Chapter 16

Flora's answering smile was faint. "It seems as strange to me as it seems absurd to you, but I think I have done something already."

"Are you sure, or has he only let you think so? We have all at some time longed, or even thought it was our duty, to adjust something when it would have been safer to have kept our hand off," Mrs. Herrick went on gently.

"Oh, safer," Flora breathed. "Oh, yes; indeed, I know. But if something had been put into your hands without your choice; if all the life of some one that you cared about depended on you, would you think of being _safe_?" Flora, leaning forward, chin in hand, with shining eyes, seemed fairly to impart a reflection of her own passionate concentration to the woman before her.

Mrs. Herrick, so calm in her reposeful attitude, calm as the old portrait on the wall behind her, none the less began to show a curious sparkle of excitement in her face. "If I were sure that person's life _did_ depend on me," she measured out her words deliberately. "But that so seldom happens, and it is so hard to tell."

"But if you were sure, sure, sure!" Flora rang it out certainly.

Mrs. Herrick in her turn leaned forward. "Ah, even then it would depend on him. And do you think you can make a man do otherwise than his nature?"

"You think I should fail?" Flora took it up fearlessly. "Well, if I do, at least I shall have done my best. I shall have to have done my best or I can never forgive myself."

"I see," Mrs. Herrick sighed. "But it sounds to me a risk too great for any reward that could come of its success." She thought. "If you could tell me more." Then, as Flora only looked at her wistfully and silently: "Isn't there some one you can confide in? Not Mrs. Britton?"

"Clara? Oh, no; never!" Flora startled Mrs. Herrick with the passionate repudiation.

"But could not Mr. Cressy--" and with that broken sentence several things that Mrs. Herrick had been keeping back looked out of her face.

Flora answered with a stare of misery. "I know what you must be thinking--what you can not help thinking," she said, "that the whole thing is unheard-of--outrageous--especially for a girl so soon to--to be--" She caught her breath with a sob, for the words she could not speak. "But there is nothing in this disloyal to my engagement, even though I can not speak of it to Harry Cressy; and nothing I hope to gain for myself by what I am trying to do. If I succeed it will only mean I shall never see him--the other one--again."

Mrs. Herrick rose, in her turn beseeching. "Oh, I can't help you go into it! It is too dubious. My dear, I know so much better than you what the end may mean."

"I know what the end may mean, and I can't keep out of it."

"But I can not go with you." There was a stern note in Mrs. Herrick's voice.

Flora looked around the room, the sunny windows, the still shadows, the tall, monotonous clock, as if this were the last glimpse of peace and protection she would ever have. She rose and put out her hand.

"I'm afraid I didn't quite realize how much I was asking of you. You have been very good even to listen to me. It's right, I suppose, that I should go alone."

Mrs. Herrick looked at her in dismay. "But that is impossible!" Then, as Flora turned away, she kept her hand. "Think, think," she urged, "how you will be misunderstood."

"Oh, I shall have to bear that--from the people who don't know."

"Yes, and even from the one for whom you are spending yourself!"

Flora gave her head a quick shake. "He understands," she said.

"My dear, he is not worth it."

Flora turned on her with anger. "You don't know what he is worth to me!"

Mrs. Herrick looked steadily at this unanswerable argument. Her hold on Flora's hand relaxed, but she did not quite release it. Her brows drew together. "You are quite sure you must go?"

Flora nodded. She was speechless.

"Did Mrs. Britton know you were coming to me?"

"No. She doesn't even know that I am going out of town. She must not," Flora protested.

"Indeed she must. You must not place yourself in such a false position. Write her and tell her you are going to San Mateo with me."

"Oh, if you would!" Tears sprang to Flora's eyes. "But will you, even if I can't tell you anything?"

"I shall not ask you anything. Now write her immediately. You can do it here while I am getting ready."

She had taken authoritative command of the details of their expedition, and Flora willingly obeyed her. She was still trembling from the stress of their interview, and she blinked back tears before she was able to see what she was writing.

It had all been brought about more quickly and completely than she had hoped, but it was in her mind all the while she indited her message to Clara, that Kerr, for whom it had been accomplished, was not yet informed of the existence of the scheme, or the part of guest he was to play. Yet she was sure that if she asked he would be promptly there. She wrote to him briefly:

At San Mateo, at the Herricks'. I want you there to-night. I have made up my mind.

As she was sealing it she started at a step approaching in the hall. She had wanted to conceal that betraying letter before Mrs. Herrick came back. She glanced quickly behind her, and saw standing between the half-open folding doors, the slim figure of a girl--slimmer, younger even than the one who had passed her at the gate, but like her, with the same large eyes, the same small indeterminate chin. Just at the chin the likeness to Mrs. Herrick failed with the strength of her last generation--but the eyes were perfect; and they gazed at Flora wondering. With the sixth sense of youth they recognized the enactment of something strange and thrilling.

