The Coast of Chance Part 17

This denouement, this climax to her somber expectations, struck Flora as something wildly and indecently ridiculous. "Why, but it's impossible!"

she protested, and began helplessly to laugh.

"Well, I'd like to know why?" Ella snapped. "I'm sure papa is twice as rich as old Britton was, and twice as easy." She went off into sobs behind her handkerchief.

"Oh, don't, Ella, don't cry!" Flora begged, petting the large expanse of heaving shoulders. "I didn't mean anything. I was just silly. Of course it may be that she wants to marry him. But she never has before--at least, I mean, I don't believe she wants to now. What makes you think she does? What has she done?"

"Well," Ella burst out, "why is she coming here all the time, when she never used to, and petting papa? Why does she bother to be so agreeable to me when she never was before? Why does she make me ask her to dinner, when I don't want to?"

Each question knocked on Flora's brain to the accompaniment of Ella's furious rocking. She could not answer them, and Ella's explanation, absurd as it seemed, coming on top of her high expectations, wasn't impossible. It was like Clara to have more than one iron in the fire; but when Flora remembered the pa.s.sionate intentness with which Clara had demolished the order of her room, she couldn't believe that Clara would pause in the midst of such pursuit to pounce on Judge Buller.

"Oh, Ella," Flora sympathetically urged, "I don't believe there's really any danger. And surely, even if she meant it, Judge Buller wouldn't be--"

"Oh, yes, he would," Ella cut her short. "Why, when she came yesterday he was just going out, and she went for him and made him stop to tea.

Think of it--papa stopping to tea! And he was as pleased as Punch to have her make up to him. He hasn't the least idea of what she's after.

Papa isn't used to ladies. He's always just lived with me."

This astonis.h.i.+ng statement looking at Flora through Ella's unsuspecting eyes had nevertheless a pathos of its own. It conjured up a long vista of harmonious existence which the two, the daughter and the father, had made out of their mutual simplicity, and their mutual gusto for the material comforts which came comfortably.

"But I'll tell you one thing," Ella ended, still rocking vigorously; "if she comes here to-night to dinner when she knows I don't want her I shall tell her what I think of her, before she leaves this house! See if I don't."

"Don't do that, Ella," Flora entreated, "that would be awful." She was certain that such an interview would only end in Clara's making Ella more ridiculous than she was already. "Let me speak to her. I don't mind at all," she declared bravely, and in a manner truly, though she was fully aware that speaking to Clara would be anything but a treat.

"Oh, would you?" said Ella eagerly. "I really would be awfully obliged.

I hated to ask you, Flora, but I thought perhaps you might be able to--to, well, perhaps be able to do something," she ended vaguely. "Do you think you could?"

"I'll speak to Clara to-night," said Flora heroically, "or to-morrow,"

she added; "I'm afraid I won't see her to-night."

"Well, I'll let you know if it makes any difference," said Ella hopefully.

Flora knew that nothing either of them could say would make any difference to Clara, or turn her from the thing she was pursuing; but by speaking she might at least find out if Judge Buller himself were really her object. And Ella's wail of a.s.sured calamity, "Papa has always been so happy with me," touched her with its absurd pathos.

She kissed Ella's misty cheek at parting. It wasn't fair, she thought remorsefully, for people like the Bullers to be at large on the same planet with people like Clara--and herself--and--and like--Her thoughts ran off into the fog. At least, thank heaven, it was the judge Clara was trailing and not Kerr.

The bells and whistles of one o'clock were making clangor as she ran up the steps of her house again. In the hall s.h.i.+ma presented her with a card. She looked at it with a quickening pulse. "Is he waiting?"

"No, madam. Mr. Kerr has gone. He waited half an hour."

Down went her spirits again. Yet surely after their last interview she ought not to be eager to meet him again. "In the morning," she thought, "and waited half an hour. How he must have wanted to see me!" She didn't know whether she liked that or not. "When did he come?"

"At eleven o'clock."

At this she was frightened; he had missed Harry by less than half an hour.

"He waited all that time alone?"

"No. Mr. Cressy came."

