"Persons Unknown"
by Virginia Tracy · English · Gutenberg #37545 · 830,618 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: "Persons Unknown"
Author: Virginia Tracy
Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
Release date: September 27, 2011 [eBook #37545]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37545
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "PERSONS UNKNOWN" ***
Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
"PERSONS UNKNOWN"
BY VIRGINIA TRACY
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HENRY RALEIGH
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914
Copyright, 1914, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company
_Published, October, 1914_
TO
MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS
HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE
When winter's breath was on the pane,
Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain,
I fled to your bright hearth again
To read about a _Shadow_!
You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea,
Pulled up the deepest chair for me,
And set yourselves to guess and see--
_What ailed that minx, Christina?_
What Herrick found--what Nancy knew--
Whose motor raced the county through--
What could that harsh Policeman do--
You never failed to argue;
Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats,
Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets,
And pale, dark men with cigarettes,
Not once I found you weary!
Through broken music, sudden light
In the deep darkness, jewels bright,
Persons unknown in unknown plight,
You still sought _unknown_ persons;
Authors, if you would straightway know
Where faith and cheer and counsel grow,
Suggestions flourish and hints flow:
_Go ask my Nancy Cornish!_
[Illustration: Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange
and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had
never seen before]
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST
THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT 3
II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED 7
III SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND 12
IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING 14
V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER 19
VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR 25
VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY 36
VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS 51
IX JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED 58
X JOE PATRICK ARRIVES 67
XI PERSONS UNKNOWN 89
XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE 96
BOOK SECOND
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT 103
II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED 115
III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S
WAY 124
IV THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD 133
V HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING 158
VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL 166
VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY 170
VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN
ENTERS 177
IX PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS
ME!" 184
X MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DESIR--" 190
XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT 201
XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW 206
XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION
SCENE 215
XIV ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS 219
XV "WHEN STARS GROW COLD" 222
BOOK THIRD
WILL O' THE WISP
I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY 231
II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY 242
III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY 254
IV A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS 270
V THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA
WAS 283
VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT 292
VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE 298
VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR 305
IX A SIGN IN THE SKY 314
X "THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY
TIES 324
XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE
TO A COMIC OPERA 334
XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD
BOY AM I!'" 343
XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE 356
XIV THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE
VIEW" 365
XV ONE WITNESS SPEAKS 377
XVI THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT
BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!" 380
XVII HERSELF 385
BOOK FOURTH
THE LIGHTED HOUSE
I THE HOSTESS PREPARING 389
II THE EXPECTED COMPANY 399
III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM 401
IV TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL-- 423
V CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX 433
VI THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I
MADE MY BATTLE STAY!" 447
VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF
THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT 459
VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR 481
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and
splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as
Herrick had never seen before _Frontispiece_
Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders 10
"Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression;
may I? 76
"'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'" 86
"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't
deny it--I know!" 160
Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any
other name 296
"You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool!
Thank God, I've done with you!" 420
"Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are,
through and through--?" 476
BOOK FIRST
THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
CHAPTER I
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with
such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the
smothering blackness of the torrid August night.
He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed
from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the
tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his.
In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had
brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of
desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every
summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach
which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It
was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less
unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and
whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to
decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell
him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with
her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one
phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her
what that was doing there--since her name was not Ann and he had never
imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them,
blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a
horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy
forms of shadowy persons--he hoped if they were his other characters
they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!--one of whom threateningly
cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now,
actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he
really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if
he had!
He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was--a little red-headed
girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years
and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his
dreams?
She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere
inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose
photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph
which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in
Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for.
Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she
was not Nancy Cornish.
The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious
failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung
himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching
linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley
cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway;
the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to
all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The
mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness
in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a
black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom--the back
parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow,
after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the
maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes,
baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with
McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with
Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right!
That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely
with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that
burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of
climax.
Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house
opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one
of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were
drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should
care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds,
some one began to play a piano.
The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in
surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air
with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party?
Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he
dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the
Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of
appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his
Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender
and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed,
thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out
the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the
drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders,
and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those
quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one
across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's
now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice,
or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he
had no thoughts at all.
He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and
there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there
with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one
arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and
desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute
she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have
covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never
ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from
Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over
Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the
sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the
blind, the lights went out.
CHAPTER II
HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED
The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to
feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into
that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned
ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't
a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a
lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed
it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the
piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he
spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent.
Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that
young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth
floor.
There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing
figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall,
upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these
was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for
his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began
hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer.
Was he too late?
The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with
wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement,
brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get
hurt! Be--"
"Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!"
"A woman! Why--I _thought_ I heard a woman--!"
It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed
he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst
in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman
as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a
screw-driver!"
"Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you
open our door! It's no business of yours!"
Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently
aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the
young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall
crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of
questioning voices mingled with excited cries--And then came a girl's
voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to _do_ anything?" A husky
business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be
breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble."
Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me
a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his
face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held.
What was going on in there? Or--what had ceased to go on? He could hear
Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the
superintendent--He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business--"
Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the
longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the
superintendent, carrying the keys.
The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by
Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which
proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with
excitement, the half-dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock.
The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside.
The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the
superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!--You
heard no cries--no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face
and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble.
The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had
arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures
had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the
roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made
itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the
street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any
way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's
Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in
both these rooms from hers."
"Only two rooms?"
"Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus.
"You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second
policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?"
Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with
admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him
with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's
steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said.
"Why doesn't she make some sign?"
"You're sure 'twas him fired?"
"That shadow had no revolver."
"He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself
like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?"
"Only the one shot."
"If there's an inquest you'll be wanted."
"All right.--But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of
parley--some kind of bluff?"
"Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's
more than one--" The bolt gave.
McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried.
There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared.
Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs.
Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In
the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring.
"Any hall?"
The superintendent replied in the negative.
"No fire-escapes, you say?"
"No. Fireproof building."
"They're right ahead of us, then."
Again, with a long shudder, the door gave.
The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled.
"I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that
said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick
out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be
witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous
miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full
flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep
back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side.
The door swung open.
[Illustration: Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders]
It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light
and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a
movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind.
Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past
Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent
leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding
everything. The room was empty.
CHAPTER III
SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND
"Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly.
The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!"
They glanced round them, non-plused.
The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished,
but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the
windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great
window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door
opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left
wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the
couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one
of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate
the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object
of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay
between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost
halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right
of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for
the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly
opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of
ordinary size.
"The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the
court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch
hung with heavy portieres. And the sight of these portieres carried
with it a cold thrill. But--"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy
persisted.
McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was
locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?"
"A closet."
"Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him."
He went up to the portieres, opened them with some caution and peered
in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portieres to throw them
back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to
the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for
him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the
bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look
round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing
the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly
empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle
section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony.
Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he
watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no
explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the
balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted
bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed
McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same
observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should
still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that
automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he
heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath.
Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot
of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been
shot through the heart.
CHAPTER IV
HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING
There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it--about
the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in
the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the
limbs!--was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead
man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's
revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the
superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him."
"He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly,
but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you
see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group
he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the
inside. He had to shoot himself!"
McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head
he responded, "Where's the weapon?"
They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom
closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portieres,
behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon,
either.
Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an
ordinary little brass catch--a slip-catch, the engineer called it--which
shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut
behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The
engineer shook his head.
The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to
pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor.
Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a
personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate.
His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portieres were
of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with
their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered
that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy
satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The
stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been
dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this
tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In
couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to
predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently
supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut.
He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom
and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard
glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that
window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books
that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great
desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front
window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the
illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted
atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver
candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the
library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a
sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by
the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had
been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown
low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it
had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the
bedroom itself had been evoked.
Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled
and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood
tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as
if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a
decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was
still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a
half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still.
"McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice.
"Hallo!"
"He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to
the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the
hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood.
McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well,
the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest."
"What's this?" asked somebody.
It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the
lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers
in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a
woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy
arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick
noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray
room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I
never saw it before!"
McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to
the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"
Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected
Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare,
then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was
gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?
Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from
that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the
whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant
death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at
the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.
On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if
they expected the tragedy to be reenacted for their benefit. They all
turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the
nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
"Him?"
"Why, the murderer!"
"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the
man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that
Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the
sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly
speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that
it's a suicide."
"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening
dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always
supposed to be suicides!"
The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked
him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'--I accept the correction. Any poor
fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit
suicide!--I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down
the street.
Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was
from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from
his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury
through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the
cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that
suicide.--What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what
despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how--in God's
name, how!--had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had
seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this
time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house
baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get
out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal
excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman
who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I
see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"
CHAPTER V
HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER
Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of
consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with
to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own
life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out
of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.
Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had
passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon
with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this
was a critical period in his fortunes.
At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a
singularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His first
twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary
popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd,
Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known
as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for
generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was
Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already
largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their
Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little
fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and
Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear
glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once
peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall
youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an
aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with
a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his
dealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood
and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin,
and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very
much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical
type which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deep
chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of
flank--it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally,
spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the
craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from
his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_;
soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like
sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick
died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time
gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent
creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity
of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had
come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was
prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their
straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during
the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories
which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been
thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book
form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too
painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two
uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business
affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and
Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his
father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father
suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him
suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no
secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he
thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this,
uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion
and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and he
had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation,
this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life
sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and
poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks;
and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a
romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their
right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of
his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and
the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow;
sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned;
perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living,
mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous,
lost, world.
Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans,
the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was
married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his
pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a
man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of
his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone
desert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and which
seemed to have dropped him out!
But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him;
and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of
Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at
last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad,
Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at
the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--had
responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!
Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to
remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.
Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't
going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at
lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too
superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for
his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do
away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And,
before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in
his Heroine!
He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to
her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through
my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Lose
faith in _her_!
The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented
a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the
sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair
all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in
her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was
sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair,
with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had
wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and
wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what
touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity
of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the
alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage
of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed
to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little
girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come
adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during
those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in
the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's
deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things
would look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realized
it, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising
with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon
rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the
moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best
shirt, he called her Sal.
A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him
to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a
murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was
destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something
which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule,
Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of
paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--a
ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely
symbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from its
smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful
hand,
For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?
But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all
the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this
neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He
was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the
Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and
it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was
to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers.
Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying
three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his
eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It
began--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--"
He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.
James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment--
Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second
Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E.
Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase,
"Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."
CHAPTER VI
HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR
Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler
classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present
moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn
diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of
what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person.
Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further
from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly
the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair
of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance
which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and
Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not
basely, nervous.
He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took
humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least
half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new,
garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was
thoroughly "_high-class_!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it
shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his
hands and plunged.
"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I
want to ask you.--You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr.
Herrick.--Well, I will, thanks,"--as he dropped into a chair. "I--I
won't keep you a minute--"
"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.
The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been
disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer
home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and
excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no
sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What
made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.
"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."
"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."
The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well,
now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now
please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if
there _was_ a lady there last night--but there _couldn't_ have
been--well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't
have seen her so very plain, now could you?"
"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.
"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr.
Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand--"
"While he played the piano with the other?"
"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled.
"It's against the rules--that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such
a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been
running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk,
especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be
ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings.
We got leases signed by--"
"Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be
reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a
woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not,
I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch."
"No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't
understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the
police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't
expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick;
it's your language!"
"What!"
"It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be
quite so particular--"
"Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know
it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to
me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a
good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I
was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I
don't feel very leniently to the person--not even to the woman--who
murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do
it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going
to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed
him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr.
Deutch. And, good-morning."
"Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir--"
"And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what
people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and
that it was you who connived at her escape!"
"All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no
kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the
lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina."
"Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor
worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any
woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss
Christina!"
"You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all
like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of
a play."
"Did I? Well?"
Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped
upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran:
"About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina
Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as
of prophecy realized. "Oh--ho!" he breathed.
"Oh--ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes
you think, all right. Even me!--that was what brought her first to my
mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed,
any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody
think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not
so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!"
"That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he
had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as
a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West,
and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to
her detriment.
"Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all,
but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop
there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with
their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any
denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think
she's guilty--"
"Oh, come! Why--"
"Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?"
Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them
without speaking.
"The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to
be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself
and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit
of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated
gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced,
old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries--people like
them, and Miss Christina--Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr.
Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn
them on to Miss Christina, you--"
"I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the
completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in
every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed.
But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a
handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression,
must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very
good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried,
"you want a drink!"
For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on
his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump
and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got
himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his
relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he
returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr.
Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres
near so crazy to you."
Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and
regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions.
But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see
her with Mr. Ingham?"
"Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before
ever _he_ set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa
had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a
pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for
myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it
was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very
refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as
high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames;
plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings--oh,
beautiful!--by expensive, high-class artists; everything elegant. But it
wasn't a success. The public don't appreciate the artistic, Mr. Herrick,
they got no edjucation. I lost my last dollar, and I don't know as I
ever recovered exactly. I ain't ever been what you could call anyways
successful, since."
"But you saw something of Mr. Hope--"
"Well, Mr. Hope was an edjucated gentleman, Mr. Herrick, like you are
yourself. He had very up-to-date ideas; and when he'd buy a picture,
once in a while I'd go up to the house to see it hung. Miss Christina
was about eight years old, then, and I used to see her coming in from
dancing school with her maid, or else she'd be just riding out with her
groom behind her, like a little queen. When my shop failed; I went to
manage my sister-in-law's restaurant. I was ashamed to let Mr. Hope know
that time. But one Sunday night, my wife says to me, 'Ain't that little
girl as pretty as the one you been telling me about?' And there in the
door, with her long hair straight down from under her big hat and her
little long legs in black silk stockings straight down from one o' them
pleated skirts and her long, square, coat, was Miss Christina. Behind
her was her papa and her mama. And after that they came pretty regular
every week or two; we served her twelfth birthday party. My wife made a
cake with twelve pink rosebuds, all herself. She was always the little
lady, Miss Christina, but she made her own friends, and to people she
liked she spoke as pretty as a princess. We got to feel such an
affection for her, Mr. Herrick, we couldn't believe there was anybody
like her in this world. We never had a child of our own, me and my wife,
Mr. Herrick. It does knock out your faith in things to think a thing
like that can happen, but it's what's happened to her and me. We was
kind of cracked about all children, and Miss Christina was certainly the
most stylish child I ever set eyes on!"
"Father living?" Herrick prompted.
"No, Mr. Herrick, no. And before he died, he got into business
difficulties himself, and he didn't leave enough to keep a bird alive. I
helped Mrs. Hope dispose of all the bric-a-brac, my paintings and all,
everything that wasn't mortgaged, and they put it in with an aunt of Mr.
Hope's, a catamaran, and went to keeping a high-class boarding-house.
We're all apt to fall, Mr. Herrick. I've fallen myself."
"The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?"
"I ask you, how could it, with that battle-ax? She cheated my poor
ladies, and she bullied Miss Christina, and used to take the books she
was always reading and burn 'em up, and say nasty common things to her,
when she got older, about the young gentlemen that were always on her
heels even then, and that she'd like well enough, one day, and the next
she couldn't stand the sight of. If there's one thing Miss Christina
has, more than another, it's a high spirit; she has what I'd call a
plenty of it. They had fierce fights. Often, when she'd come to me with
a little breastpin or other to pawn for her, so her and her mama'd have
a mite o' cash, she'd put her pretty head down on my wife's shoulder and
cry; and my wife'd make her a cup o' tea. She'd say then she was going
to run away and be an actress. And, when she was sixteen yet, she ran.
Two years afterward, her and her mama turned up in my first little
flat-house; a cheap one, down Eighth Avenue, in the twenties. She was on
the stage, all right, and what a time she'd had! It'd been cruel, Mr.
Herrick; cruel hard work and, just at the first, cruel little of it. But
now she's a leading lady. And this fall she's going to open in New York,
in a big part. It's the play they call 'The Victors'; I guess you've
heard. Mr. Wheeler, he's the star, and Miss Christina's part's better
than what his is. But now--"
There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating,
bit his lip.
"This engagement to Ingham--"
"She met him about two years ago, when she had her first leading part,
and they went right off their heads about each other. I never expected I
should see Miss Christina act so regular loony over any man. But she
refused him time and again. She said she'd always been a curse to
herself and she wasn't going to bring her curse on him. In the end, of
course, she gave in. She said she'd marry him this winter, if he'd go
away for the summer and leave her alone. You knew it was only day before
yesterday he got back from Europe?"
"Yes. I know."
"My wife and me have seen a lot more of her this summer than since she
was a little girl. There's been years at a time, all the while she was
on the road, that we wouldn't know if she was alive or dead. And then
some day I'd come home, and find her sitting in our apartment--it's a
basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!--as easy as if she'd just stepped
across the street. But I wouldn't like you should think it's Miss
Christina's talked to us very much about her engagement. She's a pretty
close-mouthed girl, in her way, and a simply elegant lady. Not but what
Mrs. Hope is an elegant lady, too. But still she is--if you know what I
mean--gabby! Miss Christina's always been a puzzle to her; and she's a
great hand to sit and make guesses at her with my wife. Mr. Ingham left
a key with Miss Christina when he went abroad so she could come and play
his piano and read his books whenever it suited her, and she'd have a
quiet place to study her part. Every once in a while Mrs. Hope would
take a notion it wasn't quite the proper thing she should come by
herself. But after she'd seen her inside, she'd drop down our way and
wait. She wasn't just exactly gone on Mr. Ingham, and my wife wasn't
either."
Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the
marriage?"
"Well, not opposed. She never opposed the young lady in anything, when
you came down to it. But he wanted she should leave the stage. And he
wasn't ever faithful to her, Mr. Herrick! For all he was so crazy about
her and so wild-animal jealous of the very air she had to breathe, he
wasn't ever faithful to her--and if ever you'd seen her, that'd make
your blood boil! She'd hear things; and he'd lie. And she'd believe him,
and believe him! If it wasn't for his money, she'd be well rid of him,
to my mind."
He sat nursing his wrath. And Herrick, still watching him, felt sorry.
For, in Herrick's mind it was now all so clear; so pitiably clear! Poor
little chap!--he didn't know how scanty was the reassurance in his
portrait of his Miss Christina! The indulged, imperious child, choosing
"her own" friends; the unhappy, bold, bedeviled girl, already with young
men at her heels, whom she encouraged one day and flouted the next;
pawning her trinkets at sixteen and plunging alone into the world, the
world of the stage; the ambitious, adventurous woman capable of holding
such a devotion as that of the good Deutch by so capricious and
high-handed a return, snaring such a man of the world as Ingham by an
adroit blending of abandon and retreat, putting up with the humiliations
of his flagrant inconstancies only, perhaps, to find herself, after her
stipulated summer alone, on the verge of losing him through his
insensate jealousy--were there no materials here for tragic quarrel? Was
not this the very figure that last night he had seen fling out an arm in
unexampled passion and grace? In his heart he saw Christina Hope, while
her betrothed, whether as accuser or accused, taunted her from the
piano, kill James Ingham. And he profoundly knew that he had almost seen
this with his eyes. His pulse beat high; but it was with a sobered mind
that he beheld Mr. Deutch preparing to depart.
"Well, you see how I had to ask you, Mr. Herrick, not to say that lady's
shadow made you think any of an actress?"
"I do, indeed."
"There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if
only you was acquainted with her--" He had turned, in rising, to get his
hat, and he now stopped short and exclaimed with bewildered reproach,
"Oh, well, now, Mr. Herrick! Why wouldn't you tell me?"
"Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his
Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?"
"Why, that you _was_ acquainted with--" said Mr. Deutch, extending his
hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope."
Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her,
all along! It's a real old picture--'bout five years ago. You knew her
then? You knew her--And you--saw--" His voice died away. His glance
turned from Herrick's and traveled unwillingly to where, upon the blinds
drawn down again, across the street, it seemed to both men the shadow
must start forth. And, as he slowly withdrew his gaze, Herrick saw,
looking out at him from those soft, spaniel eyes, the eyes of fear.
Deutch bowed bruskly and withdrew. Herrick was alone, as he had been
these many months, with the young challenge of his Heroine; the familiar
face, long learned by heart, asking its innocent questions about life,
shone softly out on him, in pride. And, on that August morning, he felt
his blood go cold.
CHAPTER VII
HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY
There was a time coming when Herrick was to salute as prophetic what he
now noted with a grim amusement; that from the moment the shadow sprang
upon the blind the current of his life was changed. Peopled, busy,
adventurous, it had passed, as one might say, into active circulation.
He was suddenly in the center of the stage.
This was brought home to him rather sharply when Deutch had been not
five minutes gone. On the exit of that gentleman Herrick's first thought
had been for Miss Hope's photograph. Although an actress seems less a
woman than a type, yet, since, to any stray gossip, she was recognizable
as a real person, she mustn't, at this critical time, be left hanging on
his wall to excite comment. He had scarcely laid the photograph on his
desk to compare it with a cut in one of the newspapers when information
that he was "wanted on the 'phone" made him drop the paper atop of his
dethroned Heroine and hurry into the hall. And the place to which the
telephone invited him was the Ingham publishing house.
The message was from old Gideon Corey, the prop and counselor of the
House of Ingham, father and son. It told Herrick that Ingham senior had
just arrived in New York and had not yet gone to an hotel; he had turned
instinctively to his office, where he besought Herrick, whose name he
had recognized, to come to him and tell him what there was to tell. It
was only the piteous human longing to be brought nearer, by some detail,
by some vision later than our own, to those to whom we shall never be
near again. Herrick flinched from the task, but there could be no
question of his obedience; and he came out from that interview humbly,
softened by the gentleness of such a grief. It seemed to him that he had
never seen so tender a dignity of reserve; that beautiful old gentleman
who had wished to question him had also wished to spare him; wished,
too,--and taken the loyalest precautions--to spare some one else.
"I don't know if you are aware, Mr. Herrick," Ingham's father had said
to him, "that my son was engaged to be married?"
"I had just heard--"
"Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should
be any mention of a--another lady--Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the
old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl--" He paused, as if he were feeling
for words delicate enough for what he had to say; and then a little
breath that was like a cry broke from him. "My son was a wild boy, Mr.
Herrick, but he loved her--he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to
her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining--?
I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my
son?"
Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I
do?"
"Mr. Ingham means to ask"--Corey interposed--"whether, at the--the
inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you
observed?"
Thus, for the second time that day, from what different mouths and under
what different circumstances, came the same request! And there passed
over Herrick that little shiver of the skin which takes place, the
country people tell you, when some one steps over your grave.
"Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might
have been a man's shadow--?"
"I was not mistaken--Why, look here!" he continued, eagerly. "Can't you
see that it would be the worst kind of a mistake for me to change now?
They'd think I'd heard who the woman was, and was trying to shield her!
And, besides," he added to Corey, "it's your only clue." It occurred to
him, as he spoke, that Ingham's family might be concerned for his
reputation rather than for vengeance; this continued to seem probable
even while they assured him that it was not the police, but Miss Hope
alone, from whom they wished to keep the circumstance; they were
thinking of what would have been the dead man's dearest wish. What she
read in the papers they could perhaps deny; but what she heard at the
inquest--
When, however, they reluctantly agreed with him that it was too late for
any effectual reticence it was with unabated kindliness that Corey went
with him into the hall. "We remain infinitely obliged to you, Mr.
Herrick, and--later on--we mustn't lose track of you again--Well,
good-morning! Good-morning!"
