Fatherless, motherless, alone upon the pinnacle of her fortune, she had known that such an extraordinary entrance, even at this rather wide social portal, would only be acceptable if toned down, glossed over, and drawn out by a personality sufficiently neutral, sufficiently potent, and sufficiently in need of what she had to give. The successive flickers of the gas-lamps through the carriage window made of Clara"s profile so hard and fine a little medallion that it was impossible to conceive it in need of anything. And yet it was just their mutual need that had drawn these two women together, and after three years it was still the only thing that held them. As much of a fight as she had put up with the rest--the people who had taken her in--she had put up the hardest with Clara. Yet of them all Clara was the only one she had failed to capture. Clara was always there in the middle of her affairs, but surveying them from a distance, and Flora"s struggle with her had resolved itself into the attempt to keep her from seeing too much, from seeing more than she herself saw. Clara"s seeing, thus far, had always been to help, but Flora sometimes wondered whether in an emergency this help could be depended on--whether Clara could give anything without exacting a price.
Their dubious intimacy had created for Flora a special sort of loneliness--a loneliness which lacked the security of solitude; and it was partly as an escape from this that she had accepted Harry Cressy.
By herself she could never have escaped. The initiative was not hers.
But he had presented himself, he had insisted, had overruled her objections, had captured her before she knew whether she wanted it or not--and held her now, fascinated by his very success in capturing her, and by his beautiful ruddy masculinity. She did not ask herself whether women ever married for greater reasons than these. She only wondered sometimes if he did not stand out more brilliantly against Clara and the others than he intrinsically was. But these moments when she was obliged to defend him to herself were always when he was not with her. Even in the dusky carriage she had been as aware of the splendor of his attraction as now when they had stopped between the high lamps of the club entrance, and she saw clearly the broad lines of his shoulders and the stoop of his square-set head as he stepped swingingly to the pavement. After all, she ought to be glad to think that he was going to stand up as tall and protectingly between her and the world, as now he did between her and the press of people which, like a tide of water, swept them forward down the hall, sucked them back in its eddy, and finally cast them, ruffled like birds that have ridden a storm, on the more generous s.p.a.ce of the wide, upward stair.
From here, looking down on the current sweeping past them, the little islands of black coats seemed fairly drowned in the feminine sea around them--the flow of white, of pale blue and rose, and the high chatter, like a cage of birds, that for the evening held possession.
"Ladies" Night!" Harry Cressy mopped his flushed face. "It"s awful!"
Flora laughed in the effervescence of her spirits. She wanted to know, teasingly, as they mounted, if this were why he had brought two more to add to the lot. He only looked at her, with his short note of laughter that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls--proud that her daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating enough to make her right.
She could recall a time when she had not even been quite sure of her clothes. Not Clara"s subdued rustle at her side could make her doubt them now; but her security was still recent enough to be sometimes conscious of itself. It was so short a time since all these talking groups, that made a personage of her, had had the power to put her quite out of countenance. The women who craned over their shoulders to speak to her--how hard she had had to work to make them see her at all! And now she did not know which she felt more like laughing at, herself or them, for having taken it so seriously. For, when one thought of it, wasn"t it absurd that people out of nowhere should suppose themselves exclusive? And people out of nowhere they were, herself and all the rest of them. From causes not far dissimilar they had drifted or scrambled to where they now stood. It was a question of squatter rights. The first on the ground were dictators, and how long they could hold their claim against invaders a dubious cast of fate. For there were for ever fresh invasions, and departures; swift risings from obscurity, sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred and delighted her.
And to-night it was not the picture exhibition, nor the function itself that elated her, but the fancy she had as she looked over the moving ma.s.s below her that the crowning excitement of the day, the vanishing mystery, hovered over them all. It was fantastic, but it persisted; for had not the Chatworth ring itself proved that the most ordinary appearances might cover unimagined wonders? Which of those bland, satisfied faces might not change shockingly at the whisper "Chatworth"
in its ear? She wanted to confide the naughty thought to Harry. But no, he wasn"t the one. If Harry were apprehensive of anything at all it was only of being caught in too hot a crush. He saw no possibilities in the mob below except boredom. He saw no possibilities in the evening but his conventional duty; and Flora could read in his eye his intention of getting through that as comfortably as possible. His suggestion that they have a look at the pictures brought the two women"s eyes together in a rare gleam of mutual mirth. They knew he suspected that the picture gallery would be the emptiest place in the club, since to have a look at the pictures was what they were all supposed to be there for. That was so infallibly the note of their life, Flora thought, as she followed up the wide sweep of the middle stair, and along the high-ceiled, gilded hall whose open arches overlooked the rooms below.