Flora felt a cold thrill in her nerves. Then Harry had come back! What had he come for?

"He also would wait," the j.a.panese explained.

Flora gasped. "They waited together!"

The j.a.panese shook his head. "They went away together."

She didn't believe her ears. "Mr. Kerr went away with Mr. Cressy?"

The j.a.panese seemed to revolve the problem of mastery. "No, Mr. Cressy accompanied Mr. Kerr." He had made a delicate oriental distinction. It put the whole thing before her in a moment. Harry had been the resistant, and the other with his brilliant initiative attacking, always attacking when he should have been hiding, had carried him off. "What had he done, and how had he managed, when Harry must have had such pressing reasons for wanting to stay?" Ah, she knew only too well Kerr's exquisite knowledge of managing; but why must he make such a reckless exposure of himself? Did he suppose Harry was to be managed? Had he no idea where Harry stood in this affair? In pity's name, didn't he know that Harry had seen him before--had seen him under circ.u.mstances of which Harry wouldn't talk? They were circ.u.mstances of which she knew nothing, and yet from that very fact there was left a horrible impression in her mind that they had been of a questionable character.

XV

A LADY IN DISTRESS

She had returned, ready for pitched battle with Clara, and on the threshold there had met her the very turn in the affair that she had dreaded all along--the setting of Kerr and Harry upon each other.

These were two whom she had kept apart even in her mind--the man to whom she was pledged, with whom she had supposed herself in love, and the man for whom she was flying in the face of all her traditions. She had not scrutinized the reason of her extraordinary behavior; not since that dreadful day when the vanis.h.i.+ng mystery had taken positive form in him had she dared to think how she felt about Kerr. She had only acted, acted; only asked herself what to do next, and never why; only taken his cause upon herself and made it her own, as if that was her natural right. She could hardly believe that it was she who had let herself go to this extent. All her life she had been docile to public opinion, buxom to conventions, respectful of those legal and moral rules laid down by some rigid material spirit lurking in mankind. But now when the moment had come, when the responsibility had descended upon her, she found that these things had in no way persuaded her. They were not vital enough for her proposition. They had no meaning now--no more than proper parlor furniture for a castaway on a desert island.

Then this was herself, a creature too much concerned with the primal harmonies of life to be impressed by the modulations her decade set upon them. This was that self which she had obscurely cherished as no more real than a fairy; but at Kerr's acclamation it had proclaimed itself more real than flesh and blood, and Kerr himself the most real thing in all her life.

Then what was Harry? The bland implacable p.r.o.nouncement of s.h.i.+ma had summoned him up to stand beside Kerr more clearly than her own eyes could have shown him. Surely she was giving to Kerr what belonged to Harry, or else she had already given to Harry what ought to have been Kerr's. That was her last conclusion. It was horrible, it was hopeless, but it was not untrue. It had crept upon her so softly that it had taken her unawares. She was appalled at the unreason of pa.s.sion. Unsought by him, unclaimed, in every common sense a stranger to him--how could she belong to him? And yet of that she was sure by the way he had unveiled her the first night, by the way he had quickened her dreaming into life.

As many times as she had fancied what love was like she had never dreamed it could be like this. It was mockery that she could be concerned for one who only wanted of her--plunder. Yet it was so. She was as tremblingly concerned for his fate as if she owned his whole devotion; and his fate at this moment, she was convinced, was in Harry's hands.

Kerr, with his brilliant initiative, might carry him off, but Kerr was still the quarry. For had not Harry, from the very beginning, known something about him? Hadn't he at first denied having seen him before, and then admitted it? Hadn't he dropped hints and innuendoes without ever an explanation? She remembered the singular fact of the Emba.s.sy ball, twice mentioned, each time with that singular name of Farrell Wand. And to know--if that _was_ what Harry knew--that a man of such fame was in a community where a ring of such fame had disappeared--what further proof was wanted?

