For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers. Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It began—"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but—" He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment—
Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E. Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase, "Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."
Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person. Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not basely, nervous.
He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new, garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was thoroughly "high-class!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his hands and plunged.
"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I want to ask you.—You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr. Herrick.—Well, I will, thanks,"—as he dropped into a chair. "I—I won't keep you a minute—"
"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.
The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.
"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."
"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."
The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if therewasa lady there last night—but therecouldn'thave been—well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't have seen her so very plain, now could you?"
"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.
"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr. Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand—"
"While he played the piano with the other?"
"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled. "It's against the rules—that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk, especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings. We got leases signed by—"
"Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not, I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch."
"No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick; it's your language!"
"What!"
"It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be quite so particular—"
"Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I don't feel very leniently to the person—not even to the woman—who murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr. Deutch. And, good-morning."
"Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir—"
"And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and that it was you who connived at her escape!"
"All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina."
"Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss Christina!"
"You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of a play."
"Did I? Well?"
Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran: "About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as of prophecy realized. "Oh—ho!" he breathed.
"Oh—ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes you think, all right. Even me!—that was what brought her first to my mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed, any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!"
"That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West, and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to her detriment.
"Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all, but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think she's guilty—"
"Oh, come! Why—"
"Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?"
Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them without speaking.
"The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced, old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries—people like them, and Miss Christina—Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr. Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn them on to Miss Christina, you—"
"I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed. But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression, must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried, "you want a drink!"
For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr. Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres near so crazy to you."
Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions. But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see her with Mr. Ingham?"
"Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before everheset eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames; plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings—oh, beautiful!—by expensive, high-class artists; everything elegant. But it wasn't a success. The public don't appreciate the artistic, Mr. Herrick, they got no edjucation. I lost my last dollar, and I don't know as I ever recovered exactly. I ain't ever been what you could call anyways successful, since."
"But you saw something of Mr. Hope—"
"Well, Mr. Hope was an edjucated gentleman, Mr. Herrick, like you are yourself. He had very up-to-date ideas; and when he'd buy a picture, once in a while I'd go up to the house to see it hung. Miss Christina was about eight years old, then, and I used to see her coming in from dancing school with her maid, or else she'd be just riding out with her groom behind her, like a little queen. When my shop failed; I went to manage my sister-in-law's restaurant. I was ashamed to let Mr. Hope know that time. But one Sunday night, my wife says to me, 'Ain't that little girl as pretty as the one you been telling me about?' And there in the door, with her long hair straight down from under her big hat and her little long legs in black silk stockings straight down from one o' them pleated skirts and her long, square, coat, was Miss Christina. Behind her was her papa and her mama. And after that they came pretty regular every week or two; we served her twelfth birthday party. My wife made a cake with twelve pink rosebuds, all herself. She was always the little lady, Miss Christina, but she made her own friends, and to people she liked she spoke as pretty as a princess. We got to feel such an affection for her, Mr. Herrick, we couldn't believe there was anybody like her in this world. We never had a child of our own, me and my wife, Mr. Herrick. It does knock out your faith in things to think a thing like that can happen, but it's what's happened to her and me. We was kind of cracked about all children, and Miss Christina was certainly the most stylish child I ever set eyes on!"
"Father living?" Herrick prompted.
"No, Mr. Herrick, no. And before he died, he got into business difficulties himself, and he didn't leave enough to keep a bird alive. I helped Mrs. Hope dispose of all the bric-a-brac, my paintings and all, everything that wasn't mortgaged, and they put it in with an aunt of Mr. Hope's, a catamaran, and went to keeping a high-class boarding-house. We're all apt to fall, Mr. Herrick. I've fallen myself."
"The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?"
