The Coast of Chance | Page 8

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 glass 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 anticipation, 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 assurance 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