Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important question asked him ran—"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from Europe—the day, in fact, of his death—did Mr. Ingham have any callers?"
"Yes, sir. He had one."
Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.
Apart from interruptions, his story ran—"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse; but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet. She wouldn't give her name. But not one o'thatsort, you understand. She came up to me—the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her job—and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on herself,—'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat. That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum—no parlor. I was really sorry for the little lady—no, not short, but the kind a man just naturally calls little—she was so nervous and she talked about as loud as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says. And while they were waiting for the elevator—the hall-boy wasn't much on running it—she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him. The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the door when he was in it and off."
"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"
"Nop! He got back about six—chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."
He was dismissed, strutting.
"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner, "Miss Christina Hope."
If the young actress and Ten Euyck, now at his best as the coroner, had, as Corey had suggested, any previous knowledge of each other, neither of them stooped to signify it now.
"Your name, if you please?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"May one ask a lady's age?"
"Twenty-two years."
She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. — West 93rd Street. The girl spoke very low, but clearly, and of these dry preliminaries in her case not a syllable was lost. Her audience, leaning forward with thumbs down, still took eagerly all that she could give them. On being offered a chair, she said that she would stand—"Unless, of course, you would rather I did not."
The coroner replied to this biddable appeal—"I shan't keep you a moment longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject; and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may callpersonallyintended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause."
"Oh, certainly."
"You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?"
"Yes."
"When did this engagement take place?"
"About a year ago."
"And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?"
"Yes."
"When did you last see him alive?"
"On the day before he—died. He drove to our house from the ship."
"Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?"
"No."
"No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August—the evening of his death?"
"My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal—everything had gone wrong. My head ached and my mother was worn out with trying to get our house in order; it was a new house, we were just moving in."
"You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?"
"Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat."
A smile of sympathy stirred through her audience. It might be stupidity which kept her from showing any resentment toward a man who had practically accused her of murder. Or, it might be guilt. But she was so young, so docile, so demure! Her voice was so low and it came in such shy breaths—there was something so immature in the little rushes and hesitations of it. She seemed such a sweet young lady! After all, they didn't want to feed her to the tigers yet awhile!
And the coroner was instantly aware of this. "Then your mother," he said, "is the only person who can corroborate your story of how you passed that evening?"
"Yes."
"How did you pass it?"
"I worked on my part until after eleven, but I couldn't get it. Then I took a letter of my mother's out to the post-box."
"At that hour! Alone!"
"Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air."
"You came straight home?"
"Yes."
"While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?"
"On the way to the post-box I saw Mrs. Johnson, who lives two doors below and who had told us about the house being for rent. She is the only person whom I know in the neighborhood. On the way back I met no one."
"Then no one saw you re-enter the house?"
"I think not."
"Did the maid let you in?"
"No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed."
"But it was a very hot night. People sat up late, with all their windows open, and caretakers in particular must have been sitting on the steps, some one must have seen you return."
"Perhaps they did."
"Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to your return?"
"No one."
"What did you do when you came in?"
"I went to bed."
"You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?"
"No."
"On the same floor?"
"Yes."
"Do you lock your door?"
"No."
"But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?"
"Not unless something had happened; no."
"Could you pass her door without her hearing you?"
"I should suppose so. I never tried."
"So that you really have no witness but your mother, Miss Hope, that you returned to the house, and no witness whatever that you remained in it?"
"No," Christina breathed.
"Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?"
"In the morning, early, the telephone began to ring and ring. I could hear my mother and the maids hurrying about the house, but I felt so ill I did not try to get up. I knew I had a hard day's work ahead of me, and I wanted to keep quiet. But, at last, just as I was thinking it must be time, my mother came in and told me to lie still; that she would bring up my breakfast herself. I said I must go to rehearsal at any rate; and she said, 'No, you are not to go to rehearsal to-day; something has happened.'"
The naïveté of Christina's phrases sank to an awed whisper; her eyes were very fixed, like those of a child hypnotized by its own vision.
"I saw then that she was trying not to tremble and that she had been crying. She couldn't deny it, and so she told me that Mr. Ingham was very, very ill, and she let me get up and helped me to dress. But then, when I must see other people—she told me—she told me—"
Christina's throat swelled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears.
