The Coast of Chance Part 3

"Shall we join the others?" It was the voice with which she had begun with him, but her eyes were hot through their light mist of lashes, and he threw her a comprehending glance of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Oh, no," he a.s.sured her, "we can't help ourselves. They are going to join us."

Ella Buller, in the van of her procession, was already descending upon them. Her approach dissipated the last remnant of their personal moment.

Her presence always insisted that there was nothing worth while but instant partic.i.p.ation in her geniality, and whatever subject it might at the moment be taken up with. This conviction of Ella's had been wont to overawe Flora, and it still overwhelmed her; so that now, as she followed in the tail of Ella's marshaled force, she had a guilty feeling that there should be nothing in her mind but a normal desire for supper.

Yet all the way down the great stair, "the Corridors of Time," where the white owl glared his gla.s.sy wisdom on the pa.s.sings and counter-pa.s.sings, she was haunted with the thought that Harry had seen the extraordinary Kerr before; not shaken hands with him, perhaps--perhaps not even heard his name; but somewhere, across some distance, once glimpsed him, and had never quite shaken the memory from his mind. For there was something marked, notable, unforgettable in that lean distinctiveness. Against the sleek form of the men they met and shook hands with, he flashed out--seemed in contrast fairly electric. She saw him, just ahead of her where the crowd was thickening in the door of the supper-room, making way for Clara through the press with that exasperating solicitude of his that was half ironic. And the large broadside offered by her elegant Harry, matter-of-factly towing Ella by the elbow, herself conscious of a curl or two awry, and Judge Buller tramping heavily at her side, all took on to her the aspect of a well-chosen peep-show with the satanic Kerr officiating as showman. Even the smooth and pallid Clara, who usually coerced by her sheer correctness, failed to dominate this fantastic image; rather, she took on, as she was handed into the supper-room, the aspect of his chief exhibit.

The room, hot, polished, flaring reflections of electric lights from its glistening floor, announced itself the heart of high festivity, through the midst of which their entrance made an added ripple. The flushed faces of the women under their flowers, under their pale-tinted hats, with their smiling recognitions to Clara, to Flora, to Ella, smiled with a sharpened interest. It proclaimed that Kerr was a stranger, and, in a circle which found itself a little stale for lack of innovations, a desirable one. Exclamatory greetings, running into skirmishes of talk, here and there halted their progress, and even after they had settled about their table in the center of the room the attention of one and another was drawn over the shoulder to some special, trans-table recognition.

Apparently the dominant note of their party was Ella's clamorous selection for the supper; but to Flora the more real thing was the atmosphere of excitement and mystery she had been moving in all the evening. She was pursued by the obsession of something more about to happen--something imminent--though, of course, nothing would; at least, how could anything happen here, to them? And by "them," she meant herself and these people around her so stupidly talking--the eternal repet.i.tion of the story she had read out that evening to Clara, and not one glimmer of light! She wondered if her obsession was all her own--or did it reach to one of them? Certainly not Ella; not Judge Buller, settled into his collar, choosing champagnes. Clara? She had to skip Clara. One never knew whether Clara had not more behind her smooth prettiness than ever she brought to light. Kerr? Perhaps. With him she felt potentialities enormous. Harry? Never. Harry was being appealed to by all the women who could get at him as to his part in the affair--what had been his sensations and emotions? But Flora knew perfectly well he had had none. He was only oppressed by the attention his fame in the matter, and the central position of their table, brought upon him.

Protesting, he made his part as small as possible.

"Oh, confound it, if I can't get at my oysters!" he complained, leaning back into his group again with a sigh.

"You divide the honors with the mysterious unknown, eh?" Kerr inquired across the table.

"Hang it, there's no division! I'd offer you a share!" Harry laughed, and it occurred to Flora how much Kerr could have made of it.

"Purdie'd like to share something," Buller vouchsafed. "He's been pawing the air ever since Crew cabled, and this has blown him up completely."

"Crew?" Flora wondered. Here was something more happening. Crew? She had not heard that name before. It made a stir among them all; but if Kerr looked sharp, Clara looked sharper. She looked at Harry and Harry was vexed.

"Who's Crew?" said Ella; and the judge looked around on the silence.

"Why, bless my soul, isn't it--Oh, anyway, it will all be out to-morrow.

But I thought Harry'd told you. The Chatworth ring wasn't Bessie's."

It had the effect of startling them all apart, and then drawing them closer together again around the table over the uncorked bottles.

"Why," Judge Buller went on, "this ring is a celebrated thing. It's the 'Crew Idol'!" He threw the name out as if that in itself explained everything, but the three women, at least, were blank.

"Why celebrated?" Clara objected. "The stones were only sapphires."

Kerr smiled at this measure of fame.

"Quite so," he nodded to her, "but there are several sorts of value about that ring. Its age, for one."

He had the attention of the table, as if they sensed behind his words more even than Judge Buller could have told them.

"And then the superst.i.tion about it. It's rather a pretty tale," said Kerr, looking at Flora. "You've seen the ring--a figure of Vishnu bent backward into a circle, with a head of sapphire; two yellow stones for the cheeks and the brain of him of the one blue. Just as a piece of carving it is so fine that Cellini couldn't have equaled it, but no one knows when or where it was made. The first that is known, the Shah Jehan had it in his treasure-house. The story is he stole it, but, however that may be, he gave it as a betrothal gift to his wife--possibly the most beautiful"--his eyebrows signaled to Flora his uncertainty of that fact--"without doubt the best-loved woman in the world. When she died it was buried with her--not in the tomb itself, but in the Taj Mehal; and for a century or so it lay there and gathered legends about it as thick as dust. It was believed to be a talisman of good fortune--especially in love.

