The Coast of Chance

by Esther Chamberlain; Lucia Chamberlain

She loved him for that gallant denial, for she knew he had been afraid, horribly afraid, more afraid than she was now; but that strange quality of his that gave to a double risk a double zest had set him all the hotter on this resolution.

He sat for some long moments thoughtfully looking straight before him. She, glancing at his profile, white and faintly glimmering in the twilight, thought it looked sharp, absorbed and set. She could see his great determination growing there in the gloom between them, looming and overshadowing them both.

"I see," he said at last. "I'll simply have to take you in spite of it." He turned around to her, and reached his hands down through the dusk. She was being drawn up into arms which she could not see. Her hands were clasped around a neck, her cheek was against a face which she had never hoped to touch. Her reason and her fears were stifled and caught away from her lips with her breath. She was giving up to her awful weakness. She was giving up to the power of love. She was letting herself sink into it as she would sink into deep water. The sense of drowning in this profound, unfathomable element, of shutting her eyes and opening her arms to it, was the highest she had ever touched; but all at once the memory of what she was leaving behind her, like a last glimpse of sky, swept her with fear. She made a desperate effort to rescue herself before the waters quite closed over her head.

She pulled herself free. Without his arms around her for the first moment she could hardly stand. She took an uncertain step forward; then with a rush she reached the white curtains. They flapped behind her. She heard Kerr laugh, a note, quiet, caressing, almost content. It came from the gloom like a disembodied voice of triumph. Her rush had carried her into the middle of the anteroom. At this last moment was there to be no miracle to save her? There was no rescue among these dumb walls and closed-up windows. The purple child gave her a sharp, bird-like glance, as if the most that this wild woman could want was "change." Flora looked behind her and saw Kerr, who had put aside the curtains and was standing looking at her. He was bright and triumphant in that twilight room. He was not afraid of losing her now. He knew in that one moment he had imprisoned her for ever! She saw him approaching, but though all her mind and spirit strained for flight, something had happened to her will. It tottered like her knees.

He stooped and picked up an artificial rose, which had fallen from her hat, and put it into her hand. A moment, with his head bent, he stood looking into her face, but without touching her.

"Sit down over there," he said, and pointed toward a chair against the wall. She went meekly like a prisoner. He spoke to the child in the purple apron, who was still sitting behind the desk. He put some money on the cash-desk in front of her. It was gold. It shone gorgeously in the dull surrounding, and the child pounced upon it, incredulous of her luck. Then he turned, crossed the room, soundlessly opened the door, and went out into the violet dark of the street.

The child furtively tested her coin, biting it as if to taste the glitter, and Flora waited, lost, given up by herself, passively watching for the room to be filled again with his presence. He was back after a long minute, and this time took up his stand at the door, where, pushing aside the tight-drawn curtain a little, from time to time he looked out into the street. Sometimes his eyes followed the cracks of the plastered wall, sometimes he studied the floor at his feet; every moment she saw he was alert, expectantly watching and waiting; and though he never looked at her sitting behind him, she felt his protection between her and the darkening street. She sat in the shadow of it, feeling it all around her, claiming her as it would claim her henceforth, from, the world. A ghost of light glimmered along the curtains of the window, and stopped, quivering, in the middle of the curtained door. Then he turned about and beckoned her. Sheer weakness kept her sitting. He went to her, took her face between his hands, and looked into it long and intently.

"You don't want to go!" The words fell from his lips like an accusal. His sudden realization of what she felt held him there dumb with disappointment. "You have won me," her look was saying, "and yet I have immediately become a worthless thing, because I am going; and I don't believe in going." She felt she had failed him—how cruelly, was written in his face. But it was only for a moment that she made him hesitate. The next he shook himself free.

"Well, come," he said.

She felt that all doors would fly open at his bidding. She felt herself swept powerless at his will with all the yielding in her soul that she had felt in her body when his arms were around her. He had taken her by the hand—he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights flared—the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of the carriage waiting before the door. It all glimmered before her—a picture she might never see again—might not see after she passed through the carriage door that gaped for her. The will that had swept her out of the door was moving her beyond her own will, as it had moved her that morning in the garden, beyond all things that she knew. There was no feeling left in her but the despair of extreme surrender.