step after step, down the broad and polished stair and across the empty
hall. She went quiet, direct, determined, not at all as she had fled on
her other perilous enterprise only yesterday. She shut the outer door
after her without a sound and with great relief breathed in the fresh
and faintly smoky air of morning.
She walked quickly. The windows of her house still overlooked her, and
her greatest terror was that some voice, some appearance, out of that
house, might command her return. The street was nearly empty. A maid
scrubbing down steps looked after her sharply, and she wondered if she
had been recognized. She had no intention of keeping to this street, or
even taking a car and traveling down its broad, gray and gleaming vista
of formal houses and formal gardens that she knew and that knew her so
well. It was a cross-town car bound for quite another locality that she
climbed aboard. It was filled only with mechanics and workmen with picks
and shovels. She sat crowded elbow to elbow among odors of stale
tobacco, stale garlic, stale perspiration, and looking straight before
her through the car window watched the aspect of the city, still gray,
grow less gleaming and formal and finally quite dirty, and quite, quite
dull.
This was all as she had intended, very much in the direction of her
errand, and safe. But in Market Street the car-line ended, and she was
turned out again in this broad artery of commerce where she was in
danger of meeting at any moment people she knew. She made straight
across the thoroughfare to its south side, turned down Eighteenth and in
a moment was hidden in Mission Street.
Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why
a woman with a small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a
school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the
women--women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered
heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags
in their hands--the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass
for--all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they
thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.
She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where
she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that
offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked
there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief.
It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two
hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as long as she
dared, drinking two cups of the hideous coffee; stayed while many came
and went, until she felt the proprietor noticing her. That revived her
consciousness of the possible dangers still between her and the end she
held in view. She had heard of people being arrested for suspicious
conduct. She didn't feel sure in what this might consist, but surely
such an appearance could be avoided by walking fast and seeming to know
exactly where one was going.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, three hours since she had left her
house and a most reasonable time of daylight, when Flora turned out of
the flatness of "south of Market Street" and began to mount a
slow-rising hill. It was a wooden sidewalk she followed flanking a
wood-paved street, and these, with the wooden fences and dusty cypress
hedges and the houses peering over them upon her looked worn, battered
and belonging all to the past. None the less it bore traces of having
been a dignified past, and farther up on the crown of the hill among
deep-bosomed trees, two or three large mansions wore the gravely
triumphant aspect of having been brought successfully from a past empire
into a present with all their traditions and mahogany complete. Upward
toward these Flora was looking. Her breath was short from fast
climbing. Her cheeks under her thin veil were hot and bright.
As she neared the hilltop she glanced at a card from her chatelaine,
consulting the address upon it. Then anxiously she scanned the
house-fronts. It was not this one, nor this; but the square white
mansion she came to now stood so far retired at the end of its lawn that
she could not make out the number. As she peered a young girl came down
the steps between the dark wings of the cypress hedge, a slim, fair,
even-gaited creature dressed for the street and drawing on her gloves.
As she passed Flora made sure she had seen her before. There was
something familiar in the carriage of the girl's head and hands;
something also like a pale reflection of another presence. Pale as it
was, it was enough to reassure her that this was the house she wanted.
She ascended the steps beneath the arch of cypress and immediately found
herself entering an atmosphere quieter even than that of the little
street below. It was quiet with the quiet of protectedness, as if some
one brooding, vigilant care encircled it, defending it against all
inroads of violent action and thought. It had been long since any young
girl had carried such a heart of passionate hopes and fears up this
mossed path between these peaceful flower-beds.
This appearance of the place began to bring before Flora the full
enormity and impertinence of her errand, but though her heart beat on
her side as loud as the brass knocker upon the door, she had no mind for
turning back.
A high, cool, darkly gleaming interior, mellow with that precious tint
of time which her own house so lacked, received her. And here, as well
as out of doors, all the while she sat waiting she felt that protected
peace was still the deity of the place. To Flora's eager heart time was
streaming by, but the tall clock facing her measured it out slowly. Its
longest golden finger had pointed out five minutes before the sweeping
of a skirt coming down the hall brought her to her feet.