It was nearly afternoon and Herrick stepped out from the dark,
old-fashioned elevator into its sunny heat, which occasional spattering
showers had vainly tried to dissipate, with a very highly charged sense
of moving among vivid personalities. Concerning two of these there
persisted a certain lack of reassurance, and as that of Ingham
brightened or darkened the shadow herself now shone as a tigress
devouring, now an avenging angel. Sometimes her figure stood out
clearly, by itself; sometimes it wavered and changed, and passed,
whether Herrick willed it or not, into the figure of Christina Hope.
Then, whether for Deutch's or Ingham's sake, or for Evadne's, there was
something oppressive in the sunshine.
But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to
himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift
events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all
this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself,
were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His
walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow
of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer
a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his
brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he
heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by a _Record_
acquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost
eagerness.
The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely
one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she
could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He
found himself hailed into the office of the _Record_, whence they had
been madly telephoning him this long while, and immediately
commissioned, at the price of a high, temporary specialist, to report
the Ingham inquest, and to write a Sunday special of the murder!
He thought of Ingham's father, and "It isn't a tasty job!" he said to
his old chief. But it swept upon him what material it was; it felt, in
his empty hand, like the key of success; and then, there is always in
our ears at such a time the whisper that it will certainly be done by
somebody. "And never, surely," Herrick wrote his sister that night, "so
chastely, so justly, with either such dash or such discretion, as by our
elegant selves!"
This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey
reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a
tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over
Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation
through the _Record_ phone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk
some things over during lunch!
"To shake the iron hand of Fate" was becoming so much the rule that
Herrick was nearly capable of feeling gripped by it even in the somewhat
remote circumstances that the Pilgrims' had been founded as a club of
actors and, overrun as it was by men of all professions and particularly
literary men, it had remained essentially a club of actors--while he,
Bryce Herrick, hastening toward it through a smart shower, had at first
conceived of his novel as a play and then, in Switzerland, been baffled
by the inaccessibility of that world! His novel, of whom the heroine had
been so unwittingly Christina Hope!--However, the low, wide portals of
the Pilgrims' received him under their great, wrought iron lanterns
without excitement and he passed, self-consciously and with a certain
shyness, into the cooling twilight of a hallway still perfectly calm and
over the lustrous, glinting sweeps of easy and quite indifferent stairs
up to an "apartment brown and booklined" that looked out on a green
park.
At one of the windows Corey stood talking to a dark, heavy, vigorous man
whose face was familiar to Herrick and whom Corey introduced as Robert
Wheeler. It was a name of note but Herrick bewilderedly exclaimed "Miss
Hope's manager?" Two or three men turned to Wheeler and grinned and he,
himself, said with a gruff chuckle, yes, he supposed it had come to
that, already! Herrick's embarrassed tactlessness sought refuge in
looking out of doors.
The famous square had kept its ancient privacy secure from all the
city's noise and hurry. It was still, secluded; self-sufficient with an
old-world grace; and the green park shone fresh after the shower, its
flower beds and the window boxes of its grave, dark houses gave out a
delicate, glimmering sparkle along with their moist and newly piercing
sweetness. Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces,
the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed
club--neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even
Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole
place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann
Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted
round her name. The blithe young gentlemen in light clothes, fussing
over with cigarette smoke and real and unreal English accents, the older
men, less saddled and bridled and fit for the fray but still with
something at once lazy and boyish in the quick sensibility of their
faces, appeared to have no very lurid intensities up their sleeve and
amid so much serene and humorous assurance Ingham senior's "sweet, good
girl," Hermann Deutch's "Miss Christina" seemed better founded in kind
and credible probabilities. She bloomed, indeed, hedged with all
proprieties in the sound of Wheeler's voice saying, "But must Miss Hope
appear at the inquest?"
"Yes," said Corey, tartly, "since her name will add to its notoriety!
Have you forgotten our coroner?" Wheeler lifted his thick brows in
annoyance and with the same sourness of inflection Corey added, "Is it
possible any corner of the universe can for a moment forget Cuyler Ten
Euyck!"
Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You
don't mean--"
"Precisely! The mighty in high places--Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler
Ten Euyck! No less!"
Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss
Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes
with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his
always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire--the
world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his
taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his
poor jaw broken one of these days!"
Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on
putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out
onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon
as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But--I've been so long
away--this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck--"
"Can you think there are two?"
Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of
the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as
coroner--coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's
meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme
youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full
significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a
startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have
aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and
public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him
as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of
elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the
people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned
during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government,
took his caste and its duties much too seriously.--"But why coroner?"
Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had
been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had
run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency
in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the
least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power
by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could
condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world
ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical,
was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the
diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were
launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking
himself for a kind of District Attorney.--I may as well say, Mr.
Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy
should have authority in--in dealing with Mr. James. There was never
anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a
book of his once!"
"But, great heavens,--"
"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman
soldiery--with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle
saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now,
it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's
eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to
think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books!
It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I
tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest
admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out
your novel."
Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become
articulate before--such is our mortal frailty--his slight, but hitherto
persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and
moldered in dust away.
"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript.
Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him.
He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking
about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there
yesterday--think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!--working out his ideas
for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and
the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very
different from Mr. Ten Euyck's--"
A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong
contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased
abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you--you're a man with
a mania!"
The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on
crime."
Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you
think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the
plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is
corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal
class."
"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the
challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the
decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy
surface, one of two things--either you can cut it away and save the
apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will
open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because
the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his
chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty
and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer
height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and
long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions.
Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find
the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent
and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something
funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker
leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly.
His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole
Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might
not be amusing at all!
Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a
trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's
guest--Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest--to
give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All
very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting
oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged!
It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must,
to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have
to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell
because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham--his admirer--which
Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove
prejudicial to Christina Hope--she whose face had been his heart's
companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had
become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became;
the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man.
Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a
sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of
Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on
whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a
trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to
taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch
things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made
for success.
The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown
accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze.
Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the
lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's
game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable
impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting
players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and
even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood
which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of
himself as a prosecutor--he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously
assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him
justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the righteous
and life a thing continually coming up before him to be weighed, found
wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then--with a spring--to
crush--it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten
Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of
one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason,
provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions--ideas, too,
daily spreading--must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and
the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a
rebel.--Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. B. C. Ten
Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at
a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the
symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of
a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game.
But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of
a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your
aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the
hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will
run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions
add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched
off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was
not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the
excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word
"crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched;
and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical
contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less
was a name named--nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues,
of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating,
thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead
me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all
dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's
inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and
bore his host away.
In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a
mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
"Kane?"
"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to
pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But
our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll
become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular
appetite for the scalps of women!"
Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused
apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be
presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance
connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to
Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions
had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always
prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the
defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could
scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest!
Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should
nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the
afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the _Record_, he could not
rout his distaste for his own evidence.
Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and
early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when
he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hote in the
neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers
and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory
cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a
chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the
beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a
tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so
far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthy _dame de
comptoir_ was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and
neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such
surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed
and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun
flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them,
through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a
worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat
there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain
sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.
He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his
perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner,
practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest
daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses
of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her
mother was setting a long table for some fete, and, when the guests
began to come, he still waited in his corner, idly watching.
They were all men and all poor, but all lively; there was an almost
feminine sweetness in the gallantry of the Latin effervescence with
which they passed a loving-cup in some general ceremony. And no woman
could have been more beautiful than the tall Sicilian whose grave
stateliness, a little stern from the furrowing of brows still touched
with Saracen blood, faced Herrick from the table's farther end. Herrick
even inquired, as he paid his check, who this imposing creature was and
the Yankee woman replied with unconcern that he was Mr. Gumama, who ran
a pool-game at the barber's.
It charmed Herrick to combine this name and occupation with the fervent
kisses which Mr. Gumama, rising majestically and swooping to the nearer
end of the table, implanted, one on each cheek, upon the hero of the
fete. All the guests, as each finished the ceremonial draught, followed
his example. None of the rest, however, had Saracen brows, nor long,
grim earrings whose fringe swing beneath three stories of gilt squares.
The Yankee woman turned contemptuously from "such monkey-shines," but
Herrick lingered till the last kiss and as he even then walked home
through the hot cloudy night it was after nine o'clock before he reached
there. He had not been in since morning and he was greatly to blame. For
he had had a caller and the caller was Cuyler Ten Euyck!
The Grubeys were greatly excited by this circumstance and it excited
Herrick, too. The coroner had himself examined Ingham's apartment and
then the conscientious creature had climbed the stairs to Herrick's. He
had even waited in the hope that his witness might return. All this was
proudly poured forth while Herrick was also asked to examine a rival
public interest--a most peculiar prize which the corner saloon-keeper's
son had been awarded at a private school; he had loaned it to Johnnie
Grubey for twenty-four hours if Johnnie would let him see the revolver
with which Herrick would have shot the murderer last night if the
murderer had been there! It was a sort of return in kind; for the
school prize was also a revolver.
It was a very little one and Johnnie insisted that it was solid gold. On
the handle was a monogram of three capital A's in small bright stones,
white, green and red--near them a straggling C had been wantonly
scratched. Johnnie averred that the A's stood for Algebra, Astronomy and
Art-Drawing and even had the combination of studies for one prize been
less remarkable Herrick would have suspected that the boy was lying.
What he suspected he hardly knew; still less when he discovered that
this unwontedly sympathetic prize was, after all, a fake. The little
golden pistol was not a pistol, but a curiously pointless trinket--the
cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all
in one piece!--"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he
never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses.
But Herrick's head was full of other things. As he opened his door he
grinned to think of that aristocratic scion waiting in his humble
bedroom. Well, it had been a great day! Even if he had lost heart for
that taxi-ride up the river with Evadne! And then from long habit, he
glanced at Evadne's empty place.
The picture had left an unfaded spot on the wall-paper. "I suppose I
might add 'And on my heart!'" said Herrick. He lifted the concealing
newspaper. Then he went out and made inquiries. No one but Ten Euyck and
Mrs. Grubey had been in the room nor had Mrs. Grubey noticed that the
picture had been moved. Now Herrick was certain he had left the likeness
under the newspaper, lying face up. It was still under the newspaper,
but face down. He said to himself, with a shrug of annoyance, that the
coroner had made good use of his time.
CHAPTER VIII
MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS
The morning of the inquest was cloudy, with a wet wind. Herrick was
nervous, and he could not be sure whether this nervousness sprang from
the ardor of championship or accusation. But one thing was clear.
Christina Hope had slain Evadne and closed his mouth to Sal; but, at
last, he was to see her, face to face.
She was there when he arrived, sitting in a corner with her mother.
Herrick recognized her at once, but with a horrid pang of
disappointment. Was this his Diana of the Winds? Or yet his Destroying
Angel? This was only a tall quiet girl in a gray gown. To be more exact
it was a gray ratine suit, with a broad white collar, and her small gray
hat seemed to fold itself close in to the shape of her little head; the
low coil of her hair was very smooth. Herrick observed with something
oddly akin to satisfaction that he had been right about her
coloring--there were the fair skin, the brown hair, the eyes cool as
gray water. Under these to-day there were dark shadows and her face was
shockingly pale.
The first witness called was a Doctor Andrews. After the preliminary
questions as to name, age, and so forth, he was asked, "You reside in
the Van Dam Apartments?"
"I do."
"On what floor?"
"The ninth."
"On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?"
"Not until I heard the pistol-shot--that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing
his piano--if you could call that unusual."
"He often played late at night?"
"He had been away during the summer; but, before that, there was a great
deal of complaint. He gave a great many supper-parties; at the same
time, he was such a charming fellow that people forgave him whenever he
wished. Besides, he was a magnificent musician."
"Were there ladies at these supper-parties?"
"Not to my personal knowledge."
"What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?"
