The Coast of Chance.
by Esther Chamberlain and Lucia Chamberlain.
I
THE VANISHING MYSTERY
Flora Gilsey stood on the threshold of her dining-room. She had turned her back on it. She swayed forward. Her bare arms were lifted. Her hands lightly caught the molding on either side of the door. She was looking intently into the mirror at the other end of the hall. All the lights in the dining-room were lit, and she saw herself rather keenly set against their brilliance. The straight-held head, the lifted arms, the short, slender waist, the long, long sweep of her skirts made her seem taller than she actually was; and the strong, bright growth of her hair and the vivacity of her face made her seem more deeply colored.
She had poised there for the mere survey of a new gown, but after a moment of dwelling on her own reflection she found herself considering it only as an object in the foreground of a picture. That picture, seen through the open door, reflected in the gla.s.s, was all of a bright, hard glitter, all a high, harsh tone of newness. In its paneled oak, in its glare of cut-gla.s.s and silver, in the shining vacant faces of its floors and walls, there was not a color that filled the eye, not a shadow where imagination could find play. As a background for herself it struck her as incongruous. Like a child looking at the landscape upside down, she felt herself in a foreign country. Yet it was hers. She turned about to bring it into familiar a.s.sociation. There was nothing wrong with it. But its great capacity suggested large parties rather than close intimacies.
In the high lift of its ceilings, the ample openings of its doors, the swept, garnished, polished beauty of its cold surfaces, it proclaimed itself conceived, created and decorated for large, fine functions. She thought whimsically that any one who knew her, coming into her house, would realize that some one other than herself had the ordering of it.
She glanced over the table. It was set for three. It lacked nothing but the serving of dinner. She looked at the clock. It wanted a few minutes to the hour. Shima, the j.a.panese butler, came in softly with the evening papers. She took them from him. Nothing bored her so much as a paper, but to-night she knew it contained something she really wanted to see.
She opened one of the damp sheets at the page of sales.
There it was at the head of the column in thick black type:
AT AUCTION, FEBRUARY 18 PERSONAL ESTATE OF ELIZABETH HUNTER CHATWORTH CONSISTING OF----
She read the details with interest down to the end, where the name of the "famous Chatworth ring" finished the announcement with a flourish.
Why "famous"? It was very provoking to advertise with that vague adjective and not explain it.
She turned indifferently to the first page. She read a sentence, re-read it, read it again. Then, as if she could not read fast enough, her eyes galloped down the column. Color came into her cheeks. The grasp of her hands on the edges of the paper tightened. It was the most extraordinary thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was blazing at her from the columns of the paper was at once the wildest thing that could possibly have happened, and yet the one most to have been expected.
For, from the first the business had been sinister, from as far back as the tragedy--the end of poor young Chatworth and his wife--the Bessie, who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her death, that had befallen in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their little city, and the large announcements of auction that had followed hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some special luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They had been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the "Maple Room" before the auction. And now the whole spectacular business was capped by a sensation so dramatic as to strain credulity to its limit. She could not believe it; yet here it was glaring at her from the first page. Still--it might be an exaggeration, a mistake. She must go back to the beginning and read it over slowly.
The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima"s announcement of dinner only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when, with a faint, smooth rustle, Mrs. Britton came in, she let the paper fall. She always faced her chaperon with a little nervousness, and with the same sense of strangeness with which she so frequently regarded her house.
"It"s fifteen minutes after eight," Mrs. Britton observed. "We would better not wait any longer."
She took the place opposite Flora"s at the round table. Flora sat down, still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.
"It"s the most extraordinary thing!" she burst forth.
Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her companion"s face--seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes, through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached for an explanation.
"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and smooth, as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.
"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply vanished! And--and it was all our own crowd who were there!"
"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it definite.
Flora flung out her hands.
"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the afternoon, when everybody was there--and they haven"t the faintest clue."
"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to be calm.
Again Flora"s eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the other jewels. Harry saw it"--she glanced at the paper--"as late as four o"clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was gone."
Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have differed more than these two women in their blondness and their prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to ivory through all the gamut of gold--hair color of a panther"s hide, eyes dark hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit.
The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked far over the head of Clara Britton"s annoyance that there should be no clue.
"Why, don"t you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I would much prefer to think it was some one we didn"t know so well--some one strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping out the Golden Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be embarra.s.sed."
Clara looked back with extraordinary intentness.