"I ask you, how could it, with that battle-ax? She cheated my poor ladies, and she bullied Miss Christina, and used to take the books she was always reading and burn 'em up, and say nasty common things to her, when she got older, about the young gentlemen that were always on her heels even then, and that she'd like well enough, one day, and the next she couldn't stand the sight of. If there's one thing Miss Christina has, more than another, it's a high spirit; she has what I'd call a plenty of it. They had fierce fights. Often, when she'd come to me with a little breastpin or other to pawn for her, so her and her mama'd have a mite o' cash, she'd put her pretty head down on my wife's shoulder and cry; and my wife'd make her a cup o' tea. She'd say then she was going to run away and be an actress. And, when she was sixteen yet, she ran. Two years afterward, her and her mama turned up in my first little flat-house; a cheap one, down Eighth Avenue, in the twenties. She was on the stage, all right, and what a time she'd had! It'd been cruel, Mr. Herrick; cruel hard work and, just at the first, cruel little of it. But now she's a leading lady. And this fall she's going to open in New York, in a big part. It's the play they call 'The Victors'; I guess you've heard. Mr. Wheeler, he's the star, and Miss Christina's part's better than what his is. But now—"
There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating, bit his lip.
"This engagement to Ingham—"
"She met him about two years ago, when she had her first leading part, and they went right off their heads about each other. I never expected I should see Miss Christina act so regular loony over any man. But she refused him time and again. She said she'd always been a curse to herself and she wasn't going to bring her curse on him. In the end, of course, she gave in. She said she'd marry him this winter, if he'd go away for the summer and leave her alone. You knew it was only day before yesterday he got back from Europe?"
"Yes. I know."
"My wife and me have seen a lot more of her this summer than since she was a little girl. There's been years at a time, all the while she was on the road, that we wouldn't know if she was alive or dead. And then some day I'd come home, and find her sitting in our apartment—it's a basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!—as easy as if she'd just stepped across the street. But I wouldn't like you should think it's Miss Christina's talked to us very much about her engagement. She's a pretty close-mouthed girl, in her way, and a simply elegant lady. Not but what Mrs. Hope is an elegant lady, too. But still she is—if you know what I mean—gabby! Miss Christina's always been a puzzle to her; and she's a great hand to sit and make guesses at her with my wife. Mr. Ingham left a key with Miss Christina when he went abroad so she could come and play his piano and read his books whenever it suited her, and she'd have a quiet place to study her part. Every once in a while Mrs. Hope would take a notion it wasn't quite the proper thing she should come by herself. But after she'd seen her inside, she'd drop down our way and wait. She wasn't just exactly gone on Mr. Ingham, and my wife wasn't either."
Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the marriage?"
"Well, not opposed. She never opposed the young lady in anything, when you came down to it. But he wanted she should leave the stage. And he wasn't ever faithful to her, Mr. Herrick! For all he was so crazy about her and so wild-animal jealous of the very air she had to breathe, he wasn't ever faithful to her—and if ever you'd seen her, that'd make your blood boil! She'd hear things; and he'd lie. And she'd believe him, and believe him! If it wasn't for his money, she'd be well rid of him, to my mind."
He sat nursing his wrath. And Herrick, still watching him, felt sorry. For, in Herrick's mind it was now all so clear; so pitiably clear! Poor little chap!—he didn't know how scanty was the reassurance in his portrait of his Miss Christina! The indulged, imperious child, choosing "her own" friends; the unhappy, bold, bedeviled girl, already with young men at her heels, whom she encouraged one day and flouted the next; pawning her trinkets at sixteen and plunging alone into the world, the world of the stage; the ambitious, adventurous woman capable of holding such a devotion as that of the good Deutch by so capricious and high-handed a return, snaring such a man of the world as Ingham by an adroit blending of abandon and retreat, putting up with the humiliations of his flagrant inconstancies only, perhaps, to find herself, after her stipulated summer alone, on the verge of losing him through his insensate jealousy—were there no materials here for tragic quarrel? Was not this the very figure that last night he had seen fling out an arm in unexampled passion and grace? In his heart he saw Christina Hope, while her betrothed, whether as accuser or accused, taunted her from the piano, kill James Ingham. And he profoundly knew that he had almost seen this with his eyes. His pulse beat high; but it was with a sobered mind that he beheld Mr. Deutch preparing to depart.
"Well, you see how I had to ask you, Mr. Herrick, not to say that lady's shadow made you think any of an actress?"
"I do, indeed."
"There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if only you was acquainted with her—" He had turned, in rising, to get his hat, and he now stopped short and exclaimed with bewildered reproach, "Oh, well, now, Mr. Herrick! Why wouldn't you tell me?"
"Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?"