"I looked out of the window, and saw nothing. I thought I might have
been mistaken; it might have been a tire bursting. But I noticed that
the piano had stopped."
After the shot the witness had remained restless.
"Presently I thought I heard some one hammering. I got up again and
opened the door and then I heard it distinctly. I know now that it was
the efforts of Mr. Herrick to break Ingham's lock with a revolver. I
could hear a mixture of sounds--movements. I went back and began to get
my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang."
"Tell us what it said."
"It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B
in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'"
"And you went?"
"Immediately."
"He was dead on your arrival?"
"Quite."
"How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?"
"Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes."
"Had the death been instantaneous?"
"Certainly. He was shot through the heart."
"Then, in your opinion, if the deceased had taken his own life, he could
not have sprung off the electric lights, nor in any fashion done away
with the weapon, after the shot."
"He certainly could not."
"In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?"
"There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not."
"You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?"
"Absolutely positive. Death was instantaneous. Also, there was no powder
about the wound, showing that the shot had been fired from a distance of
four feet or more. Also, the body did not lie where it had fallen."
"How do you know that?"
"There was a little puddle of blood in the sitting-room, where Ingham
fell. Your physician and myself called the attention of the police to
marks on the rugs following a trail of drops of blood into the bedroom
where the body was found."
"You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered
there, after the shooting?"
"I do not."
"You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?"
"Yes."
"You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor
Shippe?"
"I did."
"Dr. Andrews, the apartment in which the shooting occurred had no access
to the windows of any other apartment, no fire-escape, and no means of
egress except through a door which was found bolted on the inside.
Suppose that a murder was committed. Have you any theory accounting for
the murderer's escape?"
"None whatever."
"And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your
theory of the impossibility of suicide?"
"Not in the least. It is unshakable."
"Thank you. That will do."
The coroner's physician confirmed Dr. Andrews in every particular. The
coroner settled back and seemed to pause. And the listeners drew a long
breath. Something at least had been decided. It was not suicide. It was
murder.
This had been established so completely and so early in the examination
that Herrick found himself impressed with the idea of the coroner's
knowing pretty distinctly what he was about. It seemed that he might
very well have some theory to establish, for which, in the first place,
he had now cleared the ground. Herrick stole a glance at Deutch. His
face was wet and colorless, and his eyes fixed on vacancy. And then,
curious to note the effect of hearing her lover proclaimed foully
murdered, he permitted himself the cruelty of looking at Miss Hope.
Apparently it had no effect on her at all. Her mother, a slight,
handsome woman, very fashionably turned out, followed eagerly every
suggestion of the evidence. But the girl still sat with lowered eyes.
The next evidence, that of the police, threw no further light; and then
came the tremulous Theodore of Herrick's acquaintance whose surname
transpired as Bird.
Bird, too, had been awake and had heard the shot; he had been fully
aware from the first that it was a pistol-shot. He and Mrs. Bird had
risen and put up the chain on their door, and then he had telephoned to
the superintendent.
"Did the hall-boy connect you at once?"
"It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy."
"Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?"
"No, I was a long time getting him."
"The boy?"
"Yes."
"Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your
connection with the superintendent immediate?"
"Almost immediate, I guess."
"It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?"
The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped
his eyes.
"Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have
been asleep, too."
"Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?"
"Through the 'phone?"
"Certainly. Through the 'phone."
"He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.)
"Well? Go on!"
"I said, 'Excuse me. But I heard a shot just now, in 4-B.' And he said,
'A pistol-shot?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you think somebody
has got hurt?' And I said, 'I'm afraid so.' Then he said, 'Well, I'll
come up.'"
"Did he seem excited?"
"Not so much as I was."
Mrs. Bird, though she described at some length her forethought in
dressing and getting their valuables together, had nothing material to
add. Nor had the widow and her son in the apartment below that in which
the catastrophe took place; nor the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Willing, in the
apartment across the court which had been invaded as a look-out station
by the police, anything further to relate; until, indeed, the lady
stumbled upon the phrase--"The party had been going on for some time."
"In 4-B?"
"What? Yes."
"What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?"
"There were voices. And then he often had them."
"Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at
these parties?"
"I wouldn't like to say."
"I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?"
"I don't know."
"About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?"
"Oh, not many at all. There was poor Mr. Ingham's voice, nearly all the
time. And maybe a couple of others. I was in my bedroom, trying to
sleep, and the piano was going all the time."
"I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham,
and there may have been only one?"
"Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a
third one, anyhow."
"Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"
"I don't know."
"Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?"
"Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No."
"Now, Mrs. Willing, I want you to be very careful. And I want you to try
and remember. Please tell exactly all that you can remember about what I
am going to ask you and nothing more."
"Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully."
"I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are
certain you heard at least two voices?"
"Yes, I am, I--"
"Mr. Ingham's and one other?"
"Yes, sir."
"Was that other voice the voice of a man?"
"No, sir."
"It was a woman's voice?"
"I--I suppose so."
"Aren't you sure?"
"Well, yes, I am."
"Was it angry, excited?"
"Toward the end it was."
"As if the speaker were losing control of herself?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?"
"The woman's voice?"
"Yes."
"I can't be sure."
"What do you think?"
"Well, I thought I had, yes. I told Mr. Willing so. He'd been to a
bridge party upstairs and he came down just along there."
"You recognized it then?"
"Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes."
"Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?"
"Oh, sir,--I--I'd rather not say!"
"You must say, Mrs. Willing."
"Well, then, I'll just say I don't know."
"That won't do, Mrs. Willing.--When you told your husband that you
thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?"
"Well, I said--oh!--I--Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's
engaged to in there with him.'"
"Ah!--And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was
engaged to?"
"Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course,
I haven't said I was sure!"
"Thank you. That will do."
CHAPTER IX
JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED
A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was
the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along
had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall,
dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something
sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild
animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp
and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then
collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking
indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected
girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she
was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will
have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with
exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed
it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained
her composure intact.
But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a
long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It
was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards
earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once
she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there.
In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact
profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more
to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there _was_ something
royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that
obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus
expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little
girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding
her!--"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.
The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence
was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon
Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At
last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who
saw _something_."
Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to
in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which
hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was
still hungry.
The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr.
Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or
thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"
They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of
changing spirit in Ingham's music.
"That crash which waked you for the second time--do you think it could
have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?--that he may have been
struck and thrown against the piano?"
"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of
hellish eloquence."
"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was
asked--"That gesture which so greatly impressed you--do you think you
could repeat it for us?"
Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool
of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."
"Kindly do so."
"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide
angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while
the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if
they were of some stiff mechanism--and it seemed to me that it was the
violence of her feeling they were stiff with--until the whole hand was
open, like a stretched gauntlet."
"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"
"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered
her face."
"And then she disappeared?"
"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."
"As if to pick something up?"
"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."
"From a chair, then, or the couch?"
"Possibly."
"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from
the piano, where Ingham sat?"
"I should say about that."
"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the
shooting?--this forward dip?"
"After? No, it was before!"
"Ah--And directly after the shot the lights went out?"
"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."
"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague
outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from
the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or
something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure
that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in
the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can
quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of
her personality?"
Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said--"I don't think so."
"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very
distinct impression?"
"In what way?"
"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or
emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in
movement."
Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that.
Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little
indifferent to social constraint."
The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well,
then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your
mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a
gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"
"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina
the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You
answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to
confuse my evidence with yours!"
The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young
man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not
falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence
has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing
an actress."
"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly,
"and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"
"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down
Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"
"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right
to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't
want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."
"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."
Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing
him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he
found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.
It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not,
indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The
superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself
been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation
with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked
upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his
proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in
caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him
appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the
easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what
he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly
perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and
to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in
a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not
accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public
that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages.
So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew
from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies
at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various
tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of
the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect
Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.
"I didn't,"--Mr. Deutch burst forth--"keep 'em quiet any because she was
there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her
foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put
out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to
him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated
tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and
she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that
she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I
didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him
already."
"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch.
Miss Hope, now,--you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe.
And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
"I'd do anything at all for her."
"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even
to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder
for her sake?--Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the
coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say,
when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out
you don't go a little too far."
"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh,
"who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward,
saying something about "telephoned--accident--get here shortly."
"See that he does,--The day-elevator boy in court!"
Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race
went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have
been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim,
blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a
faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping
down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence
Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the
assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with
hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's
cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of
atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled
up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that
trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious.
Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression,
looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie
Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably
tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.
Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of
bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a
murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in
life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's
self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card
to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him
of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important
question asked him ran--"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from
Europe--the day, in fact, of his death--did Mr. Ingham have any
callers?"
"Yes, sir. He had one."
Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.
Apart from interruptions, his story ran--"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a
good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse;
but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet.
She wouldn't give her name. But not one o' _that_ sort, you understand.
She came up to me--the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her
job--and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on
herself,--'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he
expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she
said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat.
That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum--no parlor. I was really
sorry for the little lady--no, not short, but the kind a man just
naturally calls little--she was so nervous and she talked about as loud
as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come
upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says.
And while they were waiting for the elevator--the hall-boy wasn't much
on running it--she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get
Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite
understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had
his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him.
The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't
answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the
door when he was in it and off."
"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"
"Nop! He got back about six--chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out
in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."
He was dismissed, strutting.
"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner,
"Miss Christina Hope."
CHAPTER X
JOE PATRICK ARRIVES
If the young actress and Ten Euyck, now at his best as the coroner, had,
as Corey had suggested, any previous knowledge of each other, neither of
them stooped to signify it now.
"Your name, if you please?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"May one ask a lady's age?"
"Twenty-two years."
She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. -- West 93rd
Street. The girl spoke very low, but clearly, and of these dry
preliminaries in her case not a syllable was lost. Her audience, leaning
forward with thumbs down, still took eagerly all that she could give
them. On being offered a chair, she said that she would stand--"Unless,
of course, you would rather I did not."
The coroner replied to this biddable appeal--"I shan't keep you a moment
longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few
questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject;
and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may call
_personally_ intended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope
you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause."
"Oh, certainly."
"You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?"
"Yes."
"When did this engagement take place?"
"About a year ago."
"And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?"
"Yes."
"When did you last see him alive?"
"On the day before he--died. He drove to our house from the ship."
"Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined
together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?"
"No."
"No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August--the
evening of his death?"
"My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good
spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal--everything had gone wrong. My
head ached and my mother was worn out with trying to get our house in
order; it was a new house, we were just moving in."
"You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?"
"Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat."
A smile of sympathy stirred through her audience. It might be stupidity
which kept her from showing any resentment toward a man who had
practically accused her of murder. Or, it might be guilt. But she was so
young, so docile, so demure! Her voice was so low and it came in such
shy breaths--there was something so immature in the little rushes and
hesitations of it. She seemed such a sweet young lady! After all, they
didn't want to feed her to the tigers yet awhile!
And the coroner was instantly aware of this. "Then your mother," he
said, "is the only person who can corroborate your story of how you
passed that evening?"
"Yes."
"How did you pass it?"
"I worked on my part until after eleven, but I couldn't get it. Then I
took a letter of my mother's out to the post-box."
"At that hour! Alone!"
"Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air."
"You came straight home?"
"Yes."
"While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?"
"On the way to the post-box I saw Mrs. Johnson, who lives two doors
below and who had told us about the house being for rent. She is the
only person whom I know in the neighborhood. On the way back I met no
one."
"Then no one saw you re-enter the house?"
"I think not."
"Did the maid let you in?"
"No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed."
"But it was a very hot night. People sat up late, with all their windows
open, and caretakers in particular must have been sitting on the steps,
some one must have seen you return."
"Perhaps they did."
"Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to
your return?"
"No one."
"What did you do when you came in?"
"I went to bed."
"You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?"
"No."
"On the same floor?"
"Yes."
"Do you lock your door?"
"No."
"But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?"
"Not unless something had happened; no."
"Could you pass her door without her hearing you?"
