The Coast of Chance Part 28

For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the porte-cochere, 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 grat.i.tude, not so much for the slight kindness of her words as for the great kindness of her att.i.tude in thus so readily resuming the first a.s.sumption 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 antic.i.p.ated 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."

Mrs. Herrick's eyes fixed her with their deep pity and their deeper apprehension. "There are few things so bad as that," she said slowly, "and those are the ones we must not touch."

Flora paused a moment on the brink of her last plunge. "Do you think what I am going to do is such a thing as that?"

"Oh, my poor child, how do I know? I hope, I pray it is not!" Her fingers closed on Flora's hand, and the girl clung to the kind grasp. It was a comfort, though it could not save her from the real finality.

In spite of the consciousness of a friendly presence in the house her fears increased as the afternoon waned, and her thoughts went back to what she had left behind her, and forward to what might be coming--the one person whom she so longed for, and so dreaded to see. He might be on his way now. He might at this moment be hurrying down the hedged lane from the station; and when he should come, and when they two were face to face, there would be no other "next time" for them. Everything was crystalizing, getting hard. Everything was getting too near the end to be malleable any more. It was her last chance to make him relinquish his unworthy purpose; perhaps his last chance to save himself from captivity. She found she hadn't a thing left unsaid, an argument left unused. What could she do that she had not done before, except to show him by just being here, accessible and ready to serve him at any risk, how much she cared? Could his generosity resist that?

Beyond the fact of getting him away safe she didn't think. Beyond that nothing looked large to her, nothing looked definite. The returning of the sapphire itself seemed simple beside it, and the fact that her position in the matter might never be explained of no importance.

Now while every moment drew her nearer her greatest moment she grew more absent, more strained, more restless, more intently listening, more easily starting at the lightest sound; until, at last, when the late day touched the rooms with fiery sunset colors, her friend, watchful of her changing mood, ready at every point to palliate circ.u.mstance, drew her out into the garden.

The wind, which had fallen with approaching evening, was only a whisper among the trees. The greenish-white bodies of statues in the shrubbery glowed ruddy. Gathering their skirts from the gra.s.s that glittered with the drops of the last shower, arm in arm the two women walked down the broad central gravel drive between ribbon beds of flowers. From here numerous paths paved with white stone went wandering under s...o...b..ll trees and wild apple, losing themselves in shrubbery. But one made a clear turn across the lawn for the rose-garden, where in the midst a round pool of water lay like a flaming bit of the sunset sky. Among the bushes red and rose and white, the elder woman in her black, the younger in her gown more glowing, with a veil over her hair, walked, and, loitering, looked down into the water, seeing their faces reflected, and, behind, the tangled brambles and the crimson sky. They did not speak, but at last their companionship was peaceful, was perfect. The only sounds were the sleepy notes of birds and that faint, high whisper of the tree tops on an evening that is not still.

Loud and shrill and shriller and more piercing, from the west wing of the house, overhanging the garden, the sound reached them--an alarum that set Flora's heart to leaping. Startled apart, they listened.

"Would that be--is that for you?"

"I think it's for me."

The words came from them simultaneously, and almost at the same instant Flora had started across the lawn. The sight of an ap.r.o.ned maid coming out on the veranda and peering down the garden set her running fleetly.

"It's a telephone for Miss Gilsey," the girl said.

"Oh, thank you," Flora panted.

She knew so well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck her with dismay and disappointment.

"Ella, oh, yes; yes; Ella." What was she saying? Ella was using the telephone as if it were a cabinet for secrets.

"Clara told me you were down there," she was explaining. "I saw her this morning, yes. Well,"--and she could hear Ella draw in her breath--"I'm so relieved! I thought you'd be, too, to know. I _was_ perfectly right.

She was after him."

Flora faltered, "After whom?" There flashed through her mind more than one person that, by this time, Clara might possibly be after.

"Why, after papa, of course!" Ella's injured surprise brought her back to the romance of Judge Buller. Her voice rose in sheer bewilderment.

"Well?"

Ella's voice rose triumphantly. "I got it out of her myself. I just came right out to her at last. She seemed awfully surprised that I knew; but she owned up to it, and what do you think? I bought her off!"

"Bought her off?" Flora cried. Each fact that Ella brought forth seemed to her more preposterous than the last.

"Why, yes, it's too ridiculous; what do you think she wanted?"

At that question Flora's heart seemed fairly to stand still. That was the very question she had been asking herself for days, and asking in vain.

Ella's voice was coming to her faint as a voice from another world. "She wanted that little, little picture--that picture of the man called Farrell Wand. Don't you remember, papa mentioned it at supper that evening at the club? Isn't it funny she remembered it all this time?

Well, she wanted it dreadfully, but Harry wanted it, too, and papa said he had promised it to Harry; but I got it first and gave it to her."

Ella's voice ended on a high note of triumph.

Flora's, if anything, rose higher in despair. "Oh, Ella!"

"Doesn't it seem ridiculous," Ella argued, "that if she really wanted him she'd give him up for that?"

"Oh, no--I mean yes," Flora stammered. "Yes, of course! thank you, Ella, very much--very much." The last words were hardly audible. The receiver fell jangling into its bracket, and Flora leaned against the wall by the telephone and closed her eyes.

For a moment all she could see was Clara with that little, little picture. How well she could remember how Clara had looked that night of the club supper!

From the moment Judge Buller had spoken of the picture, how all three of them had changed, Clara and Kerr and Harry. Everything that had seemed so phantasmal then, everything she had put down as a figment of her own imagination, had meant just this plain fact. All three of them had wanted the picture. For his own reason Kerr had turned aside from the chase, but Harry had stood with it to the last, and now, when finally the prize had been a.s.sured to him, Clara had it!

At this moment she had it in her hand. At this moment she knew what was the aspect of the figure in the picture, whether it showed a face, and, if a face, whose. Flora's hands opened and closed. "Oh," she whispered to the great silence of the great house awaiting him; "where is he? Why isn't he here?"

All those terrible things which might be happening beyond her reach processioned before her. Had Clara already snapped the trap of the law upon Kerr? And if she hadn't yet, what could be done to hold her off?

Flora turned again to the telephone. Slowly she took down the receiver and gave into the bright mouthpiece of the instrument the number of her own house.

Presently the voice of Shima spoke to her. Mrs. Britton had gone out to dinner.

"Tell her, Shima," Flora commanded, "tell her to come down on the earliest train." She hesitated, then finished in a firm voice. "Tell her not to do anything until she has seen me."

Shima would tell her--but Mrs. Britton had been out all day. He did not know when she would be back.