Chapter 10

Flora went red. She walked down the room from him to give her suddenly tumultuous heart time. However little he might guess the real trend of her interview with Kerr, she couldn't hear him come near it without apprehension. She was angry, helplessly angry at Harry that he had taken this moment for his stupid jealousy. But she was more angry at Clara, since such a speech on Clara's part wasn't carelessness. She had meant it to work upon him, and here he stood, like the fine animal that he was, smoldering with the suspicion of encroachment on his prey.

She tried to laugh him out of it.

"Why, Harry, I never saw you jealous before!"

"It's all very well to say that--and you know I've never made a row about the other Johnnies. I knew you didn't care for any of _them_."

Her eyes narrowed and darkened.

"And you take it for granted I care for Mr. Kerr?"

"Oh, no, no!" He pushed his hand through his hair with an irascible gesture. "But it's plain enough you like him--you women always like a fellow that flourishes--but that's not the sort of man I care to see hanging around my girl."

Flora stood leaning on the table, breathing a little hurriedly, feeling rather as if she had been shaken. Harry, standing with his hands in his pockets, looked not unlike the threatening image he had appeared in the back of the goldsmith's shop.

"Of course, the fellow can talk," he admitted, "and he has a manner. But Lord knows where he comes from or who he is. Why, even the Bullers don't know."

Flora turned sharply on him. "Who told you that?"

"The judge. He picked him up at the club."

"Well," she kept it up, "some one had to introduce him there."

Harry smiled. "You wouldn't care to bow to some of those club members."

"Harry, do you know how you sound to me?" She was trembling at the daring of what she was going to say. "You talk as if you knew something against him."

Her statement seemed to bring him up short. "No, no, I don't," he said hastily.

She made a little gesture of despair. How was she to count on Harry if he was going to behave like this? How trust him when he was shuffling so?

She made one more bold stroke to make him speak out.

"Harry, you _do_ know something about him! I know you have seen him before."

"Why, yes, I've seen him before. But that's got nothing to do with it."

He looked surprised that she should seem to accuse him of it, and she wondered if he could have forgotten how he had denied it before.

"And that isn't why you distrust him?"

The devil's tattoo that he beat on his hat stopped.

"I don't distrust him."

"Well, dislike him, then. When was it that you saw him before?"

"Isn't it enough for me to tell you that I don't want _you_ to see him?"

"Oh!" She turned away from him. Every nerve in her was in revolt. Then he really wasn't going to tell her anything. He was keeping her out of it as if she were a child. She had relied on him to return the ring. She had counted upon his indifference and good nature. And he was neither indifferent nor good-natured. All desire of even mentioning the ring to him left her; and as to giving him her confidence--These hints that he had thrown out about Kerr--they might be mere jealousy--but he might have actual knowledge, knowledge that, with her own fitted to it, would make for him a complete figure. She caught her breath at the thought of how near she had come to actually betraying Kerr. Until that moment she had not realized that through all her waverings her one fixed intention had been not to betray him.

Harry had risen and was buttoning his overcoat. "You know you're never at home if you don't want to be," he said.

She stood misleadingly drooping before him. But though her appearance was passive enough for the most exacting lover her will had never been in more vigorous revolt. She knew Harry was taking her weariness for acquiescence, and she let him take it so. She even followed him into the hall, and with a vague idea of further propitiation, nodded away Shima and opened the door for him herself.

The fog was a chasm of white outside. Harry turned on the brink of it. "By the way, where's Clara?"

"Why, do you want to see her? She'll be out all day. She's dining with the Willie Herricks."

"No, I don't want to see her, but, by the way, she's not dining with the Willie Herricks; she's dining with the Bullers. I heard her make the engagement yesterday."

"Oh, no, Harry, I'm sure you're mistaken."

"Well, it doesn't matter. All I want to know is, why did you show that ring to Clara before it was set?"

She was genuinely aghast. "I didn't," she flashed. "What made you think I had?"

He shrugged. "Well, she asked me where we got it. I don't see why women always talk those things over." He was looking at her inquiringly.

"Well, I haven't," she said quickly. "Have you?"

He looked out upon the fog. "Told her where we got it, do you mean? No, I just chaffed her. I'd look out, if I were you. She strikes me as damned curious." He stood a moment on the threshold, looking from Flora to the chasm of fog outside, as if he were choosing between two chances. "I think I'll take that ring this morning," he said slowly.

