"But you've changed the relationship—?"
"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've reversed the parts—in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and labor of a generous girl."
"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother! Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"
Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"
"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits, perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,—old friendships, real relationships—to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and her daughter's lover into her quicksand—of course, by means of their efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"
"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a strong scene, a very strong scene.—What made you think of reversing the characters?—less trite?"
"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous—I couldn't keep her from being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted a rather passée woman she became much quieter—just a feeble, worthless, selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but comfort—trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it—at any rate until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human, just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered, they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime, collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a trap-door!"
"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother or the daughter be the star-part?"
"I could play both!" Christina cried.
Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"
"Well, but why not? Why not a dual rôle? Even if the relationship were false, the resemblance would have to be real—it's the backbone of the story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance resemblances incomparably stronger!"
She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an actress—that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account. She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the path of success.
Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be blotted from the vocabulary of New York."
"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.
"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?
"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could engage him as Javert!"
"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to do our scene?"
She drove her rather reluctant star to action.—"Young miss!" he said, "it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene with her is a tonic to me—I did not know the old man had so much blood in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha—ha! Wait till Monday week!' or whenever we open!
"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,They'll be all gane a-glee!They'll be all gangin' East an' West,Courtin' Molly Lee!'
"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,They'll be all gane a-glee!They'll be all gangin' East an' West,Courtin' Molly Lee!'
"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!—for the younger generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it, that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.
From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously. "She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with great satisfaction.
Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous humility of his love must recognize it.
She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die, for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always been so.
It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had worked,—she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,—"like a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through which she did not hesitate to run her pin.
For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music; they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy" played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer—as of a mental dumbness, groping for words—that overtook him in moments of extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a queen to do—oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments—and Christina, though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had occasional moments of extreme grandeur—upon that simple, domestic stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.
On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled herself—except for a stray vagary of speech—upon Mrs. Hope's excellent idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here when I was cold and wet andoh!how hopeless, and felt in me the anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I should like to do a Judith! How I should like totameall this!" She looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."
She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that they were now continually together and there was something about her which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys dive, and even to his table d'hôte in the back yard. She had a zest, a fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table d'hôte, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed.
She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it couldn't talk real talk."
"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself, and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr. Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.
But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm about Nancy were only because Nancy—yes, and the threatening Arm of Justice,—were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.
It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction. There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its bread!"
Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Whowasthe best friend you ever had?"
Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.
"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."
"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business, bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"
"And where's he now?"
"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."
Was it true, then—what had been hinted to him often enough—that once she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends some personal mannerism?—any peculiar impression of which she might master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it! Only, how long before she would have finished with it?
In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put her on a diet of Italian table d'hôtes! She accepted all this quite as a matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park, sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had accepted him like the weather.
For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when, looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him extraordinarily young.
He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs, leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not good enough.
They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world. Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say "Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as "Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of race, of patriotism, and—once you came to good acting—of religion, was centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little protégée of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."
Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate editor ofIngham's Weekly!—While he was still dizzy with this knowledge a friend on theRecordhad pointed out a suite in an old fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires—one of those cool days of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter! Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.
He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler—a fine actor, of course, but why bother?"
Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my daughter!"
"Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed.
"Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck. Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht! It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?—it's so angelic it justmeltsyou—when she's really thinking how dull people are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know, for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like Wheeler—of course, Mr. Herrick, itisannoying, but they will ask things like that; they can't help it."
"And Miss Hope?"
"She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the—well, you know! And I must say, when you come to think of his—ah—affairs—! And they talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina clouding up."
Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!"
"Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There are times when she certainly is not delicate!"
Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?"
"Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly, like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I don't know where to hide my head!"
Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina.
The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held him dumb.
"The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me. Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right."
Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I love you!"
It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect honor of coming—she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him.
The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!"
He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry, "Oh, you love me!—You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save me!"
"Don't let them take me!" Christina entreated. "Don't let them lock me up! That door—! Turn the key!"