"It had age; it had intrinsic value; it had beauty, and that one other quality no man can resist--it was the only thing of its kind in the world. At all events, it was too much for old Neville Crew, when he saw it there some couple of hundred years ago. When he left India the ring went with him. He never told how he got it, but lucky marriages came with it, and the Crews would not take the House of Lords for it. Their women have worn it ever since."

For a moment the wonder of the tale and the curious spark of excitement it had produced in the teller kept the listeners silent. Clara was the first to return to facts. "Then Bessie--" she prompted eagerly.

Kerr turned his gla.s.s in meditative fingers. "She wore it as young Chatworth's wife." He held them all in an increasing tension, as if he drew them toward him.

"The elder Chatworth, Lord Crew, is a bachelor, but, of course, the ring reverted to him on Chatworth's death."

"And Lord only knows," the judge broke in, "how it got s.h.i.+pped with Bessie's property. Crew was out of England at the time. He kept the wires hot about it, and they managed to keep the fact of what the ring was quiet--but it got out to-day when Purdie found it was gone. You see he was showing it--and without special permission."

Flora had a bewildered feeling that this judicial summing up of facts wasn't the sort of thing the evening had led up to. She couldn't see, if this was what it amounted to, why Harry had changed his mind about telling them at the dinner table. She could not even understand where this belonged in the march of events in their story, but Clara took it up, clipped it out, and fitted it into its place.

"Then there will be pressure--enormous pressure, brought to bear to recover it?"

"Oh-o-oh!" Buller drew out the syllable with unctuous relish. "They'll rip the town inside out. They'll do worse. There'll be a string of detectives across the country--yes, and at intervals to China--so tight you couldn't step from Kalamazoo to Oshkosh without running into one.

The thing is too big to be covered. The chap who took it will play a lone game; and to do that--Lord knows there aren't many who could--to do that he'd have to be a--a--"

"Farrell Wand?" Flora flung it out as a challenge among these prosaic people; but the effect of it was even sharper than she had expected. She fancied she saw them all start; that Harry squared himself, that Kerr met it as if he swallowed it with almost a facial grimace; that Judge Buller blinked it hard in the face--the most bothered of the lot. He came at it first in words.

"Farrell Wand?" He felt it over, as if, like a doubtful coin, it might have rung false. "Now, what did I know of Farrell Wand?"

"Farrell Wand?" Kerr took it up rapidly. "Why, he was the great Johnnie who went through the Scotland Yard men at Perth in '94, and got off.

Don't you remember? He took a great a.s.sortment of things under the most peculiar circ.u.mstances--took the Tilton emeralds off Lady Tilton's neck at St. James'."

"Why, Harry, you--" Flora began. "You told us that," was what she had meant to say, but Harry stopped her. Stopped her just with a look, with a nod; but it was as if he had shaken his head at her. His tawny lashes, half drooped over watching eyes, gave him more than ever the look of a great, still cat; a domestic, good-humored cat, but in sight of legitimate prey. Her eyes went back to Kerr with a sense of bewilderment. His voice was still going on, expansively, brilliantly, juggling his subject.

"He knew them all, the big-wigs up in Parliament, the big-wigs on 'Change, the little d.u.c.h.esses in Mayfair, and they all liked him, asked him, dined him, and--great Scott, they paid! Paid in hereditary jewels, or the shock to their decency when the thing came out--but, poor devil, so did he!"

And through it all Buller gloomed unsmiling, with out-thrust underlip.

"No, no," he said slowly, "that's not my connection with Farrell Wand.

What happened afterward? What did they do with him?"

Kerr was silent, and Flora thought his face seemed suddenly at its sharpest.

It was Clara who answered with another question. "Didn't he get to the colonies? Didn't he die there?"

Judge Buller caught it with a snap of his fingers. "Got it!" he triumphed, and the two men turned square upon him. "They ran him to earth in Australia. That was the year I was there--'96. I got a snapshot of him at the time."

It was now the whole table that turned on him, and Flora felt, with that unanimous movement, something crucial, the something that she had been waiting for; and yet she could in no way connect it with what had happened, nor understand why Clara, why Harry, why Kerr above all should be so alert. For more than all he looked expectant, poised, and ready for whatever was coming next.

"What sort of a chap?" he mused and fixed the judge a moment with the same stare that Flora remembered to have first confronted her.

"What sort? Sort of a criminal," the judge smiled. "They all look alike."

"Still," Clara suggested, "such a man could hardly have been ordinary--"

"In the chain-gang--oh, yes," said Buller with conviction.

"Oh! Then the picture wasn't worth anything?"

"Why, no," Buller admitted slowly, "though, come to think of it, it wasn't the chain-gang either. They were taking him aboard the s.h.i.+p. The crowd was so thick I hardly saw him, and--only got one shot at him. But the name was a queer one. It stuck in my mind."

"But then," Clara insisted, "what became of him?"

"Oh, gave them the slip," the judge chuckled. "He always did. Reported to have changed s.h.i.+ps in mid-ocean. Hal, is that another bottle?"