The Coast of Chance Part 20

The judge looked pleased. "That one? Why, that's my own--was, at least, half an hour ago. You see, about that twenty-thousand-dollar proposition--" They moved nearer him. They stood, the four, around the red velvet-covered table, like people waiting to be served. "The trouble is right here," said the judge, emphasizing with blunt forefinger. "The crook has a pal. That's probable, isn't it?"

Harry nodded. Flora felt Kerr's eyes upon her, but she could not look at him.

"And we see the thing is at a deadlock, don't we? Well, now," the judge went on triumphantly, "we know if any one person had the whole ring it would be turned in by this time. That is the weak spot in the reward policy. They didn't reckon on the thing's being split."

"Split? No, really, do you think that possible?" Kerr inquired, and Flora caught a glimmer of irony in his voice.

"Well, can you see one of those chaps trusting the other with more than half of it?" The judge was scornful. "And a fellow needs a whole ring if he is after a reward." He rolled his head waggishly. "Oh, I could have been a crook myself!" he chuckled, but his was the only smiling face in the party.

For Kerr's was pale, schooled to a rigid self-control.

And Harry's was crimson and swollen, as if with a sudden rush of blood.

His twitching hands, his sullen eyes, responded to Judge Buller's last word as if it had been an accusation.

"It makes me d.a.m.ned sick, the way you fellows talk--as if it was the easiest thing in the world to--" He broke off. It was such a tone, loose, harsh and uncontrolled, as made Flora shrink.

As if he sensed that movement in her, he turned upon her furiously.

"Well, are we going to stand here all night?" He took her by the arm.

She felt as if he had struck her. Buller was staring at him, but Kerr had opened the door through which she had entered, and now, turning his back upon Harry, silently motioned her out.

She had a moment's fear that Harry's grasp, even then, wouldn't let go.

Indeed, for a moment he stood clutching her, as if, now that his rage had spent itself, she was the one thing he could hold to. Then she felt his fingers loosen. He stood there alone, looking, with his great bulk, and his great strength, and his abashed bewilderment, rather pathetic.

But that aspect reached her dimly, for the fear of him was uppermost.

Her arm still burned where he had grasped it. She moved away from him toward the door Kerr had opened for her. She pa.s.sed from the light of the crimson room into the dark of the pa.s.sage. Some one followed her and closed the door. Some one caught step with her. It was Kerr. He bent his dark head to speak low.

"I don't know why you did it, you quixotic child, but you must not expose yourself in this way, for any reason whatsoever."

The light of the crowded rooms burst upon them again.

"Oh," she turned to him beseechingly, "can't you get me away?"

"Surely." His manner was as if nothing had happened. His smile was rea.s.suring. "I'll call your carriage, and find Mrs. Britton."

When Flora came down from the dressing-room she found Clara already in the carriage, and Kerr mounting guard in the hall. As he handed her in, Clara leaned forward.

"Where is Mr. Cressy?" she inquired.

"He sent his apologies," Kerr explained. "He is not able to get away just now."

Clara could not control a look of astonishment. As the carriage began to move and Kerr's face disappeared from the square of the window, she turned to Flora.

"Have you and Harry quarreled over that man?"

Flora's voice was low. "No. But Harry--Harry--" she stammered, hardly knowing how to put it, then put it most truly: "Harry is not quite himself to-night."

Flora lay back in the carriage. She was dimly aware of Clara's presence beside her, but for the moment Clara had ceased to be a factor. The shape that filled all the foreground of her thought was Harry. He loomed alarming to her imagination--all the more so since, for the moment, he had seemed to lose his grip. That was another thing she could not quite understand. That burst of violent irritation following, as it had, Judge Buller's words! If Kerr had been the speaker it would have been natural enough, since all through this interview Harry's evident antagonism had seemed strained to the snapping point.

But poor Judge Buller had been harmless enough. He had been merely theorizing. But--wait! She made so sharp a movement that Clara looked at her. The judge's theory might be close to facts that Harry was cognizant of.

For herself she had had no way of finding out how the sapphire had got adrift. But hadn't Harry? Hadn't he followed up that singular scene with the blue-eyed Chinaman by other visits to the goldsmith's shop? Why, yesterday, when he was supposed to be in Burlingame, Clara had seen him in Chinatown. The idea burst upon her then. Harry was after the whole ring. He counted the part she held already his, and for the rest he was groping in Chinatown; he was trying to reach it through the imperturbable little goldsmith. But he had not reached it yet--and she could read his irritation at his failure in his violent outburst when Judge Buller so innocently flung the difficulties in his face. She knew as much now as she could bear. If Harry did not suspect Kerr, it would be strange. But--Harry waiting to make sure of a reward before he unmasked a thief! It was an ugly thought!

And would he wait for the rest now--now that the situation was so galling to him? Might not he just decide to take the sapphire, and with the evidence of that, risk his putting his hand on the "Idol" when he grasped the thief?

The carriage was stopping. Clara was making ready to get out. She braced herself to face Clara, in the light, with a casual exterior--but when she had reached her own rooms she sank in a heap in the chair before her writing-table, and laid her head upon the table between her arms.

In her wretchedness she found herself turning to Kerr. How stoically he had endured it all, though it must have borne on him most heavily! How kind he had been to her! He had not even spoken of himself, though he must have known the shadows were closing over his head. Any moment he might be enshrouded. If it came to a choice between having him taken and giving him the blue jewel, she wondered which she would do.