Without demur he turned it. He was in that commotion of bewildered feeling where one shock after another deliciously and terribly strikes upon the heart, and anything seems possible. From the trembling girl his pulses took a myriad alarms; apprehension of he knew not what ran riot in them and credited the suggestions of her terror; but all the while his blood rushed through him, warm and singing, and his heart glowed. She was here, with him! She had fled here and clung to him for defense! She loved him! In no dream, now, did she lie back there, in the deep chair beside his fire, with her hand clasping his eagerly as he knelt and her shoulder leaning against his. It was keener than any dream; it was that fullness of life, which, even at Herrick's age, we have mostly ceased to expect.
"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it—I know! They've been following me from the beginning!"
"But why, dearest, why?"
"Because they think I killed Jim Ingham."
"Christina! Why should they think such a thing?"
"Why shouldn't they? Don't you?"
She put her finger on his lips to still his cry of protest, and, looking down into his face, her own eyes slowly filled with that brooding of maternal tenderness which seemed to search him through and through. For a moment he thought that her eyes brimmed, that her lips trembled with some communication. But, without speaking, she ran her hand along his arm and a quiver passed through her; taking his face in her two hands she bent and kissed his mouth. In that kiss they plighted a deeper troth than in ten thousand promises. And, creeping close into his breast with a shuddering sigh, she pressed her cheek to his. "Oh, Bryce, you won't let them take me away? I can stand anything but being locked up—I couldn't bear that—I couldn't! What can I do?"
"My dearest, no one in the world can harm you!"
"I came here to be safe, where I could touch you. Let me rest here a little, and feel your heart close to me. Oh, my love, I'm so frightened! I thought I was strong! I thought I was brave and could go through with it! But I can't! I'm tired—to death! All through my soul, I'm cold. It's only here I can get warm!"
"Christina," he asked her, "go through with what?"
She stirred in his arms and drew back. "Look first—ah, carefully!—from the window. What do you see?"
"Nothing but ordinary people passing. And the usual number of waiting taxis."
"Well, in the nearest of those taxis is a detective. He has been following me all the afternoon. He is sitting there waiting for me to come out."
Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it."
"I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path."
A series of sounds burst on the air. Herrick went to the window. "There, my sweet, the taxi's gone."
"Did no one get out?"
"No one."
He had snatched up her hand again and he felt her relax.
"Well, I ought to be used to shadows; all my girlhood there has been a shadow near me. Bryce, when I was really a child, something happened. Something that changed my whole heart—oh, you shall know before you marry me! I shall find a way to tell you!—It made me a rebel and a cynic; it made me wish to have nothing to do with the rules men make; I had to find my own morality. Only, when I saw you, I felt such a strength and freshness, like sunny places. Bryce!"
"Yes."
"My feeling for Jim was dead a year ago. Do you believe that?"
"Oh, my darling! Why—"
"Because I won't have you think me shameless! Nor that an accident, like death, turned my light love to you! I was just twenty when he first asked me to marry him; I was so mad about him that my head swam. And yet it wasn't love. It was only infatuation and I knew it. I was still young enough for him to be a sort of prince—all elegance and the great world. The last two have been my big years, Bryce. I was rather a poor little girl till then. Even so, I held him off ten months. I felt that there was a curse on it and that it could never, never be! What did I know of men or that great world—well, God knows he taught me! When I did consent to our engagement the fire was already dying. But by that time the idea of him had grown into me. He had always a great influence over me, Bryce, and he could trouble and excite me long after he had broken my dream. Oh, my dear, it was one long quarrel. It was a year's struggle for my freedom! Well, I got my release. I didn't wait for fate." She paused. And then with a low gasp, "All my life I've stood quite alone. I have been hard. I have been independent. I have been brave—oh, yes, I can say it; I have been brave!—but I've broken down. Only, if you will let me keep hold of you, I shall get courage."
"Christina!"
"Do you know how big you are? Or what a clear look your eyes have got? There in that coroner's office—oh, heavens,—among thosestones!—Bryce, he was there this afternoon! that man!"
"Ten Euyck? Yes, I know."