Then why didn't Harry speak? And what was going on on his side of the affair? Harry's side would have been her side a few days before. Now, unaccountably, it was not. Nor was Kerr's side hers either. She was standing between the two--standing hesitating between her love of one and her loyalty to the other and what he represented. The power might be hers to tip the scales Harry held, either to Kerr's undoing, or to his protection. At least she thought she might protect him, if she could discover Harry's secret. Her special, authorized relation to him--her right to see him often, question him freely--even cajole--should make that easy. But she shrank from what seemed like betrayal, even though she did not betray him to Kerr by name.

Then, on the other hand, she doubted how much she could do with Harry.

She wasn't sure how far she was prepared to try him after that scene of theirs. She had no desire to pique him further by seeing too much of Kerr. On her own account she wanted for the present to avoid Kerr. He roused a feeling in her that she feared--a feeling intoxicating to the senses, dazzling to the mind, unknitting to the will. How could she tell, if they were left alone together for a long enough s.p.a.ce of time, that she might not take the jewel from her neck, at his request, and hand it to him--and d.a.m.n them both? If only she could escape seeing him altogether until she could find out what Harry was doing, and what she must do!

Meanwhile, there was her promise to Ella. She recalled it with difficulty. It seemed a vague thing in the light of her latest discovery, though she could never meet Clara in disagreement without a qualm. But she made the plunge that evening, before Clara left for the Bullers', while she was at her dressing-table in the half-disarray which brings out all the softness and the disarming physical charm of women.

From her low chair Flora spoke laughingly of Ella's perturbation. Clara paused, with the powder puff in her hand, while she listened to Flora's explanation of how Ella feared that some one might, after all these years, be going to marry Judge Buller. Who this might be she did not even hint at. She left it ever so sketchy. But the little stare with which Clara met it, the amus.e.m.e.nt, the surprise, and then the shortest possible little laugh, were guarantee that Clara had seen it all. She had filled out Flora's sketch to the full outline, and p.r.o.nounced it, as Flora had, an absurdity. But though Clara had laughed she had gone away with her delicate brows a little drawn together, as if she'd really found more than a laugh, something worth considering, in Ella's state of mind.

Flora was left with the uneasy feeling that perhaps she had unwittingly delivered Ella into Clara's hands; that Ella, too, was in danger of becoming part of Clara's schemes. Danger seemed to be spreading like contagion. It was borne in upon her that from this time forward dangers would multiply. That nothing was going to be easier, but everything infinitely harder, to the end; and now was the time to act if ever she hoped to make way through the tangle.

She heard the wheels of Clara's departing conveyance. Now was her chance for an interview with Harry. She spent twenty minutes putting together three sentences that would not arouse his suspicions. She made two copies, and sent them by separate messengers, one to his rooms, one to the club, with orders they be brought back if he was not there to receive them. Then--the miserable business of waiting in the large house full of echoes and the round ghostly globes of electric lights, with that thing around her neck for which--did they but know of it--half the town would break in her windows and doors.

The wind traveled the streets without, and shook the window-casings. She cowered over the library fire, listening. The leaping flames set her shadow dancing like a goblin. A bell rang, and the shadow and the flame gave a higher leap as if in welcome of what had arrived. She went to the library door. In the glooms and lights outside s.h.i.+ma was standing, and two messengers. It was odd that both should arrive at once. She stepped back and stood waiting with a quicker pulse. s.h.i.+ma entered with two letters upon his tray. She had a moment's anxiety lest both her notes had been brought back to her, but no--the envelope which lay on top showed Harry's writing. She tore it open hastily. Harry wrote that he would be delighted, and might he bring a friend with him; a bully fellow whom he wanted her to meet? He added she might send over for some girl and they could have a jolly little party.

Flora looked at this communication blankly. Was Harry, who had always jumped at the chance of a tete-a-tete, dodging her? In her astonishment she let the other envelope fall. She stooped, and then for a moment remained thus, bent above it. The superscription was not hers. The note was not addressed to Harry, but to her, and in a handwriting she had never seen before!

Again the peal of the electric bell. s.h.i.+ma appeared with a third envelope. This time it was her own note returned to her. With the feeling she was bewitched she took up the mysterious letter from the floor and opened it. She read the strange handwriting:

May I see you, anywhere, at any time, to-night?