She raised her eyes. "Certainly I shall not discuss you with him."
"Is that a promise?"
"Harry, how you do dislike him!"
"Well, suppose I do?" he shrugged.
"You"ve used up twice your twenty minutes," she said, "and Clara will be scandalized."
He stopped the caressing movement of his hand on her hair. "Are you afraid of Clara?" he asked.
"Mercy, yes!" She was half in earnest and half laughing. "But then I"m afraid of every one."
He put his arm affectionately around her. "But not of me?"
"Oh," she told him, "you"re a great big purring p.u.s.s.y-cat, and I am your poor little mouse."
He thought this reply immensely witty, and Flora thought what a great boy he was, after all.
"Now, really, you must go home," she urged, trying to rise.
"But look here," he protested, still on the arm of her chair, "there"s another thing I want to ask you about." And by the tip of one finger he lifted her left hand shining with rings. "You will have to have another one of these, you know. It"s been on my mind for a week. Is there any sort you haven"t already?"
She held up her hand to the light and fluttered its glitter.
"Any one that you gave me would be different from the others, wouldn"t it?" she asked prettily.
"Oh, that"s very nice of you, Flora, but I want to find you something new. When shall we look for it? To-morrow, in the morning?"
"Yes, I should love it," she answered, but with no particular enthusiasm, for the idea of shopping with Harry, and shopping at Shrove"s, did not present a wide field of possibility. "But I have a luncheon to-morrow," she added, "so we must make it as early as ten."
"Oh, you two!"
At Clara"s mildly reproving voice so close beside them both started like conspirators. They had not heard her come in, yet there she was, just inside the doorway, still wrapped in her cloak. But there was none of the impetus of arrested motion in her att.i.tude. She stood at repose as if she might have waited not to interrupt them.
"Don"t scold Flora," said Harry, rising. "It"s my fault. She sent me away half an hour ago. But it is so comfortable here!"
Flora couldn"t tell whether he was simply natural, or whether he was giving this domestic color to their interview on purpose. She rather thought it was the latter.
"To-morrow at ten, then!" he said cheerfully to Flora. The stiff curtains rustled behind him and the two women were left together.
"What an important appointment," said Clara lightly, "to bring a man at this hour to make it."
"Oh, it is, awfully!" Flora answered in the same key. "To choose my engagement ring."
Clara"s delicate brows flew upward, and though Clara herself made no comment, the quick facial movement said, "I don"t believe it."
VI
BLACK MAGIC
The memory of Clara"s incredulous glance remained with her as something curious, and she was not unprepared to be challenged when, the next morning, she hurried down the hall, drawing on her gloves. Clara"s door did open, but the lady herself, yawning lightly on the threshold, had this time no questions for her. "Remember the luncheon," she advised, "and by the way, Ella wants us to sit in their box to-night. Don"t forget to tell Harry."
Flora threw back a gay "All right," but she was in danger of forgetting even the object of their errand, once she and Harry were out in the bright glare of the street. The wind, keen and resinous from the wet Presidio woods, blew at their back down the short block of pavement, and buffeted them, broadside, as they waited on the corner for the slow-crawling little car. In spite of the bl.u.s.tering air Flora insisted on the side seat of the "dummy," and, catching her hat with one hand, pressing down her fluttering skirts with the other, she laughed, now sidelong at Harry, now out at the dancing face of the bay.
Each succeeding cross-street gave up a flash of blue water. The short blocks slid by, first stone fronts and fresh lawns, stucco and tiles; then here and there corner lots, the great gray, towered, wooden mansions the stock-brokers of the "seventies" built, and below them, like a contingent of shabby-genteel relations, the narrow gray wooden faces of what was "smart" in the "sixties". It was a continuous progress backward toward the old, the original town. There was no stately nucleus. This town was a succession of widening ripples of progress, each newer, more polished than the last, but not different in quality from the old center that still teemed--a region of frail wooden rookeries full of foreign contending interests, haunted with the adventures of its feverish past. It had built itself on the hopes of a moment, and what spread from it still was the spell of the new, the changing, and the reckless. It drew still from the ends of the earth.
The broad road in over the mountains, the broad road out over the ocean made it where it stood, touching all trades, a road-house of the world.