Mrs. Herrick came in hatless, a honeysuckle leaf caught in her gray
crown of hair, geraniums in her hand. Flora had never seen her so
informal and so gay.
"I would have asked you to come out into the garden, except that it's so
wet, and there's no place to sit," she said.
Flora apologized. "I knew if I came at this hour I should interrupt you,
but really there was no help for it." She glanced down at her satchel.
"I had to go this morning, and before I went I had to see you about the
house. I'm going down to look at it and--and to stop a while."
Mrs. Herrick hesitated, deprecated. "But you know Mrs. Britton wasn't
satisfied with the price I asked."
"Oh," said Flora promptly, "but I shall be perfectly satisfied with it,
and I want to take possession at once."
The positive manner in which she waved Clara out of her way brought up
in Mrs. Herrick's face a faint flash of surprise; but it was gone in an
instant, supplanted by her questioning puzzled consideration of the
main proposition.
"Oh, I hope you haven't come to tell me you want it changed," she
protested. "You know it's quite absurd in places--quite terrible indeed.
It's 1870 straight through, and French at that; but even such whims
acquire a dignity if they've been long cherished. You couldn't put in or
take out one thing without spoiling the whole character."
"But I don't want to change it, I want it just as it is," Flora
explained. "It isn't about the house itself I've come, it's about going
down there. You see there are--some people, some friends of mine. I
haven't promised them to show the house, but I have quite promised
myself to show it to them, and they are only here for a few days more.
They are going immediately." She was looking at Mrs. Herrick all the
while she was telling her wretched lie, and now she even managed to
smile at her. "I thought how lovely it would be if you could go there
with me. I should like so very much to be in it first with you, to have
you go over it with me and tell me how to take care of it, as it's
always been done. I should hate to do it any disrespect."
Her hostess smiled with ready answer. "Of course I will go down. I
should be glad, but it must be in a day or two. Indeed, perhaps it would
be better for you to have your people first, and I can come down, say
Monday afternoon or Tuesday."
Flora faced this unexpected turn of the matter a little blankly. "Ah,
but the trouble is I can't go down alone."
It was Mrs. Herrick's turn to look blank. "But Mrs. Britton?"
"Mrs. Britton isn't going with me; she can't."
"I see." Mrs. Herrick with a long, soft scrutiny seemed to be taking in
more than Flora's mere words represented. "And you wouldn't put it off
until she can?"
"I couldn't put it off a moment," Flora ended with a little breathless
laugh. "I do so wish you would come down with me this morning, for I
must go, and you see I can't go alone."
Mrs. Herrick, sitting there, composed, in her cool, flowing, white and
violet gown with the red flowers in her lap, still looked at Flora
inquiringly. "But aren't there some women in your party old enough to
make it possible and young enough to take pleasure in it?"
Flora shook her head. "Oh, no," she said. Her house of cards was
tottering. She could not keep up her brave smiling. She knew her
distress must be plain. Indeed, as she looked at Mrs. Herrick she saw
the effect of it. Gaiety still looked at her out of that face, but the
warmth, the spontaneity were gone; and the steady eyes, if anything so
aloof could be suspicious, surely suspected her.
Her heart sank. If only she had told the truth--even so much of it as to
say there was something she could not tell. What she had said was
unworthy not only of herself but of the end she was so desperately
holding out for. Now in the lucid gaze confronting her she knew all her
intentions were taking on a dubious color, stained false, like her
words, under the dark cloud of her own misrepresentation. Yet they were
not false, she knew. Her motives, the end she was struggling for, were
as austere as truth itself. She could not give up without one bold
stroke to clear them of this accusation.
"Do you think there's anything queer about it?" she faltered.
"Queer?" To Flora's ears that sounded the coldest word she had ever
heard. "I hardly think I understand what you mean."
"I mean is it that you think there's more in what I'm asking of you than
I have said?" The two looked at each other and before that flat question
Mrs. Herrick drew back a little in her chair.
