The Coast of Chance Part 33

"Is that paid woman still here?"

"Oh, no; she's gone." Flora looked at him warningly. But Mrs. Herrick had caught his tone. "Why shouldn't she be?" she demanded with delicate asperity.

Kerr had dropped his monocle. "Because, in common decency, she couldn't. She sold Cressy to me for a good round sum."

Flora and Mrs. Herrick exchanged a look of horror.

"I'd suspected him," said Kerr. "I knew where I'd seen him, but I couldn't be sure of his ident.i.ty till she showed me the picture."

"What picture?" cried Flora.

"The picture Buller mentioned at the club that night: Farrell Wand, boarding the _Loch Ettive_. Don't you remember?" He spoke gently, as if afraid that a hasty phrase in such connection might do her harm. Now, when he saw how white she looked, he steadied her with his arm. "We won't talk of this business any more," he said.

"But I must talk of it," Flora insisted tremblingly. "I don't even know what you are."

For the first time he showed apologetic. He looked from one to the other with a sort of helpless simplicity.

"Why, I'm Chatworth--I'm Crew; I'm the chap that owns the confounded thing!"

To see him stand there, announced in that name, gave the tragic farce its last touch. Flora had an instant of panic when flight seemed the solution. It took all her courage to keep her there, facing him, watching, as if from afar off, Mrs. Herrick's acknowledgment of the informal introduction.

"I came here, quietly," he was saying, "so as to get at it without making a row. Only Purdie, good man! knew--and he's been wondering all along why I've held so heavy a hand on him. We'll have to lunch with them again, eh?" He turned and looked at Flora. "And make all those explanations necessitated by this lady's wonderful sense of honor!"

It was here, somewhere in the neighborhood of this sentence of doubtful meaning, that Mrs. Herrick left them. In looking back, Flora could never recall the exact moment of the departure. But when she raised her eyes from the gra.s.s where they had been fixed for what seemed to her eternity she found only Kerr--no, Chatworth--standing there, looking at her with a grave face.

"Eh?" he said, "and what about that honor of yours? What shall we say about it, now that the sapphire's gone and no longer in our way?"

She was breathing quick to keep from crying. "I told you that day at the restaurant."

"Yes, yes; you told me why you kept the sapphire from me, but"--he hung fire, then fetched it out with an effort--"why did you take it in the first place?"

She looked at him in clear astonishment. "I didn't know what it was."

"You didn't!"

It seemed to Flora the whole situation was turning exactly inside out.

The light that was breaking upon her was more than she could bear. "Oh,"

she wailed, "you couldn't have thought I meant to take it!"

"Then if you didn't," he burst out, "why, when I told you what it was, didn't you give it to me?"

The cruel comic muse, who makes our serious suffering ridiculous, had drawn aside the last curtain. Flora felt the laughter rising in her throat, the tears in her eyes.

"You guessed who I was," he insisted, advancing, "at least what I represented."

She hid her face in her hands, and her voice dropped, tiny, into the stillness.

"I guessed you were Farrell Wand."

XXV

THE LAST ENCHANTMENT

The tallest eucalyptus top was all of the garden that was touched with sun when Flora came out of the house in the morning. She stood a s.p.a.ce looking at that little cone of brightness far above all the other trees, swaying on the delicate sky. It was not higher lifted nor brighter burnished than her spirit then. Shorn of her locket chain, her golden pouch, free of her fears, she poised looking over the garden. Then with a leap she went from the veranda to the gra.s.s and, regardless of dew, skimmed the lawn for the fountain and the rose garden.

There she saw him--the one man--already awaiting her. He stood back to back with a mossy nymph languis.h.i.+ng on her pedestal, and Flora hoped by running softly to steal up behind him, and make of the helpless marble lady a buffer between their greetings. But either she underestimated the nymph's bulk, or forgot how invariably direct was the man's attack; for turning and seeing her, without any circ.u.mvention, with one sweep of his long arm, he included the statue in his grasp of her. With a laugh of triumph he drew her out of her concealment.