"Do you know what he means to do as Police Inspector? He means to run me down! Wait—you've never known. I've kept so still—I didn't want to think of it. Four years ago he payed for the production of a play of his, by a stock company I was with. Oh, my dear, that play! It gave us all quite a chill! He wanted his Mark Antony played like a young gentleman arranging the marriage-settlements. But he took the rehearsals so hard, he nearly killed us." She hesitated. "He was very kind to me. He was too kind. One night, he met me as I was coming out of the theater, and—forgot himself. One of the boys in the company, who was right behind me, slapped him in the face! Do you mean to tell me that he has ever forgotten that? At the inquest he thought he had me down, and the laugh turned against him! Is he the man to forget that?"
"But what can he do?"
"How I detested him!" Christina hurried on. "He taught me, in that one minute, when I was eighteen, how men feel about girls who aren't in their class! Just because I was on the stage, he took it for granted I—Well, he, too, learned something! Since then I've heard about him. He isn't a hypocrite, he's an egoist. I wonder, were some of the Puritans really like that? He's so very proper, and so particular not to entangle himself with respectable women! But with women he calls bad he doesn't mind—because for him bad women don't count, they don't exist! Oh, dear God, how I despise a man who feels like that! How I love you, who never, never could! Does he really know, I wonder, that sometimes it's the coldest of heart who can be made to turn his ships at Actium?—'What can he do?' He can hope I'm guilty! And he can use all the machinery of his office to prove me so!"
"Why, look here, dearest, if he's never revenged himself on the man who struck him—"
Christina gave a shrill little cry. "But, now he has his chance with me! His great spectacular chance! Oh, Bryce, I'm afraid of him, and I was never afraid before!—Dearest dear, I know you can't do anything! But the girl's in love with you, poor thing, and she feels as if you can! I've wanted you—oh, how I've wanted you!—all my life. I've known the dearest fellows in the world, the cleverest, the gamest, the most charming. But they were too much like poor Christina; fidgety things, nervous and on edge. 'You take me where the good winds blow and the eternal meadows are!'—What are you doing?"
He had bowed down to kiss her wrist and he replied, "I'm thanking God I look like a farmer!"
"My poor boy!" cried Christina, breaking her tears with little laughs, "I've got your cheek all wet! Bryce dear, we're engaged, aren't we? You haven't said.—Bryce!"
He slipped back onto the floor, with his head in her lap and her two hands gathered in his one. They were both silent. The little fire was going out and the room was almost dark. And in that happy depth of life where she had led him he was at first unaware of any change. Then he knew that the hands he held had become tense, that rigidity was creeping over her whole body, and looking up, he could just make out through the dusk, the alert head, the parted lips of one who is waiting for a sound. "Bryce," she said, "you were mistaken. That detective has not gone!"
"What do you hear?"
"I don't hear. I simply know." Their senses strained into the silence. "If he went away, it was only to bring some one back. He went to get Ten Euyck!"
"Christina! Tell me what you're really afraid of!"
"Oh! Oh!" she breathed.
"Christina, what was it you couldn't go through with?"
"Death!" she said. "Not that way! I can't!" She rocked herself softly to and fro. "If I could die now!" she whispered.
"You shan't die. And you shan't go crazy, either. You're driving yourself mad, keeping silence." He drew her to her feet, and she stood, shaking, in his arms. "Christina, what's your trouble?"
"Nancy,—that murder—my opening—my danger—aren't they enough?"
"For everything but your conviction that it is you who are pursued, and you who will be punished. Some horrible accident, dear heart, has shown you something, which you must tell. Tell it to me, and we will find that it is nothing."
"Bryce," she said, "they're coming. It's our last time together. Don't let's spend it like this."
"Did you—" he asked her so tenderly that it sounded like a caress, "did you, in some terrible emergency, in some defense, dear, of yourself, Christina—did you fire that shot?"
Her head swung back; she did not answer.
"My darling, if you did we must just take counsel whether to fight or to run. Don't be afraid. The world's before us. Christina, did you?"