"I have no right to think about it at all," she said.
"Well, there is," Flora insisted. "There's a great deal more. I am
sorry. I should have told you, but I was afraid. I don't know why I was
afraid of you, except that in this matter I've grown afraid of every
one. It's true that there may be people going down--at least, a person.
But it isn't, as I let you think it, a house party at all. It's for
something, something that I can't do any other way--something," she had
a sudden flash of insight, "that, if I could tell you, you would believe
in, too."
Mrs. Herrick's look had faded to a mere concentrated attention. "You
mean that there is something you wish to do for whoever is going down?"
"Oh, something I must do," Flora insisted.
Mrs. Herrick considered a moment. "Why can't he do it for himself?" she
threw out suddenly.
It made Flora start, but she met it gallantly. "Because he won't. I
shall have to make him."
"You!" For a moment Flora knew that she was preposterous in Mrs.
Herrick's eyes--and then that she was pathetic. Her companion was
looking at her with a sad sort of humor. "My dear, are you sure that
that is your responsibility?"
Flora's answering smile was faint. "It seems as strange to me as it
seems absurd to you, but I think I have done something already."
"Are you sure, or has he only let you think so? We have all at some time
longed, or even thought it was our duty, to adjust something when it
would have been safer to have kept our hand off," Mrs. Herrick went on
gently.
"Oh, safer," Flora breathed. "Oh, yes; indeed, I know. But if something
had been put into your hands without your choice; if all the life of
some one that you cared about depended on you, would you think of being
_safe_?" Flora, leaning forward, chin in hand, with shining eyes, seemed
fairly to impart a reflection of her own passionate concentration to the
woman before her.
Mrs. Herrick, so calm in her reposeful attitude, calm as the old
portrait on the wall behind her, none the less began to show a curious
sparkle of excitement in her face. "If I were sure that person's life
_did_ depend on me," she measured out her words deliberately. "But that
so seldom happens, and it is so hard to tell."
"But if you were sure, sure, sure!" Flora rang it out certainly.
Mrs. Herrick in her turn leaned forward. "Ah, even then it would depend
on him. And do you think you can make a man do otherwise than his
nature?"
"You think I should fail?" Flora took it up fearlessly. "Well, if I do,
at least I shall have done my best. I shall have to have done my best or
I can never forgive myself."
"I see," Mrs. Herrick sighed. "But it sounds to me a risk too great for
any reward that could come of its success." She thought. "If you could
tell me more." Then, as Flora only looked at her wistfully and silently:
"Isn't there some one you can confide in? Not Mrs. Britton?"
"Clara? Oh, no; never!" Flora startled Mrs. Herrick with the passionate
repudiation.
"But could not Mr. Cressy--" and with that broken sentence several
things that Mrs. Herrick had been keeping back looked out of her face.
Flora answered with a stare of misery. "I know what you must be
thinking--what you can not help thinking," she said, "that the whole
thing is unheard-of--outrageous--especially for a girl so soon to--to
be--" She caught her breath with a sob, for the words she could not
speak. "But there is nothing in this disloyal to my engagement, even
though I can not speak of it to Harry Cressy; and nothing I hope to gain
for myself by what I am trying to do. If I succeed it will only mean I
shall never see him--the other one--again."
Mrs. Herrick rose, in her turn beseeching. "Oh, I can't help you go into
it! It is too dubious. My dear, I know so much better than you what the
end may mean."
"I know what the end may mean, and I can't keep out of it."
"But I can not go with you." There was a stern note in Mrs. Herrick's
voice.
Flora looked around the room, the sunny windows, the still shadows, the
tall, monotonous clock, as if this were the last glimpse of peace and
protection she would ever have. She rose and put out her hand.
"I'm afraid I didn't quite realize how much I was asking of you. You
have been very good even to listen to me. It's right, I suppose, that I
should go alone."
Mrs. Herrick looked at her in dismay. "But that is impossible!" Then, as
Flora turned away, she kept her hand. "Think, think," she urged, "how
you will be misunderstood."