The picture gallery was new, an addition; and the plain, narrow, unexpected door in this place, where all was high, arched, elaborate and flourished, was like a loophole through which to slip into a foreign atmosphere. This atmosphere was resinous of fresh wood; the light was thick with drifting motes; the carpets harshly new, slipping beneath the feet on the too polished floor; the bare bones of the place yet scarcely covered. But its quiet was after all comparative. There were plenty of people lingering in groups in the center of the gallery which was dusky, eclipsed by the great reflectors that circled the room, throwing out the pictures in a bright band of color around the walls. People leaning from this border of light back into the dusk to murmur together, vanished and reappeared with such fascinating abruptness that Flora caught herself guessing what sort of face, where this nearest group stood just on the edge of shadow, would pop out of the dark next.
She was ready for something extraordinary, but now, when it came, she was taken aback by it. It gave her a start, that toss of black hair, that long, irregular, pale face whose scintillant, sardonic smile was mercilessly upon the poor, inadequate picture-face fronting him. His stoop above the rail was so abrupt that his long, lean back was almost horizontal, yet even thus there was something elegant in the swing of him--in the careless twist of his head, around, to speak to the woman behind him. The light above struck blind on the gla.s.s in one eye, but the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to Flora"s lips--"Who in the world is that?"--she checked; why, she didn"t ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well, beginning with the Chatworth ring, had been raised even a note higher.
Her restive fancy was beginning again. All the footlights of her little secret stage were up.
Clara turned to the right, following a beckoning fan, and Flora, dallying with her antic.i.p.ation, reasoned that now they must circle the room before they should face him--the interesting apparition. It was a pilgrimage of which he on the other side was performing his half.
Perfunctorily talking from group to group, conscious now and again of the lagging Clara or Harry, she could nevertheless keep a sly eye on the stranger"s equal progress. The flash of jet, and the voluble, substantial shoulders of the lady so profusely introducing him, were an a.s.surance of how that pilgrimage would terminate, since it was Ella Buller who was parading him. She even wondered before which of the florid pictures at the far, other end of the room, as before a shrine, the ceremony would take place.
She kept her eyes fixed on the paintings before her, and as she moved down from one to another, and the voices of the approaching group drew nearer, one separated itself from the general murmur, so clear, so resonantly carried, so clean-clipped off the tongue, that it stood out in syllables on the blur of sound which was Ella Buller"s conversation.
It had color, that voice; it had a quality so sharp, so individual that it touched her with a mischievous wonder that he dared speak so differently from all the world about him. Then, six pictures away, she heard her own name.
"Why, Flora Gilsey!" It was Ella"s husky, boyish note. "I"ve been looking for you all the evening! How d"y"do, Harry?" She waved her hand at him. "Why, how d"y"do, Mrs. Britton? I wouldn"t let papa go to supper until I"d found you. "Papa," I said, "wait; Flora and Harry will be here." Besides," she had quite reached Flora"s side by this time and communicated it in an impressive whisper, "I want you to meet my Englishman." She looked over her shoulder, and largely beckoned to where the blunt and florid Buller and his companion, with their backs to what they were supposed to be looking at, were exchanging an anecdote of infinite amus.e.m.e.nt.
Buller"s expression came around slowly to his daughter"s beckoning hand, but the Englishman"s face seemed to flash at the instant from what he was enjoying to what was expected of him. In the flourish of introductions, across and across, Flora found herself thinking the reality less extraordinary than she had at first supposed. Now that Mr.
