize, yet instantly she knew what it must be--what
she had feared and thought impossible. She thrust her head far out and
addressed the driver.
"Go as fast as you can, faster! and I'll give you twice what he gave
you." The words rang so wildly to her own ears that she half expected
the driver to peer down like an old bird of prey from his perch and
demand her reason. But he made no sound or sign. It may have been that
in his time he had heard even wilder requests than hers. He only sent
his whip cracking forward to the ears of the lean horse, and the cab
began to rattle like a mad thing.
Flora leaned back with a sigh of relief. The mere sensation of being
borne along at such a rate, the sight of houses, lamp-posts, even people
here and there, flitting away from the eye, unable to interrupt her
course, or even to glimpse her identity, gave her a feeling of safety.
The more she was getting into the residence part of the city, the more
deserted the streets, the closer shut the windows of the houses, the
more it seemed to her as if the night itself covered and abetted her
flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held
together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent
carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a
cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky,
moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little
fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp--the only living thing in sight.
It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in
front of her, waiting for her, who had driven so fast--too fast, it had
seemed, for human foot to follow. By what unimaginable route had he
traveled? She was ready to believe he had flown over the housetops. And
above all other horrors, why was he pursuing her?
The carriage was abreast the Chinaman now, and immediately he took up
his trot, for a little while keeping up, dodging along between light and
shadow, presently falling behind. At intervals she heard the patter,
patter, patter of his footsteps following; at intervals she lost the
sound, and shadows would engulf the figure, and she would wait in a
panic for its reappearance. For she knew it was there somewhere, on one
side of the street or the other. But, oh, not to see it! To expect at
any moment it might start up again--Heaven knew where, perhaps at her
very carriage window. Her unconscious hand was doubled to a fist upon
her breast, fast closed upon the sapphire.
With all her body braced, she leaned and looked far backward, and far
forward, and now for a long time saw nothing. The distance was empty.
The glare of arc-lights showed her the shadows of her own progress--the
shadow of her vehicle shooting huge and misshapen now on the cobbles,
now along a blank wall, wheels, body and driver, all lurching like one;
now heaped on each other, now tenuously drawn out, now twisting
themselves into shapes the mind could not account for. For here,
whirling the corner, the carriage seemed to wave an arm, and now between
the wheels, fast twinkling, she saw a pair of legs. She leaned and
looked, so mesmerized with this grotesque appearance that it scarcely
troubled her that all the way down the last long hill she knew it must
be that a man was running at her wheel.
The warm lights of her house were just before her, offering succor,
stiffening courage. It would be but a dash from the door of the cab to
her own door. There was no second course, once the cab stopped. She felt
that to lurk in its gloom would mean robbery, perhaps death. She thought
without fear, but with an intense calculation. Her hand held the door at
swing as the cab drew up. Before it should stop she must leap. She
gathered her skirts and sprang--sprang clean to the sidewalk. The steps
of her house rushed by her in her upward flight. Her bell pealed. She
covered her eyes.
For the moment before Shima opened the door there was nothing but
darkness and silence. She had never been so glad of anything in her life
as of the kind, astute, yellow face he presented to her distressed
appeal.
"Shima," she panted, "pay the cab; and if there's any one else there say
that I'll call the police--no, no, send him away." There was no question
or hesitation in Shima's obedience. Through the glass of the door she
watched him descend upon his errand, until he disappeared over the edge
of the illumination of the vestibule. She waited, dimly aware of voices
going on beyond the curtains of the drawing-room, but all her listening
power was concentrated on the silence without--a silence that remained
unbroken, and out of which Shima returned with the same imperturable
countenance.
"He wants ten dollars."
"Oh, yes, give him anything," Flora gasped. If that was all the Chinaman
had followed her for! But her relief was momentary, for instantly Shima
was back again.
"I gave him ten dollars, the cabman."
Now she gasped indeed. "Oh, the cabman! But the other one!" For an
instant Shima seemed to hesitate; glancing past her shoulder as if there
was something that he doubted behind her. Then as she still hung on his
answer he brought it out in a lowered voice.
"Madam, there was no one else there."
XIX
THE FACE IN THE GARDEN
With her hand at her distressed forehead she turned, and saw, between
the curtains of the drawing-room, Harry, and behind him Clara, looking
out at her with faces of amazement, and she fancied, horror. Harry came
straight for her.
"Why, you poor child, what's happened to you?"
She gave him a look. She couldn't forget their scene in the red room,
but the mixture of apprehension and real concern in his face went far
toward melting her. She might even have told him something, at least a
part of the truth, but for that other standing watching her from the
drawing-room door. With Clara, there was nothing for it but to ignore
her disordered hair, her hat in her hand, her ruffle torn and trailing
on the floor.
She put on a splendid nonchalance, as if it were none of their business.
"Oh, I am sorry if I kept you waiting."
It was Clara who spoke to her, past Harry's blank astonishment. "Why, we
don't mind waiting a few moments more while you dress."