The deliberate words came to her with a shock. But in the moment, while she looked into Harry's moody face, she realized how impossible to make a scene over what must still be maintained as a trivial matter betwixt them--the mere resetting of a jewel; what should she do to put him off? She looked up at him, and saw with relief that his face was turned from her to the fog, as if he had forgotten her. Then, still with averted head, as if he addressed the whiteness, or himself,--"No," he determined, "I won't. I'll take it when I come back." He pulled himself together with an effort, with a smile. "That is," he turned to her, "if you're in no great hurry about the setting? Very well, then. In a day or two."

He plunged away into the fog. A few rods from the door he disappeared, but she could still hear his footsteps growing thinner, lighter, passing away in the whiteness.

XIV

COMEDY CONVEYS A WARNING

She stood where he had left her in the open doorway, with the damp eddy of the fog blowing on her. She had had a narrow escape; but after the first fullness of her relief there returned upon her again the weight of her responsibility. There was no slipping out of it now, and it was going to be worse than she had imagined. So much had come out in the last half-hour that she felt bewildered by it. What Harry had let slip about Clara alarmed her. What in the world was Clara about? With one well-aimed observation she had stirred up Harry against Kerr and against Flora herself. And meanwhile she was running after the Bullers. Twice in two days, if Harry was not mistaken, and she was even nearing another engagement.

After all her fruitless mousings, Clara had too evidently got on the scent of something at last. How much she knew or guessed as yet, Flora could not be sure, but certainly, now, she couldn't let Clara go. For that would be turning adrift a dangerous person with a stronger motive than ever for pursuing her quest, and the opportunity for pursuing it unobserved, out of Flora's sight. Clara was at it even now, and the only consolation Flora had was that Harry, at least, would not play into her hands.

For Harry had a special secret interest of his own. The last ten minutes of their interview had made that plain. His manner, when he had declared his intention of taking the ring, had been anything but the manner of a care-free lover merely concerned with pleasing his lady. Then they were all of them racing each other for the same thing--the thing she held in her possession; and whether she feared most to be felled by a blow from Harry, or hunted far afield by Kerr, or trapped by Clara, she could not tell. She stood hesitating, looking out into the obscurity of the fog, as if she hoped to read the answer there. Presently she returned to the fact that Shima was waiting to close the door. Half-way across the hall she paused again, looking thoughtfully down the rose-colored vista of the drawing-room, and up at the broad black march of the stair. Vague mysteries peered at her from every side. Which should she flee from? Which walk boldly up to and dispel?

She went up-stairs slowly. She stood in her dressing-room absently before the mirror. She touched the hard, unyielding stone of the ring under the thin bodice of her gown. She recalled the morning when she had gone to get it, before anything had happened and the lure of life had been so exquisite. Now that it had come near--if this indeed were life that she was laboring in--it was steep and crabbed, like the brown hills in summer, far off, like velvet, to climb, plowed ground and stubble.

And yet she didn't wish herself back, but only forward. Now she had no leisure to imagine, to pretend, to enjoy, only the breathless sense that she must get forward. The chattering clock on her mantel warned her of the passing time and set her hurrying into her walking-gown, her hat, her gloves, as if the object of her errand would only wait for her a moment longer. When, for the second time, she opened the house door, she didn't hesitate. She descended into the white fog that covered all the city.

Above her the stone façade of her house loomed huge and pinkish in the mist. Her spirits rose with the feeling that she was going adventuring again, leaving that house where for the last two days she had awaited events with such vivid apprehensions. She hurried fast down the damp, glistening pavement, seeing long, dim gray faces of houses glimmer by, seeing figures come toward her through the fog, grow vivid, pass, and hearing at intervals the hoarse, lonely voice of the fog-horn at "The Heads" reaching her over many intervening hills. She did not feel sure what she should do at the end of her journey or what awaited her there. She knew herself a most unpractised hunter, she, who, all her life, had been the most artful of quarries. A quarry she was still, but in this chase she had to come out and stalk the facts in order to see which way to run; if, she told herself in her exhilaration, she decided to run at all.

She turned in at the low gate of imitation grill in front of an enormous wooden mansion, with towers and cupolas painted all a chill slate gray, with fuchsias, purple and red, clambering up the front. She rang, and was admitted into a hall, ornate and very high, with a wide staircase sweeping down into the middle of it.