The coroner, cursing the sympathy of the situation, forced himself to a commiserating, "Did she say how he died?"
"She told me it was an accident. I said, 'What kind of an accident?' And she said he was shot. 'But,' I said, 'how could he be shot by an accident? He didn't have any pistol? You know he didn't own such a thing.'" A slight sensation traversed the court. "Then it came out—that no one knew—that people were saying it was—murder—"
"Do you believe that, Miss Hope?"
"I don't know what to believe."
"Did Mr. Ingham have any enemies?"
"I knew of none."
"From your intimate knowledge of Mr. Ingham's affairs you know of no one, either with a grudge to satisfy or a profit to be made, by his death?"
"No. No one at all."
"So that you have really no theory as to how this terrible thing happened?"
"No, really, I haven't."
"Well, then, I suppose we may excuse you, Miss Hope."
The girl, with her tranquil but slightly timid dignity, inclined her head, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, turned away.—
—"Oh, by the way, Miss Hope,—" And suddenly, with a violent change of manner, he began to beat her down by the tactics which he had used with Deutch. But with how different a result! Nothing could make that pale, tall girl ridiculous. Scarcely speaking above a breath, she answered question after question and patiently turned aside insult after insult. He found no opposition, no confusion, no reticence; nothing but that soft yielding, that plaintive ingenuousness. The crudest jokes, the cruelest thrusts still left her anxiously endeavoring to convey desired information. He took her back over her relations with Ingham, their interview upon his return, the events of the last evening, with an instance and a repetition that wearied even the auditors to distraction; he would let her run on a little in her answers and then bring her up with a round turn; twenty times he took with her that journey to and from the post-box and examined every step, and still her replies ran like sand through his fingers and left no trace behind. But, at last, she put out a hand toward the chair she had rejected, and sank slowly into it. Then indeed it became plain that she was profoundly exhausted.
And because her exhaustion was so natural and so pitiable, the coroner, watching its effect, said, "Well, I can think of nothing more to ask you, Miss Hope. I suppose it would be useless to inquire whether, being familiar with the apartment, you could suggest any way in which, the door being bolted, the murderer could have escaped?"
Christina looked up at him with a very faint smile and with her humble sweetness that had become almost stupidity, she said, "Perhaps the murderer wasn't in the apartment at all!"
The whole roomful of tired people sat up. "Not in the apartment! And where, then, pray?"
"Well," said Christina, softly, "he could have been shot through an open window, I suppose. Of course, I'm only a woman, and I shouldn't like to suggest anything. Because, of course, I'm not clever, as a lawyer is. But—"
"Well, we're waiting for this suggestion!"
"Oh!—Well, it seems to me that when this lady, whose shadow excited the young gentleman so much, disappeared as if it went forward, perhaps it did go forward, perhaps she ran out of the room. You can see—if you don't mind stopping to think about it—that she must have been standing right opposite the door. If she had been quarreling with Mr. Ingham, he may have bolted the door after her. I don't know if you've looked—but the button for the lights is right there—in the panel of the wall between the door and the bedroom arch. Mr. Ingham was a very nervous, emotional person. If there had been a scene, he might very well have meant to switch the lights out after her, too. If he had his finger on the button when the bullet struck him, he might very well, in the shock, have pressed it. And then the lights would have gone out, almost as if the bullet had put them out, just as the young man says. But, of course, if this were what had happened, you would have thought of it for yourself." And she looked up meekly at him, with her sweet smile.
The coroner smiled, too, with compressed lips, and putting his hands in his pockets, threw back his head. "And how do you think, then, that—if he was killed instantly, as the doctors have testified,—the corpse walked into the bedroom, where it was found?"
"Ah!" said Christina, "I can't account for everything! I'm not an observer, like you! But there has never been, has there, a doctor who was ever wrong? Of course, I don't pretend to know."
"Well, it's a pretty theory, my dear young lady, and I'm sure you mean to work it out for us all you can. So give us a hint where this bullet, coming through an open window, was fired from."
"It could have been fired from the apartment opposite. Across the entrance-court. You remember, the policeman who went in there found that the windows exactly—do you call it 'tallied'?"
"Very good, Miss Hope. If it were an unoccupied apartment. But it is occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Willing, and Mrs. Willing was in the apartment the entire evening."