Some dim perception of this touched Flora as the houses, gliding past, grew older, grayer, with steeper gardens, narrower streets, here and there even trees, lone, sentinel, at the edge of cobbled gutters. From the crest of the last hill they had looked a mile down the long gray throat of the street to where the ferry building lay stretched out with its one tall tower p.r.i.c.ked up among the masts of shipping. Half-way between their momentary perch and the ferry slips the street suddenly thickened, darkened, swarmed, flying a yellow pennon high above blackened roofs. And now, as they slipped down the long decline into the foreign quarter the pungent oriental breath of Chinatown was blown up to them. She breathed it in readily. It was pleasant because it was strange, outlandish, suggesting a wide web of life beyond her own knowledge. She wondered what Harry was thinking of it, as he sat with his pa.s.sive profile turned from her to the heathen street ahead. She guessed, by the curl of his nostril, that it was only present to him as an unpleasant odor to be got through as quickly as possible; but she was wrong. He had another thought. This time, oddly enough, a thought for her.
He gave it to her presently, abrupt, matter-of-fact, material. "That Chinese goldsmith down there has good stuff now and then. How"d you like to look in there before we go on to what-you-call-"em"s,--the regular place?"
"You mean for a ring?" She was doubtful only of his being in earnest.
"You have so many of the Shrove kind," he explained. "I thought you might like it, Flora; you"re so romantic!" he laughed.
"Like it!" she cried, too touched at his thought for her to resent the imputation. "I should love it! But I didn"t know they had such things."
"Now and then--though it is a rare chance."
"But that will be just the fun of it," she hastened, half afraid lest Harry should change his mind, "to see if we can possibly find one that will be different from all these others."
She kept this little feeling of exploration close about her, as they left the car, a block above the green trees of the plaza, and entered one of the narrow streets that was not even a cross-street, but an alley, running to a bag"s end, with balconies, green railings and narcissi taking the sun.
A slant-eyed baby in a mauve blouse stared after them; and a white face so poisoned in its badness that it gave Flora a start, peered at them from across the street. It made her shrink a little behind Harry"s broad shoulder and take hold of his arm. The mere touch of that arm was security. His big presence, moving agilely beside her, seemed to fill the street with its strength, as if, by merely flinging out his arms, Samson-like, he could burst the dark walls asunder.
In the middle of the block, sunk a little back from the fronts of the others, the goldsmith"s shop showed a single, filmed window; and the pale glow through it proclaimed that the worker in metals preferred another light to the sun"s. The threshold was worn to a hollow that surprised the foot; and the interior into which it led them gloomed so suddenly around them after the broad sunlight, that it was a moment before they made out the little man behind the counter, sitting hunched up on a high stool.
"Hullo, Joe," said Harry, in the same voice that hailed his friends on the street-corners; but the goldsmith only nodded like a nodding mandarin, as if, without looking up, he took them in and sensed their errand. He wore a round, blue Chinese cap drawn over his crown; a pair of strange goggles like a mask over his eyes, and his little body seemed to poise as lightly on his high stool as a wisp, as if there were no more flesh in it than in his long, dry fingers that so marvelously manipulated the metal. Save for that glitter of gold on his gla.s.s plate, and the grin of a lighted brazier, all was dark, discolored and cluttered.
And the way Harry bloomed upon this background of dubious antiquity! He leaned on the little counter, which creaked under his weight, in his big, fresh coat, with his clear, fresh face bent above the shallow tray of trinkets--doubtful jades, dim-eyed rings, dull clasps and coins--his large, fastidious finger poked among. He was the one vital thing in the shop.
Over everything else was spread a dimness of age like dust. It enveloped the little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a carved idol in a curio shop that Flora was a little startled to find that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his extraordinary gla.s.ses that gave point to that expression; and presently when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true.
His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed to find it.
"Harry," she murmured to Cressy, who was still stirring the contents of the box with a disdainful forefinger, "this little man gives me the shivers."
"Old Joe?" Harry smiled indulgently. "He"s a queer customer. Been quite a figurehead in Chinatown for twenty years. Say, Joe, heap bad!" and with the back of his hand he flicked the tray away from him.
The little man undoubled his knees and descended the stool. He stood breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-l.u.s.ter eye to the box.
"Velly nice," he murmured with vague, falling inflection.
"Oh, rotten!" Harry laughed at him.
"You no like?"