Part 32 (1/2)

”No, no, no!” she cried in horror. ”It was there! I put it there myself this morning!” They looked at each other now equally sincere and aghast.

”But you have seen him; you've been near him?” he demanded.

She gasped out the whole truth. ”This morning! He left me. He kissed me.”

”Then, my G.o.d, where is he?” He gave a wide glance around him. Then raising his voice, ”Stay where you are!” he commanded, and began to run from her through the trees.

She stood with her hand to her breast, with the empty pouch spinning in front of her, hearing him cras.h.i.+ng in the shrubbery. Then, in sudden panic at finding herself alone, she fled back down the willow avenue, and burst out on the broad drive in full view of the house.

Kerr was not in sight, but there was a tremor of disturbance where all had been still. Clara's face appeared at one of the upper windows and looked down into the garden. Then Mrs. Herrick came down the stairs, and, showing an anxious profile as she pa.s.sed the door, hurried away along the lower hall. There was a flutter in the servants' quarter, and from a side door the coachman appeared hatless, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and ran toward the stable. All the people of the house seemed to be running to and fro, but she didn't see Harry. This struck her with unreasoning terror. She fled up the drive, and Clara's small face at the window watched her.

As she came into the hall she heard Kerr's voice. He was at the telephone speaking names she had never heard in sentences whose meaning was too much for her stunned senses to take in; but none the less while she listened the feeling crept over her that there was some strange revolution taking place in him. It might be transformation; it might be only a swift increase of his original power. Whatever it was, he seemed to her superhuman. The house was full of him--full of his rapid movement, his ringing orders. If he knew that the sapphire was gone, what was the meaning of this bold command? Was he, knowing all lost, plunging gallantly into the clutches of his enemies? Or was this only a blind, a splendid piece of effrontery to cover his too long delayed retreat? She sat like a jointless thing on the fauteuil in the large hall, and all at once saw him in front of her.

She looked at his hat, his overcoat, his slim, glittering stick--all symbols of departure.

”Wait here,” he said, and turned away.

She watched his shadow dance across the flagging, and as it slipped over the threshold she thought dully that now the sapphire was gone every one was going from her.

XXIV

THE COMIC MASK

She listened to the sound of wheels, first rattling loud on the gravel, slowly growing fainter. Then stillness was with her again, and inanition. She looked around and up, and had no start at seeing Clara's small face watching her over the gallery of the rotunda. It seemed to her that appearance was natural to her existence now, like her shadow.

She looked away. When she raised her eyes again Clara was coming down the stairs, and even at that distance Flora saw she carried something in her hand--something flat and small and wrapped in a filmy bit of paper.

Out of the chaos of her feeling rose the solitary thought--the picture which she had bought that morning, the picture of Farrell Wand. She watched it drawing near her with wonder. She sat up trembling. She had a great longing and a horror to tear away the filmy paper and see Kerr at last brutally revealed. She could not have told afterward whether Clara spoke to her. She was conscious of her pausing; conscious of the faint rustle of her skirt pa.s.sing; conscious, finally, that the small swathed square was in her hand.

She tore the tissue paper through. She held a photograph, a mounted kodak print. She made out the background to be sky and water and the rail of a s.h.i.+p with silhouettes of heads and shoulders, a jungle of black; and in the middle distance caught in full motion the single figure of a man, back turned and head in profile. He was moving from her out of the picture, and with the first look she knew it was not Kerr.

Her first thought was that there had been a trick played on her! But no--across the bottom of the picture, in Judge Buller's full round hand, was written, ”Farrell Wand boarding the _Loch Ettive_.” She held it high to the light. Clara had been faithful to her bargain. It was the picture that had deceived her. She studied it with pa.s.sionate earnestness. She did not know the bearded profile; but in the burly shoulders, in the set and swing of the body in motion, more than all in the lowering, peering aspect of the whole figure, she began to see a familiar something. She held it away from her by both thin edges, and that aspect swelled and swelled in her startled eyes, until suddenly the figure in the picture seemed to be moving from her, not up a gang-plank, but through a glare of sun over gra.s.s between broad beds of flowers.

She was faint. She was going to fall. She caught at the chair to save herself, and still she was dropping down, down, into a gulf of spinning darkness. ”Oh, Harry!” she whispered, and let her head roll back against the arm of the fauteuil.

With a dim sense of rising through immeasurable distances back to light she opened her eyes. She saw Mrs. Herrick's face, and as this was connected in her mind with protection she smiled.

”Do you feel better?” Mrs. Herrick asked her. Then she opened her eyes wide and saw the walls and the high-arched ceiling of the hall directly above her, knew herself lying on the floor, saw above her the figure of Clara standing with a bottle of salts, and then remembered; and, with a moan, buried her face in Mrs. Herrick's lap. ”Oh, no, no, no; don't bring me back; I don't want to come back!”

Their voices sounding high above her were speaking. Mrs. Herrick said: ”What is that?” Then Clara murmured. Then there was the light rustling of paper. Flora moved her hand.

”Give it to me; I want it.” She felt the stiff little square of cardboard between her fingers, and closed them around it fast.

After a little she went up-stairs holding tight to the bal.u.s.ter with one hand and to Mrs. Herrick with the other. After a little of sitting on the edge of her bed she lay down, still holding to Mrs. Herrick. She felt as though some cord within her had been drawn tight, too tight to endure, and every moment she hoped it would snap and set her free.

”You don't think I'm mad, do you?” she asked. Her friend earnestly disclaimed it. ”Then things are,” Flora said, ”everything. Oh, oh!” The memory overwhelmed her. ”He took me there as if by chance! He gave the sapphire to me for my engagement ring. Oh, dreadful! Oh, poor Harry!”

All that afternoon and all night she slept fitfully, starting up at intervals, trembling at nameless horrors--the glittering goldsmith's shop, the Chinaman, the great eye of the sapphire, and, worst of all, Harry's face, always the same calm, ruddy, good-natured, innocent-looking face that had led her to the goldsmith's shop, that had smiled at her, falling under the spell of the sapphire, that had covered, all those days, G.o.d knew what ravages of stress and strain, until the man had finally broken. That face appeared and reappeared through the flas.h.i.+ng terrors of her dreams like the presiding genius of them all. Finally, drifting into complete repose, she slept far into the morning.

She wakened languid and weak. She lay looking about the room, and, like a person recovering after a heavy blow, wondering what had happened.