"Yes," said Christina, turning and looking pleasantly at the lady mentioned, "alone." Then she was silent.
After a staggered instant, the coroner asked, "And what became of this lady who ran out into the hall?"
"Well, of course," said Christina, sweetly, "if it was Mrs. Willing—"
The Willings leaped to their feet. "This is ridiculous! This is an outrage! Why!" cried the husband, "his blind opposite our sitting-room was down all the time. There isn't even a hole through it where a shot would have passed!"
"Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew that!"
"What do you mean, you wicked girl! How dare you! Why, you heard the policeman say that it was only when he looked through our bedroom that he could see into Mr. Ingham's apartment—"
"And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?"
"Miss Hope!" said the coroner, sternly, "I must ask you not to perpetrate jokes. You know perfectly well that your implied charge against Mrs. Willing is perfectly ridiculous—"
"Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!"
And for the first time she lifted to his a glance alight with the faintest mockery of malice; a wintry gleam, within the white exhaustion of her face. Then,—if all the time she had been playing a part—then, if ever, she was off her guard.
And she could not see what Herrick, from his angle, could see very well; that the coroner had been quietly slipping something from his desk into his hand, and was now dangling it behind his back.
This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table—that white scarf with its silky border, cloudy, watery, of blue glimmering into gray. How the tender, misty coloring recalled that room of Ingham's!
"Don't you know very well, Miss Hope," the coroner went on, "that Mrs. Willing had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Ingham's death?"
"How can I? You see, I wasn't there!"
"So that, by no possibility," said the coroner, "could this be yours?"
He launched the scarf, like a soft, white serpent, almost in her face. And the girl shrank from it, with a low cry. She might as well have knotted it about her neck.
And in the horrible stillness that followed her cry, the coroner said, "Your nerves seem quite shattered, Miss Hope. I was only going to ask you if you didn't think that ornament, in case it was not yours, might have been left on Mr. Ingham's table by the young lady who called on him that afternoon."
With a brave attempt at her former mild innocence, Christina responded, "I don't know."
"Neither can you tell us, I suppose,—it would straighten matters out greatly—who that caller was?"
"No, I can't. I'm sorry."
"Think again, Miss Hope. Are there so many smartly dressed and pretty young ladies of your acquaintance, with curly red hair and, as Mr. Dodd informs us, with cute little feet?"
Christina was silent.
"What? And yet she knows you well enough to say to your fiancé—'I don't wish to get Christina into trouble'!" Whose was the smile of malice, now! "Come, come, Miss Hope, you're trifling with us! Tell us the address of this lady, and you'll make us your debtors!"
The girl opened her pale lips to breathe forth, "I can't tell you! I don't know!"
"Let us assist your memory, Miss Hope, by recalling to you the lady's name. Her name is Ann Cornish."
Herrick's nerves leaped like a frightened horse. And then he saw Christina start from her chair, and, casting round her a wild glance that seemed to cry for help, drop back again and put her hands over her face. A dozen people sprang to their feet.
Mrs. Hope ran to her daughter's side, closely followed by Mrs. Deutch. The two women, crying forth indignation and comfort, and exclaiming that the girl was worn out and ought to be in bed, rubbed Christina's head, and began to chafe her hands. She was half fainting; but when a glass of whiskey had appeared from somewhere and Mrs. Deutch had forced a few drops between her lips, Christina, unlike the heroine of romance whose faints always refuse stimulants, lifted her head and drank a mouthful greedily. She sat there then, breathing through open lips, with a trace of color mounting in her face.
Then the coroner, once more commanding attention, held up a slip of pasteboard. "This visiting-card," he said, "is engraved with Miss Cornish's name, but with no address. It was found leaning against a candlestick on Mr. Ingham's piano, as though he wished to keep it certainly in mind. As a still further reminder, Mr. Ingham himself had written on it in pencil—'At four.'"
Christina, with the gentlest authority, put back her friends. She rose, slowly and weakly, to her feet. "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I?"
"That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully replied.