"I should suppose so. I never tried."
"So that you really have no witness but your mother, Miss Hope, that you
returned to the house, and no witness whatever that you remained in it?"
"No," Christina breathed.
"Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when
and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?"
"In the morning, early, the telephone began to ring and ring. I could
hear my mother and the maids hurrying about the house, but I felt so ill
I did not try to get up. I knew I had a hard day's work ahead of me, and
I wanted to keep quiet. But, at last, just as I was thinking it must be
time, my mother came in and told me to lie still; that she would bring
up my breakfast herself. I said I must go to rehearsal at any rate; and
she said, 'No, you are not to go to rehearsal to-day; something has
happened.'"
The naivete of Christina's phrases sank to an awed whisper; her eyes
were very fixed, like those of a child hypnotized by its own vision.
"I saw then that she was trying not to tremble and that she had been
crying. She couldn't deny it, and so she told me that Mr. Ingham was
very, very ill, and she let me get up and helped me to dress. But then,
when I must see other people--she told me--she told me--"
Christina's throat swelled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears.
The coroner, cursing the sympathy of the situation, forced himself to a
commiserating, "Did she say how he died?"
"She told me it was an accident. I said, 'What kind of an accident?' And
she said he was shot. 'But,' I said, 'how could he be shot by an
accident? He didn't have any pistol? You know he didn't own such a
thing.'" A slight sensation traversed the court. "Then it came out--that
no one knew--that people were saying it was--murder--"
"Do you believe that, Miss Hope?"
"I don't know what to believe."
"Did Mr. Ingham have any enemies?"
"I knew of none."
"From your intimate knowledge of Mr. Ingham's affairs you know of no
one, either with a grudge to satisfy or a profit to be made, by his
death?"
"No. No one at all."
"So that you have really no theory as to how this terrible thing
happened?"
"No, really, I haven't."
"Well, then, I suppose we may excuse you, Miss Hope."
The girl, with her tranquil but slightly timid dignity, inclined her
head, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, turned away.--
--"Oh, by the way, Miss Hope,--" And suddenly, with a violent change of
manner, he began to beat her down by the tactics which he had used with
Deutch. But with how different a result! Nothing could make that pale,
tall girl ridiculous. Scarcely speaking above a breath, she answered
question after question and patiently turned aside insult after insult.
He found no opposition, no confusion, no reticence; nothing but that
soft yielding, that plaintive ingenuousness. The crudest jokes, the
cruelest thrusts still left her anxiously endeavoring to convey desired
information. He took her back over her relations with Ingham, their
interview upon his return, the events of the last evening, with an
instance and a repetition that wearied even the auditors to distraction;
he would let her run on a little in her answers and then bring her up
with a round turn; twenty times he took with her that journey to and
from the post-box and examined every step, and still her replies ran
like sand through his fingers and left no trace behind. But, at last,
she put out a hand toward the chair she had rejected, and sank slowly
into it. Then indeed it became plain that she was profoundly exhausted.
And because her exhaustion was so natural and so pitiable, the coroner,
watching its effect, said, "Well, I can think of nothing more to ask
you, Miss Hope. I suppose it would be useless to inquire whether, being
familiar with the apartment, you could suggest any way in which, the
door being bolted, the murderer could have escaped?"
Christina looked up at him with a very faint smile and with her humble
sweetness that had become almost stupidity, she said, "Perhaps the
murderer wasn't in the apartment at all!"
The whole roomful of tired people sat up. "Not in the apartment! And
where, then, pray?"
"Well," said Christina, softly, "he could have been shot through an open
window, I suppose. Of course, I'm only a woman, and I shouldn't like to
suggest anything. Because, of course, I'm not clever, as a lawyer is.
But--"
"Well, we're waiting for this suggestion!"
"Oh!--Well, it seems to me that when this lady, whose shadow excited the
young gentleman so much, disappeared as if it went forward, perhaps it
did go forward, perhaps she ran out of the room. You can see--if you
don't mind stopping to think about it--that she must have been standing
right opposite the door. If she had been quarreling with Mr. Ingham, he
may have bolted the door after her. I don't know if you've looked--but
the button for the lights is right there--in the panel of the wall
between the door and the bedroom arch. Mr. Ingham was a very nervous,
emotional person. If there had been a scene, he might very well have
meant to switch the lights out after her, too. If he had his finger on
the button when the bullet struck him, he might very well, in the shock,
have pressed it. And then the lights would have gone out, almost as if
the bullet had put them out, just as the young man says. But, of course,
if this were what had happened, you would have thought of it for
yourself." And she looked up meekly at him, with her sweet smile.
The coroner smiled, too, with compressed lips, and putting his hands in
his pockets, threw back his head. "And how do you think, then, that--if
he was killed instantly, as the doctors have testified,--the corpse
walked into the bedroom, where it was found?"
"Ah!" said Christina, "I can't account for everything! I'm not an
observer, like you! But there has never been, has there, a doctor who
was ever wrong? Of course, I don't pretend to know."
"Well, it's a pretty theory, my dear young lady, and I'm sure you mean
to work it out for us all you can. So give us a hint where this bullet,
coming through an open window, was fired from."
"It could have been fired from the apartment opposite. Across the
entrance-court. You remember, the policeman who went in there found that
the windows exactly--do you call it 'tallied'?"
"Very good, Miss Hope. If it were an unoccupied apartment. But it is
occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Willing, and Mrs. Willing was in the apartment
the entire evening."
"Yes," said Christina, turning and looking pleasantly at the lady
mentioned, "alone." Then she was silent.
After a staggered instant, the coroner asked, "And what became of this
lady who ran out into the hall?"
"Well, of course," said Christina, sweetly, "if it was Mrs. Willing--"
The Willings leaped to their feet. "This is ridiculous! This is an
outrage! Why!" cried the husband, "his blind opposite our sitting-room
was down all the time. There isn't even a hole through it where a shot
would have passed!"
"Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew
that!"
"What do you mean, you wicked girl! How dare you! Why, you heard the
policeman say that it was only when he looked through our bedroom that
he could see into Mr. Ingham's apartment--"
"And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?"
"Miss Hope!" said the coroner, sternly, "I must ask you not to
perpetrate jokes. You know perfectly well that your implied charge
against Mrs. Willing is perfectly ridiculous--"
"Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!"
And for the first time she lifted to his a glance alight with the
faintest mockery of malice; a wintry gleam, within the white exhaustion
of her face. Then,--if all the time she had been playing a part--then,
if ever, she was off her guard.
And she could not see what Herrick, from his angle, could see very well;
that the coroner had been quietly slipping something from his desk into
his hand, and was now dangling it behind his back.
This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table--that white scarf
with its silky border, cloudy, watery, of blue glimmering into gray. How
the tender, misty coloring recalled that room of Ingham's!
"Don't you know very well, Miss Hope," the coroner went on, "that Mrs.
Willing had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Ingham's death?"
"How can I? You see, I wasn't there!"
"So that, by no possibility," said the coroner, "could this be yours?"
He launched the scarf, like a soft, white serpent, almost in her face.
And the girl shrank from it, with a low cry. She might as well have
knotted it about her neck.
And in the horrible stillness that followed her cry, the coroner said,
"Your nerves seem quite shattered, Miss Hope. I was only going to ask
you if you didn't think that ornament, in case it was not yours, might
have been left on Mr. Ingham's table by the young lady who called on him
that afternoon."
With a brave attempt at her former mild innocence, Christina responded,
"I don't know."
"Neither can you tell us, I suppose,--it would straighten matters out
greatly--who that caller was?"
"No, I can't. I'm sorry."
"Think again, Miss Hope. Are there so many smartly dressed and pretty
young ladies of your acquaintance, with curly red hair and, as Mr. Dodd
informs us, with cute little feet?"
Christina was silent.
"What? And yet she knows you well enough to say to your fiance--'I don't
wish to get Christina into trouble'!" Whose was the smile of malice,
now! "Come, come, Miss Hope, you're trifling with us! Tell us the
address of this lady, and you'll make us your debtors!"
The girl opened her pale lips to breathe forth, "I can't tell you! I
don't know!"
"Let us assist your memory, Miss Hope, by recalling to you the lady's
name. Her name is Ann Cornish."
Herrick's nerves leaped like a frightened horse. And then he saw
Christina start from her chair, and, casting round her a wild glance
that seemed to cry for help, drop back again and put her hands over her
face. A dozen people sprang to their feet.
Mrs. Hope ran to her daughter's side, closely followed by Mrs. Deutch.
The two women, crying forth indignation and comfort, and exclaiming that
the girl was worn out and ought to be in bed, rubbed Christina's head,
and began to chafe her hands. She was half fainting; but when a glass of
whiskey had appeared from somewhere and Mrs. Deutch had forced a few
drops between her lips, Christina, unlike the heroine of romance whose
faints always refuse stimulants, lifted her head and drank a mouthful
greedily. She sat there then, breathing through open lips, with a trace
of color mounting in her face.
Then the coroner, once more commanding attention, held up a slip of
pasteboard. "This visiting-card," he said, "is engraved with Miss
Cornish's name, but with no address. It was found leaning against a
candlestick on Mr. Ingham's piano, as though he wished to keep it
certainly in mind. As a still further reminder, Mr. Ingham himself had
written on it in pencil--'At four.'"
Christina, with the gentlest authority, put back her friends. She rose,
slowly and weakly, to her feet. "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to
correct a false impression; may I?"
[Illustration: "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false
impression; may I?"]
"That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully
replied.
"I have said nothing," she went on, "that is not true, but I have
allowed something to be inferred which is not true." She pressed her
hands together and drew a long breath. "It is true that I was engaged to
Mr. Ingham. And when you asked me if our understanding was unimpaired at
the time of his death, I said yes; for, believe me, our understanding
then was better than it had ever been before. But that was not what you
meant. I will answer what you meant, now. At the time of his death, I
was not engaged to marry Mr. Ingham."
"You were not! Why not?"
"We had quarreled."
"When?"
"The day before he died."
An intense excitement began to prevail. Herrick longed to stand up and
shout, to warn her, to muzzle her. Good God! was it possible she
didn't see what she was doing? The coroner, weary man, sat back with a
long sigh of satisfaction. His whole attitude said, "Now we're coming to
it."
"And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the
engagement?"
"I did."
"Oh, of course, _naturally_. And may one ask why?"
"Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be
possible to me."
"But on what grounds?"
"He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some
women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't."
"Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?"
"Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular."
"There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?"
Christina looked through him without replying.
"Well, well. And was there nothing but this?"
"He objected to my profession; and when I was first in love with him I
thought that I could give it up for his sake. But as I came to know more
of--everything--and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could
not. And I would not."
"So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your
renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?"
"If you like."
"At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?"
"It made it unbearable. And as it gradually became clear to me that he
scarcely pretended to practise even the rudiments of the fidelity that
he exacted, it seemed to me that there were limits to the insults which
even a gentleman may offer to his betrothed. And I--freed myself."
Two or three people exchanged glances.
"Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?"
"We had quarreled before, but not definitely. Last spring I asked him to
release me, and he would not. But he consented to my remaining on the
stage, and to going away for the summer, so that I could think things
out."
"And you immediately took a house from which to be married!"
"Yes. I tried to go on with it. I thought furnishing it might make me
want to. But I couldn't. I wrote him so, and he came home. While he was
on the ocean I found out something which made any marrying between us
utterly impossible. When he drove to my house the day before he was
killed, I told him so. We had a terrible scene, but he knew then as well
as I that it was the end. I never saw him again."
"As a matter of fact, then, the definite breaking of the engagement was
caused by something new and wholly extraneous to your profession or his
jealousy?"
"Yes."
"And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?"
"Oh!" said Christina, quite simply, "I am not going to tell you that."
And she suddenly began to speak quite fast. "Do you think I don't know
what I am doing when I say that? Do you think you have not taught me?