"No, no, no!" she whispered. "I did not!" She felt his quiver of relief, and her nervous hands closed on his sleeve. "Oh, if you only knew. There is a thing I long to tell you! But not that! Oh, if I could trust you!"
"Can't you?"
"I mean—trust you to see things as I do! To do only what I ask! What I chose—not what was best for me! Suppose that some one whom—Bryce?"
"Yes?"
"If any one should hear—"
"There is no one to hear."
"You can't tell where they are."
"Christina, can't you see that we're alone here? That the door's locked? That you're safe in my arms? The cab went away. No one followed you. No one even knows where I live; my dear, dear love, we're all alone—"
The door-bell sounded through the house.
He thought the girl would have fallen and his own heart leaped in his side. "Darling, it's nothing. It's for some one else."
"It's for me."
"That's impossible."
There was a knock on the door.
Herrick called—"Who's there?"
"It's a card, sir."
"A card?"
"A gentleman's card, sir. He's down in the hall."
"I can't see any one at present."
"It's not for you, sir; it's for the young lady."
"Did you tell him there was a lady here?"
"He knew it himself, sir."
"Well, she came in here because she felt ill; I'm just taking her home. She can't be bothered."
"He said it was very important, sir. Something she's to do to-morrow," he said.
"Christina! It's only some one about your going away."
"No. It's the end. Take the card."
Springing on the light, he took the card to reassure her. She motioned him to read it. And he read aloud the words "Mr. Ten Euyck."
Christina took the card from him, and seemed to put him to one side. Almost inaudibly she said, "I will go down."
Before Herrick could prevent her, a voice from just outside the door replied, "Don't trouble yourself, Miss Hope. May I come in?" Ten Euyck, hat in hand, appeared in the doorway.
He looked from one to the other, noting Christina's tear-stained face, with a civil, sour smile. "I am sorry if I intrude. I had no idea Mr. Herrick was to be my host. The truth is, Miss Hope, I followed you and have been waiting for you, in the hope of making peace—where it was once my unhappy fortune to make war."
Christina said, "You followed me!"
"But I shouldn't have yielded to that impulse so far as to—well, break into Mr. Herrick's apartment, if I had not become, in the meanwhile, simply the messenger of—a higher power." Ten Euyck tried to say the last phrase like a jest, but it stuck in his throat. He moved out of the doorway, and there stepped past him into the room the man whom Herrick had seen at the Pilgrims'. "Miss Hope, Mr. Herrick," Ten Euyck said, "Mr. Kane; our District Attorney."
Kane nodded quickly to each of them. "Miss Hope," he said, "I don't often play postman; but when I met our friend Ten Euyck outside and he told me you were here, the opportunity was too good to lose." He took a letter out of his pocket, watching her with shrewd and smiling eyes. "We've been tampering with your mail. Allow me."
Christina took the letter wonderingly, but at its heading her face contemptuously brightened. "I can hardly see," she said, passing it to Herrick. "Read it, will you?—He would have to know anyhow," she said sweetly to the two officials. "We are just engaged to be married. You must congratulate us."
Herrick, never very eloquent, was stricken dumb. "Sit down, won't you?" was as much as he could ask his guests. The letter ran—
"The Arm of Justice suggests to Miss Christina Hope that she exert her well-known powers of fascination to persuade the Ingham family into paying the Arm of Justice its ten thousand dollars. Miss Hope need not work for nothing, nor even in order to avert an accusation against which she doubtless feels secure. But the Arm of Justice has in its possession a secret which Miss Hope would give much to know. She may learn what that secret is, and how it may be negotiated if she will hang this white ribbon out of the window wherever she may be dining on Monday. She will receive a communication at once."
"Exactly!" said Kane, as though in triumph. "For such swells as the Arms of Justice it's about dinner-time now. Would you oblige me, Miss Hope, by tying the ribbon out of the window? Show yourself as clearly as possible. All the lights, please."
As Christina stepped to the window, he added, "I'm trusting they didn't recognize us as we came in. It's pretty dark."
They waited. The three men were strung to a high degree of expectation.
"But it's all so silly!" Christina said. The call of the telephone shrilled through the room.