"I have said nothing," she went on, "that is not true, but I have allowed something to be inferred which is not true." She pressed her hands together and drew a long breath. "It is true that I was engaged to Mr. Ingham. And when you asked me if our understanding was unimpaired at the time of his death, I said yes; for, believe me, our understanding then was better than it had ever been before. But that was not what you meant. I will answer what you meant, now. At the time of his death, I was not engaged to marry Mr. Ingham."
"You were not! Why not?"
"We had quarreled."
"When?"
"The day before he died."
An intense excitement began to prevail. Herrick longed to stand up and shout, to warn her, to muzzle her. Good God! was it possible she didn't see what she was doing? The coroner, weary man, sat back with a long sigh of satisfaction. His whole attitude said, "Now we're coming to it."
"And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the engagement?"
"I did."
"Oh, of course,naturally. And may one ask why?"
"Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be possible to me."
"But on what grounds?"
"He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't."
"Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?"
"Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular."
"There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?"
Christina looked through him without replying.
"Well, well. And was there nothing but this?"
"He objected to my profession; and when I was first in love with him I thought that I could give it up for his sake. But as I came to know more of—everything—and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could not. And I would not."
"So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?"
"If you like."
"At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?"
"It made it unbearable. And as it gradually became clear to me that he scarcely pretended to practise even the rudiments of the fidelity that he exacted, it seemed to me that there were limits to the insults which even a gentleman may offer to his betrothed. And I—freed myself."
Two or three people exchanged glances.
"Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?"
"We had quarreled before, but not definitely. Last spring I asked him to release me, and he would not. But he consented to my remaining on the stage, and to going away for the summer, so that I could think things out."
"And you immediately took a house from which to be married!"
"Yes. I tried to go on with it. I thought furnishing it might make me want to. But I couldn't. I wrote him so, and he came home. While he was on the ocean I found out something which made any marrying between us utterly impossible. When he drove to my house the day before he was killed, I told him so. We had a terrible scene, but he knew then as well as I that it was the end. I never saw him again."
"As a matter of fact, then, the definite breaking of the engagement was caused by something new and wholly extraneous to your profession or his jealousy?"
"Yes."
"And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?"
"Oh!" said Christina, quite simply, "I am not going to tell you that." And she suddenly began to speak quite fast. "Do you think I don't know what I am doing when I say that? Do you think you have not taught me? But I don't care about appearing innocent any longer. And so I know, now, what I'm saying. I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It had nothing to do with Mr. Ingham's death. It was simply something—monstrous—which happened a long time ago. But, between us two, it had to fall like a gulf. More than that I will not tell you. And you can never make me."
"And you don't know Ann Cornish?"
Christina hesitated. "Of course I thought of her. But I couldn't bear to have that little girl brought into it. She's only twenty," Christina added, as if the difference in their ages were half a century. "And, besides, how could it be she? She scarcely knew Mr. Ingham; she never had an appointment with him; I can't believe she ever told him ill of me. She is my dearest friend. But ask her, Mr. Coroner, ask her. Her address is—" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied. "She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress, poor child!"
"Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,—you don't care about appearing innocent any longer?"
"I mean that never again will I go through what I have gone through this afternoon. You have asked me the last question I shall answer. You've made me sound like a liar, and feel like a liar; you've made me turn and twist and dodge, trying to convince you of the truth about me, and now that I have told you all the truth, you may think a lie about me, if you choose!"
Her face was all alive, now, and her voice thrilled out its deep notes, impassioned as they were soft. "Oh, I wished so much to say nothing! Not to have to stand up here and tell all sorts of intimate things, in this horrible place before these gaping people! But when you began to worry me, to threaten and jeer at me, trying to trip me, I was afraid of you! I know people say that your one thought is to make a mark and have a career, and I seemed to see in your face that you would be glad to kill me for that. I remembered all I had ever heard of you; how you hated women—once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;—how you copied an attorney who made all his reputation by the prosecution, by the persecution, of women, and how they say you never run a woman so hard as when she has to work for her living, as I do, and stands exposed to every scandal, as I am! And so I tried to convince you, to answer everything you asked; I am in great trouble, and I am not so very old, and since this came I have scarcely eaten and not slept at all. For if you imagine that, because I haven't really loved him this long while, it is easy to bear thinking how his life had been rived out of him like that, oh, you are wrong—and my nerves are all in shreds. So that it seemed as if I must clear myself, as if it were too hideous to be hated, and to have every one thinking I had murdered him! I struggled to defend myself, and I let you torture me. But oh, I was wrong, wrong! To be judged and condemned and insulted, that's hard, but it's not degrading. But to explain, and pick about, and plead, and wrack your brain to make people believe your word, oh, that degrades!" She paused on a little choking breath. "Think what you like! I have no witness but my mother, and I know very well, in such a case, she doesn't count. I can't prove that I returned to my house, I can't prove that I stayed in it. It's worse than useless to try. If I had friends to speak for me do you think I would have them subjected to what Mr. Deutch has borne for me to-day? I've nothing that shop-keepers call position; I've no money; I'm all alone. Think what you please." And Christina crossed the room and sat down beside her mother.