But I don't care about appearing innocent any longer. And so I know,
now, what I'm saying. I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It
had nothing to do with Mr. Ingham's death. It was simply
something--monstrous--which happened a long time ago. But, between us
two, it had to fall like a gulf. More than that I will not tell you. And
you can never make me."
"And you don't know Ann Cornish?"
Christina hesitated. "Of course I thought of her. But I couldn't bear
to have that little girl brought into it. She's only twenty," Christina
added, as if the difference in their ages were half a century. "And,
besides, how could it be she? She scarcely knew Mr. Ingham; she never
had an appointment with him; I can't believe she ever told him ill of
me. She is my dearest friend. But ask her, Mr. Coroner, ask her. Her
address is--" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied.
"She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress,
poor child!"
"Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,--you don't care
about appearing innocent any longer?"
"I mean that never again will I go through what I have gone through this
afternoon. You have asked me the last question I shall answer. You've
made me sound like a liar, and feel like a liar; you've made me turn and
twist and dodge, trying to convince you of the truth about me, and now
that I have told you all the truth, you may think a lie about me, if you
choose!"
Her face was all alive, now, and her voice thrilled out its deep notes,
impassioned as they were soft. "Oh, I wished so much to say nothing! Not
to have to stand up here and tell all sorts of intimate things, in this
horrible place before these gaping people! But when you began to worry
me, to threaten and jeer at me, trying to trip me, I was afraid of you!
I know people say that your one thought is to make a mark and have a
career, and I seemed to see in your face that you would be glad to kill
me for that. I remembered all I had ever heard of you; how you hated
women--once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;--how you copied an
attorney who made all his reputation by the prosecution, by the
persecution, of women, and how they say you never run a woman so hard as
when she has to work for her living, as I do, and stands exposed to
every scandal, as I am! And so I tried to convince you, to answer
everything you asked; I am in great trouble, and I am not so very old,
and since this came I have scarcely eaten and not slept at all. For if
you imagine that, because I haven't really loved him this long while, it
is easy to bear thinking how his life had been rived out of him like
that, oh, you are wrong--and my nerves are all in shreds. So that it
seemed as if I must clear myself, as if it were too hideous to be hated,
and to have every one thinking I had murdered him! I struggled to defend
myself, and I let you torture me. But oh, I was wrong, wrong! To be
judged and condemned and insulted, that's hard, but it's not degrading.
But to explain, and pick about, and plead, and wrack your brain to make
people believe your word, oh, that degrades!" She paused on a little
choking breath. "Think what you like! I have no witness but my mother,
and I know very well, in such a case, she doesn't count. I can't prove
that I returned to my house, I can't prove that I stayed in it. It's
worse than useless to try. If I had friends to speak for me do you think
I would have them subjected to what Mr. Deutch has borne for me to-day?
I've nothing that shop-keepers call position; I've no money; I'm all
alone. Think what you please." And Christina crossed the room and sat
down beside her mother.
Conflicting emotions clashed in the silence. She seemed to flash such
different lights! She had so little, now, the manners or the sentiments
of a sweet young lady. Many people were greatly moved, but no one knew
what to think. If Christina had brought herself to slightly more
conciliatory language or if, even now, she had thrown herself girlishly
into her mother's arms, she could, at that moment, easily have melted
the public heart. But she sat with her head tipped back against the
wall, with her eyes on vacancy, and great, slow tears rolling down her
unshielded face, "as bold as brass." And the coroner, leaning forward
across his desk, surveyed the assemblage with a cold, fine smile. "My
friends," he began, "after the young lady's eloquence, I can hardly
expect you to care for mine. Nevertheless, while we are waiting for a
witness unavoidably detained, I will ask you to listen to me. Let us get
into shape what we have already learned.--The first thing of which we
are sure is that James Ingham landed in New York on the afternoon of the
third of August and drove directly to the residence of Miss Christina
Hope, his betrothed. Miss Hope tells us that when he left that house
their engagement was broken; that he was unbearably jealous; that he
disapproved of the profession which she persisted in following and that
they quarreled over something which she refuses to divulge. We have no
witness to this quarrel, but I will ask you to remember it. I will ask
you to remember that neither have we witnesses to Miss Hope's statement
that it was she, rather than Mr. Ingham, who broke the engagement.
"Let us get to our next positive fact. Our next positive fact is that
Mr. Ingham, on the next afternoon, the afternoon of August fourth, had
an appointment with a lady for four o'clock--an appointment the hour of
which he was so anxious not to forget that he wrote it on the lady's
visiting-card, and stood the card against a candle on his piano. Our
next facts are that the lady kept this appointment, that she had a
private interview with Mr. Ingham which greatly excited him; that, as
soon as she was gone, he drove off in a taxi with desperate haste, and
that he returned in about an hour, still under the repressed excitement
of some disagreeable emotion. If, gentlemen of the jury, you should
bring in a verdict warranting the State in examining that cabman and in
questioning Miss Ann Cornish as to the news she imparted to Mr. Ingham,
then, indeed, I am much mistaken if we do not have our hands upon the
great clue to all murders, gentlemen, the motive. For, as you have
clearly perceived, the meeting between Mr. Ingham and Miss Cornish was
not a lover's meeting. Or, if so, it was not a meeting of acknowledged
lovers. Miss Hope tells us that Miss Cornish is her confidential friend,
and, as far as she knew, had only the most formal acquaintance with Mr.
Ingham. No, Miss Cornish had a piece of information to give Mr. Ingham,
and she expected this information to serve her own ends, for she
said--'It is good of you to see me.' And Mr. Ingham found the
information important, for he soon wished it told him at greater length
upstairs, 'where we shall be quite undisturbed.' The lady agrees;
although she adds, 'I don't want to get Christina into trouble.' Now, I
ask you, gentlemen, what could have been her object except to get
Christina into trouble. Why does a pretty young woman who refuses to
give her name come to a specially attractive man with news of her
dearest friend whom she supposes him to be still engaged to marry--news
for which she feels it necessary to apologize--for but one of two
reasons;--either she is in love with him herself, and wishes to injure
her friend in his eyes, or she is in love with some other man and
jealous of her friend whom she wishes warned off by the friend's
legitimate proprietor. In either case, she evidently effected her point
for she sent Mr. Ingham rushing from the house. He, however, apparently
failed in what he set out to do. All this, gentlemen, is but conjecture.
"Here is where I expected to present you with an astonishing bridge of
facts. I had now meant to show you that Mr. Ingham, that evening,
expected an unwelcome visitor; that he left orders she was not to be
admitted; that she came, that she was well-known to the elevator boy,
and to all of us here present as well as to a greater public; that
despite the efforts of the elevator boy, she penetrated to Mr. Ingham's
apartment, whence she was not seen to return, and that she was the only
visitor he had that night. But in the continued absence of the boy,
Joseph Patrick, all this must wait.
"Our next known fact is that Mr. Herrick was wakened by Mr. Ingham's
playing at one or shortly before. You will remember that it was after
eleven when Miss Hope spoke to Mrs. Johnson on her way to the post-box,
and that after that no one but her mother claims to have seen or spoken
with her. For a quarter of an hour, Mr. Herrick tells us, Mr. Ingham
played, calmly and beautifully. All was peace. But then there began to
be the sound of voices talking through the music--the voices, as other
witnesses have testified, of a man and a woman. And the piano begins to
sound fitfully and brokenly. The man and the woman have begun to
quarrel. Their voices--particularly the woman's voice--rise higher and
stormier. Mr. Herrick, with the whole street between, has fallen asleep.
But Mrs. Willing, just across the court, hears a voice she knows, and
says to her husband, who has just come in, 'He's got that actress he's
engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by
a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish
eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his
mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose
shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon
the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman?
Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely,
but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who
has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest
circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression,
without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and
becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose
that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies,
with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and
affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this
exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a
little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be
torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes,
in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit
in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations,
but--contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope--he is perhaps
soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully
withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next
day he receives a call from his fiancee's confidential friend,--very
possibly his informant while he was abroad--who circumstantially
confirms his worst suspicions. Let us suppose he drives wildly to the
house of his betrothed; but she is not at home, and after a time he
gives up looking for her. He comes miserably back, dines out, returns
early, but leaves word that he is not at home. But in the meanwhile may
not the lady have got word of all this? Suppose that when she does, she
comes to him,--at any hour, at any risk,--and uses her hitherto
infallible charm to get him back. Suppose she gets him back; they are
alone together; she is excited and confident and off her guard. She lets
something slip. Instantly the battle is on. This time she cannot get him
back. She becomes desperate. If he speaks, as perhaps he has threatened
to, she loses not only him, but everything. For she is on the brink of
the great step of her career. She is to play the leading feminine role
under a celebrated star, who does not care for scandal in his
advertisements. On the contrary, he has bruited everywhere her youth,
her propriety, her breeding, her good blood. She is a fairy-tale of the
girlish virtues. He has no use for her otherwise. And still the man at
the piano proclaims her everything that is otherwise, and she sees that
she is to lose him and all she has struggled for, professionally, in one
breath. He sits there--he, he, the man who has been continually false to
her, claiming for himself a different morality--he sits there playing,
playing, shattering her nerves with his crash of chords, with his
hellish eloquence. But with his back to her, you observe, where she
stands at the window and suddenly she sees something lying on a little
table or the foot of the couch--something not unusual in a man's
apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not
possess one--something which, perhaps, in his wrecked happiness, he had
loaded earlier in the evening with that sinister intention of suicide in
which Miss Hope's respected friend, Mr. Deutch, so profoundly believes.
Well, gentlemen, the frenzied eye of this tormented girl lights on that
little object, she stoops to pick it up, he turns,--and then comes a
pistol-shot. There is an end to the strength of a woman's nerves,
gentlemen, and she has found it. She cannot look upon her handiwork. She
springs off the light and flees. In the confusion she escapes.
Gentlemen, with the dumbfounding mystery of that bolted door I can not
deal, unless--as Miss Hope has reminded us--medical science may be for
once at fault,--unless the wounded man instinctively staggered to the
door and bolted it, staggered toward his telephone, in his bedroom, and
died there. That, gentlemen, can be threshed out at the trial. In the
meantime, I must ask you to remember that the lady whom events seem to
indicate is high-strung and overwrought; that her natural grief and
nervousness led her through a long cross-examination in which she never
once betrayed any hesitation, or the fact that she had quarreled with
Mr. Ingham or that she was aware of the existence of Ann Cornish, to a
satirical attack upon Mrs. Willing, whose remarks had annoyed her; that,
as she tells us, she has no one to take care of her, and if we are
inclined to think that she can take very good care of herself, we must
remember that when she was confronted with a lady's scarf found not far
from the murdered man, she screamed at the sight of it, and when
confronted with the visiting-card of Ann Cornish, she so much wished her
friend to be kept out of it that she fainted, and, afterwards, _changed
all her evidence_.--Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our
witness, Joseph Patrick."
Joe Patrick, a short, thick-set young fellow, with rough hair and a
bright eye, advanced to the coroner's desk. His forehead was ornamented
with a great deal of very fresh surgeon's plaster, and when asked why he
was so late, he replied that he had been knocked down by an automobile
on his way to the inquest. Well, yes, he would sit down; he did feel a
little weak, but it wasn't so much from that--he'd had some candy sent
him day before yesterday and he'd been awful sick ever since he ate it.
Joe was a friendly soul and he added that he was sorry the man the
coroner sent hadn't seen anybody but his mother. He was to the doctor's,
then.
"But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't
you, before you left the Van Dam--on the morning of the murder--much
more detailed than you gave the police?"
"Yes, sir. I guess I did."
"Well, then, please give that account to us."
Joe looked rather at sea, and the coroner added, "You have said from the
beginning, that a lady called upon Mr. Ingham the night of his death?"
"Oh, yes, sir! She did!"
"Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a
message from Mr. Ingham?"
"Yes, sir. He telephoned down to me. He says, 'I'm out. And if any lady
comes to see me this evening, you say right away I'm out.'"
