The Coast of Chance Part 24

"Well, come," he said.

She felt that all doors would fly open at his bidding. She felt herself swept powerless at his will with all the yielding in her soul that she had felt in her body when his arms were around her. He had taken her by the hand--he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights flared--the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of the carriage waiting before the door. It all glimmered before her--a picture she might never see again--might not see after she pa.s.sed through the carriage door that gaped for her. The will that had swept her out of the door was moving her beyond her own will, as it had moved her that morning in the garden, beyond all things that she knew. There was no feeling left in her but the despair of extreme surrender.

She found herself in the carriage. She saw his face in the carriage door as pale as anger, yet not angry; it was some bigger thing that looked at her from his eyes. He looked a long while, as if he bade her never to forget this moment. Then, "I'll give you twenty-four hours," he said.

"This man will take you home." He shut the carriage door--shut it between them. Before she had gathered breath he had straightened, fallen back, raised his hat, and the carriage was turning. Flora thrust her head, straw hat and ribbons out of the window.

"Oh, I love you!" she called to him. She sank back in the cus.h.i.+ons and covered her face with her hands.

XVIII

GOBLIN TACTICS

For a little she kept her face hidden, shutting out the present, jealously living with the wonderful thing that had happened to her. It was as wonderful as anything she had dreamed might come when she had written him that letter. And if she needed any proof of his love, she had had it in the moment when he had let her go. There he had transcended her hope. She felt lifted up, she felt triumphant, though the triumph had not been hers. It was all his; he had saved her from her own weakness; his was the miracle. How he shone to her! The dark, swaying hollow of the carriage seemed still full of his presence, full of his hurried whispering; and again she seemed to see him standing outside the window in the deep blue evening holding out his hands to her cry of "I love you!"

He had been wonderful in a way she had not expected. He had shown her so beautifully that he could be reached in spite of his obsession. Might not she hope to touch him just a little further? Was there any height now that he might not rise to? She seemed to see the possible end of it all shaping itself out of his magnanimity. She seemed to see him finally relinquis.h.i.+ng his pa.s.sion for the jewel, and his pa.s.sion for her for the sake of something finer than both. She had seen it foreshadowed in what he had done this day--having them both in his hands, he had put them away from him. Yet in that action she knew there had been no finality.

She had touched him, but she had not convinced him, and as long as he was unconvinced he would be at her again in some other way.

Her hands dropped from her face, and she confronted the fact drearily.

"No," she thought, "he never gives up what he wants."

She looked out of the window. The flickers of gas-lamps fell intermittently through it upon her. Her queer vehicle was rattling crazily--jolting as if every spring were at its last leap. She was out of the quiet, blue street. Montgomery Avenue, with its lights, its glittering gilt names and Latin insignia, was traveling by on either side of her. The voice of the city was growing louder in her ears, the crowd on the pavement increased. At intervals the carriage dipped through glares of electric lights that illuminated its interior in a flash broader than day--the ragged cus.h.i.+ons, the raveled ta.s.sels, the limp-swinging shutters, and, glimmering in the midst, wild and disheveled, herself in all the little wavy mirrors. She sat looking out at the maze of moving lights and figures without seeing them, intent on an idea that was growing clearer, larger, moment by moment in her mind.

Kerr's appearance in her garden--his capture of her--had not been the fantastic freak it had seemed. He had had his purpose. He had taken her out of her environment; he had carried her beyond succor or menace just that he might carry them both so much further and faster through their differences. They had not reached the point of agreement yet, but might they not on some other ground, where they could be unchallenged? It seemed to her if she could only meet him on her own ground for once--instead of for ever on Clara's or Harry's--only meet him alone, somewhere beyond their reach, it might be accomplished, it might be brought to the end she so wished. Yet where to go to be rid of Clara and Harry, the two so closely a.s.sociated with every fact of her life?

The hack, which had been moving along at a rapid pace, slowed now to a walk among the thickening traffic, and from a mere moving ma.s.s the crowd appeared as individuals--a stream of dark figures and white faces. Her eyes slipped from one to another. Here one stood still on the lamp-lit corner, looking down, with lips moving quickly and silently. It was strange to see those rapid, eager, moving lips with no sound from them audible. Then her eyes were startled by something familiar in the figure, though the direct down-glare of the ball of light above him distorted the features with shadows. She pressed her face against the window-gla.s.s in palpitating doubt. It was Harry.

She cowered in the corner of the carriage. In a moment the risks of her situation were before her. Had he seen her? Oh, no, at least not yet. He had been too intent on whomever he was talking to. She peered to make sure that he was still safely on the street corner. He was just opposite, and now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear s.p.a.ce around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very small, shabby, nondescript man--possibly only a boy, so short he seemed.

His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could explain--Italian, Portuguese, Greek--whatever he was, he was a strange foil to Harry, so bright and burnished.

The hack was turning. She realized with dismay that it was turning sharp around that very corner where they stood. Suppose Harry should chance to glance through its window and see Flora Gilsey sitting trembling within.

The hack wheezed and cramped, and all at once she heard it sc.r.a.pe the curb. Then she was lost! She looked up brave in her desperation, ready to meet Harry's eyes. She saw the back of his head. For a moment it loomed directly above her, then it moved. He was separating from his companion. With one stride he vanished out of the square frame of the window, and there remained full fronting her, staring in upon her, the face of his companion.

Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop--dull hues and odors all at once--and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly.

The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless, powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney, where at this hour the town was widest awake, and the crowd was a crowd she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of the florists' shops and restaurants, or pa.s.sing her in carriages. And what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner.

She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing that section of large, old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 ident.i.ty, 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 s.h.i.+ma 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.

"s.h.i.+ma," 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 s.h.i.+ma's obedience. Through the gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ma 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 s.h.i.+ma was back again.

"I gave him ten dollars, the cabman."

Now she gasped indeed. "Oh, the cabman! But the other one!" For an instant s.h.i.+ma 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."