Conflicting emotions clashed in the silence. She seemed to flash such different lights! She had so little, now, the manners or the sentiments of a sweet young lady. Many people were greatly moved, but no one knew what to think. If Christina had brought herself to slightly more conciliatory language or if, even now, she had thrown herself girlishly into her mother's arms, she could, at that moment, easily have melted the public heart. But she sat with her head tipped back against the wall, with her eyes on vacancy, and great, slow tears rolling down her unshielded face, "as bold as brass." And the coroner, leaning forward across his desk, surveyed the assemblage with a cold, fine smile. "My friends," he began, "after the young lady's eloquence, I can hardly expect you to care for mine. Nevertheless, while we are waiting for a witness unavoidably detained, I will ask you to listen to me. Let us get into shape what we have already learned.—The first thing of which we are sure is that James Ingham landed in New York on the afternoon of the third of August and drove directly to the residence of Miss Christina Hope, his betrothed. Miss Hope tells us that when he left that house their engagement was broken; that he was unbearably jealous; that he disapproved of the profession which she persisted in following and that they quarreled over something which she refuses to divulge. We have no witness to this quarrel, but I will ask you to remember it. I will ask you to remember that neither have we witnesses to Miss Hope's statement that it was she, rather than Mr. Ingham, who broke the engagement.
"Let us get to our next positive fact. Our next positive fact is that Mr. Ingham, on the next afternoon, the afternoon of August fourth, had an appointment with a lady for four o'clock—an appointment the hour of which he was so anxious not to forget that he wrote it on the lady's visiting-card, and stood the card against a candle on his piano. Our next facts are that the lady kept this appointment, that she had a private interview with Mr. Ingham which greatly excited him; that, as soon as she was gone, he drove off in a taxi with desperate haste, and that he returned in about an hour, still under the repressed excitement of some disagreeable emotion. If, gentlemen of the jury, you should bring in a verdict warranting the State in examining that cabman and in questioning Miss Ann Cornish as to the news she imparted to Mr. Ingham, then, indeed, I am much mistaken if we do not have our hands upon the great clue to all murders, gentlemen, the motive. For, as you have clearly perceived, the meeting between Mr. Ingham and Miss Cornish was not a lover's meeting. Or, if so, it was not a meeting of acknowledged lovers. Miss Hope tells us that Miss Cornish is her confidential friend, and, as far as she knew, had only the most formal acquaintance with Mr. Ingham. No, Miss Cornish had a piece of information to give Mr. Ingham, and she expected this information to serve her own ends, for she said—'It is good of you to see me.' And Mr. Ingham found the information important, for he soon wished it told him at greater length upstairs, 'where we shall be quite undisturbed.' The lady agrees; although she adds, 'I don't want to get Christina into trouble.' Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what could have been her object except to get Christina into trouble. Why does a pretty young woman who refuses to give her name come to a specially attractive man with news of her dearest friend whom she supposes him to be still engaged to marry—news for which she feels it necessary to apologize—for but one of two reasons;—either she is in love with him herself, and wishes to injure her friend in his eyes, or she is in love with some other man and jealous of her friend whom she wishes warned off by the friend's legitimate proprietor. In either case, she evidently effected her point for she sent Mr. Ingham rushing from the house. He, however, apparently failed in what he set out to do. All this, gentlemen, is but conjecture.