"I shan't have to dress." Such a statement Flora felt must amaze even
Shima, waiting like an image on the threshold of the dining-room. But if
these people were waiting to be amazed she felt herself equal to amazing
them to the top of their expectations.
"Oh, but at least go up and let Marrika give you some pins," Clara
protested, hurrying forward as if fairly to drive her.
"Thank you, no, this will do," Flora said. On one point she was quite
clear. She wasn't going to leave those two together for a moment to
discuss her plight; not till she could first get at Harry alone. Then
and there she turned to the mirror and with her combs began to catch
back and smooth the disorder of her hair, seeing all the while Clara's
reflection hovering perturbed and vigilant in the background of her own.
While her hands were busy seeming to accommodate Clara, her mind was
marshaled to Clara's outwitting. The only thing to do was to tell
nothing. Let Clara spend her time in guessing. Unless by some wild
chance she had seen Kerr in the garden she couldn't come near the truth
of what had happened. But what was to be done with Harry? Harry was too
close to her to be ignored. Her attitude toward him had undergone a
change. In the moment in the red room, when she had seen him break the
one feeling that had held her to him, the feeling of awe and respect had
evaporated. She felt that it was quite impossible now for them to go on
on the same footing; yet, as long as she kept the sapphire she must
somehow manage to keep up an appearance of it. She must tell him
something.
At that dreadful dinner, where she sat a conscious frustrater of these
two silent ones, glancing at Harry's face, she knew that if she didn't
attack she would be attacked by him. It was here in the midst of the
noiseless passings of Shima, watching Harry's suspicious glances
flashing across the table at her strange disorder, that the idea
occurred to her of a way out of it. She was bold enough to try a daring
thrust at the mystery. If ever a hunter was to be led off on a false
scent, Harry was that one. She was amazed at the sudden, fearless
impulse that had sprung up in her. She wasn't even afraid to say to him
under Clara's nose, "Harry, I want you to myself after dinner. Come up
into the garden study."
He was very willing to follow her. She thought she detected in his
alacrity something more than curiosity or concern. It seemed almost as
if Harry was ashamed of that scene in the red room, and anxious to make
it up with her. He even tried before they had reached the head of the
stairs. "Oh, Flora--I say, Flora, I--"
But an explanation between them was the last thing she wanted just then.
She fairly ran, leaving him panting in the wake of her airy skirts.
For the first time since the thing began Clara was left out completely.
Flora knew she was even left out of a possibility of listening at the
keyhole. For the bright, tight, little room into which Harry followed
her was approached by a square entry and a double door. The room itself
overhung the garden as a ship's deck overhangs the sea. Leather books
and long red curtains were the note of it. She and Harry had often been
here together before. Harry had made love to her here, and she had found
it pleasurable enough. But the fact that she could recall it now with
distaste made this familiar surrounding seem strange, and they
themselves strangest of all.
He hadn't got his breath. He had hardly shut the door on them before she
began. "Well, something has happened." She had his attention. His other
purpose was arrested. "Oh, something extraordinary. I would have told
you on the spot, only I thought you would rather Clara didn't know it."
"I?" That left him staring. "What have I to do with it?"
At this she gave him a long look. "It was through you he ever had the
chance of seeing me. I mean the blue-eyed Chinaman. He has followed me
all the evening. He followed me here to the very door." Flora's array of
facts fell so fast, so hard, so pointed, that for a moment they held him
speechless in the middle of the room.
Any fleeting suspicion she might have had of his complicity in the
Chinaman's pursuit vanished. He showed plain bewilderment. For a moment
he was more at sea than herself. The next she saw the shadow of a
thought so disturbing that it sharpened his ruddy face to harshness. He
stepped toward her. "What did he say to you?" He loomed directly above
her, threatening.
"Nothing. He didn't say anything. But I know he followed me quite to
the house, for I saw his shadow all the way down the hill."
Harry still breathed quickly. "Where--how did he come across you?"
She'd been prepared for that question.
"I was driving down Sutter Street and he saw me at the carriage window."
Harry stood tense, poised, catching everything as she tossed it off;
then as if all at once he felt the full weight of the burden, "Lord!" he
said, and let himself down heavily into a chair. It was plain in his
helpless stare that he knew exactly what it all meant. Laying her hands
on the high chair-arms, leaning down so that she could look into his
face, Flora made her thrust.
"What do you think he wants?" she gently asked. It was as if she would
coax it out of him. His answer was correspondingly low and soft.
"It's that damned ring."
She heard her secret fear spoken aloud with such assurance that she
waited, certain at the next moment Harry's voice would people the
silence with all the facts that had so far escaped her. But when, after
a moment of looking before him he did speak, he went back to the
beginning, which they both knew.
"You know he didn't want to part with it in the first place."
"Yes, yes; but he did," Flora insisted.
"Well," he answered quickly, "but that was before--" He caught himself
and went on with a scarcely perceptible break: "He may have had a better
offer for it since."