"Well, and then?"
"Well, along about half-past twelve--it was awful hot and lonesome,
and--and--"
"And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was
able to sleep that night!"
"Well," said Joe, "I guess anybody'd get sleepy, been sittin' there for
four hours in that heat! Anyhow, it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes,
when they came open all of a sudden and I was looking at the front
door. And there, all in white--'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's
Miss Hope!' I don't know why it seemed so awful queer to me, unless
because I wasn't really but half-awake."
[Illustration: "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"]
It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina,
white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned
toward him in an agony.
"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner.
"Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"
"No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was
something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is
our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And
she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I
suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'"
"Well? Go on!"
"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could
say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."
"And what did you do?"
"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped
and put her elbows on the stair-rail,--they run right up to one side o'
the 'phone desk, you know,--and laughed down at me. She looked awful
pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's
all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again
an' ran on up."
"And you did nothing?"
"Well, what could I do, I like to know! But I grabbed at the switchboard
and called up Mr. Ingham. 'Mr. Ingham,' I says, 'that lady's coming up
anyhow.' An' he says, 'Damnation!' That's the last word I ever heard out
o' him."
"'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?"
"Why, I didn't know her name, sir!"
"Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope--you know her name?"
"Oh, yes, sir."
"Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?"
"Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!"
CHAPTER XI
PERSONS UNKNOWN
The revulsion of feeling in Christina's favor was so immense that it
became a kind of panic. It practically engulfed the rest of the inquest.
The taking of testimony from her mother and Mrs. Deutch was the emptiest
of formalities; the notion of holding her under surveillance until
Ingham's cabman and Ann Cornish could be produced confessed itself
ridiculous. Another woman, a strange woman, an aggressive, sarcastic
woman forcing her way in upon Ingham a couple of hours before his death,
and not coming down again! Well!
As for the coroner, he suffered less a defeat than a rout. Even his
instant leap upon Joe Patrick was only a plucky spurt. He was struggling
now against the tide, and he knew it; the strength of his attack was
sucked down. Even the remainder of Joe's own evidence did not receive
its due consideration. The public fancy fastened upon that figure of a
smiling woman, "awful pretty, but with something scaring about her,"
leaning over the baluster to laugh, "I won't hurt him!" It worked out
the rest for itself.
"Yes, sir," Joe persisted, "my mother misunderstood me, all right. I
said I took her for Miss Hope at the door, and so I did. But she
wasn't."
"Did she look so much like Miss Hope?"
"No, sir; not when she came near. That was the thing made me feel so
queer. I can't understand it. First she was Miss Hope, and then she
wasn't. She gave me a funny feeling when I seen her standing there in
the door an' says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope.' 'Twas kind of's if I
seen her ghost. An' then all of a sudden there she was, right on top o'
me. An' not like Miss Hope a bit. An' that gimme a funny feeling, too!"
"Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at
least how did she differ from her?"
"Why, I guess she was a good deal handsomer for one thing. At least I
expect most people would think so, though I prefer Miss Hope's style,
myself. She was dressier, for one thing, in white lace like, with a big
hat, an' she was pretty near as slim, but yet she had, as you might say,
more figger. An' she had red hair."
Joe had made another sensation.
"Red hair! Curly?"
"Well, it was combed standin' out fluffy like one o' these here halos,
up into her hat. It wasn't anyways common red, you know, sir, it was
elegant, stylish red, like the goldy part in flames."
"Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?"
"I don't think so, sir.--Oh, I guess she wouldn't hardly see twenty-five
again! Her feet, sir? I didn't notice. But she didn't walk kind o'
waddlin', either, nor else kind o' pinchin', the way ladies mostly do;
she just swum right along, like Miss Hope does."
"But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?"
"No, sir."
"Now look here, Joe Patrick, how do you know she didn't? When Mr. Bird
went to the 'phone after the shooting he was a long time getting
connected, and Mr. Herrick found you asleep at the desk."
"I couldn't have fell asleep again until after one o'clock, sir, for I
had a clock right on the desk and at one I noticed the time. I was
watchin' for her, she was such a queer one, an' only one man came in all
that time, that I had to carry upstairs. He only went to the fourth
floor, just where she was, an' I rushed him up an' dropped right down
again. She couldn't ha' walked down in that time. I could hear the piano
goin' all the while, the front doors bein' open. But after one I must
ha' dropped off. Because it was about twenty minutes past when Mr.
Herrick shook me up. Then I knew I'd been kind o' comin' to, the last
few minutes, hearin' Mr. Bird ringin'. When Mr. Herrick grabbed my
elevator I called up Mr. Deutch, an' he was quite a minute, too. I says
to him, 'Say, Mr. Deutch, somepun's happened,' an' I switched him onto
Mr. Bird."
"Well, we're very much obliged to you, Mr. Patrick, for an exceedingly
full account. What apartment did the gentleman have whom you took up to
the fourth floor? Perhaps he may have heard something."
"I don't know, sir."
"What?"
"He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to
me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him."
"You didn't know him?"
"No, sir."
"You'd never seen him before?"
"No, sir."
"Nor since?"
"No, sir."
"You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing
him, whom you knew to be a stranger?"
"Why no, I thought he was a new tenant. We got a few furnished
apartments in the building, goes by the month. And then there's always a
good deal o' sublettin' in the summer. He was so quiet an' never asked
any questions nor anything, goin' right along about his business, I
never give him a thought."
"Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the
elevator, which way did he turn?"
The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he
cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B."
His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner
controlled himself.
"What time was this?"
"It hadn't quite struck one, sir."
"And during all this talk about Mr. Ingham's murder, at one-fifteen, it
never occurred to you that at just before one, you had taken up to his
floor a man whom you had never seen, whom you never saw again, and who
turned toward his apartment?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute."
"Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man."
"A description of him?"
"Yes, yes. What did he look like?"
"Why, I don't hardly know, sir."
"Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss
Hope?"
"No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything."
"He looked so unlike other people?"
"No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen."
"I see, Joseph, that you don't observe your own sex with the passionate
attention which you reserve for ladies. Well, had he a beard or a
mustache?"
"No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure."
"Come, that's something! And no mustache?"
"Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say."
"Was he light or dark?"
"I never noticed, sir."
"Was he tall?"
"Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height."
"About how old?"
"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."
"Stout?"
"No, sir."
"Ah! He was slender, then?"
"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."
"How was he dressed, then?"
"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."
"Was the suit light or dark?"
"About medium, sir."
"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"
"No, sir."
"Black?"
"I don't think so, sir."
"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"
"Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it.
But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a
blue."
"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're
not a detective."
"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing
the best I know."
"I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only
been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate
and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you
saw him?"
"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."
"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!--The lady who was not Miss
Hope--you would know her, I presume?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"--Joe hesitated.
"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.
"Why, it's only--why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it.
She had--" He paused, blushing.
"She had--what?"
"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had--I'm afraid you'll
laugh."
"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"
"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."
"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"
"Sir?"
"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"
"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."
"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."
"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"
The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the
coroner laughed.
"Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't
wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake,
Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality--she would be
easily identified!"
Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just
before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an
unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in,
and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by
shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not
gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name
called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe
Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had
come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in
her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her
eyes. And she said to him,
"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went
to help her?"
He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"
"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I
wonder, will you shake hands?"
He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but
electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.
"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever
she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
CHAPTER XII
HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before,
blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into
his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the
wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world,
just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning!
And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time,
he had found himself. For he had found Her!
Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time
wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly,
she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage
for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could
gape! Two dollars a vision--eight visions a week. He began to perceive
that he would need some money!
And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of
the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had
been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special.
Good--that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key
to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully
at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have
thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment,
he had no use.
He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her.
First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her
mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her.
And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that
strange, proud, childish innocence--like Evadne's. At the time he had
reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary
purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the
length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the
soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and
short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so
that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve
and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one
innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a
howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly
made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency
to strike him dead!
He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her
first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands
were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive
cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice
boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of
pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable.
Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of
verse, now high, now homely--she had risen to give her testimony! There
she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the
world was a line from his school-reader--
"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by--"
Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For
the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild,
so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had
leaped with but the one cry,
"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
"Your name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"Age?"
"Twenty-two years."
Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a strain
deeper, lower, richer colored,--Irish girls speak so, sometimes. It
trailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by the
unsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creatures
may have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it was
the last turn of the screw.
"Name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"The devil hath not yet in all his choice
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"
This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center and
the quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast!
"Name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Age?"
"Twenty-two years."
At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had not
yet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist.
He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would have
denied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him?
Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All he
wanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her!
Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, to
know her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take up
every moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of her
perfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objected
profoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had acted
loony about Ingham. Ingham!--why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would be
better than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception of
her become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. It
was too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yet
April-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves.
Yet he remembered something--the elevator boy had thought that, too!
Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thought
dressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too;
hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it,
even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did he
fully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfect
beauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, so
slight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy way
into your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and that
you alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly,
passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as the
dream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope and
the world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wet
wind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and,
at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for the
face that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of
Ilium!
At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on the
telephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the
_Record_ office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we've
got hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story."
He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her.
But he said, "Have you?"
"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent
right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."
"And what had she?"
"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at
either place. She's disappeared."
BOOK SECOND
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
CHAPTER I
HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT
Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I
am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call
it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the
terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too
emotional and in the worst possible taste.
Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan
white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a
couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad,
shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's
charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and
then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.
Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina,
flying down the stairs.
"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then,
"Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"
"News?" he queried.
"Of Nancy!"
He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first
thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."
Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.
Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further
attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
she said.
Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as
little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of
Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.
"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough
of this!"
Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to
sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then?
Can you tell me that? Where is she?"
"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now
you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in
this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to.
Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety
that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."
"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an
extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police
in New York looking for her, where is she?"
"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been,
she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with
their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with
themselves!"
Christina shuddered.
"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized
to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am
not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own
ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you,
and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It
would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you
won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at
nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself
within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are
nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."
Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly
lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have
treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour.
But--sometimes--we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then,
becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and
Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and,
springing up, she led the way into the little white room.
Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope,
having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling
that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young
man single handed.
But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's
appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but
that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The
lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were
possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She
looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of
her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that
followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being
concentrated in expectation,--almost, as it were, in listening,--through
her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal
listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with
a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of
bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.
The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it
must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday
special.
"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of
course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've
ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article
which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it
here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it--you would
only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I
know how distasteful the idea--the horribly melodramatic and sensational
idea--must be to you--"
"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all
that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She
seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to
Herrick unopened. "No,--say what you please of me. It is sure to be only
too good. Well, and if not?--What does it matter?" She closed her eyes,
and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the
same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his
tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.
"But--" he ventured.
"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do--give it to my mother. You
will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite
easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break
the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that
do?--Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and
ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"
"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."
"Then they can both read it."
Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come
back?"
Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portieres to
the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely
alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.
Herrick sat down.
She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He
told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to
him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he,
too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I
didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it
out--perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty
fidgety state,--to speak grandly, an electric state,--and, being just on
the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply
happened to catch it--like a wireless at sea."
"Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy--ah, if we could!
What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you
heard it again?"
"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."
"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you
that it might have been the woman who fired? I see--you don't think of
women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call
here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."
She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that
Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"
"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr.
Herrick--they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or
else--" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?--a curse, a
darkness?--I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a
circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap
fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush
curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his
house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell
you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I
can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the
storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's
all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,--the quaint
little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this
to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well,
then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to
befriend me? Isn't that true?"
"It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied.
"You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl
needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need.
I don't know what it may do to you."
Herrick answered her with a smile--"And I don't care."
She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when
she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him
with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering,
questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of
her murmuring--
"'Vous qui m'avez tant puni,
Dans ma triste vie--'"
"Well, then," she said, "if you must,--I want something. Not protection,
not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm
not easily frightened.
"'Je suis aussi sans desir
Autre que d'en bien finir--
Sans regret, sans repentir--'
"I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?"