"Here is where I expected to present you with an astonishing bridge of facts. I had now meant to show you that Mr. Ingham, that evening, expected an unwelcome visitor; that he left orders she was not to be admitted; that she came, that she was well-known to the elevator boy, and to all of us here present as well as to a greater public; that despite the efforts of the elevator boy, she penetrated to Mr. Ingham's apartment, whence she was not seen to return, and that she was the only visitor he had that night. But in the continued absence of the boy, Joseph Patrick, all this must wait.
"Our next known fact is that Mr. Herrick was wakened by Mr. Ingham's playing at one or shortly before. You will remember that it was after eleven when Miss Hope spoke to Mrs. Johnson on her way to the post-box, and that after that no one but her mother claims to have seen or spoken with her. For a quarter of an hour, Mr. Herrick tells us, Mr. Ingham played, calmly and beautifully. All was peace. But then there began to be the sound of voices talking through the music—the voices, as other witnesses have testified, of a man and a woman. And the piano begins to sound fitfully and brokenly. The man and the woman have begun to quarrel. Their voices—particularly the woman's voice—rise higher and stormier. Mr. Herrick, with the whole street between, has fallen asleep. But Mrs. Willing, just across the court, hears a voice she knows, and says to her husband, who has just come in, 'He's got that actress he's engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman? Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely, but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression, without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies, with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes, in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations, but—contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope—he is perhaps soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next day he receives a call from his fiancée's confidential friend,—very possibly his informant while he was abroad—who circumstantially confirms his worst suspicions. Let us suppose he drives wildly to the house of his betrothed; but she is not at home, and after a time he gives up looking for her. He comes miserably back, dines out, returns early, but leaves word that he is not at home. But in the meanwhile may not the lady have got word of all this? Suppose that when she does, she comes to him,—at any hour, at any risk,—and uses her hitherto infallible charm to get him back. Suppose she gets him back; they are alone together; she is excited and confident and off her guard. She lets something slip. Instantly the battle is on. This time she cannot get him back. She becomes desperate. If he speaks, as perhaps he has threatened to, she loses not only him, but everything. For she is on the brink of the great step of her career. She is to play the leading feminine rôle under a celebrated star, who does not care for scandal in his advertisements. On the contrary, he has bruited everywhere her youth, her propriety, her breeding, her good blood. She is a fairy-tale of the girlish virtues. He has no use for her otherwise. And still the man at the piano proclaims her everything that is otherwise, and she sees that she is to lose him and all she has struggled for, professionally, in one breath. He sits there—he, he, the man who has been continually false to her, claiming for himself a different morality—he sits there playing, playing, shattering her nerves with his crash of chords, with his hellish eloquence. But with his back to her, you observe, where she stands at the window and suddenly she sees something lying on a little table or the foot of the couch—something not unusual in a man's apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not possess one—something which, perhaps, in his wrecked happiness, he had loaded earlier in the evening with that sinister intention of suicide in which Miss Hope's respected friend, Mr. Deutch, so profoundly believes. Well, gentlemen, the frenzied eye of this tormented girl lights on that little object, she stoops to pick it up, he turns,—and then comes a pistol-shot. There is an end to the strength of a woman's nerves, gentlemen, and she has found it. She cannot look upon her handiwork. She springs off the light and flees. In the confusion she escapes. Gentlemen, with the dumbfounding mystery of that bolted door I can not deal, unless—as Miss Hope has reminded us—medical science may be for once at fault,—unless the wounded man instinctively staggered to the door and bolted it, staggered toward his telephone, in his bedroom, and died there. That, gentlemen, can be threshed out at the trial. In the meantime, I must ask you to remember that the lady whom events seem to indicate is high-strung and overwrought; that her natural grief and nervousness led her through a long cross-examination in which she never once betrayed any hesitation, or the fact that she had quarreled with Mr. Ingham or that she was aware of the existence of Ann Cornish, to a satirical attack upon Mrs. Willing, whose remarks had annoyed her; that, as she tells us, she has no one to take care of her, and if we are inclined to think that she can take very good care of herself, we must remember that when she was confronted with a lady's scarf found not far from the murdered man, she screamed at the sight of it, and when confronted with the visiting-card of Ann Cornish, she so much wished her friend to be kept out of it that she fainted, and, afterwards,changed all her evidence.—Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our witness, Joseph Patrick."