"Oh, I shall have to bear that--from the people who don't know."
"Yes, and even from the one for whom you are spending yourself!"
Flora gave her head a quick shake. "He understands," she said.
"My dear, he is not worth it."
Flora turned on her with anger. "You don't know what he is worth to me!"
Mrs. Herrick looked steadily at this unanswerable argument. Her hold on
Flora's hand relaxed, but she did not quite release it. Her brows drew
together. "You are quite sure you must go?"
Flora nodded. She was speechless.
"Did Mrs. Britton know you were coming to me?"
"No. She doesn't even know that I am going out of town. She must not,"
Flora protested.
"Indeed she must. You must not place yourself in such a false position.
Write her and tell her you are going to San Mateo with me."
"Oh, if you would!" Tears sprang to Flora's eyes. "But will you, even if
I can't tell you anything?"
"I shall not ask you anything. Now write her immediately. You can do it
here while I am getting ready."
She had taken authoritative command of the details of their expedition,
and Flora willingly obeyed her. She was still trembling from the stress
of their interview, and she blinked back tears before she was able to
see what she was writing.
It had all been brought about more quickly and completely than she had
hoped, but it was in her mind all the while she indited her message to
Clara, that Kerr, for whom it had been accomplished, was not yet
informed of the existence of the scheme, or the part of guest he was to
play. Yet she was sure that if she asked he would be promptly there. She
wrote to him briefly:
At San Mateo, at the Herricks'. I want you there to-night. I have
made up my mind.
As she was sealing it she started at a step approaching in the hall. She
had wanted to conceal that betraying letter before Mrs. Herrick came
back. She glanced quickly behind her, and saw standing between the
half-open folding doors, the slim figure of a girl--slimmer, younger
even than the one who had passed her at the gate, but like her, with the
same large eyes, the same small indeterminate chin. Just at the chin the
likeness to Mrs. Herrick failed with the strength of her last
generation--but the eyes were perfect; and they gazed at Flora
wondering. With the sixth sense of youth they recognized the enactment
of something strange and thrilling.
Another instant and Mrs. Herrick's presence dawned behind her
daughter--and her voice--"Why, child, what are you doing there?"--and
her hands seemed apprehensive in their haste to hurry the child away, as
if, truly, in this drawing-room, for the first time, something was
dangerous.
XXI
THE HOUSE OF QUIET
The day which had dawned so still and gloomy was wakening to something
like wildness, threatening, brightening, gusty, when they stepped out of
the train upon the platform of the San Mateo station. Clouds were piling
gray and castle-like from the east up toward the zenith, and dark
fragments kept tearing off the edges and spinning away across the sky.
But between them the bright face of the sun flashed out with double
splendor, and the thinned atmosphere made the sky seem high and far, and
all form beneath it clarified and intense.
There upon the narrow platform Mrs. Herrick hesitated a moment, looking
at Flora. "What train do you want to meet?" she asked.
Flora stood perplexed. "I hardly know. You see I can't tell how soon my
letter would reach--would be received."
"Then we would better meet them all," the elder woman decided.
They drove away into the face of the wet, fresh wind and flying drops of
rain. Flora, leaning back in the carriage, looked out through the window
with quiet eyes. The spirited movement of the sky, the racing of its
shadows on the grass, the rolling foliage of the trees, seen tempestuous
against flying cloud, were alike to her consoling and inspiring. She had
never felt so free as now, driving through the fitful weather, nor so
safe as with this companion who was sitting silent by her side. She was
driving away from all her complications. She was retreating to a fresh
stronghold, where her conflict would be a duel hand to hand, and where
the outside forces, which had harassed her and threatened ignobly to
down her antagonist with a stab in the back, could be held at bay.
Already she was looking toward the house which she had never seen as
her own kindly castle; and the generous opening of its gate--old granite
crowned with rose of sharon--did not disappoint her. The house was
hidden in the swelling trees, but the drive winding beneath them gave
glimpses through of lawns, of roses wreathing scarletly the old gray
fountain basin, of magnolia and acacia, doubly delicate and white and
fragile beneath the thunderous sky.