"Raised on it!" Herrick said.
"Well, then, you understand things--I don't mean merely his French
songs! And that is exactly what I want--to be quite simply and sensibly
and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you
realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad
child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak
now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl
with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and
sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse
but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would
sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed.
She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she
is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common
person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an
artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me,
because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the
world--you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a
little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of
other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy
by yours--and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be
proud of!"--It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history
of his novel.
He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the
photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said
to him was--"Is there a play in it?"
"I tried it as a play first, but--"
"Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your
system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my
end of it--for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could
have you up,--couldn't I?--for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep
me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read
it to me--it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me
stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at
what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my
portrait, and not let me see the proof!"
The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs.
Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and
Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?"
"She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home."
Christina went and parted the portieres and Herrick heard her speaking
with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the
phrase--"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there
till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the
tea-table.
Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too
stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended
into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he
was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that
not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her
husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large
silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she
was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction
to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she
had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education
"with accomplishments."
"Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick,
who stood up for us against that man."
The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs.
Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her
white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your
things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak--you know, the long
one with the hood--"
"I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my
lamb, you are ill!"
"No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My
hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt.
Poor soul, what a disappointment!"
"Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!"
"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my
enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous.
He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a
thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck
becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be
the New England strain--he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for
witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"
"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"
"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to
laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are
right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a
pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be
steady enough!"
"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope,
with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An
ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"
"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means
that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before
you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled.
We have been friends scarcely more than four years--since she made her
first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob--but I knew her at
once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been
a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my
loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the
world's own daughter--I know the world and she does not; my hands are
very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory--after all, one must
have something!--and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am
weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said
Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon
which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some
memoranda. "This is more to the point."
He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine,
with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft
mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the
stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them
with his own vague memories and the photograph.
Height, five feet, four inches.
Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.
Age, twenty years.
Complexion, fair.
Hair, dark auburn and curling.
Eyes, blue.
Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion;
white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed
with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small
purse-bag, green suede with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any
value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her
effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets--one silver, one
jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian
turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty --th Street,
walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth.
It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days.
"Where is she?"
"And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such
trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself.
But,--all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every
one! And then--does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for
nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs.
McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone
out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with
her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway,
and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she
looked as if her teeth were going to chatter.
"Now, my pretty--" began Mrs. Deutch.
"Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She
might have been going to meet--Well, Christina!"
For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the
tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces.
Everything was deluged with tea.
"My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was
already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's
white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while
fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me
quiet."
"Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr.
Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees--don't you remember what he
wrote about the music in Berlin?"
"So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to
the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable
technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so
remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness.
When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was
still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he
had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who
had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the
glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break
hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's.
"Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you."
"But, my little one--" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch.
"You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk!
And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among
spies in my own house!"
Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his
infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of
James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be
too difficult to quarrel.
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED
It was not because this reflection was in any way cooling to his love
that Herrick did not see again, for some days, the lady of his heart. He
was, perhaps, not very self-assured. Yet when his story of the murder
and the inquest appeared he became a marked man. He awoke to find
himself famous, and to be summoned to another interview at the Ingham
publishing house.
There seemed to be no thought of allowing the prestige of "Ingham's" to
perish with its brilliant junior partner. Ingham, senior, who for years
had been only nominally its head, intended to resume active work once
more, at least until the younger son should have finished college and
gone into training for his brother's place. Perhaps the real pillar of
the house was Corey; and Corey remained, to sustain both father and son.
And they had all three agreed not to forsake the new, the yet unborn
enterprise of _Ingham's Weekly_. "Mr. James Ingham was wrapped up in
it," Corey told Herrick, whom he had met with the kindest compliments,
"and his father can't bear that all his work should be wasted now.
Besides, in the whole of the business, it's the thing that most
interests young Mr. Stanley, and it seems to me the place where the boy
may be most of use. We want the _Weekly_ to be a real force, Mr.
Herrick, and in its first number we shall want to give up the usual
editorial pages to a memoir of its founder and his ideals for it. Mr.
Herrick, if we could induce you to undertake that memoir we should think
ourselves extremely fortunate."
Herrick could not believe his ears; it seemed such a strange sequel to a
kind of police report, however able, for the Sunday papers. There began
to be something uncanny to him about his connection with Ingham's death
and how it continued to seem his Open Sesame to fortune. But he was glad
enough and grateful enough. He ventured to send Christina a note telling
her that her new friend was now being pursued by good not evil fortune
and her reply came in the same mail with a letter from his sister to
whom he had written for details about Nancy Cornish.
Marion remembered only that Nancy's parents had been killed in a runaway
when she was about fourteen and that Nancy had gone out West
somewhere,--to Portland, Oregon, Marion thought, to live with an
uncle--and had gradually ceased to write. Of this uncle's name or
address both Marion and the principal of the school which both girls had
attended were amiably ignorant.
"There's only one thing I'm positive about; she was the best little soul
alive. Never in this world did she go to that man's rooms to tell tales
of her friend. She never told tales. She was a natural born
hero-worshiper; the most loyal child I ever saw and the most generous,
the bravest, the lovingest, the most devoted. If she went to Mr. Ingham,
it wasn't to injure that Christina Hope; it was to help her out of some
scrape. She was just the kind of girl to be taken in by a woman like
that, whom I must say sounds--"
Herrick dropped this letter to return to that other which it cannot be
denied he had read first. It was directed in a penmanship new to him but
recognized at once in every nerve, and he had drawn forth Christina's
note with that strange thrill which stirs in us at the first sight of
the handwriting of the beloved. She thanked him, with a certain shyness,
for his news. It was so good one must take it with their breath held!
And now she had a favor to ask. Stanley Ingham had gone home to
Springfield for the week-end, but he had just telephoned her that he
would be back in town on Tuesday morning, by the train which got in to
the Grand Central at eleven thirty-five. He had some news for her but
she would be at rehearsal; she should not see him until the evening, and
she was naturally an impatient person. Would not Mr. Herrick humor a
spoiled girl, meet the train and bring her the news at about noon to a
certain little tea-room of which she gave him the address. "You may find
it a great bore. They are supposed to let us out for an hour, like the
shop-girls. But, alas! they don't do it so regularly. They may push us
straight through till mid-afternoon. But I know you will have patience
with my eagerness to hear any news where it need not trouble my mother.
She has had anxiety enough." It may be taken as a measure of Herrick's
infatuation that he saw nothing in this letter which was not angelic.
The Grand Central Station, however, is no sylvan spot and Herrick
wondered how he should recognize an unknown Stanley Ingham among the
hordes swarming in its vast marble labyrinth. But that gentleman proved
to be a lively youth of about twenty, who plucked Herrick from the crowd
without hesitation and led him to a secluded seat with that air of
deferential protection which a really smart chap owes it to himself to
show to age. His collar was so high that it was remarkable how
powerfully he had established winking terms with the world over the top
of it, but he stooped to account for himself at once as an emissary of
Christina's.
"She wired me to see you here, and here I am. You know I'm the bearer of
some new exhibits for the police. We think we've struck a new trail.
After I've handed 'em over I'm dining with Miss Hope, and as she'd have
heard all about 'em then, should think she might have waited. Still, you
know how women are!
"In the first place," young Mr. Ingham continued, "we want you, we want
everybody, to know we're Miss Hope's friends. We want to go on record
that the way she's been knocked around in this thing has been simply
damnable, and, if poor old Jim were alive--"
He stopped. At the mention of his brother a moisture, which Herrick knew
he considered the last word of shame, rose in his eyes; behind his high
collar something swelled and impeded his utterance. Then Mr. Stanley
Ingham became once more a man of the world.
"You can take it from me that if you hadn't treated her as jolly well as
you did in that capital article of yours, we shouldn't be trying to
lasso you now onto the staff of the _Weekly_." Herrick started, but the
man of the world was not easily checked. "You were awfully decent, you
know, to all of us, and Corey was all the more pleased because
that--that last day, old Jim was down at the office till three
o'clock--the first day after he was home, too,--working like a dog, and
yet when he found that letter of Rennett's introducing you he was as
pleased as Punch, and when he made the appointment with you for next
day, he said to Corey, 'People are taking that boy pretty easy yet
awhile, but he's the best short-story writer on this side of the
Atlantic; and if he's really got a novel about him, the old house will
show him it's still awake.'" The man of the world repeated these phrases
with an innocent satisfaction in having them at first hand, and
Herrick's own heart went questing into the future.
Then his attention returned to the words of his young friend. "We don't
think we've done enough for her, and we want to do all we can do."
"Miss Hope?"
"Of course. You see, we don't any of us feel she was wrong in quarreling
with Jim--except the mater, who thinks she ought to have let him cut her
throat for breakfast every morning and damned glad to get him--and,
considering everything, we think she let him down pretty easy at the
inquest. There's no denying the dear old fellow had been a gay one in
his time, and, of course, he drove a high-spirited girl like that
frantic with a lot of antiquated notions about the stage. You see, he
was pretty close to thirty-five, and when a man gets along about there
he's apt to lose touch with what's going on. Well, having her in our pew
and our carriage at the funeral didn't shut all the fools' mouths in New
York nor Springfield either! So now we're going to do something really
swotting--we've taken a box for her first night, and we're going to get
mother into it, mourning and all, if we have to bring her in a bag. It's
our duty. Read that."
"My dear and kind Mr. Ingham (ran Christina's letter): You must try
and be patient with me, and not think hardly of me, when I tell you
that I can not profit by the terms of Jim's will. He made those
provisions for the girl who was to be his wife, and not for me who
never could be.
"As I write this I feel your good heart harden to me, with the
sense that I never loved him. But oh, believe me!--time was when I
loved him better than earth or heaven. We couldn't agree, he and I.
Let it remain my consolation that between us there was never any
question of expedient nor compromise.
"If she can bear it, give my love to his mother.
"My heart is full of fondest gratitude to all that family which I
should have been so proud to enter. And do you keep a little
kindness for your unhappy,
"CHRISTINA HOPE."
"What do you think of that? Won't take a cent! You can easily see,"
commented the wise one, "that they'd have made it up all right. Splendid
girl! Best thing the poor old chap ever did was trying to get her into
the family. I don't suppose you're as hipped about her good looks as I
am? Takes a special kind of eye, I fancy! I snaked this particularly to
show you--but we want everybody to know she's turned down the coin. And
we're going to have the beast that fired that shot if he's alive on this
planet. 'Tisn't only on Jim's account! It's for her--it's the only way
you can knock that damned lie on the head about her being up there in
his rooms that night.--Chris! Why, she's a regular kid! And the
straightest kid that ever lived! We mean to keep the police hot at it.
And look here what I'm turning in to them!"
It was a typewritten envelope, postmarked "New York City" and addressed
to Mr. James Ingham.
"We found it, opened, in his desk at the office," the boy explained.
"But we've only just got it away from my mother." Its contents were a
piece of red ribbon and a single sheet of paper, closely typed.
The Arm of Justice warns Mr. James Ingham--
("Is this a joke?") "Go on! Read it!"
--warns Mr. James Ingham that it demands ten thousand dollars. ("By
George!") If Mr. Ingham wisely decides to grant this application, he
will tie the enclosed ribbon to the frame work of his awning on the
afternoon of August fourth, at four o'clock. It will be seen by an
agent of the Society, who will then advise Mr. Ingham as to how and
where the money may be paid. If Mr. Ingham decides against the
application, he will do nothing.
But in that case he must be prepared for the publication of a
paragraph in the _Voice of Justice_, beginning--"There has recently
come to light an episode in the career of Mr. James Ingham, the
well-known publisher, eldest son of Robert Ingham of Springfield and
New York, who is engaged to be married to the popular actress,
Christina Hope--"
It will go on to relate the story of his association with a young,
pure and helpless girl eight years ago; how he betrayed her, and,
after a promise of marriage--she being then destitute--abandoned
her. It will tell this girl's name and where she is. It will give
all names
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