Kerr was fairly before her, presented to her, and taking her in with the same lively, impersonal interest with which he took in the whole room, "as if," she put it vexedly to herself, "I were a specimen poked at him on the end of a pin," it stirred in her a vague resentment; and involuntarily she held him up to Harry. The comparison showed him a little worn, a little battered, a little too perfunctory in manner; but his genial eyes, deep under threatening brows, made Harry"s eyes seem to stare rather coldly; and the fine form of his long, plain face, and the sensitive line of his long thin lips made Harry"s beauty look,--well, how did it look? Hardly callous.
This mixed impression the two men gave her was disconcerting. She was all the more ready to be wary of the stranger. She had begun with him in the way she did with every one--instinctively throwing out a breastwork of conversation from behind which she could observe the enemy. But though he had blinked at it, he had not taken her up, nor helped her out; but had merely stood with his head a little canted forward, as if he watched her through her defenses.
"But San Francisco must seem so limited after London," she had wound up; and the way he had considered it, a little humorously, down his long nose, made her doubt the interest of cities to be reckoned in round numbers.
"It"s all extraordinary," he said. "You"re quite as extraordinary in your way as we in ours."
"Oh," she wondered, still vexed with his inventory, "I had always supposed us awfully commonplace. What _is_ our way, please?"
"Ah," he said, measuring his long step to hers as they sauntered a little, "for one thing, you"re so awfully good to a fellow. In London"--and he nodded back, as if London were merely across the room--"they"re awfully good to the somebodies. It"s the way you take in the n.o.bodies over here that is so astonishing--the stray leaves that blow in with your "trade," and can"t show any credentials but a letter or two, and their faces; and those"--his _diablerie_ danced out again--"sometimes such deucedly damaged ones."
It was almost indecent, this parade of his nonent.i.ty! She wanted to say, "Oh, hush! Those are the things one only enjoys--never talks about." But instead, somewhere up at the top of her voice, she said: "Oh, we always lock up our silver!"
"But even then," he quizzed her, "I wonder how you dare to do it?"
"Perhaps we have to, because we ourselves are all--" ("without any credentials but those you mention,") she had been about to say--but there she caught herself on the very edge of giving herself and all the rest of them away to him; "--all so awfully bored," she mischievously ended with the daintiest, faintest possible yawn behind her spread fan.
He looked as if she had taken him by surprise; then laughed out. "Oh, that is the way they don"t do here," he provoked her. "You mustn"t, when I"m not expecting it."
"Then what are you expecting?" she inquired a little coolly.
"Well," he deliberated, "not expecting you to get me ready for a sweet, and then pop in a pickle; and presently expecting, hoping, anxiously antic.i.p.ating, what you really care to say."
He was expecting, she looked maliciously, more than he was likely to get; but the fact that he did see through her to that extent was at once delightful and alarming. She swayed back into the shadow beyond the dazzling line of light. She wanted to escape his scrutiny, to be able to look him over from a safe vantage-ground. But he wouldn"t have it. An instant he stood under the torrent of white radiance, challenging her to see what she could--then followed her into her retreat. "Shall we sit here?" he said, and she found herself hopelessly cut off and isolated with the enemy.
She couldn"t withhold a little grudging pleasure in the sharpness with which he had turned her maneuver, and the way it had detached them from the surrounding crowd. For there, in the dusky center of the room, it was as if they watched from safe covert the rest of their party exposed in the glare of light; though not, as Flora presently noted, quite escaping observation themselves. For an instant Harry turned and peered toward them with a look in his intentness that struck Flora as something new in him, and made her wonder if he could be jealous. She turned tentatively to see if Kerr had noticed it, and surprised his glance in a quick transition back to hers.
"By your leave," he said, and took away her fan, which in his hand presently a.s.sumed such rhythmic motion that it ceased to be any more present to her than a delicate current of air upon her face. Her face, which in the first place he had so well looked over, he now looked into with something more personal in his quest, as if under the low brows and crowding lashes there was a puzzle to solve in the timid, una.s.sured glances of such splendid eyes.
He was not, she felt sure, in spite of his light manipulation of her fan, a person who cared to please women, but one of that devastating sort who care above everything to please themselves, and who are skilful without practice; too skilful, she feared, for her defenses to hold out against if he intended to find out what she really thought. "Aren"t we supposed to be looking at the pictures?" she wanted to know.