"Why, that youwasacquainted with—" said Mr. Deutch, extending his hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope."
Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her, all along! It's a real old picture—'bout five years ago. You knew her then? You knew her—And you—saw—" His voice died away. His glance turned from Herrick's and traveled unwillingly to where, upon the blinds drawn down again, across the street, it seemed to both men the shadow must start forth. And, as he slowly withdrew his gaze, Herrick saw, looking out at him from those soft, spaniel eyes, the eyes of fear.
Deutch bowed bruskly and withdrew. Herrick was alone, as he had been these many months, with the young challenge of his Heroine; the familiar face, long learned by heart, asking its innocent questions about life, shone softly out on him, in pride. And, on that August morning, he felt his blood go cold.
There was a time coming when Herrick was to salute as prophetic what he now noted with a grim amusement; that from the moment the shadow sprang upon the blind the current of his life was changed. Peopled, busy, adventurous, it had passed, as one might say, into active circulation. He was suddenly in the center of the stage.
This was brought home to him rather sharply when Deutch had been not five minutes gone. On the exit of that gentleman Herrick's first thought had been for Miss Hope's photograph. Although an actress seems less a woman than a type, yet, since, to any stray gossip, she was recognizable as a real person, she mustn't, at this critical time, be left hanging on his wall to excite comment. He had scarcely laid the photograph on his desk to compare it with a cut in one of the newspapers when information that he was "wanted on the 'phone" made him drop the paper atop of his dethroned Heroine and hurry into the hall. And the place to which the telephone invited him was the Ingham publishing house.
The message was from old Gideon Corey, the prop and counselor of the House of Ingham, father and son. It told Herrick that Ingham senior had just arrived in New York and had not yet gone to an hotel; he had turned instinctively to his office, where he besought Herrick, whose name he had recognized, to come to him and tell him what there was to tell. It was only the piteous human longing to be brought nearer, by some detail, by some vision later than our own, to those to whom we shall never be near again. Herrick flinched from the task, but there could be no question of his obedience; and he came out from that interview humbly, softened by the gentleness of such a grief. It seemed to him that he had never seen so tender a dignity of reserve; that beautiful old gentleman who had wished to question him had also wished to spare him; wished, too,—and taken the loyalest precautions—to spare some one else.
"I don't know if you are aware, Mr. Herrick," Ingham's father had said to him, "that my son was engaged to be married?"
"I had just heard—"
"Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should be any mention of a—another lady—Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl—" He paused, as if he were feeling for words delicate enough for what he had to say; and then a little breath that was like a cry broke from him. "My son was a wild boy, Mr. Herrick, but he loved her—he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining—? I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my son?"
Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I do?"
"Mr. Ingham means to ask"—Corey interposed—"whether, at the—the inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you observed?"
Thus, for the second time that day, from what different mouths and under what different circumstances, came the same request! And there passed over Herrick that little shiver of the skin which takes place, the country people tell you, when some one steps over your grave.
"Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might have been a man's shadow—?"
"I was not mistaken—Why, look here!" he continued, eagerly. "Can't you see that it would be the worst kind of a mistake for me to change now? They'd think I'd heard who the woman was, and was trying to shield her! And, besides," he added to Corey, "it's your only clue." It occurred to him, as he spoke, that Ingham's family might be concerned for his reputation rather than for vengeance; this continued to seem probable even while they assured him that it was not the police, but Miss Hope alone, from whom they wished to keep the circumstance; they were thinking of what would have been the dead man's dearest wish. What she read in the papers they could perhaps deny; but what she heard at the inquest—
When, however, they reluctantly agreed with him that it was too late for any effectual reticence it was with unabated kindliness that Corey went with him into the hall. "We remain infinitely obliged to you, Mr. Herrick, and—later on—we mustn't lose track of you again—Well, good-morning! Good-morning!"
It was nearly afternoon and Herrick stepped out from the dark, old-fashioned elevator into its sunny heat, which occasional spattering showers had vainly tried to dissipate, with a very highly charged sense of moving among vivid personalities. Concerning two of these there persisted a certain lack of reassurance, and as that of Ingham brightened or darkened the shadow herself now shone as a tigress devouring, now an avenging angel. Sometimes her figure stood out clearly, by itself; sometimes it wavered and changed, and passed, whether Herrick willed it or not, into the figure of Christina Hope. Then, whether for Deutch's or Ingham's sake, or for Evadne's, there was something oppressive in the sunshine.
