Part 28 (1/2)

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 companions.h.i.+p 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.