"Oh, it"s not possible the thing is stolen. There"s some mistake! And if it were"--her eyes seemed to open a little wider to take in this possibility--"they will have detectives all around the water front by to-night. Any one would find it difficult to get away," she pointed out.
"You see, the ring is an important piece of property."
"Of course; I know," Flora murmured. A faint twitch of humor pulled her mouth, but the pa.s.sionate romantic color was dying out of her face. How was it that one"s romances could be so cruelly pulled down to earth? She ought to have learned by this time, she thought, never to fly her little flag of romance except to an empty horizon--never, at least, to fly it in Clara"s face. It was always as promptly surrounded by Clara"s common sense as San Francisco would be surrounded by the police. But still she couldn"t quite come down to Clara. "At least," she sighed, "he has saved me an awful expense, whoever took it, for I should have had to have it."
Mrs. Britton surveyed this statement consideringly. "Was it the most valuable thing in the collection?"
Flora hesitated in the face of the alert question. "I--don"t know. But it was the most remarkable. It was a Chatworth heirloom, the papers say, and was given to Bessie at the time of her marriage." The thought of the death that had so quickly followed that marriage gave Flora a little shiver, but no shade of the tragedy touched Clara. There was nothing but speculation in Clara"s eyes--that, and a little disappointment. "Then they will put off the auction--if it is really so," she mused.
"Oh, yes," Flora mourned, "they can put it off as long as they please.
The only thing I wanted is gone--and I hadn"t even seen it."
"Well, I wouldn"t be too sure. There may be some mistake about it. The papers love a sensation."
"But there must be something in it, Clara. Why, they closed the doors and searched them--_that_ crowd! It"s ridiculous!"
Clara Britton glanced at the empty place. "Then that must be what has kept him."
"Who? Oh, Harry!" It took Flora a moment to remember she had been expecting Harry. She hoped Clara had not noticed it. Clara always had too much the a.s.sumption that she was taking him only as the best-looking, best-natured, safest bargain presented. "He will be here," she rea.s.sured, "but I wish he would hurry. His dinner will be spoiled; and, poor dear, he likes his dinner so much!"
The faint silver sound of the electric bell, a precipitate double peal, seemed to uphold this statement. The women faced each other in a moment"s suspense, a moment of expectation, such as the advance column may feel at sight of a scout hotfoot from the field of battle. There were m.u.f.fled movements in the hall, then light, even steps crossing the drawing-room. Those light steps always suggested a slight frame, and, as always, Flora was re-surprised at his bulk as now it appeared between the parted curtains, the dull black and sharp white of his evening clothes topped by his square, fresh-colored face.
[Ill.u.s.tration: YES, HE WAS MAGNIFICENT, SHE THOUGHT.]
"Well, Flora," he said, "I know I"m late," and took the hand she held to him from where she sat. Her face danced with pleasure. Yes, he was magnificent, she thought, as he crossed with his light stride to Mrs.
Britton"s chair. He could even stand the harsh lines and lights of evening clothes. He dominated their ugly convention with his height, his face so ruddy and fresh under the pale brown of his hair, his alert, a.s.sured, deft movement. His high good nature had the effect of sweetening for him even Clara Britton"s flavorless manner. The "We were speaking of you," with which she saw him to his seat, had all the warmth of a smile, but a smile far in the background of Flora"s immediate possession. Indeed, Flora had seldom had so much to say to Harry as at this moment of her excitement over what he had actually seen. For the evidence that he had seen something was vivid in his face. She had never found him so splendidly alive. She had never seen him, it came to her, quite like this before.
She shook the paper at him. "Tell us everything, instantly!"
He gaily acknowledged her right to make him thus stand and deliver. He shot his hands into the air with the lightening vivacity that was in him a sort of wit. "Not guilty," he grinned at her.
"Harry, you know you were in it. The papers have you the most important personage."
"Oh, not all that," he denied her allegation. "They had the whole lot of us cooped up together for investigation for as much as two hours. I thought I shouldn"t have time to dress! I"m as hungry as a hawk!" He rolled it out with the full gusto with which he was by this time engaged on his first course.
"Poor dear," said Flora with cooing mock-sympathy, "and did they starve it? But would it mind telling us, now that it has its food, what is true, and what was the gallant part it played this afternoon?"
"Well," he followed her whimsical lead, "the chief detective and I were the star performers. I found the ring wasn"t there, and he found he couldn"t find it."