Joe Patrick, a short, thick-set young fellow, with rough hair and a bright eye, advanced to the coroner's desk. His forehead was ornamented with a great deal of very fresh surgeon's plaster, and when asked why he was so late, he replied that he had been knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest. Well, yes, he would sit down; he did feel a little weak, but it wasn't so much from that—he'd had some candy sent him day before yesterday and he'd been awful sick ever since he ate it. Joe was a friendly soul and he added that he was sorry the man the coroner sent hadn't seen anybody but his mother. He was to the doctor's, then.
"But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't you, before you left the Van Dam—on the morning of the murder—much more detailed than you gave the police?"
"Yes, sir. I guess I did."
"Well, then, please give that account to us."
Joe looked rather at sea, and the coroner added, "You have said from the beginning, that a lady called upon Mr. Ingham the night of his death?"
"Oh, yes, sir! She did!"
"Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a message from Mr. Ingham?"
"Yes, sir. He telephoned down to me. He says, 'I'm out. And if any lady comes to see me this evening, you say right away I'm out.'"
"Well, and then?"
"Well, along about half-past twelve—it was awful hot and lonesome, and—and—"
"And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was able to sleep that night!"
"Well," said Joe, "I guess anybody'd get sleepy, been sittin' there for four hours in that heat! Anyhow, it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes, when they came open all of a sudden and I was looking at the front door. And there, all in white—'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!' I don't know why it seemed so awful queer to me, unless because I wasn't really but half-awake."
It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina, white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned toward him in an agony.
"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner. "Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"
"No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'"
"Well? Go on!"
"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."
"And what did you do?"
"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped and put her elbows on the stair-rail,—they run right up to one side o' the 'phone desk, you know,—and laughed down at me. She looked awful pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again an' ran on up."
"And you did nothing?"
"Well, what could I do, I like to know! But I grabbed at the switchboard and called up Mr. Ingham. 'Mr. Ingham,' I says, 'that lady's coming up anyhow.' An' he says, 'Damnation!' That's the last word I ever heard out o' him."
"'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?"
"Why, I didn't know her name, sir!"
"Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope—you know her name?"
"Oh, yes, sir."
"Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?"
"Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!"
The revulsion of feeling in Christina's favor was so immense that it became a kind of panic. It practically engulfed the rest of the inquest. The taking of testimony from her mother and Mrs. Deutch was the emptiest of formalities; the notion of holding her under surveillance until Ingham's cabman and Ann Cornish could be produced confessed itself ridiculous. Another woman, a strange woman, an aggressive, sarcastic woman forcing her way in upon Ingham a couple of hours before his death, and not coming down again! Well!
As for the coroner, he suffered less a defeat than a rout. Even his instant leap upon Joe Patrick was only a plucky spurt. He was struggling now against the tide, and he knew it; the strength of his attack was sucked down. Even the remainder of Joe's own evidence did not receive its due consideration. The public fancy fastened upon that figure of a smiling woman, "awful pretty, but with something scaring about her," leaning over the baluster to laugh, "I won't hurt him!" It worked out the rest for itself.
"Yes, sir," Joe persisted, "my mother misunderstood me, all right. I said I took her for Miss Hope at the door, and so I did. But she wasn't."
"Did she look so much like Miss Hope?"
"No, sir; not when she came near. That was the thing made me feel so queer. I can't understand it. First she was Miss Hope, and then she wasn't. She gave me a funny feeling when I seen her standing there in the door an' says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope.' 'Twas kind of's if I seen her ghost. An' then all of a sudden there she was, right on top o' me. An' not like Miss Hope a bit. An' that gimme a funny feeling, too!"
"Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at least how did she differ from her?"
"Why, I guess she was a good deal handsomer for one thing. At least I expect most people would think so, though I prefer Miss Hope's style, myself. She was dressier, for one thing, in white lace like, with a big hat, an' she was pretty near as slim, but yet she had, as you might say, more figger. An' she had red hair."
Joe had made another sensation.
"Red hair! Curly?"
"Well, it was combed standin' out fluffy like one o' these here halos, up into her hat. It wasn't anyways common red, you know, sir, it was elegant, stylish red, like the goldy part in flames."
"Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?"