But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself, were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by aRecordacquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost eagerness.
The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He found himself hailed into the office of theRecord, whence they had been madly telephoning him this long while, and immediately commissioned, at the price of a high, temporary specialist, to report the Ingham inquest, and to write a Sunday special of the murder!
He thought of Ingham's father, and "It isn't a tasty job!" he said to his old chief. But it swept upon him what material it was; it felt, in his empty hand, like the key of success; and then, there is always in our ears at such a time the whisper that it will certainly be done by somebody. "And never, surely," Herrick wrote his sister that night, "so chastely, so justly, with either such dash or such discretion, as by our elegant selves!"
This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation through theRecordphone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk some things over during lunch!
"To shake the iron hand of Fate" was becoming so much the rule that Herrick was nearly capable of feeling gripped by it even in the somewhat remote circumstances that the Pilgrims' had been founded as a club of actors and, overrun as it was by men of all professions and particularly literary men, it had remained essentially a club of actors—while he, Bryce Herrick, hastening toward it through a smart shower, had at first conceived of his novel as a play and then, in Switzerland, been baffled by the inaccessibility of that world! His novel, of whom the heroine had been so unwittingly Christina Hope!—However, the low, wide portals of the Pilgrims' received him under their great, wrought iron lanterns without excitement and he passed, self-consciously and with a certain shyness, into the cooling twilight of a hallway still perfectly calm and over the lustrous, glinting sweeps of easy and quite indifferent stairs up to an "apartment brown and booklined" that looked out on a green park.
At one of the windows Corey stood talking to a dark, heavy, vigorous man whose face was familiar to Herrick and whom Corey introduced as Robert Wheeler. It was a name of note but Herrick bewilderedly exclaimed "Miss Hope's manager?" Two or three men turned to Wheeler and grinned and he, himself, said with a gruff chuckle, yes, he supposed it had come to that, already! Herrick's embarrassed tactlessness sought refuge in looking out of doors.
The famous square had kept its ancient privacy secure from all the city's noise and hurry. It was still, secluded; self-sufficient with an old-world grace; and the green park shone fresh after the shower, its flower beds and the window boxes of its grave, dark houses gave out a delicate, glimmering sparkle along with their moist and newly piercing sweetness. Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces, the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed club—neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted round her name. The blithe young gentlemen in light clothes, fussing over with cigarette smoke and real and unreal English accents, the older men, less saddled and bridled and fit for the fray but still with something at once lazy and boyish in the quick sensibility of their faces, appeared to have no very lurid intensities up their sleeve and amid so much serene and humorous assurance Ingham senior's "sweet, good girl," Hermann Deutch's "Miss Christina" seemed better founded in kind and credible probabilities. She bloomed, indeed, hedged with all proprieties in the sound of Wheeler's voice saying, "But must Miss Hope appear at the inquest?"
"Yes," said Corey, tartly, "since her name will add to its notoriety! Have you forgotten our coroner?" Wheeler lifted his thick brows in annoyance and with the same sourness of inflection Corey added, "Is it possible any corner of the universe can for a moment forget Cuyler Ten Euyck!"
Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You don't mean—"
"Precisely! The mighty in high places—Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck! No less!"
Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire—the world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his poor jaw broken one of these days!"
Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But—I've been so long away—this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck—"
"Can you think there are two?"
Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as coroner—coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government, took his caste and its duties much too seriously.—"But why coroner?"
Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical, was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking himself for a kind of District Attorney.—I may as well say, Mr. Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy should have authority in—in dealing with Mr. James. There was never anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a book of his once!"
"But, great heavens,—"
"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman soldiery—with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now, it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books! It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out your novel."
Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become articulate before—such is our mortal frailty—his slight, but hitherto persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and moldered in dust away.
"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript. Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him. He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there yesterday—think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!—working out his ideas for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very different from Mr. Ten Euyck's—"
A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you—you're a man with a mania!"
The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on crime."
Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal class."
"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy surface, one of two things—either you can cut it away and save the apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions. Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly. His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might not be amusing at all!
Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's guest—Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest—to give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged! It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must, to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham—his admirer—which Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to Christina Hope—she whose face had been his heart's companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became; the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man. Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made for success.
The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze. Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of himself as a prosecutor—he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the righteous and life a thing continually coming up before him to be weighed, found wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then—with a spring—to crush—it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason, provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions—ideas, too, daily spreading—must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a rebel.—Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. B. C. Ten Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game.
But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word "crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched; and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less was a name named—nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues, of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating, thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and bore his host away.
In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
"Kane?"
"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular appetite for the scalps of women!"
Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest! Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for theRecord, he could not rout his distaste for his own evidence.
Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hôte in the neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthydame de comptoirwas replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them, through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.
He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner, practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her mother was setting a long table for some fête, and, when the guests began to come, he still waited in his corner, idly watching.
They were all men and all poor, but all lively; there was an almost feminine sweetness in the gallantry of the Latin effervescence with which they passed a loving-cup in some general ceremony. And no woman could have been more beautiful than the tall Sicilian whose grave stateliness, a little stern from the furrowing of brows still touched with Saracen blood, faced Herrick from the table's farther end. Herrick even inquired, as he paid his check, who this imposing creature was and the Yankee woman replied with unconcern that he was Mr. Gumama, who ran a pool-game at the barber's.
It charmed Herrick to combine this name and occupation with the fervent kisses which Mr. Gumama, rising majestically and swooping to the nearer end of the table, implanted, one on each cheek, upon the hero of the fête. All the guests, as each finished the ceremonial draught, followed his example. None of the rest, however, had Saracen brows, nor long, grim earrings whose fringe swing beneath three stories of gilt squares. The Yankee woman turned contemptuously from "such monkey-shines," but Herrick lingered till the last kiss and as he even then walked home through the hot cloudy night it was after nine o'clock before he reached there. He had not been in since morning and he was greatly to blame. For he had had a caller and the caller was Cuyler Ten Euyck!
The Grubeys were greatly excited by this circumstance and it excited Herrick, too. The coroner had himself examined Ingham's apartment and then the conscientious creature had climbed the stairs to Herrick's. He had even waited in the hope that his witness might return. All this was proudly poured forth while Herrick was also asked to examine a rival public interest—a most peculiar prize which the corner saloon-keeper's son had been awarded at a private school; he had loaned it to Johnnie Grubey for twenty-four hours if Johnnie would let him see the revolver with which Herrick would have shot the murderer last night if the murderer had been there! It was a sort of return in kind; for the school prize was also a revolver.
It was a very little one and Johnnie insisted that it was solid gold. On the handle was a monogram of three capital A's in small bright stones, white, green and red—near them a straggling C had been wantonly scratched. Johnnie averred that the A's stood for Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing and even had the combination of studies for one prize been less remarkable Herrick would have suspected that the boy was lying. What he suspected he hardly knew; still less when he discovered that this unwontedly sympathetic prize was, after all, a fake. The little golden pistol was not a pistol, but a curiously pointless trinket—the cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all in one piece!—"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses.
But Herrick's head was full of other things. As he opened his door he grinned to think of that aristocratic scion waiting in his humble bedroom. Well, it had been a great day! Even if he had lost heart for that taxi-ride up the river with Evadne! And then from long habit, he glanced at Evadne's empty place.
The picture had left an unfaded spot on the wall-paper. "I suppose I might add 'And on my heart!'" said Herrick. He lifted the concealing newspaper. Then he went out and made inquiries. No one but Ten Euyck and Mrs. Grubey had been in the room nor had Mrs. Grubey noticed that the picture had been moved. Now Herrick was certain he had left the likeness under the newspaper, lying face up. It was still under the newspaper, but face down. He said to himself, with a shrug of annoyance, that the coroner had made good use of his time.
The morning of the inquest was cloudy, with a wet wind. Herrick was nervous, and he could not be sure whether this nervousness sprang from the ardor of championship or accusation. But one thing was clear. Christina Hope had slain Evadne and closed his mouth to Sal; but, at last, he was to see her, face to face.
