"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
"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 choiceAn arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"
"The devil hath not yet in all his choiceAn 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 theRecordoffice 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."
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 portières 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—'"
"'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 désirAutre que d'en bien finir—Sans regret, sans repentir—'
"'Je suis aussi sans désirAutre 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 portières 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 suède 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.
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 ofIngham'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 theWeeklyto 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 theWeekly." 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."
"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—
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 theVoice 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 in connection with the affair. It will publish letters that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating the worst that has been said.Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it will be wise to pay for silence.
—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 theVoice 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 in connection with the affair. It will publish letters that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating the worst that has been said.
Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it will be wise to pay for silence.
"That's all!" exclaimed Stanley Ingham, as if the absence of signature were really remarkable. "Well, how's that! Poor old chap, you know—how dare they!" He reddened. "Because, hang it all, of course a man has to be a man, and you've got to be liberal-minded and all that; but, just the same, a fellow that would do what that thing says—why, he'd be regularly rotten! You can't deny it, he'd be rotten."
Herrick sat dumb. Words of Christina's were passing in his mind.—"I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It was simply something monstrous which happened a long time ago." Because he had to say something, he said—"And you're taking this in to the police?"
"Yes. Isn't it a mercy Jim didn't destroy it? Meant it for the detectives himself, I dare say. Perhaps his not hanging out that piece of ribbon didn't have anything to do with his death. And perhaps it did. Anyhow, wait a bit—I'm a walking post-office this morning. Here's the last exhibit!" And he plumped down on Herrick's knee the duplicate of the typewritten envelope. The postmark, however, was dated August ninth, and it was directed to Ingham senior.
"It opened with the same formalities, but this time its threat ran—
"TheVoicewill relate the actual circumstances connected with the death of Mr. James Ingham—"
"TheVoicewill relate the actual circumstances connected with the death of Mr. James Ingham—"
"Jove!" cried Herrick, "that would be something!"
"Wait till you read 'em!"
"It will not pause after the story of the young girl whom Ingham abandoned years ago. It will tell how, on the eve of his departure for Europe, just such a story was reënacted, but this time with a close friend of his intended bride, an actress named Ann Cornish; who, on his return, appealed to him for the only reparation in his power; even slandering her friend Christina Hope in the attempt to win him back. Failing in this, she fled, and disappeared—perhaps destroyed herself. It will tell how Miss Hope suspected the intrigue, having quarreled about it with her lover the day before, when he denied all knowledge of Nancy Cornish; how, suspecting an appointment for the evening instead of the afternoon of August fourth, Miss Hope disguised herself in a red wig and dabs of paint about her eyes and penetrated to Ingham's apartment; how, finding no one there, she was placated until she spied Nancy Cornish's card on the piano and how then a terrible quarrel arose; the excitable young woman, springing in front of the window with her arm outstretched, the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air, uttered a terrible, low cry, and snatching up Ingham's revolver from the table at the head of the couch, shot him dead. It will follow the flight of Miss Hope exactly as she described it at the inquest—out through the door which Ingham must have bolted behind her. She ran upstairs and escaped over the roof into the apartment house next door. It was a terribly hot night, and, against all rules, the roof-doors of both apartment houses had been fastened back. Miss Hope came quietly downstairs, passed through an entrance hall, empty of the boy who had run to join the crowd in the street, and walked away. This will be the conclusion of the narrative."
The light in the little tea-room was rather dim. Christina spread out Herrick's copies of the two blackmailing letters upon the table and studied them, propping her chin on her hands. Herrick, in surrendering them, had dreaded the squalid clutch which they laid upon herself. But when she lifted her eyes it was to say—"We must never let them credit this trash about Nancy!"
"None of it, then—?"
"Not a syllable! Not a breath!—Jim! Little she cared for Jim, poor child! She was unhappy, but not with that unhappiness. It's true her only love-affair had come to grief. That's what my mother means by calling her secretive—even I have never been able to get out of her what happened to it. But disgrace—run away! Disgrace could never have looked at her, and never in her life did she run away from anything! And if she were alive and free, anywhere upon this earth, the first word against me would have brought her back. She would butt walls down, with her little red head, to stand by a friend's side!"
"That's what my sister says. It's odd!"
"Odd?"
"I mean—Well, there's the circumstance that the hour when she called on Ingham was the hour when the ribbon was to have signaled from the window. And she didn't give her name, you know; she said, 'The lady he expects.' Then one remembers that this mysterious woman who passed Joe had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope—well, Miss Cornish was in white with lace trimming. He mistook her for you. Still, he was very sleepy, and though she's not so tall as you are, she's not short, and she's very slender, too. Forgive me for making you impatient. But the boy's devoted to you, isn't he?"
"I suppose so," Christina ingenuously replied.
"Well, he knows, now, that Nancy Cornish is your dear friend. I can't altogether rely upon his not recognizing her photograph."
"I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White—everybody's in white. I wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that out of your mind."
Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes—people seem to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be produced by make-up?"
"I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and—and in combination—surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?"
"To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a conspicuous impression on the boy—she may have been a dark woman, you know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first thought of you.—Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he was."
"He?"