"I don't think so, sir.—Oh, I guess she wouldn't hardly see twenty-five again! Her feet, sir? I didn't notice. But she didn't walk kind o' waddlin', either, nor else kind o' pinchin', the way ladies mostly do; she just swum right along, like Miss Hope does."
"But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?"
"No, sir."
"Now look here, Joe Patrick, how do you know she didn't? When Mr. Bird went to the 'phone after the shooting he was a long time getting connected, and Mr. Herrick found you asleep at the desk."
"I couldn't have fell asleep again until after one o'clock, sir, for I had a clock right on the desk and at one I noticed the time. I was watchin' for her, she was such a queer one, an' only one man came in all that time, that I had to carry upstairs. He only went to the fourth floor, just where she was, an' I rushed him up an' dropped right down again. She couldn't ha' walked down in that time. I could hear the piano goin' all the while, the front doors bein' open. But after one I must ha' dropped off. Because it was about twenty minutes past when Mr. Herrick shook me up. Then I knew I'd been kind o' comin' to, the last few minutes, hearin' Mr. Bird ringin'. When Mr. Herrick grabbed my elevator I called up Mr. Deutch, an' he was quite a minute, too. I says to him, 'Say, Mr. Deutch, somepun's happened,' an' I switched him onto Mr. Bird."
"Well, we're very much obliged to you, Mr. Patrick, for an exceedingly full account. What apartment did the gentleman have whom you took up to the fourth floor? Perhaps he may have heard something."
"I don't know, sir."
"What?"
"He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him."
"You didn't know him?"
"No, sir."
"You'd never seen him before?"
"No, sir."
"Nor since?"
"No, sir."
"You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing him, whom you knew to be a stranger?"
"Why no, I thought he was a new tenant. We got a few furnished apartments in the building, goes by the month. And then there's always a good deal o' sublettin' in the summer. He was so quiet an' never asked any questions nor anything, goin' right along about his business, I never give him a thought."
"Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the elevator, which way did he turn?"
The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B."
His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner controlled himself.
"What time was this?"
"It hadn't quite struck one, sir."
"And during all this talk about Mr. Ingham's murder, at one-fifteen, it never occurred to you that at just before one, you had taken up to his floor a man whom you had never seen, whom you never saw again, and who turned toward his apartment?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute."
"Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man."
"A description of him?"
"Yes, yes. What did he look like?"
"Why, I don't hardly know, sir."
"Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss Hope?"
"No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything."
"He looked so unlike other people?"
"No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen."
"I see, Joseph, that you don't observe your own sex with the passionate attention which you reserve for ladies. Well, had he a beard or a mustache?"
"No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure."
"Come, that's something! And no mustache?"
"Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say."
"Was he light or dark?"
"I never noticed, sir."
"Was he tall?"
"Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height."
"About how old?"
"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."
"Stout?"
"No, sir."
"Ah! He was slender, then?"
"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."
"How was he dressed, then?"
"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."
"Was the suit light or dark?"
"About medium, sir."
"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"
"No, sir."
"Black?"
"I don't think so, sir."
"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"
"Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it. But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a blue."
"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're not a detective."
"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing the best I know."
"I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you saw him?"
"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."
"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!—The lady who was not Miss Hope—you would know her, I presume?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"—Joe hesitated.
"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.
"Why, it's only—why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it. She had—" He paused, blushing.
"She had—what?"
"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had—I'm afraid you'll laugh."
"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"
"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."
"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"
"Sir?"
"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"
"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."
"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."
"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"
The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the coroner laughed.
"Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake, Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality—she would be easily identified!"
Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in, and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her eyes. And she said to him,
"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went to help her?"
He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"
"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I wonder, will you shake hands?"
He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.
"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before, blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world, just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning! And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time, he had found himself. For he had found Her!
Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly, she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could gape! Two dollars a vision—eight visions a week. He began to perceive that he would need some money!
And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special. Good—that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment, he had no use.
He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her. First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her. And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that strange, proud, childish innocence—like Evadne's. At the time he had reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency to strike him dead!
He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable. Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of verse, now high, now homely—she had risen to give her testimony! There she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the world was a line from his school-reader—
"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by—"
Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild, so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had leaped with but the one cry,