The house, when finally it loomed upon them, with its irregular roofs
topped by curious square turrets, with its tremendous ground floor
rambling away in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower
verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed
too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever
of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid
tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle
that panoplied its front, felt her throat swell for sheer delight.
For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the
porte-cochère, looking around them. Then half wistfully, half
humorously, Mrs. Herrick turned to Flora. "I do hope you won't want to
buy it!"
"Oh, I'm afraid I shall," Flora murmured, "that is, if--" She left her
sentence hanging, as one who would have said "if I come out of this
alive," and Mrs. Herrick, with a quick start of protection, laid her
hand on Flora's arm.
"If you must," she said lightly, "if you do buy it, then at least I
shall know it is in good hands."
Flora gave her a look of gratitude, not so much for the slight kindness
of her words as for the great kindness of her attitude in thus so
readily resuming the first assumption on which her presence there had
been invited. That was the house itself.
It was plain to Flora from the moment she set foot over the threshold
that the house was to be no mean ally of theirs, but Mrs. Herrick was
making it help them doubly in their hard interval of waiting. Alone
together with unspoken, unspeakable things between them--things that
for mere decency or honor could not be uttered--with nothing but these
to think of, nothing but each other to look at, they must yet, in sheer
desperation and suspense, have inevitably burst out with question or
confession, had not the great house been there to interpose its
personality. And the way Mrs. Herrick was making the most of that! The
way immediately, even before she had shown anything, she began to
revivify the spirit of the place, as the two women stood with their hats
not yet off in the room that was to be Flora's, talking and looking out
upon the lawn!
With her silences, with her expressive self as well as with her words,
Mrs. Herrick was reanimating it all the while they lunched and rested,
still in the upper-rooms overlooking the garden. And later, when they
made the tour of the house, she began unwinding from her memory
incidents of its early beginnings, pieces of its intimate, personal
history, as one would make a friend familiar to another friend. And
these past histories and the rooms themselves were leading Flora away
out of her anxious self, were soothing her prying apprehensions, were
giving her a detachment in the present, till what she so anticipated lay
quiescent at the back of her brain.
But it was there. And now and then, when in a gust of wind the lights
and shadows danced on the dim, polished floors, it stirred; and at the
sound of wheels on the drive below it leaped, and all her fears again
were in her face. At such moments the two women did look deeply at each
other, and the suspense, the premonition, hovered in Mrs. Herrick's
eyes. It was as unconscious, as involuntary, as Flora's start at the
swinging of a door; but no question crossed her lips. She let the matter
as severely alone as if it had been a jewel not her own. Yet, it came to
Flora all at once that here, for the first time, she was with one to
whom she could have revealed the sapphire on her neck and yet remain
unchallenged.
"Ah, you're too lovely!" she burst out at last. "It is more than I
deserve that you should take it all like this, as if there really
wasn't anything." The elder lady's eyes wavered a little at the plain
words.
"I'm too deeply doubtful of it to take it any other way," she said.
"That is why I feel most guilty," Flora explained. "For dragging you
into it and then--bringing it into your house." She glanced around at
the high, quiet, damasked room. "Such a thing to happen here!"
"Ah, my dear,"--Mrs. Herrick's laugh was uncertain--"the things that
have happened here--the things that have happened and been endured and
been forgotten! and see," she said, laying her hand on one of the walls,
"the peace of it now!"
Flora wondered. She seemed to feel such distances of life extending yet
beyond her sight as dwindled her, tiny and innocent.
"It isn't what happens, but the way we take it that makes the
afterward," Mrs. Herrick added.
The thought of an afterward had stood very dim in Flora's mind, and
even now that Mrs. Herrick's words confronted her with it she couldn't
fancy what it would be like. She couldn't imagine her existence going on
at all on the other side of failure.
"But suppose," she tremulously urged, "suppose there seemed only one way
to take what had happened to you, and that way, if it failed, would
leave you no afterward at all, no peace, no courage, nothing."