The maid looked dubiously at Flora and thought Miss Buller was not at home, but would see. Flora turned into the room on her left and sat down among the Louis Quinze sofas and potted palms with a feeling that Miss Buller was at home, and, for one reason or another, preferred not to be seen. She waited apprehensively, wondering whether Ella was not seeing the world-in-general, or had really specified against herself. Could it be that Ella was one of those women whom Harry had alluded to as running after Kerr? In the short twenty-four hours every individual help she had counted upon had seemed to draw away from her--Kerr, whose understanding she had been so sure of; Clara, whose propriety had never failed; Harry, whose comfortable good nature she had so taken for granted! It seemed as if the sapphire, whose presence she was never unconscious of, for all she wore it out of sight, had a power like the evil eye over these people. But if it could turn such as Ella against her, why, the Brussels carpet beneath her might well open and let her down to deeper abysses than Judge Buller's wine-cellar.

She started nervously at the step of the maid returning. The message brought was unexpected. "Miss Buller says will you please walk up-stairs?"

Flora was amazed. That invitation would have been odd enough at any time, for she and Ella were hardly on such intimate footing. But now she was ushered up the majestic stair, and from the majestic upper hall abruptly into a wild little cluttered sewing-room, and thence into a wilder but more spacious bedroom, large curtains at the windows, large roses on the carpet, and over all objects in the room a clutter of miscellaneous articles, as if Ella's band-boxes, bureaus, and work-baskets habitually refused to contain themselves.

From the midst of this Ella confronted her, still in her "wrapper" and with the large puff of her hair a little awry. Under it her face was curiously pink, a color deepening to the tip of her nose and puffing out under her eyes.

"Well, Flora," she greeted her guest. "You were just the person I wanted to see. Sit down. No, not there--that's my bird of paradise feather! Oh, no, not there--that's the breakfast. Well, I guess you'll have to sit on the bed."

Flora swept aside the clothes that streamed across it and throned herself on the edge of the high, white plateau of Ella's four-poster. Ella, for all her eager greeting, looked upon her friend doubtfully, and Flora recognized in herself a similar hesitation, as if each were trying to make out, without asking, what thoughts the other harbored.

"I was afraid I shouldn't see you at all," Flora began at last.

"Well, you wouldn't if it hadn't happened to be you," said Ella paradoxically. "Look at me; did you ever see such a sight?"

"You don't look very well," Flora cautiously admitted. "Why, Ella, you've been crying!"

"Yes, I've been crying," said Ella, mopping her nose, which still showed a tendency to distil a tear at its tip. "And it's perfectly awful to me to think you've been living so long in the same house with her."

Flora murmured breathlessly, "What in the world do you mean?"

"If you don't know, I certainly ought to tell you. I mean Clara," said Ella distinctly.

Flora, sitting up on the edge of the high bed with the tips of her little shoes hardly touching the floor, looked at Ella fascinated, her lips a little apart. Ella had so exactly pronounced her own secret thought of Clara. She was breathless to know what had been Clara's performance at the Bullers'.

"Of course I've always known she was like that," said Ella, leaning back in her chair with an air of resignation. "She's always getting something. It's awful. It was the same even when we were at boarding-school. I suppose she never did have enough money, though her people were awfully nice; but she worked us all for invitations and rides in our carriages, and I remember she got lots through Lillie Lewis' elder brother, and he thought she was going to marry him, but she didn't. She married Lulu Britton's father; and I guess she worked him until he went under and they found there really was no money. So she's been living on people ever since." Ella rocked gloomily.

"But she does it so nicely," Flora suggested. She still had the feeling that it was not decent to own up to these most secret facts of people's failings.

"Oh, yes, she's a perfect wonder," Ella admitted grudgingly; "look at what she's done for you!" Ella's gesticulation was eloquent of how much that had been. "But don't you imagine she cares about you any more than she cares about me!" Ella began to cry again. "You were an awfully good thing for her, Flora, and now that you're going to be married she's got to have something else. But I do think she might have taken somebody besides papa."

Flora gasped. "'Taken!' Ella, what do you mean?"

"I mean married," said Ella.

"'Married!'" For the time Flora had become a helpless echo.

"Oh, not yet," Ella defiantly nodded. "Not while there's anything left of me."

Flora stammered. "Oh, Ella, no. Oh, Ella, are you sure?" She felt a hysterical impulse to giggle.

"Sure?" Miss Buller cried. "I should think so! Why, she's simply making a dead set for him."

This dénouement, 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 passionate 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 astonishing 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 assured 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 Shima 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 Japanese explained.

Flora gasped. "They waited together!"

The Japanese shook his head. "They went away together."

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

The Japanese 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 circumstances of which Harry wouldn't talk? They were circumstances 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 vanishing 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.