"Well—man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the truth."
Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange thing! His poor mother—she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there."
He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief. "Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?—'The Arm of Justice!'"
"I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are far from thinking so."
"They think—?"
"Yes. They've accepted these letters as changing the whole course of the investigation. They believe now that the scandalous, the personal motive was an entirely wrong lead; that Ingham was murdered in cold blood, as a matter of business; that the woman was only a cat's paw. And they're looking for a man."
"Dear God!" said Christina. "How hot it is in here! That fan—can't they start it?" She took off her hat; the cool air from the fan came about her face, carrying to Herrick's nostrils a scent of larkspur and verbena and candy-tuft (how she clung to those garden flowers!), and she closed her eyes.
Herrick sat watching her with concern. He thought of how she had said her mother had had anxiety enough. It seemed now, to Herrick, that Christina, too, had had anxiety enough. "Evadne!" he said, suddenly.
She opened her eyes, smiling at him.
"You know I have known you very intimately and served you very faithfully for an immensely long time. I am your author, and I'm going to bully you. I want you to drop all this! What is it to you? Something hideous, that's over. In no way can the miserable muck of these letters touch you! Let the Inghams and the police and the District Attorney worry—it's their business. It's your business to make beautiful things for the world. Dear Evadne, you've got to possess your own soul if you're going to polish up ours! Forget these lies!"
It was rather late in the little restaurant and they were the only patrons. After a moment the girl leaned toward him, and laid her hand on his.
"I will try!" she said, gently. "And you will dine with us to-night? And Stan can tell what the detectives say to you, and not to me? Oh, please! You are right. I want to forget. I am worn out, my soul and my body; my heart's drying up. Nancy! Nancy! Oh, Nancy! If I could only know about Nancy! But for the rest, I don't care. You are my friend, and I will tell you something. Whenever they've wanted to show me they didn't think me a murderess, they've said, 'Of course, my dear, you're as eager to have the criminal caught as any of us.' It's false! Why should I wish for anything so horrible?"
He looked at her with a start of wonder that was half agreement.
"In what age are we living that I am expected to enjoy an execution? Do you know what one's like? I've been on trial for my life now, and I've been reading it up! They—"
"Hush!" said Herrick, sternly.
"But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?—to man or woman?—Or to lock some one up for life—that's worse! Why should it amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh, my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a brother or a lover—Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and kill some unhappy creature for my sake—it will kill me, too. I shall die of it!"
"What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal."
She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth! There's a female idea of a brigand."
It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock. Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a woman,—by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams into one channel—into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal strength—her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she herself once that girl?"
Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.
But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not appear in the narrative.
How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had sacrificed the only other persons mentioned—Christina and Nancy—without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had anything to do with it."
Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers, he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever. Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant, ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his business—" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it, he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer, murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage—he looked so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age—why, Beelzebub himself could not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed. It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow—he had made Christina suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves. Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman at whom he had struck!
Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty, he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat ignominiously and hurriedly!—actually to—in the language of his childhood—to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his horn!—By George, the fellow had not blown his horn!
Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace, deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came to him, that this was no second automobile—it was the same one! And now it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash, bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And then—nothing.
The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned youth and smiled.
"Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way."
"I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy. He was not very secure yet in which world he was.
On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers—larkspur and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover—the house was filled with them! Wherever did she get them?
"What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet.
The policeman was merely left there,—the automobile having escaped without leaving its number behind it,—to take his evidence of the accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest? Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n automobile?"
Herrick stared.
"Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him—'twas a gray tourin'-car."
By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?" she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said, so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I warned you!"
"It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't even let me tell you, Chris!"
"Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one could possibly interfere.—The police think they're genuine, then?"
"You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they grabbed them, fast enough."
Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the piano and sang softly—tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies, snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed.
To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster, professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her.
The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint flush suffused her face.
"My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs. Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own affairs."
Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope. It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on, "that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we—we ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it would be a favor.—My dear, can't you persuade him?"
"It's only—" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid."
"Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible fate has overtaken me!"
"Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!"
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick."
"I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats."
"Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr. Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of course, he's a very profane man."
"I love every bone in his body," Christina said.
"My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!"
"I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out of the window she said to Herrick—"You sat here? It was there, on that shade?"
"Yes."
Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy does not look wise—no, Herr Hermy, you don't,—but if ever I puzzle you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me. But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the core.—Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal, not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl."
As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus; you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!"
"She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly.
"Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk—insincere. Oh, that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?—when they flash first in the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is—she's young, an' she's got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll reflect it right into your face."
Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other people, she's more so!"
"You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.—She's got these emotions in her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?"
"The best friend she ever had?"
"Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha' made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again."
If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her alone."
Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!"
She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs. Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she began telling Wheeler about it.—Wheeler had dined there, too.
Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward. "Why, but there's a play in that!"
"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"
Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy, handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it strikes!'—heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be—Tut-tut, no sugar!—There will be too much of me—Did you get your idea of moral responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"
"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,—a lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of Howell's?—'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to find a vehicle for that notion."
"And your Italian told you this story?"
"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face! Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police in Italy—for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in her veins.—I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's the idea."