Part 24 (1/2)

”Well, come,” he said.

She felt that all doors would fly open at his bidding. She felt herself swept powerless at his will with all the yielding in her soul that she had felt in her body when his arms were around her. He had taken her by the hand--he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights flared--the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of the carriage waiting before the door. It all glimmered before her--a picture she might never see again--might not see after she pa.s.sed through the carriage door that gaped for her. The will that had swept her out of the door was moving her beyond her own will, as it had moved her that morning in the garden, beyond all things that she knew. There was no feeling left in her but the despair of extreme surrender.

She found herself in the carriage. She saw his face in the carriage door as pale as anger, yet not angry; it was some bigger thing that looked at her from his eyes. He looked a long while, as if he bade her never to forget this moment. Then, ”I'll give you twenty-four hours,” he said.

”This man will take you home.” He shut the carriage door--shut it between them. Before she had gathered breath he had straightened, fallen back, raised his hat, and the carriage was turning. Flora thrust her head, straw hat and ribbons out of the window.

”Oh, I love you!” she called to him. She sank back in the cus.h.i.+ons and covered her face with her hands.

XVIII

GOBLIN TACTICS

For a little she kept her face hidden, shutting out the present, jealously living with the wonderful thing that had happened to her. It was as wonderful as anything she had dreamed might come when she had written him that letter. And if she needed any proof of his love, she had had it in the moment when he had let her go. There he had transcended her hope. She felt lifted up, she felt triumphant, though the triumph had not been hers. It was all his; he had saved her from her own weakness; his was the miracle. How he shone to her! The dark, swaying hollow of the carriage seemed still full of his presence, full of his hurried whispering; and again she seemed to see him standing outside the window in the deep blue evening holding out his hands to her cry of ”I love you!”

He had been wonderful in a way she had not expected. He had shown her so beautifully that he could be reached in spite of his obsession. Might not she hope to touch him just a little further? Was there any height now that he might not rise to? She seemed to see the possible end of it all shaping itself out of his magnanimity. She seemed to see him finally relinquis.h.i.+ng his pa.s.sion for the jewel, and his pa.s.sion for her for the sake of something finer than both. She had seen it foreshadowed in what he had done this day--having them both in his hands, he had put them away from him. Yet in that action she knew there had been no finality.

She had touched him, but she had not convinced him, and as long as he was unconvinced he would be at her again in some other way.

Her hands dropped from her face, and she confronted the fact drearily.

”No,” she thought, ”he never gives up what he wants.”

She looked out of the window. The flickers of gas-lamps fell intermittently through it upon her. Her queer vehicle was rattling crazily--jolting as if every spring were at its last leap. She was out of the quiet, blue street. Montgomery Avenue, with its lights, its glittering gilt names and Latin insignia, was traveling by on either side of her. The voice of the city was growing louder in her ears, the crowd on the pavement increased. At intervals the carriage dipped through glares of electric lights that illuminated its interior in a flash broader than day--the ragged cus.h.i.+ons, the raveled ta.s.sels, the limp-swinging shutters, and, glimmering in the midst, wild and disheveled, herself in all the little wavy mirrors. She sat looking out at the maze of moving lights and figures without seeing them, intent on an idea that was growing clearer, larger, moment by moment in her mind.

Kerr's appearance in her garden--his capture of her--had not been the fantastic freak it had seemed. He had had his purpose. He had taken her out of her environment; he had carried her beyond succor or menace just that he might carry them both so much further and faster through their differences. They had not reached the point of agreement yet, but might they not on some other ground, where they could be unchallenged? It seemed to her if she could only meet him on her own ground for once--instead of for ever on Clara's or Harry's--only meet him alone, somewhere beyond their reach, it might be accomplished, it might be brought to the end she so wished. Yet where to go to be rid of Clara and Harry, the two so closely a.s.sociated with every fact of her life?

The hack, which had been moving along at a rapid pace, slowed now to a walk among the thickening traffic, and from a mere moving ma.s.s the crowd appeared as individuals--a stream of dark figures and white faces. Her eyes slipped from one to another. Here one stood still on the lamp-lit corner, looking down, with lips moving quickly and silently. It was strange to see those rapid, eager, moving lips with no sound from them audible. Then her eyes were startled by something familiar in the figure, though the direct down-glare of the ball of light above him distorted the features with shadows. She pressed her face against the window-gla.s.s in palpitating doubt. It was Harry.

She cowered in the corner of the carriage. In a moment the risks of her situation were before her. Had he seen her? Oh, no, at least not yet. He had been too intent on whomever he was talking to. She peered to make sure that he was still safely on the street corner. He was just opposite, and now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear s.p.a.ce around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very small, shabby, nondescript man--possibly only a boy, so short he seemed.

His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could explain--Italian, Portuguese, Greek--whatever he was, he was a strange foil to Harry, so bright and burnished.

The hack was turning. She realized with dismay that it was turning sharp around that very corner where they stood. Suppose Harry should chance to glance through its window and see Flora Gilsey sitting trembling within.

The hack wheezed and cramped, and all at once she heard it sc.r.a.pe the curb. Then she was lost! She looked up brave in her desperation, ready to meet Harry's eyes. She saw the back of his head. For a moment it loomed directly above her, then it moved. He was separating from his companion. With one stride he vanished out of the square frame of the window, and there remained full fronting her, staring in upon her, the face of his companion.

Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop--dull hues and odors all at once--and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly.

The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless, powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney, where at this hour the town was widest awake, and the crowd was a crowd she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of the florists' shops and restaurants, or pa.s.sing her in carriages. And what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner.

She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was carrying forward somewhere out of her sight--such a glimpse as Clara had given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs of danger, as a lone general at a last stand with his troops cl.u.s.tered at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the glitter of bayonets in the bushes.

She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming lights and crowds were all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually--and there her eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background--a short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a blue-eyed Chinaman.

He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pa.s.s his way. It was uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless.

It was worse than uncanny.

All at once an idea, wild and illogical enough, jumped up in her mind.

Couldn't this miserable vehicle that was lumbering like a disabled bug move faster and rattle her on out of reach of the glare, the publicity, the threat of discovery, and, above all, of her discomforting notion?