"Miss Hope?" Herrick asked. "Yes, she's here."
Then they heard Christina answering, "Yes, yes, it's Miss Hope. I hear. I understand. I'll be there." She hung up the receiver and turned round. "The Park. To-morrow. At ten in the morning. The bench under the squirrel's house at the top of the hill beyond the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance. And be sure to come alone." She sat down, staring at Kane.
He said, "Excuse me!" and went to the 'phone. "Boy! Did that party ask for Miss Hope in the first place? All right. That's queer. They asked for Mr. Herrick's apartment."
"They knew I was living here? Why, I only moved in this morning."
"And they must know I'm going on the road to-morrow; the eleven-thirty train!"
"Exactly. They're well informed." Kane had been passing up and down; now he stopped in front of Christina and again he seemed to measure her with his keen eyes. "Well!" he said; "are you game for it?"
Christina sprang up and stood before him, glowing.
"You'll keep this appointment?"
"Surely! And alone!"
"Not by a long shot! Your mother and Mr. Ingham have feared exactly some such escapade; that's why you've had to be shadowed all this while and not advised of the activities of the police. There will be plenty of plain clothes men, well planted. But not you, Mr. Herrick, whom they would know. If you attempt to smuggle yourself in, we'll have to put you in irons. Well, Miss Hope?"
"My mother," said Christina, rising, and faintly smiling, "deserves to have her hair turn as white as I'm sure it has by this time." She held out her hand. "You gave me a great fright," she said. "Did you know it? I thought you had all come to execute me. Don't! I'm not worth it!"
The admiration which no man could withhold from her for very long colored Kane's studying face and warmed his handshake. "I can count on your not losing your head, I think. You'll be there?"
"I'll be there.—But have these people really any secret? Are they really going to tell me something?"
"Well, my dear young lady, we'll know that to-morrow."
The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a desert.
After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see you alone again till Friday noon, when—" she laughed—"when I've read my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed.
Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was to tell him on Friday—when she had read her notices! Whatever it was, it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she loved him.
He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it—safe, but with an exceedingly clouded brow.
"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public conjecture and the train bore her away.
Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home, he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals; instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.
Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow, whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had come alone!" and shuddered.
But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench. Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will comealone."
He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken. Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now, to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be! And Christina was right—they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he strayed on!
Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the bench. And then it occurred to him—did they take him for a blackmailer?
It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.
He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high, hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on; the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed: they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.
Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning, caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were bearing the ball to its last goal.
For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step. Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him, missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now; barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.
The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward, that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent over him was a policeman.
"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they caught.
At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number 1411—unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out to Herrick.
To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four words: "Help me, dear Chris!"
This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion. "Besides, Mr. Herrick,—Bryce—were they trying to kidnap you, too? And if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr. Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is—and who will it be next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.
Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.
For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his influence against his being such a little liar.—"You remember that queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy friend?"
"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with them?"
"Why, it never come from a school at all!"
"I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."
"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick—and the child so naughty! Why that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it, an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real—"
"He lost it, then?"
"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an' lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin'," concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth, "but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it ever got there an' who it belonged to."
Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent as one and then the C—A. C.—Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask Christina.
One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from his Yankee woman at the table d'hôte. The night after the attack she motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come down here for one while."
His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"
"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't tell me—I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."
Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor opinion of Italians!"
"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one. I'd oughta know!"
She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after his father, poor fellow!"
"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"
"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air inimitably business like, and so continued—"Now I want you should clear out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't my business. But my own folks is my own folks."
Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one. After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that they would sojourn. Yes—that was one line to follow! He remembered that this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange, with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of the theater lobby.
Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick, abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play. Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice; a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror, that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.
But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances, many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her profession like a troubled air—through which how many eyes were already ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers, attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset Christina for her performance?
Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight. The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.
For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she must entrust her fate.
A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall, with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces, had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick, the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in "Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.
With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box, and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the murder on the night of Ingham's death.
Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked Mrs. Hope.
"Who? Oh—that's Will Denny."
Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's. "That's the man I took up in the elevator."