He turned his back on the wall and its attendant glare. "Why pictures,"
he inquired, "when there are live people to look at? Pictures for places where they"re all half dead. But here, where even the d.a.m.nable dust in the street is alive, why should they paint, or write, or sculpt, or do anything but live?" His irascible brows shot the query at her.
Again the proposition of life--whatever that was--was held up before her, and as ever she faltered in the face of it. "I suppose they do it here," she murmured, with a vague glance at the paintings around her, "because people do it everywhere else."
His disparagement was almost a snarl. "That"s the rotten part of it--because they do it everywhere else! As if there wasn"t enough monotony in the world already without every chap trying to be like the next instead of being himself!"
"Ah!" Her small, uncertain smile in the midst of her outward splendor was pathetic. "But it is different to you. You"re a man. You"re not one of us."
"One of what? I"m a man. I"m myself. Which, pardon me, dear lady, is just what you won"t be--yourself."
"But if you have to be what people expect?" She clung to her first principle of safety in the midst of this onslaught.
"People don"t want what they expect--if you care for that." He waved it away with his quick, white hand.
"But you have to care, unless you want to be queer." Her poor little secret was out before she knew, and he looked at it, laughing immoderately, yet somehow delightfully.
"Ah, if you think the social game is the game that counts! I had expected braver things of you. The game that counts, my girl," he preached it at her with his long white hand, "the game that is going on out here is the big, red game of life. That"s the only one that"s worth a guinea; and there"s no winning or losing, there"s no right or wrong to it, and it doesn"t matter what a man is in it as long as he"s a good one."
"Even if he is a thief?" The question was out of Flora"s lips before she could catch it. It was a challenge. She had meant to confound him; but he caught it as if it delighted him.
"Well, what would you think?"
He threw it back at her.
What hadn"t she thought! How persistently her fancy had played with the question of what sort of man that one might be who had so wonderfully put his hand under a gla.s.s case and drawn out the Chatworth ring. Why, outwardly, he must have been like all the crowd around him, to have escaped unnoticed; but, inwardly, how much superior in power and skill to have so completely overreached them!
"Oh," she laughed dubiously, "I suppose he is a good one as long as he isn"t caught."
"What!" His face disowned her. "You think he"s a renegade, do you? A chap in perpetual flight, taking things because he has to, more or less pursued by the law? Bah! It"s a guild as old, and a deal more honorable, than the beggar"s. Your good thief is born to it. It"s his caste. It"s in his blood. It isn"t money that he wants. If he had a million he"d be the same. And it isn"t a mania either. It"s a profession." The Englishman leaned back and smiled at her over the elegance of his long, joined finger-tips.
She looked at him with a delighted alarm, with an increasing elation; but whether these arose from his lawless declarations and the singular way they kept setting before her more vividly moment by moment the possible character of the present keeper of the Chatworth ring, or whether it was just the sight of Kerr himself as he sat there that stirred her, she didn"t try to distinguish.
"But suppose he was your own thief," she urged; "took your own things, I mean," she hastily amended, "and suppose he turned out to be--some one you knew and liked--" She hesitated. She had come at last to what she really wanted to say. She had brought out a question that had been teasing her fancy at intervals all the while he had been talking, and he hadn"t even heard it. He wasn"t even looking at her. She had caught him off his guard. He was looking across her shoulder straight down the dim vista of the room to the little blaze of bordering light. He was looking at Harry. No, Harry was looking at him. Harry was looking with a steady, an intent gaze, and Kerr meeting it--it might have been merely the blank glare of his monocle--seemed, to Flora, to meet it a little insolently.
She fancied in the instant something to pa.s.s between the two men, something which, this time, she did not mistake for jealousy--a shade too dim for defiance or suspicion, a deep scrutiny that struggled to place something, some one.
Flora felt a sudden wish to break that curious scrutiny. It had broken her little moment. It had shattered the personal, almost intimate note that had been sounded between them. The look Kerr turned back to her was vague, and stirred in her a dim resentment that he could drop it all so easily.