Another instant and Mrs. Herrick's presence dawned behind her daughter--and her voice--"Why, child, what are you doing there?"--and her hands seemed apprehensive in their haste to hurry the child away, as if, truly, in this drawing-room, for the first time, something was dangerous.

XXI

THE HOUSE OF QUIET

The day which had dawned so still and gloomy was wakening to something like wildness, threatening, brightening, gusty, when they stepped out of the train upon the platform of the San Mateo station. Clouds were piling gray and castle-like from the east up toward the zenith, and dark fragments kept tearing off the edges and spinning away across the sky. But between them the bright face of the sun flashed out with double splendor, and the thinned atmosphere made the sky seem high and far, and all form beneath it clarified and intense.

There upon the narrow platform Mrs. Herrick hesitated a moment, looking at Flora. "What train do you want to meet?" she asked.

Flora stood perplexed. "I hardly know. You see I can't tell how soon my letter would reach--would be received."

"Then we would better meet them all," the elder woman decided.

They drove away into the face of the wet, fresh wind and flying drops of rain. Flora, leaning back in the carriage, looked out through the window with quiet eyes. The spirited movement of the sky, the racing of its shadows on the grass, the rolling foliage of the trees, seen tempestuous against flying cloud, were alike to her consoling and inspiring. She had never felt so free as now, driving through the fitful weather, nor so safe as with this companion who was sitting silent by her side. She was driving away from all her complications. She was retreating to a fresh stronghold, where her conflict would be a duel hand to hand, and where the outside forces, which had harassed her and threatened ignobly to down her antagonist with a stab in the back, could be held at bay.

Already she was looking toward the house which she had never seen as her own kindly castle; and the generous opening of its gate--old granite crowned with rose of sharon--did not disappoint her. The house was hidden in the swelling trees, but the drive winding beneath them gave glimpses through of lawns, of roses wreathing scarletly the old gray fountain basin, of magnolia and acacia, doubly delicate and white and fragile beneath the thunderous sky.

The house, when finally it loomed upon them, with its irregular roofs topped by curious square turrets, with its tremendous ground floor rambling away in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle that panoplied its front, felt her throat swell for sheer delight.

For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the porte-cochère, 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 gratitude, not so much for the slight kindness of her words as for the great kindness of her attitude in thus so readily resuming the first assumption 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 anticipated 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 circumstance, 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 grass 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 snowball 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 aproned 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 assured 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.

The words sounded ominous in Flora's ears. She turned away. Was everything to be finished just as she had light enough to move, but before she had a chance?

The sound of spinning wheels on the drive startled her to fresh hope, and sent her hurrying down the stair. It was the phaëton returning from the last train. Through the open door she saw the figure of Mrs. Herrick expectant on the veranda. Then the carriage came into the porte-cochère and passed. With a rush she reached the veranda, and stood there looking after it. She wouldn't believe her eyes--she couldn't--that it had returned again empty.

Mrs. Herrick's voice was asking her, "What shall we do? Shall we serve dinner now, or wait a little longer?"

"Oh, it's no use," Flora murmured, "he won't come to-night. He'll never come." She drooped against the tall porch pillar.

"My poor child!" Mrs. Herrick took her passive hand. If she read in the profound discouragement of Flora's face that something more had transpired than a mere non-appearance, she did not show it, but waited, alert and quiet, while they gazed together out over the darkening garden.

It was the time of twilight when the sky is so much brighter than the earth. Across the lawns between the bushes from hedge to hedge the veil of the obscuring light was coming in; and through it the avenue of willows marched darkly. Their leaves moved a little. Flora watched the ripple of their tops, clear on the bright sky, and deeper down among mysterious branches there was a sense of movement where the eyes could not see. There was a curious flick, flick, flicker--a progression, a passing from the far dark end of the willow avenue toward where it met the vista of the drive. Flora's eyes, absently, involuntarily, followed the movement. She felt Mrs. Herrick's hand suddenly close on hers.

"Is some one coming?"

They clung to each other, peering timorously down the drive. A little gust of wind took the garden, and before the trees had ceased to tremble and whiten a man had emerged from their shadow and was advancing upon them up the middle of the drive.

Flora's heart leaped at sight of him. All her impulse was to fly to meet him, but she felt Mrs. Herrick's hand tighten upon her wrist as if it divined her madness.

His light stick aswing in his hand, his step free and incautious as ever, gray and slender and seeming to look more at the ground than at them, the two women watched him drawing near. His was the seeming of a quiet guest at the quietest of house parties. To meet him Flora saw she must meet him on the high ground of his reserve. As he came under the light of the porte-cochère his look, his greeting, his hand, were first for Mrs. Herrick.

"We were afraid we had missed you altogether," said she.

"It was I who somehow missed your carriage, was hardly expecting to be expected at such an hour."