In the gray hours of the morning she wrote him. She dared not put the perils into words, but she implied them. She vaguely threatened; and she implored him to go, avoiding them all, herself more than any; and, quaking at the possibility that he might, after all, overcome _her_, she declared that before he went she would not see him again. She closed with the forbidding statement that whether he stayed or went, at the end of three days she would make a sure disposal of the ring. She put all this in reckless black and white and sent it by the hand of Shima. Then she waited. She waited, in her little isolation, with the sapphire always hung about her neck, waited with what antic.i.p.ation of marvelous results--avowals, ideal farewells, or possibly some incredible transformation of the grim face of the business. And the answer was silence.

XVI

THE HEART OF THE DILEMMA

There is, in the heart of each gale of events, a storm center of quiet.

It is the very deadlock of contending forces, in which the individual has s.p.a.ce for breath and apprehension. Into this lull Flora fell panting from her last experience, more frightened by this false calm than by the whirlwind that had landed her there. Now she had time to mark the echoes of the storm about her, and to realize her position. Her absorption had peopled the world for her with four people at most. Now she had time to look at the larger aspect.

From the middle of her calm she saw many inexplicable appearances. She saw them everywhere, from the small round of Clara's movement to the larger wheel of the public aspect. Clara was taking tea with the Bullers, and the papers had ceased to mention the Crew Idol.

It had not even been a nine days' wonder. It had not dwindled. It had simply dropped from head-lines to nothing; and after the first murmur of astonishment at this strange vanishing, after a little vain conjecture as to the reason of it, the subject dropped out of the public mouth. The silence was so sudden it was like a suppression. To Flora it shadowed some forces working so secretly, so surely, that they had extinguished the light of publicity. They must be going on with concentrated and terrible activity in cycles, which perhaps had not yet touched her.

So, seeing Major Purdie among the crowd at some one's "afternoon" where she was pouring tea, she looked up at his cheerful face and high bald dome with a pa.s.sionate curiosity. He knew why the press had been extinguished, and what they were doing in the dark. She knew where the sapphire was--and where the culprit was to be found. And to think that they could tell each other, if they would, each a tale the other would hardly dare believe. Amazing appearances! How far away, how foreign from the facts they covered! But Major Purdie had the best of it. He at least was doing his duty. He was standing stiffly on one side, while she hesitated between, trying desperately to push Kerr out of sight before she dared uncover the jewel. But he wouldn't move. In spite of all she had done, he wouldn't.

Across the room that very afternoon she caught the twinkle of his resisting smile. He had had her letter then for two days, and still he had come here, though he'd been bidden to stay away; though he had been warned to keep away from all places where she, or these people around her, might find him; though he had been implored to go, finally, as far away as the round surface of the world would let him.

By what he had heard and seen in the red room that night, he must know her warning had not been ridiculous. And there was another threat less apparent on the face of things, but evident enough to her. It was the change in Clara after she had begun her attack on the Bullers, her appearance of being busy with something, absorbed with, intent upon, something, which, if she had not secured it yet, at least she had well in reach. And that thing--suppose it had to do with the Crew Idol; and suppose Clara should play into Harry's hands!

For Kerr's escape Flora had been holding the ring, fighting off events, and yet all the while she had not wanted to lose the sight of him. Well, now, when she had made up her mind finally to resign herself to the dreariness of that, might he not at least have done his part of it and decently disappeared? So much he might have done for her. Instead of smiling at her across crowded tea-rooms, and obliquely glancing at her down decorous dinner-tables, and with the same fatal facility he had displayed in getting at her, now keeping away from her, out of all possible reach.

He was playing her own trick on her, but her chances for getting at him again were fewer than his had been with her. She could not besiege him in his abode; and in the places where they met, large houses crowded with people, the eye of the world was upon her. For how long had she forgotten it--she who had been all her life so deferential toward it!

Even now she remembered it only because it interfered with what she wanted to do.

For the eye of her small society was very keenly upon Kerr. She realized, all at once, that he had become a personage; and then, by smiles, by lifted eyebrows, by glances, she gathered that her name was being linked with his. She was astonished. How could their luncheon together at the Purdies', their words that night in the opera box, their few minutes' talk in the shop, have crystallized into this gossip? It vexed her--alarmed her, how it had got about when she had seen him so seldom, had known him scarcely more than a week. It was simply in the air. It was in her att.i.tude and in his, but how far it had gone she did not dream, until in the dense crowd of some one's at-home she caught the words of a young girl. The voice was so sweet and so prettily modulated that at its first notes Flora turned involuntarily to glimpse the speaker, a slender creature in a delicate mist of muslin, with an indeterminate chin and the cheek of a pale peach.

"Just think," Flora heard her saying, "he went to see her three times in two days, but to-day, did you notice, he wouldn't look at her until she went up and spoke to him. I don't see how a girl can! Harry Cressy--"

She moved away and the words were lost. Flora looked after her. For the moment she felt only scorn for the creatures who had clapped that interpretation upon her great responsibility. These people around her seemed poor indeed, absorbed only in petty considerations, and seeing everything down the narrow vista of the "correct." Her eyes followed the young girl's course through the room, easy to trace by her shining blond head, and the unusual deliciousness of her muslin gown. She stopped beside two women, and with a certain sense of pleasure and embarra.s.sment Flora recognized one of them--Mrs. Herrick. She caught the lady's eye and bowed. Mrs. Herrick smiled, with a gracious inclination in which her graceful shoulders had a part.

It gave Flora the sense Mrs. Herrick's presence always brought her, of protection, or security, and the possibility of friendship finer than she had ever known. She started forward. But Mrs. Herrick, presenting instantly her profile, drew the young girl's hand through her arm and moved away.

Flora winced as if she had received a blow. The other people who had heard the same gossip of her had been, on account of it, all the more amused, and anxious to talk to her. But Mrs. Herrick, though she bowed and smiled, did not want her too near her daughter; perhaps, herself, would have preferred not to speak to her.