She was there when he arrived, sitting in a corner with her mother. Herrick recognized her at once, but with a horrid pang of disappointment. Was this his Diana of the Winds? Or yet his Destroying Angel? This was only a tall quiet girl in a gray gown. To be more exact it was a gray ratine suit, with a broad white collar, and her small gray hat seemed to fold itself close in to the shape of her little head; the low coil of her hair was very smooth. Herrick observed with something oddly akin to satisfaction that he had been right about her coloring—there were the fair skin, the brown hair, the eyes cool as gray water. Under these to-day there were dark shadows and her face was shockingly pale.
The first witness called was a Doctor Andrews. After the preliminary questions as to name, age, and so forth, he was asked, "You reside in the Van Dam Apartments?"
"I do."
"On what floor?"
"The ninth."
"On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?"
"Not until I heard the pistol-shot—that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing his piano—if you could call that unusual."
"He often played late at night?"
"He had been away during the summer; but, before that, there was a great deal of complaint. He gave a great many supper-parties; at the same time, he was such a charming fellow that people forgave him whenever he wished. Besides, he was a magnificent musician."
"Were there ladies at these supper-parties?"
"Not to my personal knowledge."
"What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?"
"I looked out of the window, and saw nothing. I thought I might have been mistaken; it might have been a tire bursting. But I noticed that the piano had stopped."
After the shot the witness had remained restless.
"Presently I thought I heard some one hammering. I got up again and opened the door and then I heard it distinctly. I know now that it was the efforts of Mr. Herrick to break Ingham's lock with a revolver. I could hear a mixture of sounds—movements. I went back and began to get my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang."
"Tell us what it said."
"It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'"
"And you went?"
"Immediately."
"He was dead on your arrival?"
"Quite."
"How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?"
"Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes."
"Had the death been instantaneous?"
"Certainly. He was shot through the heart."
"Then, in your opinion, if the deceased had taken his own life, he could not have sprung off the electric lights, nor in any fashion done away with the weapon, after the shot."
"He certainly could not."
"In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?"
"There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not."
"You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?"
"Absolutely positive. Death was instantaneous. Also, there was no powder about the wound, showing that the shot had been fired from a distance of four feet or more. Also, the body did not lie where it had fallen."
"How do you know that?"
"There was a little puddle of blood in the sitting-room, where Ingham fell. Your physician and myself called the attention of the police to marks on the rugs following a trail of drops of blood into the bedroom where the body was found."
"You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered there, after the shooting?"
"I do not."
"You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?"
"Yes."
"You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor Shippe?"
"I did."
"Dr. Andrews, the apartment in which the shooting occurred had no access to the windows of any other apartment, no fire-escape, and no means of egress except through a door which was found bolted on the inside. Suppose that a murder was committed. Have you any theory accounting for the murderer's escape?"
"None whatever."
"And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your theory of the impossibility of suicide?"
"Not in the least. It is unshakable."
"Thank you. That will do."
The coroner's physician confirmed Dr. Andrews in every particular. The coroner settled back and seemed to pause. And the listeners drew a long breath. Something at least had been decided. It was not suicide. It was murder.
This had been established so completely and so early in the examination that Herrick found himself impressed with the idea of the coroner's knowing pretty distinctly what he was about. It seemed that he might very well have some theory to establish, for which, in the first place, he had now cleared the ground. Herrick stole a glance at Deutch. His face was wet and colorless, and his eyes fixed on vacancy. And then, curious to note the effect of hearing her lover proclaimed foully murdered, he permitted himself the cruelty of looking at Miss Hope. Apparently it had no effect on her at all. Her mother, a slight, handsome woman, very fashionably turned out, followed eagerly every suggestion of the evidence. But the girl still sat with lowered eyes.
The next evidence, that of the police, threw no further light; and then came the tremulous Theodore of Herrick's acquaintance whose surname transpired as Bird.
Bird, too, had been awake and had heard the shot; he had been fully aware from the first that it was a pistol-shot. He and Mrs. Bird had risen and put up the chain on their door, and then he had telephoned to the superintendent.
"Did the hall-boy connect you at once?"
"It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy."
"Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?"
"No, I was a long time getting him."
"The boy?"
"Yes."
"Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your connection with the superintendent immediate?"
"Almost immediate, I guess."
"It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?"
The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped his eyes.
"Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have been asleep, too."
"Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?"
"Through the 'phone?"
"Certainly. Through the 'phone."
"He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.)
"Well? Go on!"
"I said, 'Excuse me. But I heard a shot just now, in 4-B.' And he said, 'A pistol-shot?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you think somebody has got hurt?' And I said, 'I'm afraid so.' Then he said, 'Well, I'll come up.'"
"Did he seem excited?"
"Not so much as I was."
Mrs. Bird, though she described at some length her forethought in dressing and getting their valuables together, had nothing material to add. Nor had the widow and her son in the apartment below that in which the catastrophe took place; nor the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Willing, in the apartment across the court which had been invaded as a look-out station by the police, anything further to relate; until, indeed, the lady stumbled upon the phrase—"The party had been going on for some time."
"In 4-B?"
"What? Yes."
"What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?"
"There were voices. And then he often had them."
"Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at these parties?"
"I wouldn't like to say."
"I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?"
"I don't know."
"About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?"
"Oh, not many at all. There was poor Mr. Ingham's voice, nearly all the time. And maybe a couple of others. I was in my bedroom, trying to sleep, and the piano was going all the time."
"I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham, and there may have been only one?"
"Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a third one, anyhow."
"Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"
"I don't know."
"Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?"
"Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No."
"Now, Mrs. Willing, I want you to be very careful. And I want you to try and remember. Please tell exactly all that you can remember about what I am going to ask you and nothing more."
"Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully."
"I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are certain you heard at least two voices?"
"Yes, I am, I—"
"Mr. Ingham's and one other?"
"Yes, sir."
"Was that other voice the voice of a man?"
"No, sir."
"It was a woman's voice?"
"I—I suppose so."
"Aren't you sure?"
"Well, yes, I am."
"Was it angry, excited?"
"Toward the end it was."
"As if the speaker were losing control of herself?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?"
"The woman's voice?"
"Yes."
"I can't be sure."
"What do you think?"
"Well, I thought I had, yes. I told Mr. Willing so. He'd been to a bridge party upstairs and he came down just along there."
"You recognized it then?"
"Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes."
"Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?"
"Oh, sir,—I—I'd rather not say!"
"You must say, Mrs. Willing."
"Well, then, I'll just say I don't know."
"That won't do, Mrs. Willing.—When you told your husband that you thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?"
"Well, I said—oh!—I—Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's engaged to in there with him.'"
"Ah!—And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was engaged to?"
"Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course, I haven't said I was sure!"
"Thank you. That will do."
A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall, dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained her composure intact.
But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there.
In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, therewassomething royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding her!—"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.
The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who sawsomething."
Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was still hungry.
The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr. Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"
They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of changing spirit in Ingham's music.
"That crash which waked you for the second time—do you think it could have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?—that he may have been struck and thrown against the piano?"
"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of hellish eloquence."
"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was asked—"That gesture which so greatly impressed you—do you think you could repeat it for us?"
Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."
"Kindly do so."
"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if they were of some stiff mechanism—and it seemed to me that it was the violence of her feeling they were stiff with—until the whole hand was open, like a stretched gauntlet."
"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"
"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered her face."
"And then she disappeared?"
"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."
"As if to pick something up?"
"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."
"From a chair, then, or the couch?"
"Possibly."
"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from the piano, where Ingham sat?"
"I should say about that."
"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the shooting?—this forward dip?"
"After? No, it was before!"
"Ah—And directly after the shot the lights went out?"
"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."
"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of her personality?"
Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said—"I don't think so."
"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very distinct impression?"
"In what way?"
"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in movement."
Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that. Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little indifferent to social constraint."
The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well, then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"
"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to confuse my evidence with yours!"
The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing an actress."
"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly, "and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"
"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"
"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."
"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."
Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.
It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not, indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages. So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.
"I didn't,"—Mr. Deutch burst forth—"keep 'em quiet any because she was there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him already."
"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch. Miss Hope, now,—you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe. And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
"I'd do anything at all for her."
"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder for her sake?—Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say, when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out you don't go a little too far."
"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh, "who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward, saying something about "telephoned—accident—get here shortly."
"See that he does,—The day-elevator boy in court!"
Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim, blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious. Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression, looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.