He couldn't have put it more mildly, and yet that temperate phrase
brought back to her in a flash a windy night full of raucous voices and
the great figures in the paper that had covered half a page--the reward
for the Crew Idol. Could it be that--that sum so overwhelming to human
caution and human decency which Harry had cloaked by his grudging phrase
"some better offer"? What else could he mean? And what else could the
blue-eyed Chinaman mean by his strange pursuit of her?
"Some one must have wanted it awfully," Flora tried again, keeping step
with his mild admission.
Harry covered her with an impressive stare. "There's something queer
about that ring," he nodded to her. He was going to tell her at last!
She gazed at him in expectation, but presently she realized that nothing
more was coming. He had stopped at the beginning. She tried to urge him
on.
"Queer, what do you mean?" She was feigning surprise.
He looked at her cautiously. "Why, you must have noticed it yourself
when we were at the shop. And now, to-night, his having followed you."
She could see him hesitate, choosing his words. She knew well enough her
own fear of saying too much--but, what was Harry afraid of? Did he
suspect her feeling for Kerr? Was that why he was holding back, leaving
out, giving her the small, expurgated version of what he knew. She tried
again, making it plainer.
"You think the ring is something he ought not to have had; something
that belongs somewhere else?"
He looked away from her, around the room, as if to pick up his answer
from some of the corners. "Well, anyway, it's lucky we waited about that
setting," he said with quick irrelevance. "If you're going to be annoyed
in this way you'd better let me have it."
Why hadn't she thought of that! It was what any man might say, after
hearing such a story as hers, yet it was the last thing she had thought
of, and the last thing she wanted.
"Oh, leave it with me," she quavered, "at least till you're sure!"
"Oh, no!" He gave his head a quick, decided shake. "If something should
come out you wouldn't want to be mixed up in it."
"Then why not give it back to the Chinaman?" she tried him.
"Oh, that's ridiculous." He was in a passion. His darkening eyes, his
swelling nostrils, his aspect so out of proportion to her mild and
almost playful suggestion, frightened her. He saw it and instantly his
mood dropped to mere irritation. "Oh, Flora, don't make a scene about
it. This thing has been on my mind for days--the thought that you had
the ring. I was afraid I had no business to let you have it in the first
place, and what you've told me to-night has clean knocked me out. I
don't know what I'm saying. Come, let me have it; and if there's
anything queer about the business, at least we'll get it cleared up."
But, smiling, she retreated before him.
"Why, Flora," he argued, half laughing, but still with that dry end of
irritation in his voice, "what on earth do you want to keep the thing
for?"
By this time she backed against the window, and faced him. "Why, it's my
engagement ring."
He looked at her. She couldn't tell whether he was readiest to laugh or
rage.
"You gave it to me for that," she pleaded. "Why shouldn't I keep it,
until you give me a real reason for giving it up? If you really know
anything, why don't you tell me?" She was sure she had him there; but he
burst out at last:
"Well, for a fact, I know it is stolen!" He leaned toward her; and his
arms, still flung out with the hands open as argument had left them,
seemed to her frightened eyes all ready for her, ready with his last
argument, his strength.
Once before she had feared herself face to face with the same threat in
the eyes and body of another man, but here, her only fear was lest Harry
should get the sapphire away from her. His doing so would dash down no
ideal of him. It was mere physical terror that made her tremble and
raise her hand to her breast. Instantly she saw how she had betrayed the
sapphire again. He had taken hold of her wrist, and, twist as she might,
he held it, horribly gentle.
She pressed back against the glass until she felt it hard behind her.
"Harry," she whispered, "if you care anything, if you ever want me for
yours, you'll take your hands away." She meant it; she was sincere in
that moment, for all she shrank from him. Her body and mind would not
have been too great a price to give him for the sapphire.
But these he seemed to set aside as trivial. These he expected as a
matter of course; he was going to have that other thing, too--the thing
she had clung to as a man clings to life; and that now, parting from,
she would give up not without a struggle as sharp as that with which the
body gives up breath. She wrestled. He seemed all hands. He put aside
her struggles, her pleadings, as if they were thistle-down.
Then all at once she felt his arm around her neck. She couldn't move her
body. She could only turn her head from his hot breath. For a moment he
held her, and yet another moment; and then, terrified at what this
strange immobility might mean, she raised her eyes and saw he was not
looking at her. Though he held her fast he was not conscious of her.
Straight over her head he looked, through the window and down, into the
garden. Her eyes followed. It lay beneath, the wonder of its morning
aspect all blanched and dim. She saw the silhouette of rose branches in
black on the sky. She saw the flowers and bushes all one dull tone. But
in the midst of them the oval of the path shone white; and there, as in
the afternoon, standing, looking upward, was the dark figure of a man.
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 Shima's search, he was
there, still inexorably there; small, diminished by the great façade 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 passion 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 passage 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 assail 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.