To her the splendor of skies and trees and morning light melted into that wonderful moment. For the first time in weary days she had all to give, nothing to fear or withhold. She was at peace. She was ready to stop, to stand here in her life for always--here in the glowing garden with him, and their youth. But he was impatient. He did not want to loiter in the morning. He was hot to hurry on out of the present which was so mysterious, so untried to her, as if these ecstasies had no mystery to him but their complete fulfilment. He filled her with a trembling premonition of the undreamed-of things that were waiting for her in the long aisle of life.

"Come, speak," he urged, as they paced around the fountain. "When am I to take you away?"

She hung back in fear of her very eagerness to go, to plunge head over ears into life in a strange country with a stranger. "Next month," she ventured.

"Next month! why not next week? why not to-morrow?" he declared with confidence. "Who is to say no? I am the head of my house and you have no one but me. To be sure, there is Mrs. Herrick--excellent woman. But she has her own daughters to look out for, and," he added slyly, "much as she thinks of you, I doubt if she thinks you a good example for them. As for that other, as for the paid woman--"

"Oh, hush, hus.h.!.+" Flora cried, hurt with a certain hardness in his voice; "I don't want to see her. I shall never go near her! And Harry--"

"I wasn't going to speak of him," said Chatworth quickly.

"I know," she answered, "but do you mind my speaking of him?" They had sat down on the broad lip of the fountain basin. He was looking at her intently. "It is strange," she said, "but in spite of his doing this terrible thing I can't feel that he himself is terrible--like Clara."

"And yet," he answered in a grave voice, "I would rather you did."

She turned a troubled face. "Ah, have you forgotten what you said the first night I met you? You said it doesn't matter what a man is, even if he's a thief, as long as he's a good one."

At this he laughed a little grudgingly. "Oh, I don't go back on that, but I was looking through the great impartial eye of the universe.

Whereas a man may be good of his kind, he's only good in his kind. Tip out a cat among canaries and see what happens. My dear girl, we were the veriest birds in his paws! And notice that it isn't moral law--it's instinct. We recognize by scent before we see the shape. You never knew him. You never could. And you never trusted him."

"But," she interrupted eagerly, "I would have done anything for you when I thought you were a thief."

"Anything?" he caught her up with laughter. "Oh, yes, anything to haul me over the dead line on to your side. That was the very point you made.

That was where you would have dropped me--if I had stuck by my kind, as you thought it, and not come over to yours."

She saw herself fairly caught. She heard her mental process stated to perfection.

"But if you hadn't felt all along I was your kind, if you hadn't had an idea that I was a stray from the original fold, you would never have wanted to go in for me," he explained it.

Flora had her doubts about the truth of this. For a time she had been certain of his belonging to the lawless other fold, and at times she would have gone with him in spite of it, but this last knowledge she withheld. She withheld it because she could make out now, that, for all his seeming wildness, he had no lawless instincts in himself.

Generations of great doing and great mixing among men had created him, a creature perfectly natural and therefore eccentric; but the same generations had handed down from father to son the law-abiding instinct of the rulers of the people. He could be careless of the law. He was strong in it. In his own mind he and the law were one. His perception of the relations of life was so complete that he had no further use for the written law; and Farrell Wand's was so limited that he had never found the use for it. Lawless both; but--the two extremes. They might seem to meet--but between those two extremes, between a Chatworth and a Farrell Wand--why, there was all the world's experience between!

She raised her eyes and smiled at him in thinking of it, but the smile faltered and she drew away. They were about to be disturbed. Beyond the rose branches far down the drive she saw a figure moving toward them at a slow, uncertain pace, looking to and fro. "See, there's some one coming."

"Oh, the gardener!" he said as one would say "Oh, fiddlesticks!"

The gardener had been her first thought. But now she rose uneasily, since she saw it was not he, asking herself, "Who else, at such an hour?"